neo mu

Day two of the PASS Pop-up in NYC opens with Chimurenga Library resident, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday at 3pm. She presents words and sounds from her Astro/Afrosonics Archive, a collection of Jazz Poetics and audio culture.

In her own words: “Since the 1950s, jazz music and the literary imagination have been inextricably linked, producing transcendent recordings and written work and many hybrids of the two – a new sonics, an AntiqueFuturism – From Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth and Duke Ellington to Joseph Jarman to Michael Harper to Mos Def. ”

Next, more jazz as writer and researcher, Brent Hayes Edwards presents “The Two Ages of Artist House: Ornette Coleman on Prince Street.” Edwards’ books include The Practice of Diaspora (2003) and the forthcoming Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. His translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa will be published by Seagull Books in 2016.

After that, artist and improvisor Nathaniel Donnett‘s “Malcolm X Remix” takes us into Neo Muyanga‘s “Revolting Songs: Black Music and the Aesthetics of Protest” Here, the Cape Town based composer and PASS co-founder continues his multi-focal exploration of protest music that spans from how protest songs played a key role in South Africa’s liberation to the role of liberation music in Egypt, Brazil and Uruguay.

Finally, Triple Canopy, a magazine based in New York, present a performative reading of their new series, Passage of a Rumor, edited with Ralph Lemon, which considers how and why we talk about the value and potential acquisition of ephemeral works of art.

“I and others make stuff up about what’s happening, and, more compellingly, about what might happen, knowing that one cannot predict what will happen, given life’s ephemeral relationship to life and life’s partially ephemeral relationship to art.” – Ralph Lemon, “I’d Rather Talk About the Post-part”,  Passage of a Rumor, Triple Canopy, 2015