one of the funkiest, most soulful styles of all time his blues-soaked solos & rock solid basslines balanced by repetitive grooves, melodies, & melodic hooks revealed an artist in full possession of his voice as an organist in the formative soul jazz genre that lifted him up from the earth & drew unto him no less than george benson & boss tenor gene jughead ammons who together on one date built the architecture of the soul jazz vernacular to span hard bop & jazz-funk to sundry acid jazz destinations, & for brother jack to earn the esteem & respect conveyed by the honorific “brother” which encoded his elevated status within the idiom.
he played jazz as dance music, whether it was music by basie, bird, ray charles or james brown. Over swing, shuffle & funk rhythms, he laid down a focused blues homily that perorated through his solos with gospel-like intensity. A charismatic, his soul jazz style was spirited, gifted & sophisticated his propulsive rhythmic feel capable of exhuberant declamation & persuasion. He could make that B3 say ow! Gave it essential nonverbal elements of communication that modified meaning & emotion made that organ scream! establishing his creds as a fire breathing blues- based organist, well-versed in gospel soul with a ha'mercy funky groove.
the abstract awoke in him, caused something to stir something interesting, something organic, something free in young black arthur’s blithe spirit; an event in consciousness -- an interaction in presence between artist & seminal tone, an aural vision of the sacred, a hierophany, received from tapscott in the sanctum of the pan-afrikan peoples arkestra, in his spirit’s womb chamber, that called out his consciousness, made it helically move, spiral up; pushed him out on popular bandstands. made him existentially play, his baroque tone, rich & husky, a passionate wail on high, a sweat-soaked pulsating vibrato trailing in its wake, weaving an exquisite tapestry of melody around occult scale patterns, stretching the blues to the edges of improvisation – too out for popular breakthough & an obvious target for the inevitable pushback of negation – the trial, terror error & experience of rejection, incredulity pushing him back & into the umbra of a dazzling winton’s shadow, into an unlikely wood shed. he laid there & he played there until possessed by the wave/shades of older styles which took his head, pierced the flat, polished surfaces of his genius. & he embraced them, those ghostlyremembrances, held them close, closer than haunting; heard the whole of jazz’s historical process in their stylings, in his own homagic practiceplay. heard the progression from bleak self–alienation to self–unification & realization; heard implicit contradictions become explicit & knew suddenly that each stage of that process – the blues, ragtime, dixieland, swing, bebop, progressive, cool, free, hard bop, latin, post-bop, fusion nü-jazz – is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. understood that what comes into being is, at the same time, returning to nothing, connected only by ephemeral tendrils of crafted sound, the sound of becoming. & in the darkest part of that shadow, black arthur had his epiphany – to sublate the negation he must preserve in his playing useful portions of the past – the riffs, the runs, the licks & chops; the methods of creation & divergent personal styles – while moving beyond their limitations; breathe/blow into & out of his alto a new dialectic – & he stepped out of the shadow, played the abstract concrete; played joyfully free.
chicago legend, lone prophet on the prairie booed off the band stand in ’60 @ the fifth jacks club in the town he made his home. but stayed, played his free jazz in their heads, madetheir hearts embrace him; know the canny prophet in his own home town.
mythic bridge builder; a man span between big band swing & acid organ combo; set the tone, worked preset & drawbar, shaped an audible vatic vision that smote jimmy smith on his lonely road to fame. sent him to the wood shed; & out the back door to destiny!
i heard … a cat playing forty choruses of georgia brown in pure
'nashua' tempo & never repeating. i heard futuristic,
stratospheric sounds that were never before
explored on the organ."
--babs gonzales
u pulled out that stop, that third harmonic, & the bulb lit up… thunder & lightning, u said, & stars fell out of the sky! silver & blakey brought the bop, the hard edged urban bop, but u, jimmy, brought the funk to jazz long before the mothership touched down -- when george clinton was still working his way thru’ doowop -- the chitlinstank in the neighborhood funk, the sweetsweat-not-acid shirt soaking funk, the left-hand walkin’, foot pedal stompin’ got my mean mojo workin’ funk partnered with a sizzling virtuoso horn solo playing right hand. made that hammond b3 hum, shriek; made it blues shout, holler & scream, or purr & coo or softly cry -- an ascended master ere the cognoscenti knew the jazz organ had one.
