Salon: Juke Joint

MEET ME AT THE SPOT! JOOKIN’ ON PARK AVENUE

“Following a sinuous evolutionary path shaped by history, motor-muscle memory, esthetic preference, and community reinforcement, ‘jookin’’ first appeared in a format with precursors in West African religious celebrations.” So writes Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, our preeminent cultural historian of the juke joint, in her classic book Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (1990). “Jooks, honky-tonks, and after-hours joints,” she explains, “are secular institutions of social interaction and entertainment, usually associated with some quasilegal activity such as liquor sales or gambling.” With roots in West African culture, jooking thrived as “covert social activity” during the era of plantation slavery, before emerging as an independent institution after emancipation, and thriving with the twentieth century birth of electrified rhythm and blues, funk, and soul.

These rickety venues were often nothing more than a converted barn or shack. But they provided a space where Black folks could gather and let loose, away from the eyes of white authorities who sought to control their every move. Juke joints were places of liberation and defiance, where blues and jazz music could be heard at all hours of the night, and where Black people could dance, drink, and socialize. They crossed the divide between the sacred and the secular. As my college professor of African American literature Robert Stepto always liked to say, in our culture there is always a close proximity between Sunday morning and Saturday night. The music played in juke joints reflected the experiences and viewpoint of everyday Black people, unfiltered. It was a music of pain and joy, love and funky heartbreak.

As a matrix of black sociality, jooking played a significant role in the development of American music. The blues and jazz musicians who played in these venues would go on to influence generations of artists, from rock and roll icons like Big Mama Thornton and Chuck Berry to modern-day hip-hop stars like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole (both of whom cite the blues as an influence). All belong to what Hazzard-Gordon names “the jook continuum.”

In the 1950s and 60s, juke joints began to attract a wider audience, as white Americans discovered the joys of the blues and other forms of African American music during the era of the folk and blues revival. This led to a period of commercialization, but it also marked the beginning of the end for many juke joints. The legacy of the juke joint can still be felt today, however, its visual iconography registered in the dynamic canvases of Ernest Barnes, like his neo-mannerist painting “Sugar Shack” (1971), which was featured on the cover of a Marvin Gaye album and in the credits of the groundbreaking Black sitcom Good Times. In the ecstatic and angular jook dancers of “Sugar Shack,” we can witness a potent contemporary image of this vital underground institution.

In inviting Pamela Sneed and Stew to perform in the historic rooms of the Park Avenue Armory, I approached two artists whose reputation for pointed commentary and shrewd storytelling are without peer. I knew they would each reimagine the jook continuum on their own terms, and in their own musical idiom, and perhaps in their own way, deconstruct the incongruous idea of a jook joint on Park Avenue.

But maybe this is all part of the “sinuous evolutionary path” Hazard-Gordon spoke of, something in the “muscle memory” waiting to get out. If our stories and celebrations belong everywhere, why not here? Why not now?

— Tavia Nyong’o, Curator of Public Programming at Park Avenue Armory

CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY JUKE JOINT

friday, march 31, 2023 at 8:00pm

Pamela Sneed Tribute Cabaret to Big Mama Thornton written and conceived by Pamela Sneed directed by Tom Gilroy and performed with Stacy Penson (keyboard/musical direction), David A. Barnes (harmonica), Viva DeConcini (guitar), and Bernice Boom Boom Brooks (drums)

saturday, april 1, 2023 at 3:00pm

World Premiere of a New Cabaret Piece by Stew performed with his band Baba Bibi , including Kato Hideki (bass), Marlon Cherry (guitar), Dana Lyn (keys and violin), and Urbano Sanchez (percussion)

followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by Park Avenue Armory Curator of Public Programming Tavia Nyong’o

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, The Shubert Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Reed Foundation, Wescustogo Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council.

Cover image: CLARKSDALE, MISSISSIPPI, USA - Club Champagne, a juke joint by Rob Crandall / Alamy Stock Photo.

