Chicken, Waffles & Durham’s Renaissance
Close your eyes and imagine you are sitting inside a small family-owned diner in Harlem.
It’s almost 5 o’clock in the morning. The year is 1929. A young man with a flour-dusted apron places a warm, sweet potato waffle and three seasoned fried chicken wings in front of you. It smells delicious. He leaves, then quickly returns with collard greens, maple syrup, hot sauce and flavored butter. The diner is crowded with young poets, painters and musicians unwinding after a long night.
OK, you can open your eyes now. The Harlem Renaissance poets and musicians are now frozen behind panes of glass and framed on the walls around you. There is still a steaming plate chicken and waffles at your mercy. You’re in downtown Durham about to sink your teeth into a signature dish at Dame’s (Almost) Famous Chicken and Waffles.
“There’s a connection between jazz and chicken and waffles,” owner Damion ‘Dame’ Moore explains. “[It] traces back to the Harlem Renaissance, when musicians would play after hours at venues as late as 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. Some restaurants catered to these musicians and would serve the chicken that was left over from dinner, as well as the waffles being prepared for breakfast.”
It is no surprise that chicken and waffles was born in the spirit of improvisation. Like jazz, which infuses African aesthetics of rhythm, syncopation and improvisation and with European instrumentation, chicken and waffles is also a unique and unlikely hybrid. Infusing a traditional southern African American dinner dish with a breakfast (or dessert) meal of medieval European origin, chicken and waffles has been served in black communities for nearly a century. Now, it’s available in my hometown - Durham.
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Rap, Politics & Eagles
I’ve been teaching a dream class at North Carolina Central University for the past two years called Hip Hop, Music and Politics (it was originally called, It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: Music and Political Movements - I abbreviated the title this semester for simplicity’s sake). This class is the culmination of my interests as a musician and scholar. We basically look at various political movements, including the Anti-Lynching Movement, Rastafari Movement, and the Black Power Movement and explore how the music of artists such as Billie Holiday, Bob Marley and Gil Scott Heron were in revolutionary dialogue with their respective movements. Sound interesting? Read more in this Campus Echo article written by one of my students, Jorashae Graddick:
If you walk into the special topics in political science course, Hip Hop Music and Politics, you might be surprised to find a professor who looks a lot like a typical college student.
It will be Pierce Freelon, adjunct professor of political science and local hip-hop emcee, standing in front of the class bobbing his head to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ album, “Catch a Fire,” waiting for class to begin.
1 Comment. Filed under Uncategorized, entertainment, ignorance, Africa.
hip hop and spoken word curriculum in Durham public school system
A few months ago I started working with an incredible spoken word artist, Kane “Novakane” Smego, a member of the Sacrificial Poets. He was in the midst of developing a curriculum called YouTh ink, which empowers teenage youth through spoken word. We combined YouTh ink with the Blackademics curriculum (learn more about that here) and taught a 10-week pilot program called Poetic Justice at Jordan High School in Durham. It was incredible. We’ve just started a second 10-week run at the Durham Performance Learning Center. Check out this article by The Chronicle about the program.
On the last day of January, two men in knit caps and hoodies walked into the Durham Performance Learning Center, stood up on tables in its crowded cafeteria and started yelling.
“How many of y’all like poetry? How many of y’all like hip-hop? Yeah? Aight, well check this out, then!”
And then Pierce Freelon and Kane Smego started performing spoken-word poems, delivering rhymes with such thunderous flow that students leapt out of their chairs. They were recruiting participants for Poetic Justice, their spoken-word after-school program, and by the time they left, they had handed out 70 applications—or one to nearly every student in the room at the small, nontraditional high school geared toward children who have not performed well in traditional settings.
First offered at Jordan High School in September, Freelon and Smego began a second 10-week program at DPLC last Tuesday. Their course promotes artistic expression, providing an outlet for students who are otherwise struggling.
“[Freelon and Smego] are addressing the needs of kids who have been neglected by the public school system and who don’t fit in the traditional mold,” said Danielle Riley, an English teacher at Jordan who works with students who struggle with literacy. “The talents they do have are writing and spitting their poems, and there’s not a lot of opportunity to do that in the fast-paced, highly-tested, highly-driven curriculum of our public school system.”
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#Jan25 Hip Hop in Solidarity with the People of Egypt
Shouts to The Narcicyst for this gem! Here’s Hip Hop’s statement of solidarity to the people of Egypt, featuring Amir Sulaiman, Omar Offendum, The Narcicyst, Ayah & Freeway (produced by Sami Matar), entitled #Jan25. It’s so refreshing to hear musicians match the energy and passion of a people engaged in revolution. I hope we can Catch a Fire from the Egyptian people and catalyze our own political and musical uprising.
Shouts to brother Youssef for putting me on!
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The Beast’s feature story in The Indepenent
Check out this article on The Beast, featured in The Independent… (wasn’t I just talking about my alma mater, EK Powe?)
