Ted Joans – Wikipédia

Theodore “Ted” Joans ( July 4, 1928 – April 25, 2003 ) was a free jazz trumpeter, American poet and painter.
He was one from rare African-American poet-musicians associated with the Beat Generation, friend of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman.

Ted Joans is developing a very personal style of reading aloud or of decline of his poems. He declares: ‘ I don’t sing the words, I swing the words. » (“I don’t sing the words, I swing them”) close to Langston Hughes,
As a free jazz musician, he plays with John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.

In the years 1951-1961, he resided in Greenwich Village, where his painter workshop welcomed the lights of the time as artists and musicians during legendary evenings, often photographed by Weegee or Fred McDarrah. He meets Joseph Cornell, and also Salvador Dalí from which he will quickly move away.

In the 60s he discovered Paris, met André Breton, Éric Losfeld and ended up settle in Timbuktu where he bought a house. He qualified in 1960 as a black surrealist ( I, Black Surrealist ). Large traveler, he will constantly circulate between three continents: North America (he died in Vancouver), Europe, Africa.

He said he was very close to Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and in 1966, approached the Black Panthers current, while affirming his distances.

He travels a lot on the whole African continent, often on foot or hitchhiking.

Some see in the orality of his many poems an announcement of the Slam movement but he was not interested in the competitive aspect of this practice.

At the plastic level, he owes him in 1955 poetic graffiti in memory of his friend Charlie Parker: Bird Lives! On New York walls, many books illustrated with collages, and later he invents a cut-up technique mixing photos and words. Ted Joans continues to produce drawings and collages in parallel to his poems, and also a work of short films Super 8. Having abandoned the trumpet, he remains in his life a fervent jazzist and announces: ” Jazz is my religion, Surrealism is my point of view “(” Jazz is my religion, surrealism is my point of view “).

The painting Bird Lives! , a canvas from 1958 is in the permanent collection of the Young Museum in San Francisco.

While he has spent the last fifteen years of his life mainly in Paris, Ted Joans leaves a profuse, generous, still little known work in France.

Works published in French

Other publications

• Funky Jazz Poems (1959) (New York, Rhino Review)
• Beat Poems (1959)
• All of T.J. and No More (1959)(New York, Excelsior)
• The Truth (1960)
• The Hipsters (1961) (New York, Corinth)
• A Black Pow-Wow Of Jazz Poems (1969) (New York, Hill & Wang)
• Afrodisia (1970) (New York, Hill & Wang)
• A Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose (1971) (London, Calder & Boyars)
• Sold out; Or: Blitz love Poems (1979) (Kassel, Loose Blätter Presse)
• The Aardvark Watcher (1980) (Berlin, LCB editions)
• SURE, REALLY I IS (1982) (Sidmouth, Transformaction)
• Honey Spoon (1993) (Paris, Handshake Press)
• Okapi Passion (1994) (Berkeley, Ishmael Reed Publishing)
• Wow (1998) Wheat Lower (cuckileo, Quarteromo)
• Teducation : Selected Poems (1999) (Coffee House Press)
• In Thursday Sane (2001) (Davis, CA, Swan Scythe Press)
• Our Thang : Several Poems, Several Drawings, avec Laura Corsiglia (2001) (Victoria,CA Ekstasis Editions)

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• Notice in a generalist dictionary or encyclopedia :