Vivian Jones

With his new album Songs of Resistance 1948 - 2018, Ribot one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed guitar players set out to assemble a set of songs that spoke to this political moment with appropriate ambition, passion, and fury. The eleven songs on the record are drawn from the World War II anti-Fascist Italian partisans, the U.S. civil rights movement, and Mexican protest ballads, as well as original compositions, and feature a wide range of guest vocalists, including Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, Sam Amidon, and Ohene Cornelius.

This is a progressive rock/hard rock/fusion music adapted for the “Peter & the Wolf” fairy tale. When most of the Brand X members including Phil Collins play on this record, it is quite correct to think this is a Brand X album. There are however slight nuances and additions, given that so many further musicians are involved and since the Brand X musicians do not play all together all the time: Manfred Mann, Brian Eno, Stephane Grappelli, Bill Bruford, Alvin Lee and Cozy Powell among others.

There has never been a filmmaker like Marlon Riggs: an unapologetic gay Black man who defied a culture of silence and shame to speak his truth with resounding joy and conviction. An early adopter of video technology, Riggs employed a bold mix of documentary, performance, poetry, and music in order to confront the devastating legacy of racist stereotypes, the impact of AIDS on his community, and the very definition of what it means to be Black. Bringing together Riggs’s complete films—including his controversy-inciting queer landmark Tongues Untied and Black Is . . . Black Ain’t, the deeply personal swan song that was completed after his death at the age of thirty-seven—The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs traces the artistic and political evolution of a transformative filmmaker whose work is both an electrifying call for liberation and an invaluable historical document.