The first recordings were on the Douglas label of the jazz producer Alan Douglas. The formation was, and still is today, very elastic and interchangeable, Jalal for example entered on the second album after being in prison for refusing to take part in the Vietnam war. At that point the ‘Last Poets’ were officially born. The only poem you’ll hear will be the spear point pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain, the timeless native son dancing like crazy to the retrieved rhythms of desire fading into memory” to which Nelson added: “Therefore, we are the Last Poets of the World”. When the moment hatches in times womb, there is no more art talk. William Kgostile from South Africa: “This wind you hear is the birth of memory.
The ‘Last Poets’ was chosen as the name through an inspiration from a poem by K. “Are You Ready Nigger? You Got To Be Ready” was the first ‘message’ from the trio that was made up of Nelson, Kain and Oyewole and that is how the legend started. The first idea was that of creating some musical bases over which you could read writings, even if not all of the Poets managed to sing in the same way, thus it was decided to make up a neutral base of percussion bongos as a background. It all started in New York in 1969 when Nelson and Davis, whilst celebrating the birthday of Malcolm X in a park, decided to form a collective for reading poetry continuing the African verbal method, used this time though for putting in evidence the situation of the black social classes in America during that period.
David Nelson, Gylan Kain, Charles Davis aka Abiodun, Raymond Hurrey aka Nilija Obabi, Felipe Luciano, Umar Bin Hassan, Sulieman El-Hadi and Jalaluddin Mansur Nurridin (Jalal) are the most famous pf those who would go on to become ‘The Last Poets’. Everything started when two Poets and a percussionist decided to become spiritually and artistically responsible for the beginning of a movement born for continuing the African oral traditions but above all for becoming reason bringers to the Afro-American population.
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