Saturday June 1, 2013
7:30pm
$7 suggested donation
Light Refreshments
Cd’s and hats available for sale

Jazz poet and Maine coast resident Toussaint St. Negritude conjures all crossroads of folk, blues, and the Afro-Atlantic experience, via the lone-road elegance of his bass clarinet and the alpine declarations of a voice well worth the view.

A west coast native, Toussaint is a proud product of revolution-era San Francisco, having been raised and informed by the triumphs of every left-local movement from Civil Rights to Gay Rights. Following early readings of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Emerson, and Thoreau, His first great, and what still proves to be his most influential journey from home was at 19, to the Republic of Haiti, where, for 3 years, through the profoundly creative traditions of Voodoo, he was deeply exposed to the magic-surrealist writing of The Negritude Poets. Since Haiti, and throughout his years in San Francisco and all points north, south, and east, he has lived and traveled throughout the country, and after several years in the mountains of Vermont, much to his coastal and creative delight, he has recently discovered his home here on these art-fertile shores of Belfast, Maine.

Toussaint St. Negritude has been published and recorded broadly, and will continue with a forthcoming book of new poems this fall, published by Poets Coast Press.

Performing the self-grown harvest of his own works, this solo poet/composer, bass clarinetist further orchestrates his song by way of a variety of reed and string instruments, including his own handmade stringed-heron, The Bird-of-Mingus, a fretless, fully winged, 4-string banjo/cello-like instrument based on the Ekonting of coastal Senegal.

And, just to add more voodoo to this constellation, for each performance, he also makes and dons his own cool and winged hats.

Catch this transcendental flight, and you will be flown rightly.