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Harry Belafonte’s memoir, My Song is reviewed in the New York Times today by Garrison Keillor.   Belafonte appears in conversation with Tim Robbins at Live Talks Los Angeles on Nov 28. Ticket deets here…

Here’s an excerpt:

Here is a gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy, son of a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship’s cook, Harold Bellan­fanti, who endured the grind of poverty under the watchful eye of his proud mother and waited for his chances, prepared to be lucky, and made himself into the international calypso star and popular folk singer, huge in Las Vegas, also Europe, and a mainstay of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, a confidant of Dr. King’s…..

Belafonte appeared on The Colbert Report last night.  The Los Angeles Times has a bit on it.  Here’s an excerpt:

Colbert pressed Belafonte on why he used his “banana-counting fame” to enact social change. “Why not just be rich and lusted after? That’s what I do.”

Belafonte replied, “I thought that the community from which I came would be better served if I would focus the light on the people who are not quite as fortunate as we are, and that I had a responsbility to reach into that misfortune and try to make a difference.”

The highlight of the interview arrived in the last minute, when Colbert coyly asked Belafonte if he still sings. Belafonte said that he does, but only occasionally. Colbert waited a beat, then quietly started singing Belafonte’s hit “Jamaica Farewell.” “Down the way where the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the mountaintop,” he crooned. A few seconds later, Belafonte joined in, and the two performed an unlikely duet. It was a lovely little moment.

Watch below (the singing begins around the 5:00 mark).

Here’s the video…

Harry Belafonte documentary airs on HBO on Oct 17.  Here’s a piece in Bloomberg on the doc.  Here’s an excerpt:

And he blended his artistry with activism, playing a key role in the civil rights movement alongside such leaders as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy (whom he pushed for more aggressive protection of blacks) and President John F. Kennedy (whom Belafonte schooled as a presidential candidate on the importance of King’s mission, while simultaneously advising King on how to work with the Kennedys).

The child of a Jamaican-born domestic worker in Harlem, Belafonte understood and condemned social injustices from a young age, and resolved to help correct them.

“I wasn’t an artist who turned activist, I was an activist who turned artist,” he explains.

Belafonte’s journey forms a connect-the-dots map of six decades of popular culture and social crusades. And it drives “Sing Your Song,” a beautifully conceived documentary about Belafonte’s life and the era the rest of us have shared with him. (It premieres Monday at 10 p.m. EDT on HBO.)

At first, he felt narcissistic and superfluous doing a documentary, says Belafonte, hosting a reporter at his awards- and mementos-filled office in the Manhattan neighborhood once known as Hell’s Kitchen.

“What have I got to say that people want to hear, if they’re not hearing it during the time I lived doing it?” he reasons. But then he learned a lesson from Marlon Brando, his old friend with whom he took acting classes in the early 1950s and subsequently became allied in the civil rights movement.

When Brando died in 2004, “I felt not only that America had lost a great artist, but a great social force,” Belafonte says. “But people knew little about his social activism, and he passed away without leaving any record of it.

“So I started going around, identifying all of the people who were my peers who had done incredible things but never talked about it. What began as a simple exercise in providing for the archives wound up taking four years of nothing but filming all over the world.”

Photo: Ricardo DeAratanha / LA Times

We host Harry Belafonte at Live Talks Los Angeles on November 28. Ticket info here.  He appears on the Sunday, October 16 Los Angeles Times in The Sunday Conversation series.  An HBO documentary, Sing Your Song, about him airs Monday, October 17. Here’s an excerpt:

Most Americans alive today didn’t live through segregation in this country the way you did. Did you ever think you’d live to see a black president?

I think that our hearts were filled with hope, our goals were filled with promise. We pursued things we thought were difficult to achieve, but that did not inhibit our need to go for it, and that’s what we did. And fortunately a large number of citizens and leaders and genders and races and cultures came to the table at the moment of truth and made a difference. We had a lot going for us in those days, including a very active campus, which I’m glad to say has resurrected itself in New York and other parts of the country with what’s going on down on Wall Street.

What are you doing these days?

I spend a great deal of time with the youth you see on Wall Street. Many of them do not reside in the places where I spend a good deal of time — the prisons of America. I go into the communities where the youth are the most underserved and most disconnected, a lot of the ghettos, a lot of the communities that are languishing from joblessness and hopelessness. I go there and I preach the gospel of nonviolence, and I tell them about the things that Dr. King and others did.

You look at these kids on Wall Street and people say they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re misfits, except for one thing — nobody knows what to do with them because they’re nonviolent. Those of us who come from the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. King, it is interesting to me that everywhere you go, the thing that happened in Tunisia, in Libya, in Cairo, the violence you see is from the military. But this nonviolent thing seems to have become the code of the day, and I think they’re going to have to get a whole new set of rules on how to play this one, because I think we’re definitely on the right track.