image from the archive

I took this photo of Grant's son about a year before the film was shot. We were on the roof of a loft building in which we lived in Detroit's Greektown. I used a Canon Ftb that was purchased from a former photographer from the Free Press, my former employer. This is my last blog entry for this site. All future entries will be on my Wordpress site. It's time to simplify in a new year. Hope yours is groovy. Stay tuned for more info about the film's premiere in 2016.

begin here

I am sucker for a good book to which I can return again and again. One such book is May Sarton's Journal of a A Solitude. I first discovered it on a shelf in Books and Books (the location in Coral Gables, Florida). I could not have been more than twenty years old. The book opens with two words "Begin here." Sarton's precision and thoughtful placement of words in this book, which is indeed a journal about her life as a writer, immediately drew me in. I knew it was a book I'd cherish forever when I took a road trip with a coworker through New England. As we pulled into Brattleboro, Vermont, I read a sentence in Sarton's journal in which she announces that she, too, is in Brattleboro. The serendipity left me and my fellow traveler speechless. This kind of coincidence happened just one other time. I will spare you the details now. Years later, owing to my friendship with someone who knew her, I was able to visit Sarton's home in Maine. As I maneuvered through my 20s and 30s and even 40s, I returned again and again to this book, but also another one: Hettie Jones' memoir. I recently read Jones' book cover to cover over the course of three days. I finished it on the beach this past weekend, in fact. I plan to assign it next semester in a course I am teaching at the University of Alabama for the first time. The course is titled "Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music." In this course, the students will be challenged to find meaning in the political and social issues bubbling up behind music created between the late 1950s and the present-day. Jones, a Jewish woman was married to then-Leroi Jones, a black intellectual, in the early 1960s. They met in New York City. She saw up close the beatnik moment in which Grant Green, the guitarist whose life is the subject of a documentary before me, briefly participated in St. Louis before heading east to New York himself. Like Sarton's journal, Jones permits us to access interior dialogues about the particular struggle of individuals trying to navigate a changing world. The Vietnam War, the black freedom struggle, the counterculture movement are in the backdrop of Jones' book. Will the students be able to make connections between such developments, the music being created, the musicians creating the music and their audiences? Will the be able to fully talk through why Kendrick Lamar would be drawn to use the music of a jazz musician like Grant under his lyrics? Are their certain themes that resonate across time, across youth cultures? I will be sorting through such issues with them as I continue seeing this film to the marketplace. Just now I typed three keywords that will serve as tags for this blog entry. Grant Green. Hettie Jones. May Sarton. How does the life of a black musician from St. Louis who came of age in the postwar period intersect with two liberal white women, both of whom are writers? He self-identified as a Muslim although his closest friends said he did not always adhere to the teachings of this faith. Like many, he was a complicated man. We will doubtless learn that this is true about other musicians.