what guides the hand of a muralista? some glittering idea that compels from a world apart? some form embedded in media matter, awaiting a cunning artisan touch to coax it out in all of its material splendor? or maybe some possessing spirit of the age to take the head, insinuate itself into the lime mortar or plaster, the tempera or encaustic colors ground in a molten beeswax or resin binder to buon-or-mezzo-fresco social realist art into the public sphere -- to achieve a political goal, to socially emancipate, to advertize. the mural mice, hardly a cell
of trotskyites, hired to paint
two intersection-facing walls
of the miller valley elementary
school in prescott, arizona,
learned first hand the backlash
of white privilege. they daringly
deigned to represent a multiethnic
vision --children using "green"
modes of transportation.
dominating pattern & symmetry,
points of interest & texture, line & depth of field was the striking image of a young brown boy with a thick strong jaw & defiant eyes, on one knee, poised to get up &…act! a metaphor for the artist in a decadent capitalist society? shaped by conflict between
himself & the social forces
arrayed against him? hardly. like david alfaro siqueiros’ tropical america, brimming with radical political militancy or diego rivera’s provocative post impressionist mural for
the hotel de prado in mexico
city including the words
"god does not exist" or jose
orozco’s symbolist murals
promoting the political causes
of peasants & workers?
not at all -- but powerful enough to provoke a thermidorean reaction from the prescott demographic. from moving cars came the shibboleths:
"you're desecrating our school," “get the nigger off the wall!” “get the spic off the wall!”
hurled by the philistine, the conservative & the frightened; prompting the school principal to tell the mural mice to lighten
up --the images on the wall,
that is; make those dark folk
lighter before they draw out
the destructive quality of
reconstructed whiteness, its
sinister structural causes & consequences, before they reveal the possessive investment in being white & the reinvention of white identity as nonracist,
nonoppressive & victimized --
informed by the delusions & projections of so-called decent folk preserving their heritage.
formed when sand, silt & grains of clay, scraped & torn away by tenacious, taloned fingers of wind, rain, & glacial ice, from sundry land terrain -- proud mountains & defiant flatlands – whose scarring declaims like totemic tattoos the lingering injuries & damage; join the downslope creep of soil to be carried by rivers, streams & gravity, deposited in layers of sediment on the ocean floor, in riverbeds & swamps, mixing long dead organic miasma, the fossil remains of plants & planckton mixed with mud & sand, squeezed into source rock & heated to the night temperatures of the earthen crust, bearing the downward press of a hundred thousand years, the transforming weight that releases kerogens -- the black waxy crude, or natural gas -- into porous or fractured rock, into subsurface pools – one of gaia’s many seepages & secretions – brought forth from wounds piercing her dermis in spurts of black, thick & tar-like fossil fuel or small, light effervescent carbon chains timed to the beat of her heavy heart. like a blood donor, she has given much & often, has transfused mankind’ s movement & industry but now bleeds uncontrollably from too many punctures, bathing wetlands & barrier islands in a tide of oozing crude, smothering an entire generation of shrimp & crab, smothering dolphins, whales & turtles, poisoning fish turning diving birds – gannets, pelicans frigates. & sanderlings – into flightless, oil-soaked, drowning birds. can we not read the portents, the omens? have we lost the gift of auspicy? the higher the bird flight the more favorable the omen but flightless birds portend certain doom. can we not see as one with a glittering eye? see for endless days & nights the curse in the eyes of the eleven deep water horizon dead. must we wander in our guilt this earth to tell any & all who might listen that god glories life over greed, loves all things s/he has made? or will we remain the unwitting prizes of yellow-haired, red-lipped life-in-death
(if i die, you die!) once an island lush with trees, ayiti is bereft, her mountainous breasts bare, their covering ripped by hunger’s rapine hand. the cold aromatic sea breeze with its tangy, fishy smell meets an acrid warmer air from a land smoking, redolently reeking of wood burning on lle de la gonave, stacked in whitened piles eternally curing, then bagged & distributed in les arcahaie.
the people cry out: “nou vle manje; nou pa vle mouri!” (we want to eat; we do not want to die!) but the land screams “ou ap tiye m!” (you are killing me!)
