This exhibition is currently taking place at the Musée Quai Branly in Paris and covers magazines, letters, cartoons, photographs, paintings and others types of expression. The exhibition features some of the most revered names of jazz, among them, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Some of the paintings and photographs as featured here are rather magnificent.

The painting at the top is Jazz (Variante) by Fernand Leger. The 2nd is Homage to Duke, Bessie & Louis by Romare Howard Bearden. I find these and the 1927 Josephine Baker (I must blog about Josephine Baker one day) poster quite lovely.

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On the face it, my focus for this year’s International Women’s Day, unlike the focus here, here and here may appear disordered and quite random when it actually isn’t.

This year I celebrate a short and disparate list of women who have faced enormous challenges.

Shirely Ann Jackson is a physicist who received her PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the first African American woman to do so. I am currently pursuing a science-based degree and this fabulous woman inspires me (especially when I get stumped when drawing D and L Haworth Projections glucose structures).

Selima Gerima. Teza, the film she co-produced with her brother Haile Gerima has just won the Etalon d’Or de Yennenga (Golden Stallion of Yennega) at the 40th anniversary pan-African FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou in competition with 18 other films. The film is about repression under the Mengistu Haile Mariam regime. Congratulations. This win will no doubt inspire the thousands of African women and girls who want to work in films.

I have always written poetry while listening to music and to my mind, the poems that have been the most fun to write are the ones when listening to cool blues and jazz and especially the music of long-departed divas, such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. This year, I celebrate Bessie Smith who achieved so much in an age where black people were treated like second class citizens.

Bessie Smith (1894 — 1937). Also known as the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith had perfect timing and a remarkable voice. A great singer, she had a distinctive interpretation and her unique style and delivery influenced many musicians then and now. She was a tough cookie by all accounts and I smile when I listen to ‘Gimmie a Pigfoot’:

Up in Harlem ev’ry Saturday night when the high-brows git together it’s just too tight,
They all congregates at an all night strut and what they do is tut-tut-tut..
Old Hannah Brown from ‘cross town gets full of corn and starts breakin’ ‘em
down.

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