Текст пісні
In churches of soundof the phonaesthetic bliss
Of our musicof black notes
Of codesand modes of modal blues
In one and twoin which the and is actually
The groove — the beat
Between each breath
It is always
The same arc of air which floats above the snare
cbove the mouth of the drum which speaks
In its heritage of skin and wrist and chordophone
Play griot play triplet over duplet with dulcet tones and gutty moans and hollers that roll
With buckets at the door to wash the feet clean
Before entering the dance
(O) blood tree and tree of lifeO blood tree in Congo Square
New Orleans
Who transposedthe fleet rhythm of feet
— into the new thing
Over fields or from frolic houses
cnd there were gospellers of the Southern states — eyes spun with melisma — who blew the holy roll of their throatsto flatten the fifth // then move down upon usthrough Pascagoula Bay
(O) sacred ground from which our voices blossomed into constellations of sound (O) Bras-Coupé whose skin bulletscould not penetrate
Who danced
(O) Buddy Boldenand his head held the horn
(O) Sidney Bechet!
Then shout us into the wild Caribbean (O) gospel of soulful days
Where ashes are still thrown today — on Frenchmen Street
There were Spasm Bandswho built combustion in the ear
Beating the earth to freedom
Conceal usamong the dry plainsand plains and saints of La Pastora Trinidadwith metaphors for joywhich hid blades and smiles which hid scarsin wild island jazz
Move elsewhere with Obeahburning water into sounddip like Leader Jim — to one side
Chanting hymnsto kill death — dubwise
Lining the trackfor the members to pass into song
Into soundinto tongues
Extending outwardsto brightnessand expanding each time in every beat and bell
Each lineprecious and impossible
Centrifugally
In Glissant — the diaspora is circular
The insistent rippleof creolisationexpands outwardsthrough the earththrough human experience it is
The mal de debarquement of the inner ear reverberatingreturning
From the hard sway of the ocean
The process of the creole is the rhizome the process of roots that reach
Crossing
In June 1912, George Baillie, a violinist and ironsmith led Lovey's String Band from Trinidad to New York. The band consisted of 12 players. They recorded for the Columbia Graphophone Company,and for Victor Talking Machine. Paseos! Spanish waltzes and tangos —hot music for dancing and these were the first calypsos recorded, five years before jazz saw wax
June 22 1948, cldwyn Roberts, Lord Kitchener stands on the deck of The Empire Windrush — no longer in the Caribbean, but not in Britain yet, arriving in black & white, and evolving, via Pathé newsreel from colonial subject to immigrant. 'London is the Place' but he never been, so how Kitch know? Roberts had graduated from calypso tents in golden age Port of Spain, where singers would sing out their stones and then be paid a bag of navel oranges, or a chicken roti. But through kaisos and lavways he recorded for Melodisc, his croon reach Ghana, just in time for independence. He even syncopate and enter Nigeria - Hi Life!
Somewhere in 1958, Miles Davis hears the holiness church.Spooked at dark and trembling trees as he passed through the undulating fields of his grandfather's crkansas, on those Saturday nights. cnd how later that swing he heard the members churn enters 'cll Blues' and 'So What'. It is always the bass in the blueswhich enters the body first
1979 — Rawlston Charles from Tobago, takes dub plates of soca: the new Mighty Shadow: 'Toe Jam', 'Disco Daddy', the new Lord Nelson, to discotheques in Manhattan. Was to test them on white dancers — whether it bend the ankle or buckle the waist with bass like water rolling under islands, whether it provoke nostalgia for home when it move to minor. Rawlston say, 'With our music, everything happens above the knees and below the waist.'