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Neil Charles Dark Days Quartet
Tribute to James Baldwin
Cafe Oto, Dalston London
I REMEMBER being immersed in reading the first explosive 100 pages of James Baldwin’s epochal novel, Another Country, as I rode on a Greyhound bus to take part in the massive Poor People’s Campaign demonstration in Washington DC in July 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Baldwin’s words about racist oppression and the life and suicide of the jazz drummer, Rufus Scott, were a profound message of their times. So I was determined, now in 2024, to hear Neil Charles’s Dark Days Quartet in Dalston’s Cafe Oto, celebrating Baldwin’s centenary.
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