Even as a kindergartner at Durham’s E.K. Powe Elementary School, Pierce Freelon loved hip-hop. Rather than adoring the tunes of his mother, Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, he idolized those of LL Cool J. But as a preteen, he accompanied her on tours of Japan and Finland. Everything changed.
“I knew it would change him in many ways,” Nnenna says. “Traveling allows you to see yourself through other people’s eyes and can expand your notion of what it means to be you.”
“Her show was full of people old enough to be my grandma,” Pierce jokes. “It could have been the antithesis of cool, but kicking it with the musicians and getting to experience what it’s like to live on the road … really gave me an appreciation for the life of a live musician. Every room, every instrument, every vibe had its own character and brought a different type of performance from my mom and her band.”
Freelon delved into records by Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny when he returned to America, but his first foray into music was hip-hop. He formed the group Language Arts just before college with fellow Bull City emcee Aden Darity. During a collaboration with Raleigh brass band Children of the Horn, the trio broke from its usually DJ-dependent instrumentation.
“It was kind of an epiphany,” Freelon remembers. “I didn’t realize at the time that it would be the direction that I would end up taking musically with The Beast, but it was so different and invigorating.”
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100 Schools of Thought
Local reflections on education from a young father in Durham, North Carolina…
My daughter is bossy.
Last night we stayed up until 3 a.m. playing with stuffed animals, drinking milk and watching ESPN. If I attempted to alter her evening routine by getting up to pour myself a glass of water, or changing the channel, she threatened to awaken her brother with sirens.
This is how she controls me - by sounding the alarms if I step out of line. And when I got so frustrated that even the blaring pipes of a jazz singer’s granddaughter couldn’t deter my will, she hit me with her secret weapon. Her fat cheeks spread like the Red Sea revealing a gummy, toothless smile so gentle and disarming, that it persuaded me to stay up for an additional two hours of watching UNC men’s basketball get pummeled in the Top 10 plays of the day. Eventually, she drifted to sleep.
As I staggered to bed eager to squeeze the consciousness from my pillow, I was thinking about a conversation I had with Kathryn (my wife) earlier that day about where to send the kids to school. I couldn’t sleep as questions about educational environment, socialization, growth and exposure lingered on my mind.
Luckily we have tons of great options for our kids in Durham, North Carolina where there are public, private, Montessori, magnet and charter schools for children all ages.
As Durhamites, my wife and I have personally sampled much of what the Bull City has to offer. Kathryn attended the area’s premier private school, Durham Academy for much of here middle school and high school career. She’s not what they call a “lifer” (someone who has attended DA for a whopping 12 years or more: from elementary school through high school), but she did ride for nearly a decade as a Cavalier.
I experienced a healthy mix of Durham’s public and private school sector. My siblings and I all attended a charming public elementary school called, E.K. Powe (a place to grow). From Powe my brother Deen went to Shepard Middle, a public school named after the founder of Durham’s Historically Black College, North Carolina Central University. He had a miserable time there.
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The Boondocks: Return of the KING
Back during season 1 of the revolutionary anime The Boondocks, Aaron McGruder dropped Return of the King - a controversial interpretation of a 21st Century Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. See if you can catch the references to The Last Poets “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution” in King’s final speech, which drew the ire of Al Sharpton, among others. BAM!
Find more videos like this on The Spill Movie Community
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Hip Hop, Music & Politics at NCCU
I’m teaching a new course at North Carolina Central University called: Hip Hop, Music and Politics. The class explores the relationships between music and various political movements. By addressing music of artists like KRS-One, Bob Marley, Billie Holiday and Lauryn Hill we gain invaluable insight into the Stop the Violence, Rastafari, Anti-Lynching and Women’s Movements. Check me out of facebook to learn more about the class and curriculum.
1 Comment. Filed under education, Hip-Hip.
Find the Beat: PBS promotes diversity with Esperanza Spalding
Jazz aficionado Esperanza Spalding could be hosting a new progressive music show on PBS called Find The Beat. Find the Beat features Esperanza joining with a group, a band or solo musician to explore the roots of their music. Their journeys take them to see authentic performers, explore cultural connections and investigate musical history with co-host Pierce Freelon. Support diverse and innovative programming on public television by emailing: difundsubmissions@pbs.org - and telling PBS to fund Find The Beat. Read more about PBS’ initiative after the jump.
9 Comments. Filed under television, music, jazz.
New Progressive Sounds from The Beast
The Beast - Freedom Part 2 from BECAUSEUS on Vimeo.
On Tuesday The Beast’s new anthem Freedom Part 2 was released to the masses (check us out on 2dopeboyz.com). I wrote an article about the song, which was published in the News and Observer entitled, When Freedom Disappears. The articles talks about how and why we made a music video for Freedom Part 2, and why the graffiti mural we painted during the video shoot was controversially removed. Check out the article here. And peep the world premier of the video over on Couch Sessions.