ninety eight per cent of her forests gone, fifty-odd thousand grieving trees felled each day like brittle warweary soldiers under truce to clear the way for summer floods to wash her rich, nutrient topsoil into the sea. riding bare back on the scent of charcoal are the foul cadaverine & putrescine bouquets that beckon skulking desertification, the scavenger who will surely come to clean the island’s bones!
but the people insist: “nou vle manje; nou pa vle mouri!” (we want to eat; we do not want to die!) & the land screams “se mwen menm mouri!” (i am dying!)
are there no environmental regulations? no subsidiaries for alternative fuels? where is government? behold bureaucrats, the mango tree is too precious to cut down. plant mango plantations. tell yr people to plant corn, sorghum & beans between a few mango trees on their small farms. harvest the towering mounds of garbage, recycle the paper. use that as cooking fuel! there are no shortages of solutions!
terrace farm the mountains! cultivate plants that will thrive on mountainsides, whose roots will hold in place, stabilize & regenerate the soil. behold businessmen, there are haitians who know how to do this, who are doing this already! where is the money? & where are the teachers, the each-one-teach-ones who persuade the people that killing the land brings on their own unconscionable & inevitable demise
the people rejoin: “nou vle manje; nou pa vle mouri!” (we want to eat; we do not want to die!) & the land responds with resignation ”si m mouri, ou pral mouri!” (if I die, you die!)
languages [like the arizona wapiti or the arizona jaguar] become extinct when no longer able to negotiate hostile or changing conditions or prevail against irresistible competition. the moment of extinction? the death or muting of the last language speaker. the last ubykh speaker died in turkey in ‘92 at the unethereal & certainly uneternal age of 88. cultures [like the greater prairie chicken or the passenger pigeon] become extinct when cultural diversity is abated & languages are endangered & proscribed with extreme prejudice! every two weeks, a culture dies, taking with it irreplaceable knowledge & experience into a great unknown. we stand, some of us, strangely mute, unmoved or unmoving & at our own peril, like vacuous & self- absorbed deutschländers in ’23 unmindful of the frenetic, evil goings on in the bürgerbräukeller" while in arizona a general process of destruction, like a tall, dense & involved nephotic mass, gathers momentum. a delusional rationality begets an imaginary construct which shapes a body politic in the image of its fears, resentments & whited sepulchral utopias, razing relentlessly & trying to eliminate
alabama's gotten me so upset tennessee made me lose my rest & everybody knows about mississippi goddam… nina simone
dos cabesas, yr steep mountain slopes & granite outcroppings, yr vegetated canyon floors provoke strong feelings of arousal, attraction, & yes, even love by more than just the white-tailed & mule deer or eagles, golden & bald, the ranging mountain lion, the beautiful collared lizard & the peregrine falcon. u, dos cabesas, are, indeed,a love object for arizona natives imprinted by the wilderness with its uncultivated spaces,its searing heat with that eerie desert dust on its winds, a narcotic that makes them susceptible to quaint hallucinations (daylight savings time is a bolshevik plot),conservative & highly distrusting of government. (goddam!) where lawmen under the influence of frontier fancy could take a hapless but convenient outlaw straight from the lyrics of their state song, a befuddled recidivist burglar named ernesto arturo miranda, compel from him a
rape, etc., confession, make him write it down
& sign papers with a printed certification that
he “voluntarily & of my own free will, with no threats, coercion or promises of immunity…” & “full knowledge of … his)…legal rights” made that confession, but failed to inform him of his right to have an attorney present & of his right to remain silent.(goddam!) where in a season that saw even ronald reagan bow to the inevitable winds of change by signed the king holiday into law, three house republican arizonans, including an “unevolved” john mccain & that doyen of true american conservativism, senator barry goldwater voted unequivocally no! state lawmakers like sand lemmings followed suit. babbitt, not sinclair lewis’ vacuous protagonist, but a governor doing the right thing, signed an executive order declaring a paid king holiday. but 7 months & 24 days later, soon-to-be-
impeached evan mecham rescinded that order
in one of his first acts as governor! (goddam!) rising from a searingly dry tropical airmass, pulled northward by low-pressure cells moving eastward across the two-head's wilderness
