We won’t build livable, connected neighborhoods using extractive, colonizing means. Architect and activist Mark Lakeman, in this podcast, offers some deep thinking on decolonizing our cities, and moving from extractive economies to ones that serve people, land, and animals through building connections and trusting the wisdom of people to take power in their places.
Upstream and Mark Lakeman on Grassroots Urban Placemaking
One underrated quality of the jazz scene in the 1940s and 50s was its racial integration. Music does that – it draws people together into common spaces. That it no perfect solution to a centuries-long legacy of systemic racism, but it does offer a hopeful alternative. Author and archivist Jeff Gold found a trove of photographs documenting jazz clubs of that era, and interviewed the musicians who were there. In this interview, he offers some important history of an unusual and hopeful era in American history.
‘Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s’ Opens a Portal to the Past, and a Dialogue
By Nate Chinen
“It really was a paradisical place to be, the jazz club.”
That relatably wistful sentiment is uttered by saxophonist Sonny Rollins at one point in a handsome new book devoted to the subject. Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s, recently published by Harper Design, is a testament to the bygone American nightlife culture that thrived at midcentury — years before the full realization of a Civil Rights Movement, but well into a more casual arc of racial integration.
Reverend Lisa Yebuah is the lead minister of Southeast Raleigh Table, a multicultural, multigenerational church from the Methodist tradition embedded in Raleigh, North Carolina’s historically Black region. In conversation with Common Good Collective, Reverend Yebuah reflects on the abundance in her community and the challenges she and all of us must face in order to leave Egypt and live liberated together.
We are always down for a good story here at Common Good. Jazz is a story told by an ensemble — every instrument, voice, and lyric adding colors and context and making it ever more rapturous. Embodiment practitioner and writer Prentis Hemphill said, “We were born into a body, but we were also born into a relationship.” Community is just as vital to our existence as our own bodies, and the stories of jazz reminds of this timeless truth.
Nathaniel Mackey is a prolific poet, novelist, editor, critic, and the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Much of his work orbits around and communes with jazz. Here, he explores the human connection as being like a band, and the music is the life we create together.
As If It Were “This Is Our Music”
by Nathaniel Mackey
— “mu” one hundred eighteenth part —
Heaved our bags and headed out again. Again
the ground that was to’ve been there wasn’t.
Bits of ripcord crowded the box my head had
be-
come, the sense we were a band was back,
the sense we were a band or in a band… The
rotating gate time turned out to be creaked,
we
pulled away. Lord Invader’s Reform School
Band it was we were in, the Pseudo-Dionysian
Fife Corps, the Muvian Wind Xtet… The sense
we were a band or were in a band had come
back,
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