Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast

Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat

Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight

Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night

Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks

To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

(mmmm-hmmm)

May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A.

May not have the history or the intrigue of Pompeii

But when it comes to making music, and sure enough making news

People who just don’t make sense and people making do

Seems a ball of contradictions, pulling different ways

Between the folks who come and go, and one’s who’ve got to stay

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

Seems to me, it’s still in light time people knifed up on 14th street

Makes me feel it’s always the right time for them people showing up and coming clean

Did make the one seem kind of numb

Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

Degenerate Music

"Degenerate Music - a detailed statement by State Secretary Dr. Hans Severus Ziegler, general manager of the German National Theater in Weimar.

"

The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfDK, or Fighting League for German Culture) was founded in 1929 by Alfred Rosenberg, with the aim of promoting German culture while fighting the cultural threat of liberalism. Ironically, this organisation – best known for disrupting concerts and music classes, insulting and threatening artists, and distributing inflammatory and anti-Semitic pamphlets – was originally aimed at the nation’s elite. Hitler and other early Nazi leaders were searching for a way beyond mob-style violence, and decided to create a cultural organisation as a way to court the intelligentsia.

During the first years of its existence, the relatively small and regionally-organised KfdK attracted many intellectuals and, increasingly, musicians. With its conservative agenda of fighting ‘degenerative Jewish and Negro’ influences, it spent much energy promoting the ‘cleansing’ of museums, university faculties, and concert programmes of unwanted artists. In general, the KfdK appealed to radical nationalists and anti-Semites, to those who felt betrayed by defeat in World War I and by the Treaty of Versailles, and to those who felt outraged by the leftist, modernising and ‘cosmopolitan’ tendencies of the Weimar Republic.

The KfdK was initially not very aggressive, relying instead on lectures, intimidation and propaganda. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it became increasingly violent, with the support of the Stormabteilung (SA, Storm Troopers, or brown shirts) changing both its techniques and its membership pool. The KfdK had its own orchestra, which was selected to perform a special concert for Hitler’s birthday. It also acquired control over the important music journal Die Musik, which gave it an official outlet for racist and nationalist opinions on music.

(http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/kampfbund-fr-deutsch/)

Centre Section of the triptych Grosstadt, 1927-8, by Otto Dix (1891-1969). It is an evocation of the Gershwin (1898-1937) period - the Jazz Age. This age and the kind of music (Jazz) were condemned by the Nazis as decadent and racially degenerate

Indeed, the Nazis were so fearful of African and African-American culture (particularly jazz) that in 1930 a law was passed that was titled "Against Negro Culture." In other words, the Nazis were clearly aware of the potential for popular cultural forms to taint what they considered to be genuine Aryan culture—whether this taint was a result of marriage or of music. As a consequence, the Germans often conflated stereotypes of African-American musical performers with those of Jews and Africans into some of their most heinous propaganda pieces.

Two of the most infamous and well-known Nazi propaganda artworks were posters which advertised cultural events. In a poster advertising an exhibition of entartete musik (degenerate music), for example, the viewer is confronted with a dark-skinned man in a top hat with a large gold earring in his ear.

This distorted caricature of an African homosexual male in black face playing a saxophone has a Star of David clearly emblazoned on his lapel. To the National Socialists, the most polluting elements of modern culture were represented by this single individual. They were suggesting that anyone who listened to jazz (or enjoyed other forms of art that they judged to be degenerate) could be transformed into such a barbarous figure.

Nazi propaganda poster titled "LIBERATORS" that epitomizes many perennially-recurring themes of anti-Americanism, by the Dutch SS-Storm magazine that then belonged to a radical SS wing of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (1944)

Toward the end of the war, the Nazis circulated posters in a somewhat desperate attempt to get their "white European brothers" to join their cause. In one infamous poster, the designer depicted a multi-armed monster clutching two white American women. Attached to his muscle-bound body are iconic references to the Ku Klux Klan, Judaism (the Star of David), boxing gloves, jazz dancing, and a lynching noose. At his middle is a sign that reads in English "Jitterbug—the Triumph of Civilization." This poster was directed at white European men, and it urged them to protect their wives and their culture against a coming invasion of primitive, inferior American men. As occurred in the poster that warned against jazz, this image conflated stereotypes of the Jew with that of the African in an attempt to frighten white (Aryan) Europe and America into joining their cause. The exaggerated racist stereotypes served to strengthen and amplify widely accepted attitudes regarding racial and ethnic superiority. With these images, the National Socialists were offering their justifications as to why certain groups should be feared and thus eliminated.

