Baldwin smith jazz

A prolific author, his essays, novels and plays are amongst the most searing documents of the African American freedom struggle. He was also a public figure appearing in TV debates about civil rights in America. Baldwin was deeply inspired and influenced by jazz throughout his life — he was a close friend to many jazz legends from Miles Davis and Ray Charles to Nina Simone and Roy Ayers.

As a young aspiring writer in the s, he worked menial jobs during the day and by night, sang and played guitar in Greenwich Village cafes. He also published critical essays on blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey as well as accounts of the cultural and historical significance of gospel music and soul singers like Aretha Franklin.

Roy Ayers counts him as his favourite author, and to this day Ayers lives in the New York apartment where James Baldwin once lived with his younger brother David. The precision with which he guides his instrument reveals the depth of his love for us all. As a young gay, black writer, Baldwin was doubly constrained by racism and homophobia, and in he fled America for Paris, in search of freedom.

It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me dig back to the way I myself must have spoken… and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep. For Baldwin, racism damages us all and debases the capacity to love; it requires vigilant questions.

James Baldwin's affinity for

He feared for his life, and the cumulative effects brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. He took up refuge in a hilltop village called St-Paul de Vence in Southern France, where he lived for the last seventeen years of his life. Later, I found out that he felt the same way about me. I thought we looked like brothers. I had read his books and loved and respected what he had to say.