Tag Archives: pluto press

Our opening song is “Brother Malcolm” by Archie Shepp, from his 1999 release Conversations. Archie Shepp, surely one of the great political philosophers of so-called Jazz, accompanies us throughout. While preparing for this conversation another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back by police, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but it could have been, likely has been, in …

The title of our opening song, performed by Deacon Tom Jones, from the compilation album Mississippi Saints and Sinners, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear this Building Down,” serves as an epigraph to Baldwin’s 1972 masterpiece, the essay collection No Name in the Street, which features heavily in our program today. Born on August 2nd, 1924 in Harlem James …