But This Will Bring You Back

We make no claim to have opened the book of Zora in a serious way.  All we have is the necessary reverence for Their Eyes Were Watching God.  We promise that we'll take up the the book, but we fear that when we look Zora's work full in the face, it will take full possession of our soul.  

How do we know of this power? We were strumming through the Library of Congress's dusty files looking for artifacts of Langston Hughes. Instead we found ourselves in a file folder of depression era field recordings from Florida (and we commend the whole folder to you).  Tucked inside, like someone meant to lose them, was a small treasure of Zora Neale Hurston recordings.  For the last two days we have found ourselves dazzled outta listening to Langston's big crossover project Street Scene by this string os shiny objects.   

What we're hearing:  Zora's doubled up, on the one hand herself is digging the crates of her own memory and the street for material and on the other she's been a hand working in the field for the documentating anthropologist.  She's both subject and object on both ends of the verb "to record."  And then, to redouble, she makes a record of her voice.  Now keep this trouble in mind.  She does this long before some idle listener conjuring the past from the internets can anticipate that her voice will be one we want to carry the aura of the original. Of course we can chalk this up as the drudgery of the anthropologist who cannot anticipate the magic of the fieldworker.  All they were doing was filling the ledger w/ obsessively kept records of the soon to be lost past work songs.  

In keeping, this pocketful of songs carries all of the dutiful anthropologist detailing, including snipe hunting patterns and more true sources.   There's card playing songs and track lining songs, references to the sawmills and geechees and the jukejoints, all of the places the unnaground places that A&R men go hunting for the next act to appear @ SXSW and coachella, right?  

In "Mule on the Mount," you can listen to Zora in dialogue w/ the anthropologist riff up the whole theory of the tradition out of partial answers.  This is how it really happened.  How it came back and became the biggest song in America.  In response to the sourceseeking questions she patiently develops a reply that tells much more of a story than the questions imagine they are asking for.  "[The song] has enumerable verses and whatnot about everything under the sun....  There's nowhere you can't find parts of this song....  The tune is consistent.  But the verses you know, in every locality you find new verses....  I'm gonna sing verse from whole lotsa places....  Yes, sometimes they sings thirty and forty verses....   It's one of these things that's grown by incremental repetition until it's one of the longest songs in America."

Zora, tho,' can take this quest for cool and turn it back on itself.  As you work through the material and get to songs like "Uncle Bud," and "Mule on the Mount" and "Po' Gal" there is no helping yourself.  The spell has been fully cast. These are beautiful songs because Zora knows them the way she knows them and sings them as beautiful as she can.  And we are hypnotized by the beauty.  But there's more.  We are also hypnotized because now her historical grandeur outsizes the sum of the recordkepping and the beauty of the source and her beautiful take on it.  The conjure power is as much because it is Zora's voice, carried back from the past, even as it carries back these tunes from a further past.  This is the twice Lazarussian true record of the unnaground coming back, Orpheus coming back from the Orpheus story w/ the true music back from the dead. 

We lined these records up into smaller clips.  Take 'em to church.  Shout 'em to the congregation.  Call for the resurrection.

• "Georgia Skin," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  They lose money to the drop of a card.
• "Let the Deal Go Down," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

• "Wake Up Jacob," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
• "Description of Lining Track," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
• "Shove it Over," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  The captain's got a pistol.  He's tryn to play bad, but I'm gonna take it if he makes me mad.
• "Let's Shake It," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
• "Gonna See My Long Haired Babe," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

• "Dat Old Black Gal," Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
• "Mama Don't Want No Peas and Rice," Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
• "Halimuhfack," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  Hoodoo, hoodoo, hoodoo working.
• "Crow Dance," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
• "Evalina," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  You know the baby don't favor me.
• "Tilly Lend Me Your Pigeon," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

• "Oh, Mr. Brown," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  See all of the versions.  Stuff for a future post.
• "Oh, the Buford Boat Done Gone," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

• "Uncle Bud," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  It's one of those juke songs.
• "Mule on the Mount," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  There's nowhere you can't find parts of this song.
• "Po' Gal," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).  

We'll see you when your troubles get like our'n.

