Sunday 5/15/2016 Show: Miles and Me

Photo: Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe |
 
The next show will air on Sunday, May 15, 2016 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This membership/fund raising broadcast will feature interviews with poet/writer, Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe and Margaret Porter Troupe, who is the founder of The Gloster Project. In addition to talking about Quincy’s book Miles and Me which covers his relationship with Miles Davis, we will discuss an upcoming Harlem Arts Salon fundraiser to benefit The Gloster Project on what would have been Miles Davis’s 91st birthday on May 26.
 

 
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of ten volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works; Earl the Pearl: My Story, a memoir of legendary NY Knicks basketball star, Earl Monroe, (Rodale, April 2013) is Troupe’s newest non-fiction work. In 2010 Troupe received the American Book Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Among Troupe’s best-selling works are Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and his memoir, Miles & Me, which is under development as a major motion picture.
 
Margaret Porter Troupe grew up on a farm in rural Amite County, Mississippi, on the outskirts of Gloster. In addition to enjoying careers in acting, in advertising, as a published writer, Margaret started several businesses including Porter Troupe Gallery, a contemporary art gallery; VeVe: Visual Environments for Visual Education, an award-winning nonprofit arts education organization providing after-school arts programs for children in San Diego, and Margaret Porter Troupe Arts Projects which administers the Harlem Arts Salon and The Gloster Project.
 
Suga’ will offer 10 autographed copies of Quincy Troupe’s Miles & Me as a thank you gift for a pledge to help WBAI-FM/Pacifica Radio in New York continue to provide programming you enjoy.
 
From the publisher’s description of Miles and Me:
 
Quincy Troupe’s candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author’s own development, both artistic and personal. As Davis’s collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography,Troupe–one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s–had exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis’s spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to the men’s friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations.
 
Troupe has written that Miles Davis was “irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn’t go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch.” The author’s love and appreciation for Davis make him a keen, though not uncritical, observer. He captures and conveys the power of the musician’s presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. He also shows Davis’s lighter side: cooking, prowling the streets of Manhattan, painting, riding his horse at his Malibu home. Troupe discusses Davis’s musical output, situating his albums in the context of the times–both political and musical–out of which they emerged. Miles and Me is an unparalleled look at the act of creation and the forces behind it, at how the innovations of one person can inspire both those he knows and loves and the world at large.
 
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones.
 
Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
 
Web Extras
 
Listen to Troupe discuss Davis’s “Blue in Green” on NPR’s News and Notes.
 

 
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman and Hunter colleges in the City University of New York system.