Tom Piazza via MATRIX

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If You Can't Stand the Heat

Image above is from the base of the cross in front of the church of São Francisco do Paraguaçu in the Bahian Recôncavo

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word, limned in cadenced song, Brazil is a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony...

It is not a European nation. It is not a North American nation. It is not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin. It was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people). Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David. Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof. Nowhere else but here.

Oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption — elements of these are still strongly entrenched — have defined, delineated, and limited Brazil.

But strictured & bound as it has been and is, Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of — or perhaps because of — the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.

For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...

Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.

"Onde tem miséria, tem música!"* - Raymundo Sodré

And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.

Welcome to the kitchen!

* "Where there is misery, there is music!" Remarked during a conversation arcing from Bahia to Haiti and Cuba to New Orleans and the south side of Chicago and Harlem to the villages of Ireland and the gypsy camps and shtetls of Eastern Europe...

Tom Piazza I RECOMMEND

CURATION

from this node by: Sparrow/Pardal

This is the Universe of

Name: Tom Piazza
City/Place: New Orleans, Louisiana
Country: United States

Life & Work

Bio: Tom Piazza is celebrated as a novelist and a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City Of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent The Rain. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series TREME, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He lives in New Orleans.

In both his fiction and his nonfiction, Tom Piazza explores themes of cultural and personal identity, often using music as a prism through which to view American life. His 2015 novel A Free State, set in Virginia and Philadelphia just before the Civil War, explores the difficult, many-layered relationship between blackface minstrelsy and slavery, and the deep, painful, and still-contemporary riddles of race and society.

His novel City of Refuge follows the stories of two New Orleans families, one black and one white, during and after Hurricane Katrina; it was a One Book, One New Orleans selection and won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. His novel My Cold War won the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, and his debut short-story collection Blues and Trouble won the James Michener Award. His book-length essay Why New Orleans Matters, published two and a half months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, won the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Book of the Year Award.

His writing on American music, including jazz, blues, country, and bluegrass, has been similarly recognized. He is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing (for his books The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz and Understanding Jazz, and for his Oxford American column on Southern Music), and he won won a Grammy Award for his album notes to the five-CD set Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. His music pieces have been widely anthologized, appearing in Best Music Writing 2000, The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, and many other collections.

Tom is a graduate of Williams College, and he holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has held the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Studies at Millsaps College and has been the Visiting Writer in Residence at Loyola University, the Trias Visiting Writer at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, and a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has delivered lectures and readings at Yale University, Harvard Divinity School, Columbia University, Middlebury College, Williams College, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of North Carolina, the Chautauqua Institute, the National Arts Club, and the Library of Congress. In 2015. he received the Louisiana Writer Award from the Louisiana Center for the Book and the State Library of Louisiana, awarded annually to a writer “whose published body of work represents a distinguished and enduring contribution to the literary and intellectual heritage of Louisiana.”

Contact Information

Email: [email protected]
Management/Booking: Tom Piazza is represented by Amy Williams, at The Williams Company
[email protected]

Media | Markets

▶ Book Purchases: http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Piazza/e/B001HD37P4/
▶ Website: http://www.tompiazza.com
▶ Article: http://faulknersociety.org/tom-piazza/
▶ Article 2: http://www.npr.org/books/authors/138142944/tom-piazza
▶ Articles: http://www.tompiazza.com/words.html

Quotes, Notes & Etc. “Tom Piazza’s writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension – reveals the emotions that we can’t define.”
- Bob Dylan

My Writing

Publications: A Free State opens on eve of the Civil War in 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he earns money living by his wits and performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass, leader of a popular minstrel troupe struggling to compete with dozens of similar ensembles, who imagines that Henry’s skill and magnetism might restore his troupe’s sagging fortunes.

The problem is that black and white performers are not allowed to appear together onstage. Together, the two concoct a masquerade to protect Henry’s identity, and Henry creates a sensation in his first appearances with the troupe. Yet even as their plan begins to reverse the troupe’s decline, a brutal slave hunter named Tull Burton has been employed by Henry’s former master to track down the runaway and retrieve him, by any means necessary.

Bursting with narrative tension and unforgettable characters, shot through with unexpected turns and insight, A Free State is a thrilling reimagining of the American story by a novelist at the height of his powers.

This rich novel about minstrelsy, slavery, and the dream of escape shows that our demons and our angels haven’t changed much. But the portrait of the struggle is so insightful that it becomes its own strong vision of hope.
— Zachary Lazar, author of I Pity the Poor Immigrant and Sway

A Free State has great kinetic energy, a gripping central narrative, and a host of indelible characters. And, in the current age of identity politics, it speaks to the prevailing cultural obsession with ‘authenticity’ by exposing the fragility of that very notion. A hugely rewarding novel.
— Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane