City of Asylum Jazz/Poetry: Darius Jones
by Joshua Barnes / July 23, 2011 / No comments
Video: Glen Wood
On September 10, 2011 City of Asylum/Pittsburgh will celebrate its seventh annual Jazz/Poetry event in Pittsburgh’s Northside.
The featured jazz musicians this year are Oliver Lake and guest trio Tarbaby, who recently, as part of a jazz festival featuring 55 other groups in New York, “played the set to go home remembering,” according to a reviewer from the New York Times.
Last year, the Jazz/Poetry event featured music from Oliver Lake’s Big Band, improvised behind the spoken words of writers Yusef Komunyakaa, Maryia Martysevich, Hinemoana Baker, Khet Mar, and Horacio Castellanos Moya.
As part of that event Sampsonia Way interviewed each of the members of Oliver Lake’s Big Band to get a glimpse of the personalities of the musicians that backed 2010’s readers.
Alto saxophonist Darius Jones is a proponent of the free school of jazz. For him, music is a matter of exploring the inner self. In a 2009 interview with Richmond Virginia News, Jones explained: “The better one develops one’s own craft, the deeper one can go into the self. The more practiced the craft, the easier it becomes to capture what’s inside and effectively bring it out.”
In this video, Jones talks about the pros and cons of composing outside of a traditional 20th century musical structure, fans downloading his songs illegally, and the physicality of the saxophone and human voice.