The Darkness, the Song and Me

We've been working our way through the book of Langston for about 3 months, now.  And as always, there's so much things to say that for now we'll only one or two:  Like Pops, Langston runs past our expectations, no matter how high they are, no matter how low they are.  He doesn't get penned up neatly in a book.  As he moved from from one project to another (like the troubador), he defied those who's expectations would have him a poet, or a novelist, or a communist, or a gospel songwriter.  We are compelled to say that he is none of these jobs -- lines of work -- because he is all of them.  So high you can't see over it; so low you can't get under it.

W/ this job defying tendency in mind, we have been looking up the word music in the book of Langston.  Yes, yes.  We find Langston, blues poet, Langston, poet of song, Langston, poet teacher encouraging his spanish language colleagues to do the same; Langston, pop songwriter, Langston, maker of musical theatre, Langston, maker of historical operas, Langston, jazz performer, Langston,  jazz historian, Langston, groove theorist.  His trick is to be all of this.

How does Langston play this trick?  We don't know.  That's why it's a trick, we figure.  The devils are in the details.  Not a little bit here and a little bit there, but in the details everywhere.  This morning we're'a call up a spell to Papa Guéudé and ask him to help straighten out what we know about Langston, 'cause he's the one we ask about the ancestors when we need to keep them straightened out.  We want his guidance when we're trynta leave true memories behind.

R& gives us the prompt.  He tells us that Langston worked the Village Vanguard w/ Charles Mingus/Phineas Newborn, and later Ben Webster, and later w/ Randy Weston @ the Village Gate.  He catches the ups and downs of Langston's views from an interview w/ the Toronto Star.  "Jazz gives poetry a much wider following and poetry brings to jazz that greater respectability people seem to think it needs.  I don't think jazz needs it, but most people seem to."  We want a piece of this action.  There's ideas running in every direction, and we need help so we don't overstand this.

So this morning, we offer up The Weary Blues and Other Poems Read by Langston Hughes.  Really, it's two sets in one, both produced by Leonard Feather.  The first is w/ dixieland elder Red Allen (tp) and veteran sessionmen Vic Dickenson (tb), Sam Taylor, Al Williams, Milt Hinton (b) and Osie Johnson (d).  It's easy for the afficianado to write off this session as Langston and the moldy figs, but we're long over that distinction, and we find a number of the performances, especially "Testament," to be full of Langston's bigsoul.  We have no date on this session , except we infer from the date in the Mingus discography that this one takes place in the same year.  The second, recorded March 18, 1958, includes Charles Mingus (b), Shafi Hadi (ts), Jimmy Knepper (tb), Horace Parlan (p, who gets leader credit on the album jacket), and Kenny Dennis (d).  We cannot live on tomorrow forever.  We need to take up the past and make a new present understanding.  Take it on the download and listen hard.  You may remember your ancestors straight.

• "Hey (Night)/Too Blue," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Note on Commercial Theater," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "The Weary Blues," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Blues at Dawn," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Six Bit Blues," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Morning After," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Could Be/Bad Luck Card," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Life is Fine," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Hey Hey," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
• "Testament," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)

• "Consider Me," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Warning: Augmented," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Motto/Dead in There," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Final Curve," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Boogie: 1 AM," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Bed Time," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Day Break," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Tell Me," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Good Morning/Harlem," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Same in Blues/Comment on Curb," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
• "Democracy/Island," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)

All this makes us wish for more recordings.  Those Mingus nights, those Webster nights, they must've been, as the kids say, dope.  There must be tapes boxed up at Yale or Schomburg or the LoC.  You won't be finding them be in the old or the new Smithsonian collections, and they won't be in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, or even the three volume version.  The details.  This is what we hear when we listen to Allen Lowe asking us to listen to That Devilin' Tune.  And that's certainly what we wanna hear.

So we ask The Baron to help us find the devils.  They'll get our ancestors straight.  The Devils?  Could be.  Must be.

Do You Remember?

Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade,

On that that confusion which thy death has made.

-- Phillis Wheatley, "On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall 1771"

When we say the dubscience is a conjuring way, we're telling neither secrets nor lies. Dub fulfills the wish of turning making and remaking into one and the same action. It's a way to get more out of nothing, the old surplus value sleight of hand. It's a way of tying together the loose ends, looping the full circle of the root and the branch, the unnaground and the business, the remembered and the forgotten, the dead and the living.

