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
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