2023 SEASON SPONSOR

ABOUT THE JUKE JOINT

If you were a Black young woman of a certain age in the 1920s and 1930s and early 1940s who loved blues music, there were places for you to go to experience music–be it in the North or South, in urban or rural areas. The storied “jook” of African American Southern culture, which Hurston would famously celebrate in her 1935 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay as “the most important place in America,” where “the secular music known as blues,” as well as jazz, originated, remains the iconic symbol of grown-folks’ social space wherein pleasure and adventurous possibility emerged out of and coalesced around the live-ness of Black musical performances. Cabarets in Northern, urban communities offered a complementary and sometimes cosmopolitan iteration of nightlife culture often–yet not always–constructed around vocal and instrumental performances that directly engaged audiences in intimate confines. A third and crucial, interstitial space in blues social culture is that of another kind of juke joint (hence I use “juke” rather than “jook” here to mark the distinction), the tavern which featured jukeboxes, those wondrous automated music machines, the “electrically amplified, multisection phonograph” which appeared in 1927. As Sonnet Retman reveals, these sites “catered primarily to black audiences who wanted to hear the latest Race records but could not afford home phonograph players and could not find the blues...on the segregated, ‘classed-up’ and censored airwaves of early radio.” For these folks, the juke joint served as the communal source of recreation where popular songs could be played to the steady flow of libations and jubilant encounters. Jukeboxes “transformed the segregated communal spaces where black listeners gathered to relax, dance, drink, flirt, and socialize.…. Through a shared listening experience…,” she argues, “the jukebox offered a collective sonic reorientation in space and time, a sense of cohesion and possibility, a respite from the hardships of daily labor in Jim Crow.”

— Black feminist music critic Daphne Brooks, excerpted from her book Liner Notes for The Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021)

FROM THE ARTISTS

It is a great honor of my life and career to celebrate in text and song the life of Willie Mae Thornton. She was in many ways a giant and ferocious talent whose contribution to American music and the development of Rock and Roll has been marginalized and erased. One of the many things I’ve discovered in my research for this project is that much of the roots of American music in every form is not only Black but also Black and Queer. It is also not singular but based on relationships and proximity. There are many unsung Blues women and men. I’ve heard names creating this work that I’ve never heard before, like Diamond Teeth Mary, who discovered and encouraged young Willie Mae. I hope to embody Willie Mae Thornton’s courage, uniqueness. tenacity, invention and to again place her center stage in an American landscape. I am deeply grateful to Tavia Nyong’o for their belief and interest in this work from its inception and their visualization of the juke joint. I am also grateful to the staff at the Armory and for all the musicians and the director of this work who all signed on with love and generosity. I am grateful to Denniston Hill whose Exodus Commission sparked this journey where I wanted to imagine Exodus from the standpoint of the Black spirituals, exodus meaning deliverance from slavery which also brought me to the work of Willie Mae aka Big Mama Thorton whose sound was deeply influenced and inspired by gospel. Thank you to all my music teachers as well the late Barbara Maier Gustern, Nick Hallett, Stacy Penson, and Masi Asare.

— Pamela Sneed

My juke is less a joint, more an ideal we as audience and performer bravely, joyfully and cheekily aspire to, a place to get intellectually loose, to cut a rug of funky concepts, a place to be wrong, a place to trace the outlandish dance of the recently and soon to be freed, to celebrate and practice life irreverently, soulfully, lyrically, melodically and, on a good night, lovingly as well.

— Stew

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS

PAMELA SNEED

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in October 2020. Funeral Diva has been featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Artnet, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was recommended by The New York Times alongside Barack Obama’s memoir. In, Sneed was a finalist for New York Theater Workshop’s Golden Harris Award and a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit. She has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, DIA, and NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Artforum, The Academy of American Poets, and more. Her visual work was featured in Omniscient at Leslie Lohman Museum and at The Ford Foundation. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award for her leadership and literary talent. She participated as a reader in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and is a narrator for Coco Fusco’s film, also in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She has had keynotes at Yale University, Georgetown University, and Park Avenue Armory. She won a BOFFO residency on Fire Island in August 2022 and the Creative Capital Award in Literature in 2023. She is an online professor in the SAIC low-res program. She has been a guest artist for six consecutive years. Sneed teaches poetry and art across disciplines in Columbia University’s MFA in Visual Arts program.

