ARTHUR MAGAZINE - WE FOUND THE OTHERS &#187; Jay Babcock

ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

ZAZEN, Chapter 5 — “1 800 buy COAL” (pdf, 88k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 4 — “Asian Market” (pdf, 56k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 3 — “New Haiku” (pdf, 64k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 2 — “Pregnant Rats” (pdf, 81k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 12 of ZAZEN will be posted Thursday, November 12. There are 30 chapters in all.

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka, Chapter 10: “Venus Rodere”

Jay Babcock — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:16:24 +0000

I made a list of possible terrorist group names. I decided it’s only fair that with a personal savior you should get a personal destroyer—niche terrorism being the obvious next step in identity politics. Narcissism meets the rest of the world. Hi! Howdy do? The market rallies. Satin covered bullet cases? First-responder kits with your astrological sign etched on the front plate? My mind was clicking…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 10 — “Venus Rodere” (pdf, 64k)

ZAZEN, Chapter 9 — “The Rat Queen” (pdf, 87k)

ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 10 of ZAZEN will be posted Tuesday, November 10. There are 30 chapters in all.

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka, Chapter 9: “The Rat Queen”

Jay Babcock — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:09:47 +0000

An hour after the explosion Rise Up Singing was packed. The whole block was standing around eating vegan doughnuts waiting for a chance at the landline. Gangs, they said. But not everyone agreed. Insurance, some thought. One guy said developers but nobody believed him because that would just be too obvious. Mitch was giving away food and Mirror was taking advantage of the situation to drive turnout for the sex party….

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 9 — “The Rat Queen” (pdf, 87k)

ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 10 of ZAZEN will be posted Tuesday, November 10. There are 30 chapters in all.

LENORE KANDEL, 1932-2009

Jay Babcock — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:58:09 +0000

photo: Gordon Peters

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Lenore Kandel – ‘The Love Book’ author – dies

Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful.

Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San Francisco’s famous counterculture of the ’60s, died on Oct. 18 in San Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks earlier.

“I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam,” said actor Peter Coyote. “Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity.”

Coyote, Ms. Kandel and her then-boyfriend Bill Fritsch – a poet and Hell’s Angel – became fast friends.

“She was working as a belly dancer and would sew these beaded curtains to make money on the side,” said Coyote, a founder of the Diggers, an anarchistic group supplying free food, housing and medical aid to the needy in San Francisco. “We would sit around and smoke dope and talk about philosophy and art. She was an enlightened person, a great being.”

Born in New York City on Jan. 14, 1932, to Russian and Mongol parents, Ms. Kandel was educated in a one-room schoolhouse in Bucks County, Pa., where she lived with her grandmother. She began writing poetry as a child, attended college in New York and moved to San Francisco around 1960, toward the end of the Beat era. Once here, she became the girlfriend of poet Lew Welch and friends with the movement’s seminal figures, including Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg.

In “Big Sur,” Kerouac’s 1962 novel, Ms. Kandel is portrayed as Romana Swartz, a “big Rumanian monster beauty” and Welch as Dave Wain.

By the mid-1960s, Ms. Kandel was a key figure in the burgeoning hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury. Her book of poetry “The Love Book,” published in 1966, was deemed pornographic and the famed Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street where it was sold was raided by the police. Copies were confiscated on the grounds that their display and sale “excited lewd thoughts” and the store’s owners were arrested.

” ‘The Love Book’ was extremely graphic sexually,” said Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and Beat generation chronicler. “She showed this openness to sexuality, this freedom of lifestyle. With ‘The Love Book,’ she became a cause celebre. But Lenore was a true lyric poet. Her language was as beautiful as anything being written.”

Ms. Kandel wrote another book of poetry, “Word Alchemy,” published in 1967. The same year, she was the only woman to speak onstage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park.

“She went from the Beat community to the Diggers, to being a major player at the Human Be-In,” said the poet and Beat documentarian who goes by the name of Kush. “She was a very deep poet, and she was committed to radical values and transforming culture.”

Longtime friend Vicki Pollack, also a member of the Diggers, met Kandel in 1968.

“I saw her read from ‘Word Alchemy,’ which is her most beautiful work,” Pollack said. “It changed the way I saw poetry. She became for me a rock star.”

In recent years, Ms. Kandel – who had suffered grievous spinal injuries in a motorcycle crash aboard Fritsch’s Harley – was confined to her small apartment on Folsom Street. She continued to write, her friends say, and to find joy in everyday encounters.

“She was in a lot of pain because of her back,” said Pollack. “But she got enjoyment out of anything and everything. Lenore had what I call the gift of happiness.”

A private memorial service is being planned.

