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Against Silence (feat. Tyehimba Jess)

from The Poets Are Gathering by Benjamin Boone

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Includes a **16-page booklet** with photos and liner notes by noted cultural critic GENE SEYMOUR... *PLUS* I'd be delighted to autograph the CD however you'd like me to sign it (within reason of course!) - a GREAT GIFT - Help spread the message! Thank you for your support!

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Poets Are Gathering via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of CAUGHT IN THE RHYTHM, The Poets Are Gathering, JOY, The Poetry of Jazz Volume Two, and The Poetry of Jazz. , and , .

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about

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

INSIDE SCOOP - Jess studied with poet Philip Levine, with whom Boone collaborated with on THE POETRY OF JAZZ albums.

lyrics

From the Liner Notes:

The album’s j’accuse against police injustice against Black Americans and the ongoing indignity visited upon its victims continues forthrightly and, at times, hauntingly in “Against Silence,” written and performed by Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess, whose work is as wildly acclaimed in live jams as it is on the printed page. “I am a poet murdering silence,” Jess announces as he deftly, yet emphatically assumes the names, the identities of the victims, decries the wasteful compounding of their deaths and allows you to feel the absent spaces of their lost lives with intimate, empathetic details: “My name once held all possibilities, but now flies out from the mouth hauling anger and sorrow… I have an arm against my throat and a bullet in my head. I have a wedding to go to, a graduation to walk, a little brother to chill with, and now I’m a face on a placard in a sea of anger, a newspaper article, I’m a question passed from one generation to the next, a lesson in fear, and all I really want is to go home.”

credits

from The Poets Are Gathering, released October 16, 2020
Tyehimba Jess (p/n), Benjamin Boone (as), Kenny Werner (pn), Corcoran Holt (b), Ari Hoenig (d)

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about

Benjamin Boone Fresno, California

Benjamin Boone is a jazz saxophonist, composer, professor, and U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ireland (2022-23), Ghana (2017-18) and the Republic of Moldova (2006). His Origin Records album THE POETRY OF JAZZ was #3 "Best Album of 2018" in the 83rd Annual Downbeat Readers Poll and featured on NPR's All Things Considered, The Paris Review, and many others. Websites: BenjaminBoone.com & OriginArts.com ... more

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