STEW

As a Tony Award and two-time Obie Award-winning playwright/performer, critically acclaimed singer/songwriter, and veteran of multiple dive-bar stages, Stew’s focus these days is on co-creating the Afro-Asian Imaginary Cookout Soundtrack known as BABA BIBI (Marlon Cherry, Dana Lyn, Kato Hideki, Urbano Sanchez), while teaching, raising his 13-year-old, and trying to read Fred Moten. He is Professor of the Practice of Musical Theater Writing at Harvard University. He and collaborator Heidi Rodewald are currently co-composing songs for a full-length Spike Lee movie musical as well as a musical based on Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair

TAVIA NYONG’O

Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar and curator of performance. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), which won the Erroll Hill Award for Best Book in Black Performance Studies, and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Best Book in Theater and Performance Studies. He writes regularly for Frieze, Artforum, The Baffler, and other venues. He is currently Chair and Wiliam Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale and Curator of Public Programming at Park Avenue Armory.

PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Robin A. Ediger-Seto Lighting Design

Jahdiel Rodriguez Stage Manager

Andrew Lulling Audio Engineer

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AT THE ARMORY

Park Avenue Armory’s Public Programming series brings diverse artists and cultural thought-leaders together for discussion and performance around the important issues of our time viewed through an artistic lens. Launched in 2017, the series encompasses a variety of programs including large-scale community events; multi-day symposia; intimate salons featuring performances, panels, and discussions; Artist Talks in relation to the Armory’s Drill Hall programming; and other creative interventions.

Highlights from the Public Programming series include: Carrie Mae Weems’ 2017 event The Shape of Things and 2021 convening and concert series Land of Broken Dreams, whose participants included Elizabeth Alexander, Theaster Gates, Elizabeth Diller, Nona Hendryx, Somi, and Spike Lee, among others; a daylong Lenape Pow Wow and Standing Ground Symposium held in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the first congregation of Lenape Elders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; “A New Vision for Justice in America” conversation series in collaboration with Common Justice, exploring new coalitions, insights, and ways of understanding question of justice and injustice in relation moderated by FLEXN Evolution creators Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and director Peter Sellars; Culture in a Changing America Symposia exploring the role of art, creativity, and imagination in the social and political issues in American society today; the 2019 Black Artists Retreat hosted by Theaster Gates, which included public talks and performances, private sessions for the 300 attending artists, and a roller skating rink; 100 Years | 100 Women, a multiorganization commissioning project that invited 100 women artists and cultural creators to respond to women’s suffrage; a Queer Hip Hop Cypher, delving into the queer origins and aesthetics of hip hop with Astraea award-winning duo Krudxs Cubensi and author and scholar Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls; the Archer Aymes Retrospective, exploring the legacy of emancipation through an immersive art installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux and featuring a concert performance by mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl, presented as one component of a three-part series commemorating Juneteenth in collaboration with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center as part of the Festival of New York; legendary artist Nao Bustamante’s BLOOM, a cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of the vaginal speculum and its use in the exploitative and patriarchal history of the pelvic examination; and Art at Water’s Edge, a symposium inspired by the work of director and scholar May Joseph on artistic invention in the face of climate change, including participants such as Whitney Biennale curator Adrienne Edwards, artist Kiyan Williams, Little Island landscape architect Signe Nielsen, eco-systems artist Michael Wang, and others.

Notable Public Programming salons include: the Literature Salon hosted by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose participants included Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jeremy O. Harris; a Spoken Word Salon co-hosted with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; a Film Salon featuring the works of immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth; “Museum as Sanctuary” led by installation artist and Artist-in-Residence Tania Bruguera, curated by Sonia Guiñansaca and CultureStrike, and featuring undocu-artists Julio Salgado and Emulsify; a Dance Salon presented in partnership with Dance Theater of Harlem, including New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and choreographer Francesca Harper, among others; and Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation, a salon exploring Black visual complexity and spirit, led by visionary artist Rashaad Newsome and featuring Saidiya V. Hartman, Kiyan Williams, Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes, Ms.Boogie, Puma Camillê, and others.