Today, Philly, 5:30pm, FREE: “Gold, Elixirs and Books of Secrets: A Brief History of Alchemy”

Jay Babcock — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:57:10 +0000

From the website:

Basil Valentine, Practica cum duodecim clavibus in Musaeum hermeticum reformatum et amplificatum (Frankfurt, 1678)

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Gold, Elixirs and Books of Secrets: A Brief History of Alchemy
An Illustrated Presentation By Dr. Anke Timmermann

Lecture at 5:30 PM in the Institute’s historic lecture hall
Museum open from 4:00 – 7:00 PM

Wagner Free Institute of Science
1700 West Montgomery Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19121
Telephone: 215-763-6529

Alchemy, the ancient art of transforming matter, fueled the imagination of scholars, doctors and nobleman for hundreds of years. They believed that a truly worthy alchemist could produce the philosopher’s stone, a legendary substance that would make him wealthy, wise and near immortal. The experiments, books and events that paved the paths of alchemists throughout the ages not only make good stories, but also document a part of early science that is often misunderstood.

This talk will decipher the story of alchemy from its ancient beginnings through its medieval heyday to its eventual demise in the shadow of modern chemistry. Showing some beautiful and symbolic images from rare books, Anke Timmermann will explain how alchemists thought and worked, and why even they often had trouble figuring out what it all means.

Dr. Anke Timmermann is a historian of alchemy and the current Associate Director of the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the history of alchemy and medicine in medieval and early modern Europe. This program is part of the Year of Science.

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka, Chapter 8: “Lagerstätte”

Jay Babcock — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:34:39 +0000

That’s the problem with symbolic gestures; people never take them far enough. They don’t see them as a system. They blow up something right in front of them, like the bathroom of the New Land Trust Building, then caper around like monkeys. They might as well throw bananas at it…

Download:

ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 9 of ZAZEN will be posted Monday, November 9. There are 30 chapters in all.

Sat Nov 7, Brooklyn: HERMITAGE BEACON re-opens

Jay Babcock — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:26:33 +0000

Previously on Arthurmag: The well-curated store No. 1: Hermitage Beacon of Brooklyn

Opening Reception: Saturday November 7, 6-9 pm

Please join Hermitage in celebrating the opening of its new home this saturday between the hours of 6-9.

Come look at books, talk amongst each other, and view a surprise film that will be screened at some point in the evening.

35 Meadow Street Suite 307
Brooklyn NY 11206
347-422-0395
http://www.hermitagebeacon.com

Directions:

-By subway, take the L train to the Grand St. stop (4th stop into Brooklyn).
-You will exit the station at the intersection of Grand St & Bushwick Ave.
-Head down Grand St. in the direction of the large school on the corner,
this is away from the business district.
-Walk 3 minutes and take the first right on Waterbury St.
-Walk 3 short blocks and take a left on Meadow St.
-Hermitage is located at the end of the first block in the building on the corner
of the left hand side of the street.
-Enter the building and go to the 3rd floor where you will easily find your way.

NOW HAPPENING: Arthur welcomes THE EMERALD TRIANGLE TOUR 2009—a musical celebration of California’s cannabis harvest season

Jay Babcock — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:31:27 +0000

UPDATES:
1. Neal Casal (Ryan Adams and the Cardinals) playing bass and singing harmonies…
2. Jennifer Maerz of SFWeekly reviews the SF gig: “[M]inds were melted, new musical ground covered, and a special sort of concert was cultivated, one that merged the thrill of surprise with the sure bet of solid songwriting chops.”

Show Dates
Sun Nov. 1: Santa Barbara, CA — Soho
Mon Nov. 2: San Francisco, CA — The Independent
Wed Nov 4: Nevada City, CA — The Nevada Theatre
Fri Nov 6: Sonoma, CA — Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) fundraiser
Sat Nov 7: Caspar, CA — Caspar Inn

Press release from Farmer Dave:

(((( News Flassssshhhhh )))))

There’s a musical expedition heading to Northern California the first week of November:

********* The Emerald Triangle Tour 2009 *********

Starring

* Andy Cabic * Farmer Dave Scher * Johnathan Rice * Jonathan Wilson

Living in Los Angeles fairly amazed by the results of the current Green Rush, and knowing the fertile regions of Northern California between San Francisco and Oregon to be bountiful this time of year, Farmer Dave Scher decided an investigation was in order. With the idea of getting to know more about that beautiful part of the state often referred to as The Emerald Triangle, Scher reached out to his musical friends Andy Cabic and the Jo(h)nathans Rice and Wilson about going on a musical trip to check the whole thing out, make new friends, and clear the way for future traveling and playing in the great Northern part of the state…

…. So now, a reality! Please join us for The Emerald Triangle Tour 2009, in which the Gentlemen combine musical forces to groove on Nature, the bountiful harvest, neighbors, family, friends, and friends-to-be, and most importantly, lay down some good sounds up in Northern California. Please pick a town or two and join them. Shoot to the stratosphere…..the sky’s the limit!