(http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/art-propaganda)

Mississippi Cotton Picker: Charlie Pride

Charlie Pride

One of 11 siblings born into a poor, Mississippi-based sharecropping family, Charley Pride was raised on a cotton farm, where he was forced to work for most of his childhood. At an early age he developed a passion for country music, purchasing his first guitar at the age of 14 and teaching himself to play by listening to radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry. After turning seventeen he enrolled in a baseball training camp, eventually joining the American Negro League and playing for teams in Detroit, Memphis and Birmingham.

Two years in the army interrupted his baseball ambitions, but after his discharge in 1958 he resumed his involvement with semi-professional leagues, supporting himself during the day through various manual labor jobs. His hopes of moving into the major leauges were ultimately blocked by the racist attitudes pervasive at the time, and by 1962, after being denied a tryout for the New York Mets, he left the sport behind in favor of his music.

Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi, on March 18, 1938. (population 489, from the 2010 US census)

Throughout his involvement in baseball, Pride had continued to develop his musical skills, performing on the bus between games for his teammates and occasionally joining different bands onstage. At the urging of country performers Red Sovine and Red Foley, he traveled to Nashville in 1963 and, despite initial disinterest from the locals, secured a management contract with Jack Johnson.

"I'm not a black man singing white man music, I am an American singing American music. I worked out those problem years ago, and everybody else will have to work their way out of it too."

A year later a demo was cut with producer Jack Clement, and the two songs -- The Snakes Crawl At Night and Atlantic Coastal Line -- attracted the attention of RCA Nashville chief Chet Atkins, who quickly signed the singer to a recording contract. Snakes was chosen as the first single in 1966, making a strong showing in the charts, as did its two follow-up releases later in the year, Before I Met You and Just Between You And Me. Due to concern about a backlash against a black country singer, Pride's skin color was kept concealed at the beginning of his career -- and live performances did result in some awkward moments when audiences saw him for the first time. In time the subject of his race became irrelevant, and Pride established himself as one of the leading country acts of his time, topping the country charts 36 times between 1969 and 1984.

In 1986 Pride discontinued his long association with RCA, which was now directing most of its resources towards young, up-and-coming performers. A deal was signed with the Opryland label 16th Avenue, with whom he released several reasonably successful records before the label ceased to exist. An arrangement was subsequently made with Honest Entertainment in the 1990s, but by this time Pride's recording career was largely over. Pride continued to be active as a performer, however, as well as pursuing numerous business interests, amongst which are the Charley Pride Theater in Missouri, majority holdings in the First Texas Bank, his publishing company The Pride Group, and a variety of real estate and broadcasting properties. An autobiography was published in 1994 (source: http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000023952/)

Charlie Pride: Cotton Fields


Charlie Pride: Mississippi cotton pickin' Delta town w/Lyrics

Cotton Picker B.B. King from Indianola, Mississippi.

From the USA Today: INDIANOLA, Miss. — B.B. King's fingers were lightning fast, too smooth to be described as machinelike.

His peers, even the most accomplished ones, would watch in amazement. How does he do that? He had no explanation. His fingers, he told them, were simply an extension of his soul.

King, a teenager then, knew he was good. He could pick more than 400 pounds of cotton a day. His personal best was 480.

"I had a cousin, Birkett Davis. Me and him could pick a bale of cotton a day. That was 900 pounds back then," King says. "And, man, we were proud of that. I still am."

King's fingers eventually moved from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the neck of a Gibson electric guitar, affectionately nicknamed Lucille. He has played his signature blues in 90 countries. In 1987, he earned a lifetime achievement Grammy and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Just shy of 83 (his birthday is Tuesday), he's still making music. He plays about 100 shows a year and released a new album of blues standards, One Kind Favor, in August.

Listen to what the blues master has to say about the $15-million museum bearing his name that's slated to open Saturday in the small Mississippi Delta town where he sweated for a few cents a day picking cotton nearly eight decades ago.(LA Times)

Little is missing from B.B. King's wish list these days.

