Paul Devlin | editor of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones… (U. of Minnesota Press, Fall 2011)/PhD student, English, SUNY Stony Brook/freelance critic

Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones. As told to Albert Murray. Edited by Paul Devlin.

as told to Albert Murray, afterword by Phil Schaap
transcribed, edited, annotated, with an introduction by Paul Devlin

The things that I have, I’ll give to you. This is my legacy with you, Albert. This is my last hoo-rah. So begins the autobiography of Jonathan David Samuel Jones—or as the world better knows him, Papa Jo Jones. Playing with Count Basie and his orchestra when they exploded out of Kansas City in 1936 and took the world by storm, Jones went on to inspire generations of jazz drummers, but until now few have had access to his own remarkable story.

Rifftide presents Jones’s inimitable life and opinions, as originally told by Jones to the prominent jazz historian and novelist Albert Murray and now transcribed, arranged, and introduced by Paul Devlin. Drawn from fourteen tapes recorded over eight years beginning in 1977, Rifftide is an impressionistic series of riffs and tales by Jones: his life as a musician on the road in segregated America, his outstanding solo career following his years with the Basie band, and his interactions with iconic artists and cultural figures of the time, including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Satchell Paige.

Rifftide trailer:

Available for purchase at Amazon

In “Reading Heminway Through Wittgenstein / Reading Wittgenstein Through Hemingway,” Paul offers a close comparative reading of “The Old Man and the Sea” and “Islands in the Stream” alongside Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” “Philosophical Investigations,” “A Lecture on Ethics” and “Lectures on Aesthetics.” In the process, Paul explores the shared influence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Hemingway and Wittgenstein, and suggests the possible influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with mentioning the influences of Tolstoy and World War I. This idiosyncratic and wide-ranging study attempts to show that Hemingway and Wittgenstein were thinking very much along the same lines when it came to ethics, aesthetics, the sublime, and what could and could not be expressed precisely and accurately through language. By considering Hemingway and Wittgenstein (individuals with very different reputations, but with more in common that might have previously been imagined) together, this study seeks to open up new ways of thinking about both of their oeuvres, while also offering a new perspective on the history of ideas in the early-mid twentieth century.

Available for purchase at Amazon