Candace Allen | |
---|---|
Born | 1950 (age 72–73) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Occupation(s) | Novelist, political activist, cultural critic and screenwriter |
Known for | Valaida (2004) |
Notable work | Soul Music: The Pulse of Race and Music |
Spouse | |
Relatives | Billie Allen (aunt) |
Candace Allen (born 1950) is an American novelist, political activist, cultural critic and screenwriter, who is based in London. She was the first African-American woman to be a member of the Directors Guild of America. [1] She is the niece of actress and drama coach Billie Allen, [2] and the former wife of British conductor Sir Simon Rattle. [3] [4] As a writer, Allen has published work including the novel Valaida and the non-fiction book Soul Music: The Pulse of Race and Music, and she is a contributor to The Guardian and other newspapers.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, [5] in 1950, [6] Candace Allen moved with her family to Stamford, Connecticut, when she was six years old. [7] She received her BA from Harvard University, where in the late 1960s–early '70s she was instrumental in the establishment of the African and African-American Studies Department [7] (now headed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), [8] before attending the New York University School of Film and Television. She became the first African-American female member of the Directors Guild of America.
In the 1970s, she moved to Los Angeles, California, where for twenty years she worked as an assistant director on feature and television films, and later as a screenwriter. [9] She was a founder of Reel Black Women, a professional organization for African-American women in film. [10] She also set up and ran for four years a counselling group for young black women at Jordan High School in Watts.
Allen moved to the UK in 1994, and was married (8 January 1996 – 2004) to British conductor Simon Rattle. During this marriage, as the wife of a knight, she was entitled to be known as Lady Candace or Lady Rattle. [11]
Her first book, a fictionalized biography about the African-American female jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow, was published by Virago Press in 2004. [12] In Valaida, Allen "brought to life an extraordinary woman working in a predominantly male world." [7] Reviewing the novel for JazzTimes , Gwen Ansell wrote: "Allen engages with what it might feel like to think through and play a solo; tour depressing, racist Southern towns; haggle with agents and managers. She treats Snow first and foremost as a musician. The wry, weary wit of backstage conversation rings true and the details play out before a fascinating panorama of pre-1960s jazz and vaudeville stages. In this use of close-up against rich, intensely visual backdrop, in frequent crosscutting and flashback scenes, Allen the screenwriter is very evident. And while the book remains a romance, it's tougher than most and definitely worth reading." [13] As Kevin Le Gendre puts it: "Allen astutely balances the heady excitement of Valaida's artistic growth, a trajectory during which she gains the confidence to push her trumpet phrases from 'low notes to mid with shake-butt flourish', with the grim realities of discrimination and exploitation." [14]
Allen's must recent work, the acclaimed Soul Music: the Pulse of Race and Music, published by Gibson Square Press in 2012, [15] has been described as "part-travelogue, part-memoir, part-manifesto", [16] According to the review in the New Statesman , "Allen simply opens her ears and mind in wonder at everything she has seen and heard, rejoicing in and also questioning the values and beliefs that brought her where she is." [4]
Allen writes regularly for The Guardian [1] of London and for other newspapers. [17] In 2018, she was the recipient of a McDowell fellowship for literature. [18] She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby. [19]
Through the organization "Americans Abroad for Obama" Allen was an active campaigner for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, [20] [21] and subsequently became a frequent commentator on US culture, race and politics on radio and television. [9]
Allen is a board member of the Chineke! Foundation. [22]
Sir Simon Denis Rattle is a British-German conductor. He rose to international prominence during the 1980s and 1990s, while music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1980–1998). Rattle was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2002 to 2018. He has been the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra since September 2017. Among the world's leading conductors, in a 2015 Bachtrack poll, he was ranked by music critics as one of the world's best living conductors.
Given the vastness of the African continent, its music is diverse, with regions and nations having many distinct musical traditions. African music includes the genres amapiano, Jùjú, Fuji, Afrobeat, Highlife, Makossa, Kizomba, and others. African music also uses a large variety of instruments across the continent. The music and dance of the African diaspora, formed to varying degrees on African musical traditions, include American music like Dixieland jazz, blues, jazz, and many Caribbean genres, such as calypso and soca. Latin American music genres such as cumbia, salsa music, son cubano, rumba, conga, bomba, samba and zouk were founded on the music of enslaved Africans, and have in turn influenced African popular music.
Zenzile Miriam Makeba, nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
Valaida Snow was an American jazz musician and entertainer who performed internationally. She was also known as "Little Louis" and "Queen of the Trumpet," a nickname given to her by W. C. Handy.
Jayne Cortez was an African-American poet, activist, small press publisher and spoken-word performance artist whose voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic and dynamic innovations in lyricism and visceral sound. Her writing is part of the canon of the Black Arts Movement. She was married to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman from 1954 to 1964, and their son is jazz drummer Denardo Coleman. In 1975, Cortez married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards, and they lived in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City.
Geri Antoinette Allen was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. She taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Plantation Lullabies is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter and bassist Me'shell NdegéOcello. It was released by Maverick Records on October 19, 1993, to widespread critical acclaim and has since been viewed as a landmark neo soul record.
Anthony Joseph is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. In 2023, he was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book Sonnets for Albert.
Rebecca Maria Hall is an English actress and filmmaker. She made her first onscreen appearance at age 10 in the 1992 television adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, directed by her father, Sir Peter Hall. Her professional stage debut came in her father's 2002 production of Mrs. Warren's Profession, which earned her the Ian Charleson Award.
Spinning into Butter is a play by the American playwright Rebecca Gilman. It was premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1999 and was later produced at the Lincoln Center and the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. It was named one of the best plays of 1999 by Time and eventually became the third-most-produced play of the 2000-01 season in America.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Mem Nahadr, also known as M. Nahadr and simply "M", is an American performance artist and multi-octave vocalist having access to the whistle register and best known for the performance of the song "Butterfly", composed by Yoko Kanno and lyricized by Chris Mosdell for Cowboy Bebop. In the recording studio, Nahadr writes, records, performs, and produces all of each project's music. She is co-produced by Grammy Award Winner, James P. Nichols. She is also an author, composer, poet, filmmaker, and human rights activist.
Women in jazz have contributed throughout the many eras of jazz history, both as performers and as composers, songwriters and bandleaders. While women such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald were famous for their jazz singing, women have achieved much less recognition for their contributions as composers, bandleaders and instrumental performers. Other notable jazz women include piano player Lil Hardin Armstrong and jazz songwriters Irene Higginbotham and Dorothy Fields.
Sandra Cecelia Seaton is an American playwright and librettist. She received the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature in 2012. Seaton taught creative writing and African-American literature at Central Michigan University for 15 years as a professor of English.
Stella Dadzie is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s, and co-authoring with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan in 1985 the book The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.
Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Kevin Le Gendre is a British journalist, broadcaster and author whose work focuses on Black music. He is deputy editor of Echoes magazine, has written for a wide range of publications, including Jazzwise, MusicWeek, Vibrations, The Independent On Sunday and The Guardian, and is a contributor to such radio programmes as BBC Radio 3's J to Z and BBC Radio 4's Front Row. At the 2009 Parliamentary Jazz Awards Le Gendre was chosen as "Jazz Journalist of the Year".
Tammy L. Kernodle is a musicologist and the former President of the Society for American Music (2019–21). Her academic writing and public intellectual work has highlighted Black women musicians like Mary Lou Williams, Meshell Ndegeocello, Alice Coltrane, and Melba Liston and has considered African American women's role in contemporary gospel music and jazz.