JAYNE CORTEZ, POET AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST Jayne Cortez
performing in New York in 1994. Her work was known for its power
and outrage. By MARGALIT FOX Published: January 3, 2013 - Jayne
Cortez, a poet and performance artist whose work was known for
its visceral power, its political outrage and above all its
sheer, propulsive musicality, died on Dec. 28 in Manhattan. She
was 78. Her death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, was from heart
failure, her son, the jazz drummer Denardo Coleman, said. One of
the central figures of the Black Arts Movement — the cultural
branch of the black power movement that flourished in the 1960s
and ’70s — Ms. Cortez remained active for decades afterward,
publishing a dozen volumes of poetry and releasing almost as
many recordings, on which her verse was seamlessly combined with
avant-garde music. Ms. Cortez’s work was beyond category by
virtue of embodying so many categories simultaneously: written
verse, African and African-American oral tradition, the
discourse of political protest,