Artist Talks have featured esteemed artists, scholars, and thought leaders, such as: architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in conversation with Ai Wei Wei, moderated by Juilliard president Damian Woetzel; director Ariane Mnouchkine and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick; director Ivo van Hove in conversation with James Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theater Workshop; artist William Kentridge and his collaborators Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi in conversation with Dr. Augustus Casely Hayford, Director of the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art; Lehman Trilogy director Sam Mendez and adapter Ben Powers in conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage; artist and composer Heiner Goebbels in conversation with composer, vocalist, and scholar Gelsey Bell; choreographer Bill T. Jones in conversation with architect Elizabeth Diller and designer Peter Nigrini, moderated by vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis; composer, librettist, and director Michel van der Aa in conversation with conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović; director Robert Icke in conversation with Harvard University Professor of the Classics and Comparative Literature Emily Greenwood; and composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey in discussion with visual artist Julie Mehretu, flexn pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, and baritone Davóne Tines, moderated by director Peter Sellars

NEXT IN THE SERIES

HAPO NA ZAMANI (BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT PAST AND PRESENT)

may 20

The Black Arts Movement was a cultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s led by Black artists, activists, and intellectuals that shaped the ideologies of Black identity, political beliefs, and African American culture. Past and present meet to reflect, examine, and point to the full cultural breadth of the Black Arts Movement in a celebratory concert hosted by Carl Hancock Rux with musical direction by Vernon Reid Co-presented with Harlem Stage as part of their Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference.

SALON: REVOLUTIONARY HOPE

june 18

Originally published in ESSENCE Magazine in 1984, a conversation between iconic Black thinkers James Baldwin and Audre Lorde about shared and divergent gendered histories between Black men and women continues to remain relevant today. Inspired by this groundbreaking dialogue, Claudia Rankine is joined by other poets, artists, and creators to reflect on the hidden conversations that animate our fragile democracy. Co-presented with the National Black Theatre.

NEXT AT THE ARMORY

RECITAL SERIES STÉPHANE DEGOUT & CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN

april 3 & 5

Renowned for the finesse and sensitivity he conveys in his interpretations, baritone Stéphane Degout has taken the opera world by storm with appearances at major opera houses and festivals around the world. He comes to the Armory to perform a program of French art songs and German lieder that offers audiences the chance to get to know the boundless technique and abundant musicality of the burnished baritone in the intimate Board of Officers Room.

ARTISTS STUDIO

DOUBLE BILL: THURMAN BARKER / ADEGOKE STEVE COLSON AND IQUA COLSON

april 22

A versatile drummer and percussionist, Thurman Barker has performed with countless singers and artists from the worlds of classical, pop, jazz, and those that defy categorization. He performs excerpts from three of his orchestral scores—South Side Suite, Pandemic Fever, and Mr. Speed-str—on a special double bill with “musical power couple” (The New York Times) Adegoke Steve Colson and Iqua Colson and their longtime collaborators Chico Freeman and Douglas R. Ewart. The Colsons’ vast work focuses on many facets of the human experience, illuminating social issues while taking listeners inside the aesthetics of art.

THE DOCTOR

june 3 – august 19

north american premiere

After amazing Armory audiences with his adaptations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (2022), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2022), and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (2021), visionary director and playwright Robert Icke returns with the North American premiere of this gripping moral thriller following lauded runs at London’s Almeida Theatre and West End. This scorching examination of our age, a striking reimagining of the 1912 play Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, utilizes the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, identity, race, gender, privilege, and scientific rationality. Olivier Awardwinner Juliet Stevenson stars as the doctor at the center of the drama where nothing is quite what—or who—it seems. A galvanizing piece of theater, the production serves as a stark health warning for an increasingly divided nation, where clashing views about the way we see ourselves and the world we live in today only magnify the complexities of life.