Musician, surrealist painter (he was hailed by André Breton as the "only Afro-American surrealist"), world traveler, and poet, Ted Joans has been curiously neglected by many standard anthologies of both American and Afro-American literature. A popular and well-known figure in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, Joans has devoted his life since that period to travel, his first love. In the early 1960s, he left the United States "to place myself in self-imposed exile in Timbuctoo (Mali)." Although he claims the African continent as his home, Joans regularly shuttles back and forth between Africa, Europe, and the United States.

Ted Joans's peripatetic impulses can perhaps be traced to childhood. He was born on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois, on 4 July 1928, just after the annual street parade had ended. From his father, a riverboat entertainer, he inherited a trumpet and the lifelong interest in jazz which has shaped the...