"Well, maybe a beautiful woman to hold in my arms," he says with a smile. "I love women."

Twice divorced and the father of 15 children, he has battled diabetes in recent years, but his health appears good. King looks slimmer than he has in years, though he has trouble maneuvering stairs or standing for long periods of time.

"Honestly, I feel great," he says, sipping a Diet Coke shortly after the unveiling ceremonies for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which opened Saturday here in his hometown of Indianola after five years in the planning.

"I sure don't feel 82 — or 83. Whatever I am."

"When you're running track, they pass you -- I don't know what you call it . . . -- the baton. I just picked up the baton and kept running with it. But guys like Robert Johnson, Jimmy Rogers, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and I could name you many, many more -- they are the ones that were the base," King said last week during a stop in L.A. "They could have picked any one of them to name the museum after." (LA Times)

He's still hungry for knowledge. "My brain is like a sponge. I'm interested in anything out there. I want to learn. Because to be honest, I always feel sort of second-best when I am around people who went to school, who got an education."

Sitting on the stage of a small auditorium where visitors can watch a short documentary about his life before touring the museum, King is in a reflective mood.

He's thinking of his mother, Nora Ella King, who died when he was 9.

"I would pay whatever it would take for a picture of her," says King, a white handkerchief in his left hand alternately dabbing away sweat and tears. "I don't even have a good picture of her in my mind.

Elvis Presley and BB King

"A lot of people back then thought if you let somebody take a picture of you, you were giving them your soul," King explains. "Plus, taking pictures was complicated and expensive. We were country folks who didn't have a lot of money."

And away he went, on a precious ramble down memory lane, about growing up as a hand on a plantation where they ate whole pigs, ears and all. Where they drank crystal-clear water from an artesian well. Where they had no electricity and nothing but work awaiting them at sunrise. Where worries seemed few.

He earned 75 cents a day chopping cotton, 35 cents per hundred pounds picking it.

Map: Indianola, Mississippi

"But don't get me wrong, that was a lot of money in those days," King says. "I loved my work and I loved my life."

Saturday was always his favorite day. He was off work by noon and headed to town as quickly as he could put on a fresh shirt.

King became interested in the guitar at age 6 while watching the Rev. Archie Fair pick and sing at the Sanctified Church of God in Christ in Indianola. King bought his first when he was 12, a red Stella acoustic. It cost $15, about his monthly salary.

"I worked for the Catledge family, and Mr. Catledge agreed to buy it for me, and he would take out half of it one month, and then half the next," King says.

He even wanted to be a preacher.

"But when I would go into Indianola and play there on the corner of Church and Second Street every Saturday, I got different reactions," King recalls. "When I played gospel, people would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I was going to be good one day. But when somebody asked me to play a blues song, they would also give me a tip.

"Sometimes I made more money on Saturday than I made all week driving a tractor."

"I don't live in my home state now, but I bought some land down there and I was going to build me a house on it," he said softly. "After my demise I wanted this to be open as a museum . . . But they said, 'Why wait till you die? We do it now, you could see it!' I like that idea." (LA Times)

He moved to Memphis in 1946 to pursue a music career. The blues were taking hold of him.

At some point in the past 62 years, that turned around. King got hold of the blues and redefined the genre.

In 2003, Rolling Stone named King the third-best guitar player in history, behind only Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman.

"Like a fool I let 'em come to my house and I said, 'Anything you want, you get it.' And they took damn near everything except the house -- and me," he said, still chuckling. "But I'm glad to do it, because I love to share everything I've had, trying to learn to play blues and trying to do what I've done." (LA Times)

"No question, B.B. King is the most influential blues player of all time," says blues historian Scott Barretta, host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Highway 61 radio show. "The way he bent the strings, his phrasing, his technique" changed the blues.

"B.B. grew up around traditional Delta blues, but he wasn't totally defined by it. He also loved big bands like Count Basie and the Kansas City swing sound. He took all that and created his unique sound. And just about anybody who plays blues or rock has been influenced by it." (source: USA Today)

PBS American Roots Episode 3: Chapter 2: B.B. King

Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow

The Smithsonian Magazine: An imposing sculpture by Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow—the centerpiece of a new exhibition, “African Mosaic,” which highlights recent acquisitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art—depicts the 18th-century Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. The figure, more than seven feet tall, portrays Toussaint reaching out to a seated female slave. “The ‘Great Man’ theory of history is no longer popular,” says curator Bryna Freyer. “But it’s still a way of looking at Toussaint. He really was larger than life.”

