Category: Features – Archive

July 6, 2020 / Features - Archive

The cover tells the story. Three young black men stare defiantly at the camera from a lunch counter, while the waiter’s curdled expression makes plain they’ve sat in a whites-only area of a segregated diner. Sixty years later and, like our own black population, African Americans still face racism in…

July 4, 2020 / Features - Archive

She met any transgression with such a withering glare that her eyes were more like flamethrowers than headlights; the voice imperious, with a crust of sarcasm. Nina Simone could scare the pants off her band and fans, alike. Watch, in Netflix’s gripping What Happened, Miss Simone?, her stop playing to…

July 3, 2020 / Features - Archive

Flipping through records in a department store, the 16-year-old me is hooked by the cover image: an ebony man in a bright white singlet, his body arching backwards as he plays his trumpet. Miles Davis, it says. A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I ask to hear it – in those…