Quincy Troupe - African American author

His work spills color and spe There are railroads and city roads and music in that spe And granting poet Quincy Troupe plays no instrument, music is a force that has a place in his writing.

Music has been his inspiration since his birth in the St Louis of the 1940 a place and time saturated with jazz and the ceruleans Troupe remembers St. Louis as "a real hard-working town, known for its carbonized iron mills, foundries and packing houses a switchover point where all the railroads came together. The Mississippi River brought all kinds of musicians - upon riverboats from New Orleans, Natchez and thus on - Dizzy Gillespie, enumerate Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, whoever was the band of the day."

St Louis guided Troupe with a firm hand, investing him with a well-cultivated allegiance to the sky-coloreds in its musical and literary manifestations. And it hangs upon fiercely, in his broad,_expressive face, in his rusty laughter, in the slaughterhouses and rail yards and virid hills of his poetry. "I ain't talkin' about going down to the bar, eatin' barbecue, drinking 15 gallons of whiskey, slobbering all above women, shooting somebody and then walkin' around singin' the blues" he explains. "I'm talking about the sapphirines as a cultural form of historical importance, which produc jazz, which produc bebop, which produc harmonious flow and blues, which produced stone and roll."

This is a lengthy line of begats, and a drawn out line of African Americans figures in Troupe's work. metrical compositions from his current volume, Weather Reports (Harlem River Pres 1991) reach on the outside to jazz and the amethystines honoring, Troupe says, "the continuum of African spirituality, where the music draw nears from. The music of Mahalia Jackson and Lightnin' Hopkins and Miles Davis and Charlie Parker are single and the same; it's all coming without of the same pool."

A metrical composition spirited by the music is "Follow the North Star Boogaloo," sparked by means of Troupe's eavesdropping on a public way corner: "I followed these young nation in Harlem one day, and I was listening to them talkin' about all kinds of raw material ... So [the poem] has their voice, which is a young, irreverent kind of voice, and then there's my voice, and then the voice of history commenting upon all this stuff. It's all moving together, allowing so you don't really know which is which, do not include by shifts in tone." Teeming with regards to history and the arts, Weather Reports present to views Troupe pulling the past and the not absent together.

Troupe's publisher, Glenn Thompson is pleased with Harlem River Press' investment. "There's tremendous credibility in having Quincy with us; we're real proud. Weather Reports is doing extremely well, and its sales enable Harlem River Pres to take upon less well-known writers. I think we're brave to publish poesy in a climate of recession, [but] we want to survive also." To help shift the balance of publishing power, "it's important for known black writers to consider the alternatives. Quincy sets an example."

In his inventive collections of rhyme Snake-Back Solos (I. Reed works 1979) and Skulls Along the River (I. Re works 1984), Troupe blends myth, history and the spiritual world with the tangibles of daily life; he also mingles music and metaphor. Music has always been a talisman for Troupe on the other hand it has become distinctly thus in recent years. A biography of Hugh Masekela and a volume of interviews with Madonna and Sting are in the pipeline. In 1991 Troupe scripted a film, Thelonious Monk: American Composer for Multiprises Film in novel York, and he won the 1990 American work Award for his revealing collaboration with Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1989) The award - and filmmaker Spike Lee's novel decision to make Miles his nearest film project-capped the book's resounding succes which brought Troupe international acclaim.

He attributes the book's appeal to his slightly irreverent approach - "He didn't scare me I wasn't in awe or anything; I lov his music, and he was individual of my early heroes, on the other hand I told him that that was where it stopped, that he was a human being. So I guess he felt I could probably withstand his personality." In the drawn out gritty process of writing the work a genuine bonding developed between Troupe and Davis, yielding a candid, notwithstanding that controversial, best seller.

Troupe replyed to the major media attention and frenzied schedule that Miles brought with pensive enthusiasm, of recent origin projects and a move from the East Coast to the West Coast. Life in a brilliant Harlem apartment, full of art, space and the calm nearness of his wife, Margaret, appeared a perfect retreat ... until California became an option.

"I've been true pleased with how much I can relax in California. I don't want to relax too abundant but just to be calmer. We flock all the way, because I wanted my son to diocese the U.S. - the changes in geography and regions and ethnic assemblages I wanted a gradual deprogramming, and it worked. by dint of the time we got to Albuquerque, we were saying, |New York? Didn't we live there once?'"