In this way we find ourselves possessed by Burning Spear's albums Marcus Garvey and Garvey's Ghost. They are simple albums based on each based on a simple concept: the first is a set of 10 songs that invoke the importance of Marcus Garvey to the young Jamaican; the second, a song for song echo of the first. The first is an assembly of a-side versions, the second, its b-side twin.* The back and forth casts the spell of the most powerful purpose: bring back the dead, forgotten leader, who, in new form, might lead us across the water where we can see a new land, a new way of life.

From the first track, it's a simple spell. It takes the form of a lesson (the subject is history) that comes with twin prospects: the threat of further struggle, even harm, on the one hand, and the promise of relief, even redemption on the other. "Marcus Garvey" is recast into "The Ghost." The a-side begins with the powerful incantation, "Marcus Garvey's words come to pass" in the face of hunger and deprivation, "Can't get no food to eat. Can't get no money to spend," and makes a private offering to the listener, "Come little one, oh let me do what I can for you, and you alone." The b-side is groove alone, fading horns and dubbed piano repeating in the distance against a churning rhythm section, ghostly give and take that does all it can to enact the album's first important proposition: "He who knows the right thing/and do it not/shall be spanked with many stripes," which turns into the plea, "Do right. Do right. Do right Do right. Do right." The a-side is the conjure word; the b-side the the conjure word becomes conjured deed. Now gone in the first breath, it is true to say that "Marcus Garvey's words come to pass" in the form of a ghostly echo.

Together, the twin albums do this gesture ten times over. "Slavery Days," turns to "I and I Survive." "Jordan River" turns to "Dread River." "Resting Place" turns to "Reggaelation." Taken together they create a simple back and forth, a call and response that creates unity among those who have been separated.  I and I survive?  Yes.  Even with the turn from the first title to the second, the next spell is cast, the next lesson is learned.  It is a way that makes future from the past, and makes new dreams out of old dreams.  And in this way, the dead come back to life.

Here's a clip of sacred bullets for the double barrel, kingz & queenz.  Humble yourself, my little ones.  Humble yourself.  Wa da da.

• "Marcus Garvey," Burning Spear (1975).
• "The Ghost," Burning Spear (1976).

• "Slavery Days," Burning Spear (1975).
• "I and I Survive," Burning Spear (1976).

• "The Invasion," Burning Spear (1975).
• "Black Wa Da Da," Burning Spear (1976).

• "Give Me," Burning Spear (1975).
• "Brain Food," Burning Spear (1976).

• "Old Marcus Garvey," Burning Spear (1975).
• "Farther East of Jack," Burning Spear (1976).

------------

* See:

a.)

b.)

Damballah's Divine Graces and Favors

We were listening to Pharoah Sanders last week, and we were pulled by the gravity of the Karma album to shuffle up all of the version's of Creator Plans we could dig out of the crates.

This tune is basically a gospel/spiritual collage, a prayer to glue together the loose scraps of the world -- it's past and present, it's eastern coast and its west coast, all of its opposites -- into something satisfying.

Pharoah's reference version is above all a musical comfort, less raucous than A Love Supreme, even though it's grounded in the same groove and the same aesthetic, and above all it is about the resolution of all of that screamin' and hollerin.'

The versions that spin out are all versions of the same comfort, some with more surprises to resolve than others. We find the pared down simplicity of the earlier live quartet in many ways more forceful.

And we find the Leon Thomas/Louis Armstrong take more than a freaky amusement. Pops is dying when he takes up the mike, and yet his voice fills the room with the same depth and volume it does when, say, he steals the show from Ella Fitzgerald in their duet of "Summertime."

More than once in this here place we have written about the power of the version, the conjure and reconjure that makes up tradition. This clip of bullets remakes point again, different.

• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Pharoah Sanders (1969).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Pharoah Sanders (1968).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Leon Thomas w/ Louis Armstrong (1970).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Don Cherry (1972).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Quayshaun, produced by G-Clef Da Mad Creator (1993).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Brooklyn Funk Essentials (1994).
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan," Elouise Burrell (2010).