echoing off the sulphur springs & the san simon
valleys came a venal & corruptible voice calling
out to arizonans with the arrogated authority of
i am that i am: “i guess king did a lot for the
colored people, but i don’t think he deserves a
national holiday.” but the rocks surely cried out
in protest & boycotts. all manner of stones,
pythagorean frozen music, released their song
with stevie wonder singing lead --hapy birthday
to yuh -- public enemy struck back, the nfl
relocated the super bowl & arizonans, kicking &
screaming, capitulated in ’92 (goddam!) where even the wind that competes at dusk
to be heard with the yips, barks & howls of
coyotes in telltale yellow desert coats, weeps &
wails in uncertain english even tho’ placed for
a year in english immersion classes where
languages other than english were banned from
speech. brainfried arizonans insist that the
speech of the alligator juniper, the bitter condalia
& crucifixion thorn, the catclaw & even the skunk
bush had better be the same as that which arose in
england & southeastern scotland; that they
obsequiously subordinate their mother tongues,
their identity & culture, for to speak a language
other than english is nothing more than a social
defect.(goddam!) behold arizonans, the behemoth that u have made, rising out of the desert, so mean, & abrupt of emotion – & so unlike that mighty torch-bearing mother of exiles on a distant shore who verily welcomed the poor & the homeless. this shire reeve golem of single eye & foul disposition casts his all-seeing search light glance to expose & extirpate all illegals wherever they might be found, especially in the ghostly golden gate barrio, in cuatro milpas, or in any of the barrios historicas that housed the brown laborers who built yr streets & towns, yr
canals, laid tracks for trolleys & trains that brought
in the droves of undocumented anglos who
overwhelmed the indigenous population! (goddam!) what have u done, arizonans? the adam of yr labors has run amok & points proudly back to the womb
from whence it came – that monster matrix of
racism, red-baiting,anti-government sentiment &
resentment of anything progressive, whose birth
juices reek of hatred & calumny – back to u & yr
guiltfear, yr paroxysmally parochial thinking. it has
engorged on a steady diet of rights violations, english-
only legislation, reasonable suspicion & belief, & now
it stalks like a grotesquery seeking to devour the interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples, latinos & chicanos in particular. what makes u think, brain- fried arizonans, that it won’t turn on & devour u?
the gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the gulf coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife... government officials & independent scientists
most interesting of our american birds whose iconic flight & voracious appetite inspired no less than audubon to inscribe rhapsodically in his journals:
listen to the sound of the splash they make as they drive their open bills, like a pock-net, into the sea…
a pelican feeding its young embossed on louisiana’s state seal by 1804 & on her blue unfurling flag by 1912, a fitting perch for one who’d tear her own flesh to feed her young.
one of ornithology’s most astonishing events, in 1966, the year it became louisiana’s state bird, pelecanus fuscus vanished like the hero in a novel from the state’s entire coast.
did concurrent tropical storms savage vulnerable nests in its overwash? perhaps some pathogen or virulent human encroachment struck? or more likely the toxic pesticides from
agricultural plains, drained into the mighty mississip, got absorbed by anchovies & other favored fish -- did an inside job on eggshell formation, on eggshell thickness,
& caused the heroic pelican – the same who would destroy itself to feed its young -- to destroy its eggs as it sat on them within its nest to incubate & protect them.
thus did the brown pelican become like a novel’s anti-hero whose one abiding trait is bewildered & anxious uncertainty about the futility & fundamental amorality of life.
for despite efforts to transplant fledglings from florida’s peninsula, at hundreds per year, or banning ddt, the pelican will never see any pattern in life & rarely its destination.
we can see this now in the frightened eyes of oil-soaked birds who hobble like drunks at dawn’s break on barataria bay because they cannot fly; whose brown & white feathers, are now jet black.
whose nests & new hatchlings are coated with crude, whose gunk-glazed eggs, like their habitats, may never be cleaned or saved, whose offensive images are the new expletives for corporate greed
& signs of our failure to live in harmony with nature, symbols of our disdain for ecological balance, signifiers of our suicidal self-absorption -- new metaphors for our insanity.
