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!
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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Poet, critic, and editor T.R. Hummer was born in 1950 in Macon, Mississippi. He holds degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Utah, where he earned a PhD. Though his early work is reminiscent of Southern writers such as James Dickey, Hummer’s poetry considers a range of experiences and ideas. His interest in class, sexuality, music, and metaphysics shape collections such as Lower-Class Heresy (1987), The Eighteen-Thousand-Ton Olympic Dream (1990), Walt Whitman in Hell (1996), The Infinity Sessions (2005), and Ephemeron (2011).
Praised for its “startling imagery and lyrical descriptions” by Publisher’s Weekly, Hummer’s work is at once ironic, playful, and deadly serious. In the New York Quarterly, reviewer Amy Greacen noted that Hummer’s “is a mind that sees horror and humor, beauty and cruelty, without needing to polarize them. They coexist, each playing in its own time signature and following its own rules. Hummer’s a jazz buff… so it makes sense that he is drawn to syncopation, to blue notes, to abrupt changes in tempo, to modulation.” Hummer’s own view suggests some of the bleak irony undergirding his recent work: “We are thrown into the world, from where we do not know,” he told the Rumpus. “And we are going somewhere, where we do not know. And all our human drama falls in between.”
lyrics
From the Liner Notes:
Mississippi-born poet T.R. Hummer uses his mic time to celebrate the music and method of the incomparable space traveler Herman “Sonny” Blount with “The Sun One (Homage to Sun Ra)” whose exuberant renderings of the Ra Arkestra sound (“We were invulnerable as air / The brass tunes up in a cattle truck / The bass works its slaughterhouse line / It’s a gift to wake with the light in your face / Such brilliance everywhere”) brings out the rowdy harmolodic adventurers in Boone (on soprano), altoist Hashem Assadullahi, guitarists Ben Monder and Eyal Maoz, bassist Peter Brendler and drummer John Bishop.
Inside Scoop: Hummer wrote an essay on the Boone/Levine collaboration THE POETRY OF JAZZ for the literary journal BLACKBIRD - that is how Boone met him.
credits
from The Poets Are Gathering,
released October 16, 2020
T.R. Hummer (p/n), Benjamin Boone, (ss), Hashem Assadullahi (as), Ben Monder (g), Eyal Maoz (g), Peter Brendler (b), John Bishop (d)
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
Trio helmed by director, author, and actor Jean-Paul Delore translates various texts by French and African writers into vibrant jazz fusion. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2024