Blue Note releases The Brown Beatnik Tomes — Live at BRIC House by the great jazz bassist Ron Carter and novelist, poet and abstract expressionist painter Danny Simmons. The album was recorded at an autumn date at the Brooklyn location of the title by Carter — the veteran of Miles Davis’ band and more than 2,200 sessions — and the Tony Award-winning Simmons, the co-founder of Def Poetry Jam. The album features the combination of Carter’s bespoke bass lines and Simmons’ incisive poetry. “I was trying to imagine myself as a Beat Generation poet in the ’50s,” says the wordsmith, “and how my concerns would be a bit different from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s or Allen Ginsberg’s. In a way, the beatniks romanticised black people. They were hip, but they didn’t really see the plight. That scene largely was about the Negro experience but didn’t have the Negro in it.” With this in mind, The Brown Beatnik Tomes evokes the spirit of the Beat Generation but with a 180-degree shift in the point of view from, as they say, “voyeur to source.” Carter is the perfect foil, having lived through that generation, working as a musician in New York in his 20s. The album features also Carter’s trio, with pianist Donald Vega and guitarist Russell Malone, on a pair of instrumentals including ‘Here’s to Oscar,’ which tips its hat to the pioneering bebop bassist Oscar Pettiford. Simmons’ paintings from the Brown Beatnik Tomes book, which inspired the show and the record, were projected behind him at the concert. Playwright, actor and Def Poetry notable Liza Jessie Peterson added her spoken word to ‘Where Do I Begin.’