Here’s one batch from many sessions.
Around 1992 I began to really appreciate as a performer what could happen when poetry combined with improvisational music.
Together the improvisations made a free, blending form that could enhance both expressions’ meanings. You never knew what would come out in this new and changing form.
From the first I was blessed with highly skilled and giving collaborators, quick and sympathetic in their inspirations, ample in their resources.
Henry spent hours with me in recording and Dhyani more hours in rehearsal.
With a group of such improvisers the possibilities for transformation were genuinely endless. “We’ll just go, and you do what you do,” I said to Henry when he began with India and Miya and me at that session.
With Glenn, Donald and J. R. we usually did a poem twice without break and by the second pass they
entered fully into the words, enlarging it for me,
our utterance like a vessel we carried together.
So: all of these tracks were recorded live-to-DAT (Digital Audio Tape) except
“Detroit/Crack” (a coupling of “Detroit Breakdown” and “Crack/War Goin’ On” on which I overdubbed the vocal.)
DHYANI DHARMA MAS guitar tracks 1, 9, 11
GLENN SPEARMAN tenor saxophone DONALD
ROBINSON drums J. R. ROUTHIER electric guitar
tracks 2, 5, 6, 10
HENRY KAISER guitar tracks 3, 7, 8, 13
INDIA COOKE violin MIYA MASAOKA kota track 4
INDIA, HENRY, MIYA track 12
MYLES BOISEN electric bass track 6
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1) L.A. Blue Bus to drink wine.
Dance on sand/ ... / No way around it
And no center here
2) Sonny heard the Quarters moan and keen/
... / Modern spirituals to transcend
3) Frog
s and insects/ Sound in currents
4) She holds scenes together, their energy
Centers in her who calls friends Boo
5) Behind Quarters./ Africa
6) Detroit, Detroit--mile after mile divided
or abandoned/ Where you think Rock come from?
7) Taxis wait by sand-skirted curbs
8) Baby as if to see/ That great and small
Figure in a grand plan
9) Reinaldo Arana still changed like his Island/
.../ So many, passed and passing, I now see
10) Something wanting CONTACT!--
CONTACT!-CONTACT!
11) Desire rides upon
All kinds of love’s flows
12) Birds are mired in the oil/ Palms and
firs shrink by Bays/ How we meet the calls of
life/ Is our play with Paradise
13) Green furrowed ridge/ Of sloping shoulders,
Denuded but lush,/ Speaks for the
Earth
Lasting
Produced and mixed by Don Paul
c & p 2003
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