Bonus

• "The Creator Has Other Plans for Me," Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble (2007).

"What a f*cking family picture"

When we say dubscience, the science we talk to is a conjuring way. It steals the lost from where they were, brings them back transformed. We have nothing to write today about the greatness of the island dub, though ('xcept indirectly we will, because how can we avoid it really -- that's the power that takes over and fills our fingertips with someone else's words). Instead we write about William Attaway, who rises again through the juju of Lil Wayne.

:: lights cigar ::

:: mixes vodka w/ a spritzer ::

William Attaway wandered his life up into a story that has been ignored by biographers. Literary types think of him as a two novel footnote. Brovah gains no mention, for instance, in the 8 volume Cambridge History of American Literature. No matter how infrequently we say his name, there is an accumulation of wisdom in what he left behind when he walked off this earth in 1986.

His second novel, Blood on the Forge, is built on the rock foundation of the blues, and is most famous for being misremembered by Ralph Ellison for its failings, when its strengths are partly in its single-minded failing to rise up with more than the world offers to those who are displaced. In BotF, you wake at four, you piss on a rock, you hate your boss, you lose your woman, you lose your land, you lose your strength, you lose your sight, you lose the will to sing, and you find yourself going away with no place in mind in the company of blind men who are hearing things. Ain't no transendence to a greater humanity.

On his journey, Attaway collected calypsos and children songs. He wrote for early tv. And he gave Harry Belafonte the words the words of the dawn, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song.)"

Harry Belafonte is another misremembered one, because of our problems w/ authenticity. Today's ear places him far from the street. That's a mistake. Like Attaway, he's a rover and holds the gift of crossover, a power much admired by the loa. The one who brings him back needs to remember much, including his genius for funding the early civil rights movement.

We forget that Calypso, a creole masterpiece, was as big as Michael Jackson in the early days of the ellpee. It's centerpiece, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is tossed into the crates w/ the novelty songs, samples for sports chants and other negligibles. We should hear it the way we do, of course. But we should be wondering it's constantly returning power, like the smell of honey. And we should think of the juju that created that power.

"Dayo" is a work song. Tally my bananas, Mr. Tallyman, I want to go home. You'll hear that song over and over again when you thumb the pages of BotF. And you sing it yourself at quittingtime, whether you want know it or not. But Attaway and Belafonte whip up a homegoing that is about more than just the end of the day. Like all of the great sorrow songs, this one is about leaving the world and going back across the water to find the old family, the one lost when we were displaced. It is the full tragic joy of the song, a melody and lyrics we wish we could remember more from, because then we'd be home once and for all.

So when we spin Lil Wayne's "Six Foot Seven Foot" and we hear the track dubconjure up a groove out of "Day-O," we hear all of Weezy's juju in full effect. On the one hand, it's the standard self assertion at the heart of the blues. "Tell them b*tches I say put my name on the wall./I speak the truth, but I guess that's a foreign language to y'all." Wayne is always capable of taking the form up higher, though, crossing over "like a subject and a predicate."

But then watch how he do:

You don't want start Weezy, 'cause F is for finisher.

Mo misunderstood, but what's a world without an enigma?

Two b*tches at the same time, snchronized swimmers.

Got the girl twisted 'cause she open when I twist her.

Never met the b*tch, but I fuck her like I missed her.

Life is b*tch, and death is her sister.

Sleep is her cousin, what a f*ckin' family picture.

Now he's working the other hand. This is more than the stuff of workingstiff battlerap. Weezy's f*cking w/ the two most powerful women, life and death, synchronized swimmers of the large sea. By the end, all the Guédé are around him and he's in the center. And he's crossing back and forth in a fully breathed exercise of death and fertility that brings Attaway's work back across the water in new form. Work it, bruh bruh.

Daylight's coming.

It can't stop. And it won't stop.

That's what we mean when we say 'til the breakadawn. Ya dig?

Here's the bullets for this clip.

• Harry Belafonte, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)." 1956
• Lil Wayne, "6 Foot, 7 Foot." 2010

Ain't No Telling

:: lights cigar ::

:: pours a little liquor on the ground ::

We blew the dust off some John Hurt songs this morning, and were struck over and over by the way Hurt's soft spoken approach to the blues mixes up w/ the gangsta sh*t he sings about.