The sculpture, which museum director Johnnetta Cole describes as “our Mona Lisa,” evokes two men—the celebrated rebel of Haitian history and the artist who pays homage to him.

Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow

In 1743, Toussaint Louverture was born into bondage in Haiti, the French island colony then known as Saint-Domingue, possibly the grandson of a king from what is now the West African nation of Benin. He is thought to have been educated by his French godfather and Jesuit missionaries. Toussaint read widely, immersing himself in writings from the Greek philosophers to Julius Caesar and Guillaume Raynal, a French Enlightenment thinker who inveighed against slavery. In 1776, at the age of 33, Toussaint was granted his freedom from the place he was born, Breda Plantation, but remained on, rising to positions in which he assisted the overseer. He also began to acquire property and achieved a level of prosperity.

In 1791, while France was distracted by the turmoil of the revolution, a slave rebellion began in Haiti. Toussaint quickly got involved; perhaps as repayment for his education and freedom, he helped Breda’s white overseers and their families flee the island. Toussaint (who added Louverture to his name, a reference either to his military ability to create tactical openings or to a gap in his teeth, caused when he was hit by a spent musket ball) quickly rose to the rank of general—and eventually the leader of the independence movement. His forces were sometimes allied with the Spanish against the French, and sometimes with the French against the Spanish and English. In 1799, he signed a trade pact with the administration of President John Adams.

Ultimately, Toussaint considered himself to be French and wrote to Napoleon declaring his loyalty. Bonaparte was neither impressed nor forgiving. In late 1801, he dispatched 20,000 French troops to reclaim the island. Although Toussaint negotiated an amnesty and retired to the countryside, he was seized and sent to a prison in France. There, he died of pneumonia in 1803. In death, as in life, Toussaint was lionized. Wordsworth, no friend of the French, wrote a memorial sonnet, “To L’Ouverture,” attesting to the fallen leader’s enduring fame: “There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee.”

Sculptor Ousmane Sow (rhymes with “go”) created the Toussaint figure in 1989 in Dakar, Senegal. The museum acquired the piece in 2009. Born in 1935 in Dakar, Sow left for Paris as a young man. “He worked as a physical therapist, which gave him a good knowledge of human anatomy,” says curator Freyer. “And he spent hours at Parisian museums, looking at the works of sculptors such as Rodin and Matisse.”

Sow has often chosen historic themes and heroic characters—he has completed a 35-piece work about the Battle of Little Big Horn, a series on Zulu warriors and a bronze statue of Victor Hugo. A large man himself—Sow stands well over six feet tall—the artist seems to favor large-scale pieces. Karen Milbourne, a curator at the museum who has visited Sow’s studio in Senegal, describes an outsize depiction he did of his father. “Because it’s so large and imposing,” she recalls, “it’s as if you’re seeing it [from the perspective of] a child.”

Ordinarily, when discussing sculpture, there is mention of what it’s made of—stone or bronze, wood or terra cotta. Sow works in his own unique medium, creating pieces from a farrago of ingredients that may include soil, straw, cement, herbs and other things, according to an ever-changing recipe. “It’s his secret sauce,” says curator Christine Kreamer. The mixture is allowed to age for weeks or months, and then is applied to a metal framework. According to Freyer, Sow has also used the mysterious substance to waterproof his house.

For his part, Sow doesn’t attempt to define his work’s effect: “I don’t have much to say; my sculptures say it all,” he says.

HARD TRUTHS: THE ART OF THORNTON DIAL

Carol Kino's article, "Letting His Life’s Work Do the Talking," from the 17 February 2011, New York Times states:

THORNTON DIAL has never been one for talking much about his artwork. Ask him what inspires his monumental assemblages, made from twisted metal, tree branches, cloth, plastic toys, animal bones and all manner of found materials, and he is likely to respond tersely, as he did while showing me around his studio here one bone-chilling day last month.

“I mostly pick up stuff,” he said. “I start on a picture when I get a whole lot of stuff together. And then I look at the piece and think about life.”