tube captured, tube enthralled -- cut off from smell, touch, taste, heat-sense & gravity. only my eyes & ears worked, held at electron gun
point by florescent vision – those long shapely brown legs (with the eagles on her stockings that flew in formation up under her hemline,
still flock in jagged colored specs & fly in semicircular orbits around the edges of my eyes) fill my memory now like they filled that large,
deep & heavy evacuated glass envelope so many days of my youth ago when that heart shaped, luminous face (that no gal made could get the
shade), those large, bold beautiful eyes paired with that elusive smile made their impressions, made me consider my first faustian exchange --
my soul for just a few moments, maybe just one night. i was, afterall, 12, star-struck & heavily hormonal. if made to choose between lena as
sweet georgia brown, god or petunia jackson, georgia (miss brown to u!) would win every damn time. i was no inverterate gambler then &
my real addictions were years ahead, but I felt like a drunk heady in his very first cups. the pleasure possibilities waxed infinite. the very
thought of her & me – a real little joe – made a fantastical cabin in the sky seem quite absurdly possible, even desirable. & then i heard her sing.
another night, another movie, same television... framed against an open window adorned with formal treatments -- swags, jabots & pleated drapes -- that could have been several of the imaginable colors in the middle gradient shades of gray, between absolute black & white, looking out on an urban evening street scene which captured a couple scurrying to get out of the rain & prefaced by introductory strains from the cab calloway orchestra with a cameo of the immaculate cab himself animatedly conducting that special group of musicians who needed little in the way of conducting. she sang a sultry soprano lament (an offstage wind machine ruffling the sheer full- length sleeves of her perfect black & sequined
dress). her perfect phrasing evoked a swarm of associations caught up in a vertically oriented rotating column of emotion & she sang her
heart thru the vortex, making the raging storm a distinctive collocate of the literal; a subtle way of grasping one kind of thing in terms of another,
fixing its elemental turbulence & power as the central & controlling image of her lifesong:
don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather, since my man & i ain't together seems like its raining all the time
i felt the stirrings of love in that moment, for lena & for language, for she embodied every feature of a poem in motion draped in a
musical score. she had a way of spreading her arms when she sang that had no paraphrase, but just as clearly said “love me” & when
she left that open window walking down stairs that split the orchestra into two sections with the camera panning from full room to
a head to hip shot to climbing up her bodice resolving in a full body shot framing her in a spotlight on a night club floor & in my
poetic heart, she became for me more than a beautiful, evocative ornament, but an enduring metaphor for the complexities of love.
tell me, arizonans, is a god or perhaps some human demiurge supposedly the author of your laws?
surely a god, for who else might godly see thru’ layers of artifice & deception, in honest toil, toned down actions & attire, minimal human intercourse, capricious movement, desperate concealment, the furtive, undocumented heart?
whose nostrils can indeed detect the stench of flight from custody or country; the reeking infectious foreignness of interlopers, who abide among us fangfeeding off the fat of the land, diminishing us all.
tell me, arizonans, are there among u, like minos, those who commune with an olympian sire? inspired to make laws
that bestow clairvoyance on lawmen, enable them to clair-see “probable & reasonable causes” in mexicans or o.t.m.s who work the bean fields or sinister sit on porches, in the back of pickup trucks, in barrios & in
cantinas of historic ethnic enclaves or those who don’t; who speak subversive spanish, pantomime the tortilla & butter truth about speedy gonzales, the frito bandito, las posadas & la llorona or any other appropriate provocation
for trivializing the human spirit -- por una noche de cristal fea, arizona style.
perhaps the music’s greatest living composer, yr organic conceptions of fissioning melody, harmony, & rhythm took the state of play in a fresh direction. one of the few young composers who could take a piece to miles & get it back unchanged; get the band to play it like u wrote it, conforming precisely to its often bopish, sometimes modal structure, swiveling where it said to swivel, snaking where it said to snake, crossing over the tonic center from the consonant right or weaving back
over the new middle from the dissonant left in densely dreaded unison plaits that changed the sound of jazz, that changed fluidly, like yr own rollins-like tenor style, with its ripping, runaway trane asymmetries to the coruscating color of yr rhythmic, interval leaping soprano solo voice chanting its own mystical name & transfiguring signature, its new motifs & alternate insights assigned to randomness, new denouements & meticulous untyings of personal meaning – rushing in where boppers fear to tread!