By the end of "Got the Blues (Can't Be Satisfied)," he's done some damage:

I said, "Baby, what makes you act this a way?"

I said, "Baby, why did you act this a way?"

Says I won't miss a thing she gives away.

Took my gun and I broke the barrel down.

Took my gun and broke the barrel down.

Put my baby six feet in the ground.

I cut that joker so long deep and wide.

Cut that joker so long deep and wide.

Yet got the blues and I can't be satisfied.

When we think dissatisfied, we think the full-throated "I feel like snapping a pistol in your face" hollered by Muddy Waters. John Hurt's soft droning on the guitar and sweet, near whisper make an understated haunt, not the usual volume that cuts a a backdoor man deep and wide. You can make up a catalog of this quiet violence when you dig through the Hurt stacks.

He delivers it the same way he delivers the much more matter of fact.

The way I'm sleepin,' my back and shoulder's tired.

The way I'm sleepin,' Babe, my back and shoulder's tired.

The way I'm sleepin,' my back and shoulder's tired.

Gonna turn over try it on the other side.

Hurt mixes the sweet and everyday in his menace. It sticks in our mind because we can't reconcile it. It's like killing someone because he took your hat. It's also not the voice of someone whose seen trouble all his days. It's the voice of someone who puts trouble after trouble behind, as easy as you can flirt w/a mermaid. But the more we listen, the more we think that's the all about it. It leaves us uneasy in an at ease way. Are you feeling it? Turning around is about the turning, not the next new direction you strike. All directions carry you to your grave. Turning around is the move of the most powerful loa. It's John Hurt's move.

It's in this sense that we understand "Spike Driver Blues."

With that in mind, we turn back and restudy John Hurt. With each turn we find ourselves satisfied. So we're loading the clip with some John Hurt bullets:

• "Got the Blues (Can't Be Satisfied)," 1928.
• "Big Leg Blues," 1928. Rambling because he's tired of a leg over his in the morning.
• "Candy Man," 1928. In anticipation of the candy shop, where you can get a lollipop f/ 50¢. "It don't melt away. It just gets better, so the ladies say."
• "Blue Harvest Blues," 1928. Dread when there should be none.
• "Spike Driver Blues," 1928. Turns John Henry into a reason to quit altogether. "Take my hammer and give it to the captain." Jyeah.

Gonna make it to my shanty 'fore day.

What We're Hearing

In his review of a different chapter of Jay 2 tha Z's ongoing autobiographical/autoentrepreneurial project, the dean makes the following persuasive observation:

Sean Carter isn't the first crime-linked hitmaker with a penchant for kicking broads out of bed at 6:15 in the morning. Frank Sinatra beat him to it. Right, Sinatra never boasted about his own callousness--not publicly, in song--and that's a big difference. Jay-Z has too many units tied up in playing the now-a-rapper-now-a-thug "reality" game with his customers, thugs and fantasists both, and only when he lets the token Amil talk back for a verse does he make room for female reality.

The connect b/t the business, man and the chairman of the board is an obvious one, but merits mentioning nevertheless. A different member of the VV diaspora (the best faculty a music and movie loving boy could want in the 80s), Gary Giddins might take it further. He'd draw the line b/t Sinatra and Der Bingle, Der Bingle and the minstrel circuit, the tricky bidness of makeup and voice. He might take us then to Bert Williams, one of the true kings of the 20th c. That would then give us a route back to really understand the business, man.

Get it: We are at the crossroads again. And we're on our knees.

Take this and put it in context:

• "D'Evils," Jay-Z (1996).

What We're Hearing: Pops Alone and Together

The more we hear this piece, the more we hear a before and after story about ensemble playing.

There is one approach to the ensemble at the beginning, one where the melody is owned collectively. The ensemble rolls for foaty seconds w/ the 4 piece rhythm section, making a deep bottom. It's all for one.

Then there's a cornet/banjo break, followed by the clarinet/banjo break, really just set ups for the drama of the big pops solo moment that gets all of the attention. (Johnny Dodds squallers his response in contrast to Pops' first break, which is short, dynamic and versatile, and we don't knock it, but because it comes after, it sounds like he's just trynta shout over Pops' imagination, especially in the first two or three bars of his second run through of the chorus.)

