Bird/Diz: [An Erased History of Bebop]

An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author's own roving imagination.

What becomes of a history overwritten, sampled, celebrated and smeared? How do we find creation past erasure? Part new media archive, part visual poetry project, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] is a journey into highs and lows of Black Americaís first global music export. Taking biographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a jumping off point, BIRD/DIZ jumps between actual erasures of the written/oral history of Bebop, redacted poems taken from those words, and reflections on historic performances from some of jazz's chief characters. From St. Louis heroin dins to Copenhagen sound stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black American contributions to world art, the seed of innovation that never dies.

Poetry. Essay. Hybrid. Music. African & African American Studies.