In the Spring of 2013, [the band] Florist was finally given it’s name…For me it has come to represent the multifaceted identity of a flower arranger. Beautifying, preserving, composing, killing, and commercializing a natural and emotional thing [sound/music] which we probably know too little about yet encounter very often.
– Emily Sprague
Category Archives: music
Excerpt:
HENRY DUMAS: Inseparable from Sun Ra’s music is his mythology, a sol-based cosmology that stretches deep into the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. l asked him once about his role of Ra, the Egyptian sun god.
SUN RA: Everybody should try to be what they really are. They should search and find what they really are. That is what I really am. Some people are in the role of a diplomat or a congressman. I am in the role of Ra. To be what I really am, I must be on another plane of existence. On this stage of existence I am nothing. But on another I am in the role of Ra. It’s just like when you go to the theater and you look at a beautiful stage. It doesn’t stay that way. Pretty soon the next act brings you some different scenery.
HD: I asked him about Astro-Infinity music which he plays in the new Arkestra. “Is this a way of relating jazz to the atomic age and the future?”
RA: Astro-Infinity music is just one aspect of my music. It is heavenly, eternal, no beginning and no ending The highest aspiration for many on earth is freedom. Astro-Infinity music is beyond freedom. It is precision, discipline. It is not just freedom. It is coordination and sound interdependence. It is the design of another world. It has nothing to do with the traditions of yesterday, today or the future.
HD: What would you consider some of the possibilities of jazz in the future? I mean, considering the black man as the originator of jazz, considering the social revolution going on today and his attempts to resurrect some image of dignity for himself, where does jazz get into the picture?
RA: Well, you have to go back to some beginnings to talk about that. For one thing, the Creator gave the black man harmony in the beginning. And he tried to discipline the black man to use his gifts, but the black man was too unruly. Even the Creator couldn’t handle him, or at least he decided against it. So, l guess the Creator turned the job over to me. But the black man has been worshipping death instead of trying to understand the ways of his Creator. Yet he won’t make death his king. The equation doesn’t balance. In religion, he believes in the cross, which is an X. When you X something, you eliminate it, you axe it. In the same religion the cross is the symbol of life. Anybody following the cross winds up dead in the cemetery with an X for his crown.
HD: Are you talking about the spiritual death spoken of by Christians or the death of the body?
RA: Both really. The black man is under the name of death. He carries it around with him. The word negro. It is the same as the word necro. The g and the c are interchangeable according to cosmic mathematics. It is an equation. A negro equals a necro. The sound of one is in the other. In the Greek necro means dead body. Necropolis is a city of the dead. Once you accept the name without checking into things, then you are automatically a citizen of the city.
HD: lf the citizens of a necropolis are dead, how does one resurrect them? I mean, in the analogy you just made, how are the souls called forth?
RA: Mostly through music and myth. But it’s not just the black man who is in trouble. You can look in your newspapers and read how the whole planet is in trouble, in need of spiritual awakening. I am painting pictures of another plane of existence, you might say, something so far away that it seems nonexistent or impossible. ln infinite terms anything is possible. Nothing is impossible. People have always been looking for that world where nothing is impossible. A world of happiness, so they claim. But never have they been able to create it. All the great men on this planet have not yet come close to that world. They’ve tried everything and everybody. But people will have to have new mind-cepts. All the old ways will have to pass away. When people reach the stage when they can use their infinite mind power to concentrate and direct the truth in these cosmic equations I am talking about, then they will be ready for the grand experiment. There will be no more death in the next plane of existence. You might say that I am the bridge to the next plane of existence. When they reach that stage, they will be resurrected.
HD: What is the next stage and how will music be used?
RA: For the black man the first step will be toward discipline. Music is a force of nature. I am a force of nature. I am in the role of Ra because the Creator has left it up to me to give some order and harmony to this planet. Not everyone is in need of it. Many people are well developed spiritually and are growing. But most are not. So a force of nature gets them all. It’s just like when it rains, it rains on everything and everybody. You might say that I represent all the forces of nature. People don’t all know about this mind-cept, but in the Yoruba culture it is understood. In many parts of Africa this cosmic law is true among the people. If a man or a people reach a certain stage in their growth and development and then they just can’t go any further, a force of nature incubates among them. And this force, be it the wind, the sun, rain, lightning, or thunder, whichever is really needed for that particular kind of development, achieves what could not be done A force of nature gets under you and drives you to do what you thought you couldn’t. If I am in the role of Ra and I put some heat up under you, then you will move or burn up.
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The final question Dumas asks Sun Ra before the recording cuts out is what is the name of the supreme being? The tape ends abruptly like it’s fallen off a jagged cliff. About two years after this recording was made, Dumas is killed by the NYPD in a case of “mistaken identity.” On the night he is killed, Sun Ra convinces him to give up his gun, he disarms him. Dumas goes to the subway station in Harlem and he’s shot and killed by police. The secrets he wanted Ra to divulge by proxy he now knows as another stolen black life sent to the other side for vigilance, deliverance. The thief who stole Henry Dumas’s days, turned him into a saint who now guards our hidden legacies and this recording is evidence of where he was sent. In West African tradition, the griot or town crier, because he cannibalizes his people’s history in order to tell it, must assimilate it, eat it alive, is not buried with other members of the community when he dies but instead put in a tree to be consumed by maggots.
…
Sun Ra wanted us to acknowledge that there is no death, that life is endless. At concerts he would beseech enthralled spectators, asking will you give up your death for me? When, in this recording of his fireside chat with Henry Dumas, he assures we’re already complete in the realm of the dead he is saying, in a way, that eternity awaits, this plane is remedial in comparison to that knowledge, there’s nothing we lack but understanding of that.
He is explaining that death is a western concept we must outgrow if we really expect to be among those who see and hear and know how to listen to Sun Ra. He knows that the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it’s mistranslated in the west, is really called the book of coming forth by day, of the boat that carries the sun, in its natal tongue. It is a book of endless revivification, it does not acknowledge the life/death binary the west obsesses over, but instead establishes that there is either sun or a limpid accursed sunlessness, enlightenment to the life-giving force or a forest of terrors, and we must seek the sun, Ra, Re, that ravening arrow on the way to never, the saturnine realm Sun Ra governs.
If body, mind, soul, and spirit were aligned on the same plane, language would reflect the eternal truths that belong to music and poetry and we would all be coming forth by day in harmonic unison. Beneath his matter-of-fact responses to Dumas’s naive but sincere questions, is the subterfuge of that mythos, its impatience with misinterpretation and its inability to be grasped without being experienced.
…
Even as the maggots eat the flesh of the griot, we keep talking, giving of ourselves defiantly, coming together furtively and unapologetically saying yes to yesterday, to accompaniment, to the disavowal of false curses, to being devoured by our own songs, transcending our haunts with our horrors until we become the heroes we seek in effigy. We, out here in the diaspora waiting to be cannibalized and lied on, are making conversations, new languages, and converting them to tone then song then eating the flesh of our music as this record.
-Harmony Holiday
“The Enforcement of Mosaic Law
To Be Square with the Sun at Noon, STAND STILL and Consider the Wonderous Work of God
The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.”
Outside, the walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.
Inside, most meetinghouses had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.
Frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets.
Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.
The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill.
This Ritual of Worship Became a Powerful Instrument
At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”
Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.
Afterwards, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant wind, the solemn tones of the cattle in the field, and then to the monotone of the lamp burning, and then again to the closing echoes of that cold, distant wind.””