And we don't argue the fact that from about a minute and fifty to about two and thirtyfive, pops the soloist is all there is, maybe all there is in the universe -- Emerson's transparent eyeball. We all already know that that's why we call him Pops: he fathered the 20th century by being all of it and by giving it all of his being. So when Ted Gioia or Terry Teachout* make their appropriate and now canonical claim that this is the moment when he's 'venting modern jazz, they are stating a matter of fact.

But our attention is drawn to the one for all final chorus, the last 25 seconds of the song. The melody is reframed, and it makes a new sense, not because of the solo runs leading into it; they are just drama. Rather because Pops owns the whole thing and the ensemble is hanging in w/ his every not making groove groove, making the song really sing.

We're not certain this is modern vs. old NO any more than it is Pops vs. the band. We think it goes a different way. We think Hot 7 had to make a song out of those solo choruses, a song w/ enough drama to take back the hearts and minds of the audience after the solos. And in this case they did so by exceeding themselves as soloists, as difficult as that may seem in hindsight.

We also think this is part of the essential knowhow that Pops brings to the game when he is on his best. He uses the solo and the ensemble, the one for all and all for one, to great dramatic purpose. We don't need to strum our fingers over the body of his work. We just need to press play on "Struttin' with Some Barbecue." It is a scientist's simple lesson on the interplay between individual and group making the most memorable drama.

Take it. Take it.

• "Potato Head Blues," Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven (1927).

-----------

* "However 'Potato Head Blues' came to be, it is one of the greatest solos recorded by a jazzman, a landmark of modern music that long ago achieved iconic status, both music and cultural."

Erzulie, Make Us Reach in the Files

The trick in ancient to future is to be in more than one time at a place. Like Erzulie, who's both rada and petwo. It's the old tricky like this, tricky like that manuva. Chea.

A weekend ago, the VV threw us a clue in this direction and asked us to pay attention to Greg Nice. We took it up like a gift left on the roadside, and started digging though the Nice and Smooth crates. Cause this is how we take.

As we lissened, what we found was a profound betweenness to their work. It was more than the dang diggy dang wordplay of the late 70s, and it had more than the odor of the streets that rap took up quick in the first new school. There was a love of the dancehall, a love of the battle, a love of the streets and a love of the afrofuture in egypt jewel of the nile. It's all packed in the titles, lyrics and music of two songs, "Old to the New" and, even moreso, "Same Old Brand New Style (I Can't Wait)." These two mouthfuls would feed a supperful of hungry posts here at the redlight. To paraphrase, We are always impatient for the recurrence of the old in the definitively new. Always for the first time, and for the first time, just like always. Ahh, effervescence.

In fact, just like when you call on the loa, you get more than you ask for. And it was then that we heard Dewey Redman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, the masters of conjurng the old and the new. Can't wait, you dig?

So let's cite the bullets

• "Old to the New," Nice and Smooth
• "Same Old Brand New Style (I Can't Wait)," Nice and Smooth
• "Old and New Dreams," Old and New Dreams

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

While we're on this, let's mark again: we have much to say about Smooth's verse in Same Old. Brovah calls a lotta names, but finally gets to this:

I'll beat you like Bruce, when he turned into Cato.

Who be the winner, the snake or the monkey?

Hard to tell, but this beat, this sh*t sure is funky.

We are not sure what's going on here, but this is what we mean when we say, you see? Sh*t made us break out the Harold Courlander (you know, the new school remake of the prewar sociology and anthropology, and an old school folklore author) and ask all about the snake and the monkey, cause it's one of those things that makes you go hmmmm... while you're walking to the library. And we found some good stuff 'bout gold weights and such, but nothing that stuck the snake in a tangle w/ a monkey. So we asked the internets and we got a reference to some razzledazzle, and even if it has nothing to do w/ snake and monkey proper, we're gonna call it.

That's the way Lady Erzulie would call it, too, in the in between of the in between.

Rock on. Shock on. Get on. Get on.

Rock on. To the breakadawn.

Don't You Want to Go?

For those displaced (and that's all of us -- we are all out of the place we are meant to be), home is away, out of reach. For that reason, moving on is as inevitable as the arithmetic of footsteps: you know, "One and one is two." Just as inevitable is a sense of longing, the sense that loss can be restored, that it is possible to leave this mean old place and return to a better one, the place you come from.

