No Treble
Jazz legend Ron Carter has teamed up with abstract painter and poet Danny Simmons for a new album called The Brown Beatnik Tomes – Live at BRIC House. The album features Simmons performing readings from his 2014 book of poems and paintings, The Brown Beatnik Tomes, with Carter accompanying him on bass. Simmons came up with the idea to integrate black culture and community into the style of the Beat Poets.
“I was trying to imagine myself as a Beat Generation poet in the ’50s,” says Simmons, “and how my concerns would be a bit different from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s or Allen Ginsberg’s. In a way, the beatniks romanticized black people. They were hip, but they didn’t really see the plight. That scene largely was about the Negro experience but didn’t have the Negro in it.”