Now 82, Mr. Dial has had a lot of life to think about — especially over the last year, during which he endured hernia surgery, pneumonia, a stroke and heart problems. Only recently did he return to making art in this cold and cavernous space at the back of Dial Metal Patterns, a fabrication shop run by his children. As he huddled in a chair, looking frail and slightly wary, his three sons hovered about him protectively.

Artist Thornton Dial

For one paintinglike piece, made on canvas-covered plywood, Mr. Dial had used branches, metal, clothing, paint and a pair of work boots to create a lean figure fording through a tall jungle. “That’s Obama,” he said. “I show the struggle he got through without getting bit.”

Another, saturated with powdery white pigment, presented a baby doll nested in a field of cotton-covered twigs and twisted steel. A rope encircled the doll’s neck, suggesting a noose or an umbilical cord. “That’s the way they come,” Mr. Dial said, chuckling, when asked about the rope’s significance. “You probably see many things in my art if you’re looking at it right.”

Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat. “If anybody else had created a major opus of this scope,” said Joanne Cubbs, an adjunct curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “he or she would be recognized as a major force in the art world. Instead Dial struggles at the margins.”

But his marginalization may not last much longer. Mr. Dial’s first career retrospective, “ Hard Truths,” opens at the museum in Indianapolis on Friday. And on March 19 the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea will open Mr. Dial’s first solo gallery show in New York in 11 years. “This feels like the moment when the cultural world is ready to understand Mr. Dial and perhaps to embrace him,” said Ms. Cubbs, who organized the museum survey.

That exhibition, which runs through Sept. 18 before traveling to New Orleans; Charlotte, N.C.; and Atlanta, includes examples from many different periods, starting with the pictures that made Mr. Dial’s name in the early ’90s, when he used the tiger to symbolize the struggles and triumphs of African-American life. He has continued to invoke the specter of slavery, in pieces like “High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man),” a large 2002 construction in which a grinning Mickey Mouse toy is chained to the hull of a ship.

The show also includes work he made in response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the gulf war: sculptures like the monumental “Crosses to Bear (Armageddon),” dated 2001-4, in which a nine-foot-high expanse of rusty iron crosses is festooned with rag and rubber detritus; and paintings that appear to be made from torn and bloodied American flags, like “Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together” (2003).

“The power and clarity of his work measures up to any artist of any color in the last decades,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the museum, noting the works’ superficial resemblance to those by Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer. “But unlike those figures this work is imbued with an experiential dimension. For Dial, politics is personal.”

Certainly Mr. Dial has one of the more amazing art historical biographies on record. Although he had little formal schooling, he developed an intimate acquaintance with postmodernist art-making materials early in life.

Born in 1928 in a cornfield in the tiny rural hamlet Emelle, Ala., and raised by his great-grandmother, Mr. Dial went to work as soon as he could walk, harvesting sweet potatoes and corn, and gathering twigs and “the stuff my great-grandmother needed to make fire,” he said. After her death Mr. Dial and his younger half brother went to live with another relative in Bessemer, a small industrial town, where he hauled ice, poured concrete, raised cattle, did carpentry and laid bricks, among other things, until he found employment as a metalworker at the local Pullman-Standard boxcar factory. He worked there on and off until it closed in 1981.

All the while — throughout his long marriage to Clara Mae Murrow, who died in 2005, and the birth of his five children (one daughter died at 28 from cerebral palsy) — Mr. Dial was quietly observing and honing his skills. “I was just watching people that make stuff,” he said. “I watch everything.”

He was also making things himself, from the functional, like fishing nets and lures, chimneys, bricks, funerary monuments, furniture and houses (“I made a whole lot of them and tore them down,” Mr. Dial said) to the less obviously useful, like animal sculptures made from tin and tree branches or plastic bread wrappers, or a slave ship built from metal and wood. As his sons recalled, during another interview in the shop office with nearly a dozen relatives and family friends in attendance, Mr. Dial would come home from work, watch the evening news, do some farming out back with his children and then set to work making things again.