Call it Eshu's paradox: He who stands at the crossroads urging you on, is the same who walks by you when you travel home to your final resting place. How is it that in the blues about being homesick, "Ever time de trains pass/I wants to go somewhere"? Langston goes on to capture the emotional paradox. "To keep from crying/I opens my mouth an' laughs." And there, with both ends of the equation in his hands, he's conjures Eshu.

It's a temptation to try to get more meaning out of a blues song than it offers. Brovah Elijah Wald is probably the best teacher on this subject. The song is nothing more or less than where it stands in a jukebox, a record company's ledger, and the variations from one version to the next.

Before it was a thesis/anthem that demanded a crackerrock antithesis/antianthem about, of all places, Alabama, "Sweet Home Chicago" was nothing more or less than a simple rambling song. It marks itself with cryptic references of places too distant to imagine (California, Des Moines Ioway, and Chicago). And it cries a lonesome wail inviting companionship on the ramble ("Baby, honey don't you want to go?" -- a question asked in a way that leads the listener to wonder whether Johnson is begging her because she's saying no). Going home? Rambling? Alone? Together? Eshu will tell us these cannot be separated, anymore than laughing and crying.

As we listened, we began hearing the variations more clearly. There's Kokomo and the original that comes 6 years later. There's "Sweet" by a bunch of other names, like "Don't You Want To?" You can go to Chicago or the country. You can go home or you can leave home forever. Eshu knows that when you are on your knees at the crossroads your are always coming and going. So we're reloading a clip of bullets for your own exercise in versionology:

• "Kokomo Blues," Scrapper Blackwell (1928).
• "Old Original Kokomo Blues," Kokomo Arnold (1934).
• "Mr. Freddie's Kokomo Blues," Freddie Spruell, accompanied by Carl Martin (1935).

* * * * *

• "Sweet Home Chicago," Robert Johnson (1936).
• "Don't You Want to Go," Walter Davis (1940-1946)
• "Baby, Don't You Want to Go," Tommy McClennan
• "Sweet Home Chicago," David "Honeyboy" Edwards
• "Sweet Home Chicago," Pyeng Threadgill (2003).

* * * * *

• "Going up the Country, Don't You Want to Go," The Lapsey Band (1954).
• "Going up to the Country" (Version 1), Jessie Clarence Gorman (1969).
• "Going up the Country/Paint My Mailbox Blue," Taj Mahal (1968).

* * * * *

• "Come On, Don't You Want to Go?" I.C. Glee Quartet
• "Don't You Want to Go," Arizona Dranes
• "Don't You Want to Go," the Soul Stirrers

We're uncertain about any direct line between any of these songs, 'cept perhaps the line drawn by Wald between Kokomo Arnold and Johnson's original retake. Pure sharkbiting. This is a roots maneuver and we've got nothing more to say about this kinda trickery but that you better think it's still going on all over the panhiphop tradition, and has been from ancient to future. In this way, we can take up all the retakes, from Johnson's own to Pyeng Threadgill's, and we can trace a line of longing, a longing to get back home to you name it: the people we want to be with; the people we lost; the slow groove of good loving that we been missing; you name it.

But there's more to the tradition that working the repeater pencil to draw a line between your audience and your pocketbook. There is something about coming and going that is more than just passing a coin from one hand to another.

There is the temptation to go back. When we we're studying up for this piece we read through the primitive liner notes of musicologist Frederic Ramsey, Jr., who anthropolgized the Lapsey Band's approach to Albert Ayler. He gave voice to this temptation. "As a tentative but not binding objective, we hoped to tap as many sources as possible that would lead us back to the music and the story of the period 1860 to 1900." But the Laspey's are pure ancient to future, music from the spaceways. We give Ramsey props for his diligence when we say he's got the direction wrong. Home is away, not back.

This is why we our soul stirs when we hear the line drawn between Johnson, who's pact w/ the devil is the stuff of movies by the Coen Bros, and Arizona Dranes, or even more, the I.C. Glee Quartet. That's the home: the place we can only wish for after we've lost it.

Eshu's a homesick loa, and he knows that is a joyful disease because it promises the slow groove of return.