Biography
Jayne Cortez delivered her poetry and prose with a fiercely singular force that belonged only to her. Her style—cutting, direct, free of sentiment, and brutally candid—offered so vivid a vision of the world that many other poets could appear gentle or even lightweight beside her. Over time the musicians she chose to work with consistently mirrored the social, political, and cultural concerns she held most dear. She entered the world in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1936 and spent her childhood near Los Angeles immersed in her parents’ collection of jazz and blues discs, which also held Latin American dance-band recordings and field captures of Indigenous tribal music from the Americas. Listening early on to Bessie Smith’s records fostered a profound awareness of womanhood that, together with her resolute character, turned her into an exceptionally outspoken person. The music of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the forthright Dinah Washington reshaped her sensibility; Washington’s raw manner of expression plainly spurred the poet to speak without restraint. Cortez, who held the independent performer Josephine Baker in high regard, liked to cite inspirations rather than influences when she spoke about writers. Among those she claimed kinship with were Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Christopher Okigbo, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Wright. Affinities with the raw yet lyrical poetics of Federico García Lorca likewise come to mind. She typically composed, recited, and performed her texts through repeating rhythmic structures that echoed the layered percussive idioms of African and Caribbean drumming.
In 1954, at age eighteen, Cortez wed saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Their son Denardo arrived in 1956; he started playing drums alongside his father as a youngster and later built his career around joint projects with both parents. After divorcing Coleman in 1964 she established the Watts Repertory Theater Company and remained its artistic director through 1970. While engaged in Civil Rights work in Mississippi she journeyed across Europe and Africa before settling in New York City in 1967. Bola Press, the publishing imprint she launched in 1972, has released most of her recordings. Her debut album, Celebrations and Solitudes, was taped in White Plains, New York, in 1974; the duo set with bassist Richard Davis appeared on Strata East. The first Bola Press title, recorded in October 1979, was Unsubmissive Blues and featured the piece “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto.” Cortez began presenting her work with an electric, funk-inflected modern-jazz ensemble known as the Firespitters, whose nucleus consisted of guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Al McDowell, and drummer Denardo Coleman. For an extended period the Firespitters and Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time operated side by side, with Denardo at the center and musicians moving between both groups. In 1975 she married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards, whose imagery has graced her books and several album covers.
During summer 1982 Cortez issued the powerful album There It Is, which contains several selections that epitomize her art: the exuberant tribute “I See Chano Pozo” honoring Dizzy Gillespie’s celebrated Cuban percussionist; the fierce denunciation of male violence titled “If the Drum Is a Woman”; and “US/Nigerian Relations,” built from the repeated chant “They Want the Oil But They Don’t Want the People” set against an intensifying electric free-jazz maelstrom. Her following Bola Press release, Maintain Control, recorded in 1986, is notable for Ornette Coleman’s deeply expressive saxophone on “No Simple Explanations,” the disturbing “Deadly Radiation Blues,” and the fiercely spinning “Economic Love Song,” another of her insistent repetition pieces constructed around the phrase “Military Spending, Huge Profits and Death.” Among later recordings, Cheerful & Optimistic (1994) is distinguished by the presence of an African kora player and moments of reflective tenderness on “Sacred Trees” and “I Wonder Who.” The album also includes the anti-militarist statement “War Devoted to War” together with the compact declarations “Samba Is Power” and “Find Your Own Voice.” Taking the Blues Back Home came out on Harmolodic/Verve in 1996; Borders of Disorderly Time, issued in 2002, featured guest appearances by Bobby Bradford, Ron Carter, and James Blood Ulmer.
Cortez co-established the Organization of Women Writers of Africa in 1991 and presided over it for many subsequent years. An educator, publisher, and internationally recognized author whose writings have been rendered in numerous languages, she appeared in the films Poetry in Motion and Women in Jazz. The mark she left on spoken-word performance art in the late twentieth century has still not received the thoughtful acknowledgment it merits. Her combative political candor and intensely cathartic stage presence at times aligned her with Judith Malina and the Living Theater. The African-American Registry observed online that “Her excrescent language and her ability to push the acceptable limits of expression to address issues of race, sex and homophobia place her in a category that few other women occupy.” She kept homes in both New York City and Dakar, Senegal—the latter of which she described as feeling truly like home. Jayne Cortez passed away in New York on December 28, 2012, at the age of seventy-six.
In 1954, at age eighteen, Cortez wed saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Their son Denardo arrived in 1956; he started playing drums alongside his father as a youngster and later built his career around joint projects with both parents. After divorcing Coleman in 1964 she established the Watts Repertory Theater Company and remained its artistic director through 1970. While engaged in Civil Rights work in Mississippi she journeyed across Europe and Africa before settling in New York City in 1967. Bola Press, the publishing imprint she launched in 1972, has released most of her recordings. Her debut album, Celebrations and Solitudes, was taped in White Plains, New York, in 1974; the duo set with bassist Richard Davis appeared on Strata East. The first Bola Press title, recorded in October 1979, was Unsubmissive Blues and featured the piece “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto.” Cortez began presenting her work with an electric, funk-inflected modern-jazz ensemble known as the Firespitters, whose nucleus consisted of guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Al McDowell, and drummer Denardo Coleman. For an extended period the Firespitters and Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time operated side by side, with Denardo at the center and musicians moving between both groups. In 1975 she married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards, whose imagery has graced her books and several album covers.
During summer 1982 Cortez issued the powerful album There It Is, which contains several selections that epitomize her art: the exuberant tribute “I See Chano Pozo” honoring Dizzy Gillespie’s celebrated Cuban percussionist; the fierce denunciation of male violence titled “If the Drum Is a Woman”; and “US/Nigerian Relations,” built from the repeated chant “They Want the Oil But They Don’t Want the People” set against an intensifying electric free-jazz maelstrom. Her following Bola Press release, Maintain Control, recorded in 1986, is notable for Ornette Coleman’s deeply expressive saxophone on “No Simple Explanations,” the disturbing “Deadly Radiation Blues,” and the fiercely spinning “Economic Love Song,” another of her insistent repetition pieces constructed around the phrase “Military Spending, Huge Profits and Death.” Among later recordings, Cheerful & Optimistic (1994) is distinguished by the presence of an African kora player and moments of reflective tenderness on “Sacred Trees” and “I Wonder Who.” The album also includes the anti-militarist statement “War Devoted to War” together with the compact declarations “Samba Is Power” and “Find Your Own Voice.” Taking the Blues Back Home came out on Harmolodic/Verve in 1996; Borders of Disorderly Time, issued in 2002, featured guest appearances by Bobby Bradford, Ron Carter, and James Blood Ulmer.
Cortez co-established the Organization of Women Writers of Africa in 1991 and presided over it for many subsequent years. An educator, publisher, and internationally recognized author whose writings have been rendered in numerous languages, she appeared in the films Poetry in Motion and Women in Jazz. The mark she left on spoken-word performance art in the late twentieth century has still not received the thoughtful acknowledgment it merits. Her combative political candor and intensely cathartic stage presence at times aligned her with Judith Malina and the Living Theater. The African-American Registry observed online that “Her excrescent language and her ability to push the acceptable limits of expression to address issues of race, sex and homophobia place her in a category that few other women occupy.” She kept homes in both New York City and Dakar, Senegal—the latter of which she described as feeling truly like home. Jayne Cortez passed away in New York on December 28, 2012, at the age of seventy-six.