The Players

Andy Cabic is a San Franciscan who releases acclaimed records with his group Vetiver. The most recent, “Tight Knit”, is on the Sub Pop label from Seattle.

Johnathan Rice is a California resident by way of Virginia and Scotland who plays, writes, and sings. His self-titled releases “Trouble Is Real”, and “Further North”, are on Warner Records. Mr Rice also plays and sings with Jenny Lewis.

Farmer Dave Scher is from Southern California. He plays steel guitar and organ in the group Beachwood Sparks, and released the All Night Radio record on Sub Pop. His new album “Flash Forward to the Good Times” was released by Kemado Records of New York this year…

Jonathan Wilson is a singer, writer, guitar player, guitar builder, producer, and all-around steezer. His records “Frankie Ray”, and “Gentle Spirit” can be found on Pretty and Black Records…

Musical Links
http://www.myspace.com/emeraldtriangletour
(you can also hear the individual artists on iTunes etc.)
……. or just howl at the moon on a good clear night )))))))))))))))))))
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( OWWWWWOOOOOooooooo ))))))))))))))))))

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 7

Jay Babcock — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:02:39 +0000

Everyone at Rise Up Singing knew who bombed the New Land Trust building. Mr. Tofu Scramble said it was an intergovernmental squabble. Ed, Logic’s Only Son, said it was immigrants.

“They got their own radio station with fucking tubas and everything,” he said.

Mirror said she had a friend who applied for an admin job with New Land Trust and was denied an interview for refusing to claim a gender on the application.

“She could have totally done it.”

Mitch the cook, thought it was eco-terrorists for sure. Kelly, the fill-in dishwasher agreed but then they split over whether it was an anarcho-primitivist cell or the Redwood Action Collective. That’s how the betting pool got started…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 7 — “Cherry Blossoms” (pdf, 75k)

ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 7 of ZAZEN will be posted Wednesday, November 4. There are 30 chapters in all.

DAVID BYRNE on Fela Kuti (1999)

Jay Babcock — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:06:10 +0000

This article was originally published in Mean Magazine (October 1999), which I was editing at the time, with art direction by Camille Rose Garcia. The piece was accompanied by a set of sidebar interviews and an overview of Fela’s catalog by Michael Veal [who was finishing his work on the manuscript that would be published as Fela: The Life And Times Of An African Musical Icon]. The main article text, and sidebars, were later reprinted in full in the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 book (thank you Douglas Wolk and Peter Guralnick). Main article text is online here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/11/02/fela-king-of-the-invisible-art

DAVID BYRNE
by Jay Babcock

David Byrne is a founding member of Talking Heads. When Fela was jailed by the Nigerian government in the mid-’80s, Byrne was one of the well-known American artists who worked with Amnesty International in an attempt to get Fela freed. Today, in addition to his solo career, Byrne runs the New York-based Luaka Bop record label.

Q: You first heard Fela in the ’70s, right?

David Byrne: Yeah. I don’t remember how, but I remember picking up the record…probably “Zombie” and “Expensive Shit.” And just loved em. The whole concept was different. An album that had two songs on it-each song 15 minutes long or 10 minutes long or whatever. It was like the James Brown songs that had the
two sides, part 1 and part 2, but were meant to be played together, one after the other. But in this case, they were all joined together instead of in two pieces. It was just the grooves were so great. The grooves are
intense, trance-inducing…

I’d heard some South African instrumental stuff that had fiddles, accordions, saxophones. It was pop. It had drum kits and guitars and things. That was the first African pop that I heard, but it was nowhere near as funky [as Fela]. A lot of the South African stuff has a nice swing to it but it didn’t have the kind of syncopation that I heard when I heard Fela’s stuff.

Also, I’d heard and read enough about him somewhere or other that I knew that he was a phenomenon, a unique phenomenon, in that the music he was bringing together, it sounded like it, and it truly was, he had lived in the United States for a while, he was influenced by the Black Power movement in the late ’60s, by the different strands of American music at that time, whether it was Miles Davis or Coltrane, James Brown, etc. And you could hear all that, you hear him put it together with African grooves and create something completely new out of it. But it’s obviously informed by, he’s bringing a lot of what was happening on this continent back to Africa. Just amazing! The lyrics and everything, having something to say that wasn’t just party music, that made it pretty incredible too. All these things. ‘Oh boy, here’s the Bob Marley of Africa!’