from the start, when it was the instrument of the wood-god pan, the flute has been associated with pure (some might say impure) energy. its sound releases something naturally untamed..." --seamus heaney
the iconic miss mary’s place, a hoary houston honky tonk prominently placed because it pinpoints a precise location for yr musical roots, soul sourced in an urban manifestation & a perceptible revelation of the jook, ribald cake & whiskey cousin to the beans & bacon blues with a stepped up tempo that sulky soaked the late night & early morning air across the street from yr house, combined with yr mama’s gospel piano & yr daddy’s harmonica riffs, the basis of yr own funky, secular testimony, the crucible where rhythm & blues, classical julliard, & the spiritual, weighed & mixed in proper amounts, given time to season, fluxed down, solve et coagula, & transmuted into the sweetest, purest melodic & multicolored jazz flute tone ever proffered, ever played.
the only musician to have recorded in eight different decades, yr life, a symphony in riffs pouring out of yr trumpet, out of yr alto, out yr head & captured on vinyl, on tape, on compact disc living & playing thru’ yr legend making, writing it in the tales yr music told. yr rites of passage & the sheparding process where those at a higher level of understanding guided u to & thru’ a greater exposure to the music. rex stewart, sidney bechet, fatha hines, fats waller, willie the lion smith, james p. johnson & the duke transferred their powers to u, caused a change in yr existential condition; freed u from profane time.
freed u to recapitulate the history of the music that thru this recapitulation u might sanctify the music anew, reveal its deep meanings to the new generations, help them own & assume the responsibility of mystical vocation. u took time to befriend & mentor miles when he had no friends; to mentor q when like u, he wanted to write scores for film, to be there for j.j. johnson, art pepper & max roach as they each increased in stature & in favor. & u also took time to teach yr alto to sing. yr signature sound was smooth as silk, flowing like a lazy river that might race like a rapid or be still like a honeyed pool.
and i heard charlie parker for the first time & that was quite a thrill. this guy scared me to death! ben webster
what johnnie hodges was to the alto, u were in spades to the tenor & when froggie went a’courting, uh hunh, yr warm, breathy, sensual tone slickly slipped like a tongue up under a stray hemline to caress a fleshy thigh, make it surely shake with tremulous waves of hurt-so-good need or turn brutish on a stomp, ferally fecund, growling, rasping, rooted in the blues. u were one of yr era’s three tenors, before the sunrise of bebop, when the hawk & prez prowled the bandstands seeking whom they might cut up. but when they tried to cut u, they had to bring their lunch & dinner too. u enjoyed a reign as king of the tenors, that is, until bird came – then nothing else was ever the same.
"le dieu," a sound force given into our keeping, casting off tonic light from yr spirit heat. yr sugary sweet improvs like a savory beignet reek crawdad & shrimp; yr vibrato at once wide in affect cajoles octave joy, searing sorrow, fear & creole from yr sax, yr mage’s wand.
twas a world of yr own sound that u sought, that u dared to draw us into, with its halls of mirrors & endless doors, that magic odeum within for which u did surely long; that made u wolfly stalk jazz’s outer steppes, its first great soprano soloist!
u were twenty-two when u joined the john coltrane quartet, but clearly the real mccoy. trane knew this, kept u five years close, at the core of this most seminal of jazz experiments. from where did that transcendent piano style come? from what holy place within? & where did u learn that unique two-handed harmonic attack & rhythmic charge – yr block chording low bass left hand stacking fourths & yr staccato right hand flying thru pentatonic scales, modal structures, inverted triads & multi-fingered runs – new voicings & vocabulary for virtuoso jazz piano & growing each time u played. u shadowed trane thru’ his scales, chordal structures, melodic phrasings & rhythms, playing mantrically, intuiting the sacred audible tonesto help elevate each consciousness- raising performance, drawing garrison & jones to u, transcending & integrating all that had been played before, fastened securely to his coattails, to his ascension. he took u to the pinnacleof god consciousness, let u glimpse the final & highest abode of ishwara, the ultimate revelation of the self in perfect radiance & release. he would have taken u further, into formless consciousness & boundless radiance. but u did not like the free; were not yet ready for the street of pefume sellers, &like the vagrant who was overcome by the heady aromas on that street, who could only be revived by a fecal sal volatile from the street’s gutters, u said all u heard was noise; that u had no feeling for the new music. turned away, turned back to yr unabsorbed present, to yr raw blues & passionate pentatonic; turned back to comfortable virtuosity, but haunted by an audible image of a seed syllable where all sound, all music dissolves into perfect radiance & release & a memory of not a means to an end but the means & the end.
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