Wednesday, September 30th, ISSUE is pleased to stream a performance from Heroes Are Gang Leaders, literary free jazz ensemble of writers, artists and musicians as a part of the 2020 Brooklyn Book Festival. Featuring an expansive fourteen member band, the performance features the full group’s line up as well as multiple embedded solos and ensemble formations of the group’s various members. Heroes Are Gang Leaders was founded in 2014 by poet, photographer and professor Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as a tribute to the late poet, activist and Jazz Critic Amiri Baraka. For this stream, the ensemble includes Melanie Dyer, Luke Stewart, Randall Horton, Alexis Marcelo, Bonita Lee Penn, Nettie Chickering, Arin Maya Lawrence, Devin Brahja Waldman, Brandon Moses, Tcheser Holmes, and guests Patrick Holmes and Miriam Parker.
The performance will take place at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Theater and will be followed by a discussion moderated by Thomas Sayers Ellis featuring panelists: James Brandon Lewis, Melanie Dyer, Randall Horton, Bonita Lee Penn. The conversation titled "The Freedom Reform Forms of Performance" focuses on the ways in which the boundaries between units of sound and units of meaning are eliminated in order to create Improvisational Literature.
The concert features solo performances, duets, trios, quartets, dance and poetry by the members of Heroes Are Gang Leaders, winners of the 2018 American Book Award for Oral Literature, culminating in a full band performance and celebration of the new CD, Artificial Happiness Button (Ropeadope Records 2020). Once described as “Parliament Funkadelic playing the Archie Shepp Songbook,” HAGL is a Literary Jazz Band comprised of poets, professors, musicians and artists known for recontextualizing the content of works by literary figures such as Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Etheridge Knight into original homages and performances that highlight the ever-growing possibilities within the literary work while infusing it with their own brand of patterned, wild, and Free Jazz.
