Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll does the music mold your face like a mask of mink desires and rainbow butterfly wings or does your face shield the heated heart of the music when your lips diddly-be-bop-sweet like Ella Fitzgerald swing-singing back-up and up-front, catching God’s Coltranic future love supreme as if making it up yourself? Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll I saw your favorite saxophone strip you naked. And what was love gonna do except beg to lick those crazy solos straight off your throat. I saw you twirl A-flats like swords on the tip of the tongue of your tears until E refused to equal Mc squared and Einstein’s gorgeous silver afro crackled “Blow your soul-horn Jazz Babydoll and don’t you take jive for no answer! Said swing that horn and take not jive for thine answer!” Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll you inhaled seven known planets and out of your creation came four billion heavens. Each time you exhale a star I recall a previous life and I comprehend flawlessly the ...

The PBS-TV drama ZORA IS MY NAME made its debut in 1989 and was released for sale to the general public on VHS in 2003. The televised play stands as a prime example of how the Harlem Renaissance’s potent creative energies both defined its own era and still transcends it to inform the art and culture of modern times. ZORA IS MY NAME was written by and stars Ruby Dee, a veteran actress of stage, screen, and decades of social activism. The teleplay captures in all its blazing wit, humor, and genius, the extraordinary personality of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). By tracing the growth and development of that singular personality from its early days in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, to its maturation in Washington, D.C., and New York City, the film presents a glittering collage of folklore, history, music, dance, fashion, and high literary culture. With friends like the poet Langston Hughes, artist Aaron Douglas, novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset, writer and artist Richard Bru...

In September 2003, Facts On File of New York City published the worlds first ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE by authors Aberjhani and Sandra L. West. This momentous event did more than help to insure the ongoing celebrations focused on that early twentieth century explosion of cultural creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. It also helped to place the movement within its rightful context as one of the greater triumphs of both African-American creative genius and American spiritual democratic vision. Taking place as it did from the 1920s to the 1940s (though some stop at the 1930s) the Harlem Renaissance marked a period in African-American history when the rhymes of poets, the images created by painters, and those worlds constructed inside novels and upon the stage could not afford to limit themselves to pleasurable fantasies or uncaring indulgence. Government-sanctioned racism, the social and political oppression of women, war ripping across the planet, and daily adjustmen...

WELCOME to The Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. This blog is presented to recognize, honor, preserve, and extend this twentieth century movement’s great cultural and philosophical vision, which was the promotion of creative expression as an effective tool for helping to bring greater racial harmony, social justice, and political equality to the world. Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance will feature reflections on the Harlem Renaissance in general and favorite figures of the Renaissance in particular, such as the dazzling performance artist Josephine Baker, the brilliant painter Jacob Armstead Lawrence, the poet Countee Cullen, blues singer Bessie Smith, jazz-master Duke Ellington, historian W. E. B. Du Bois, novelist Rudolph Fisher, playwright Eloise Thompson, composer Eubie Blake, or any one of numerous others. Occasional poems, book reviews, video reviews, and other writings inspired by the period are also likely to appear from time to time. The idea is to p...