Even with something ostensibly practical like a lure, “it was odd, the way he took his time and painted them and stuff like that,” his son Richard said. “Whatever he worked on had to be different from somebody else.” Mr. Dial was so prolific, he added, that his wife often made the boys tidy up by burying his old work in the yard. (Mr. Dial has said in the past that he sometimes hid his work himself because he feared the attention it might attract during the Jim Crow years.)

Life changed dramatically for Mr. Dial in the late ‘80s, when he was discovered by William Arnett, a wealthy white Atlanta collector who was obsessively scouring the South for unheralded African-American work. (Among his discoveries are the Gee’s Bend quilters, whose work toured to 12 museums in a widely lauded show.)

Mr. Arnett was smitten from the start. “Dial possessed a combination of pride, dignity and determination, along with a wry sense of humor,” he wrote in an e-mail. “His earliest artworks demonstrated an unlimited creative imagination. All he lacked was encouragement and opportunity.”

For Mr. Dial the meeting was transformative. “He didn’t have to bury stuff anymore,” his son said, “because Mr. Arnett would give him money for things, and Daddy was kind of fascinated. There was a point where he said, ‘Ya’ll been laughing at me, but look at what the man just paid me for doing this.’ ”

Or, as Mr. Dial put it, “That’s the time I did start thinking about art.”

Mr. Arnett gave him a monthly stipend in exchange for right of first refusal, which allowed Mr. Dial to make art full time. Mr. Arnett visited frequently, and introduced Mr. Dial to curators and other collectors, including Jane Fonda, who remains a major supporter. He also set the wheels in motion for Mr. Dial’s first museum exhibition, “Image of the Tiger.” Organized by the critic Thomas McEvilley, it opened at two New York institutions, the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in November 1993. The show seemed poised “to break down the border between outside and inside,” Mr. McEvilley said. Critically it was successful: “He has a genuine talent that he brandishes fearlessly,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times. But soon after the opening “60 Minutes” ran a segment that suggested Mr. Arnett was exploiting the folk artists whose work he had championed, particularly Mr. Dial. Suddenly “my show died on the vine,” Mr. McEvilley said. And so did several other major exhibitions of Mr. Dial’s art in the works.

Since then, although Mr. Dial has exhibited in galleries and been included in many group outsider art shows, as well as the 2000 Whitney Biennial, he has had only one other major museum solo exhibition, “Thornton Dial in the 21st Century,” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2005. (Mr. Dial, who remains close to Mr. Arnett, memorialized the debacle with the 2003 self-portrait assemblage “Strange Fruit: Channel 42”: it involves an eyeless scarecrow-like creature wearing a bloody tie strung up from a television antenna.) Yet the event had one positive effect on Mr. Dial, Ms. Cubbs said: “It made him re-evaluate what the relationship would be between his art and its audience, and his work became more complex and powerful.”

How did he do that? Mr. Dial isn’t telling. “I remember all of my art,” he said, “but I can’t talk about all of it, because I did it 20 or 30 years ago. You ain’t going to think about all you done did in life either.”

But pressed to explain why he makes art in the first place, he finally found an answer: “I make it for people to love.” (source: New York Times)

Pan Drums

The steeldrum (pan) is the national musical instrument of Trinidad and Tobago developed in the late 1930's. The pan is the only original non-electronic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. Prior to the invention of pan, lengths of bamboo were used during street parades to beat out rhythms and these bands were known as 'Tamboo Bamboo Bands'. In the quest of a cleaner sound, old biscuit tins and caustic soda pans were first used to replace the bamboo. Spree Simon and Ellie Manette are considered the pan pioneers in developing this steeldrum to what it is today.

The steel band is made up of percussionists whose instruments are fashioned out of oil drums. The process for creating a pan begins with the the beating of the tip of the drum into a concave shape (sinking), marking the pan into sections and hammering each one to correspond to a certain pitch (grooving).

The pan is then cut from the top of the drum at a depth that will define its overall pitch. Finally the pan is heated for tone, and fine-tuning is done with a small hammer to complete the process. Pans are played with pairs of rubber-tipped sticks.

The three basic types of pan are tenor pans that play melody, rhythm pans that play harmony, and bass pans. The steel band, which can contain numerous performers, can play a wide range of music which include, soca, calypso, classical, rock, reggae, jazz, pop, latin and rhythm and blues. (source: Da Sweet Pan)

Making a Steel Drum Steel Pan Tenor Pan