Glide Magazine
This collaboration between two giants could likely only happen live in a special setting to produce the drama and improvisation contained in The Brown Beatnik Tomes – Live at BRIC. Bassist Ron Carter (who just turned 82) not only played in Miles Davis’ vaunted Quintet but holds the Guinness-certified most-recorded jazz bassist in history with well over 2200 sessions. Danny Simmons is a Tony-award winning co-founder of Def Poetry Jam, not to a mention a novelist, poet, gallerist, and now-African abstract expressionist whose paintings have in the Smithsonian and the United Nations HQ. What began as a book, became an event and the magic of that special evening in captured on this album.
The concept is turning the original beat poetry of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, McClure and others on its head. It’s rather interesting because when we revisit that era of poetry in the ‘50s, much of the lingo such as “hipsters,” ”cool,” “beat,” and “hepcat” was credited to white poets who were, in fact, romanticizing black people. Yes, they were into jazz, but they hadn’t lived the black experience. Simmons explains, “They were hip, but they didn’t really see the plight. That scene was largely about the Negro experience but didn’t have the Negro in it.” Ginsberg’s Howl is one of Simmons’ all-time favorites, but this project shifts the point-of-view 180 degrees to the source rather than the voyeur. Carter, of course, is old enough to have lived through the original era. He was in his twenties then, working in New York.