So…in Talking Heads there’s a song we did called “The Great Curve” [on the Remain in Light album], where we tried to do a Fela-type groove and then kind of take it in another direction. There are some sections that are straight Afrobeat riffs and stuff.

Q: Do you have any favorite Fela tracks?

“Zombie,” “”Expensive Shit”…the first ones you pick up make the deepest impression, cuz it’s something that you haven’t heard before. And then I just bought more of them to keep the groove going! [laughter]

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 6

Jay Babcock — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:53:20 +0000

“Riding the bus out there, I counted rings of urban renewal. Clouds burned off and new streets ticked by on my right, Car Parts Lane, Value Town Outlet Parkway, Pay Day Loan Road, Bank of Nations Plaza and Paul of Damascus Court. On my left was the long and windowless side of the box-mall-church…”

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 6 of ZAZEN will be posted Tuesday, November 3. There are 30 chapters in all.

LESTER BOWIE on Fela Kuti (1999)

Jay Babcock — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:57:37 +0000

This article was originally published in Mean Magazine (October 1999), with art direction by Camille Rose Garcia, and an overview of Fela’s catalog by Michael Veal; the main article text, and sidebars, were later reprinted in full in the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 book (thank you Douglas Wolk and Peter Guralnick). Main article text is online here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/11/02/fela-king-of-the-invisible-art

LESTER BOWIE
by Jay Babcock

Lester Bowie, who died Nov. 8, 1999 of complications from liver cancer, was one of America’s most acclaimed trumpet players and jazz composers. He is best known for his work with the adventurous avant garde troupe Art Ensemble of Chicago. Less than two months before Lester joined the great orchestra on the other side, I was privileged to visit the great lab-coated trumpeter at his Brooklyn home. As we shared half a watermelon, Lester recalled his 1977 trip to Nigeria…

Lester Bowie: I’d always wanted to go to Africa. The Art Ensemble of Chicago had been trying to get to Africa for years. So after one of our European tours, I had enough money for a one-way ticket to Nigeria and I think I had a hundred dollars. I didn’t know anybody there, no idea about anything. The hotel in Lagos where I was ended up staying at, the restaurant’s waiter found out I didn’t know anyone, and he says, “Well what you need to do is go see Fela.” And I told him I ain’t never heard of this Fela before. And he said, “Well just get in a taxi cab and say, ‘Take me to Fela.’ Everybody knows where Fela is.”

So the very next morning I get in a taxi cab and tell him to take me to Fela. The guy takes me to this Crossroads Hotel where Fela had really taken over. The cab pulled up into the courtyard and I got out. I had my horn with me and a couple of photos and records and so on, and this little guy comes up to me and said, “Well, you’re a musician?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “What instrument do you play?” I says, “Trumpet.” He says, “Well, You must be pretty heavy. What kind of music do you play?” I says, “Jazz.” He says, “You must be pretty heavy then.” I says, “Well, you know, a little bit.” He says, “Well you come to the right place.” I say, “Why is that?” He says, “Cuz we the baddest band in Africa!” [laughter]

Fela was asleep. So he took me to a room and said, ‘We’ll get Fela up.’ Fela got up and we talked for a minute. He said, “Ah Lester Bowie, you’re from the Chicago Art Ensemble.” I say, “Yeah that’s right.” And then he tells this guy to bring in a record player. And he tells this other guy, “Bring me my horn.” The record was one that just had a rhythm section, so he figured we’d play along with that. So I just blew. I didn’t know anybody in the town, I was playing my heart out there! So after I play about two [verses], Fela says, “STOP! Stop. Go get his bags. He’s moving in!” [laughter] And I stayed there I think for about six months.

I stayed as an honored guest, so I was treated with the same respect as Fela was treated with. He said, “I’ll show you how to be an African man. You want to be an African bandleader? I’ll show you what it’s about.” And he showed me what it was about! They’d bring us food. Nobody else could eat until we finished. Which I wasn’t used to, but I just played it off like, you know, ‘Cool with me too!’ [laughter] He showed me about all the wives. He had eight wives at that time. At that same time, I was believing I should have more than one wife. At the time I was getting divorced, I was between marriages. I thought the best thing for me to do was have a couple of wives. But after I stayed with Fela for that time, I saw that one was better! [laughs]

I told him, “Fela, you’ve got too many women. You don’t have time to put into practice. You want to get into jazz, it takes time, you know. You’ve got to practice. You can’t just be mediating arguments about who get the clothes or who get to drive this or do that. Fela had about 50 people around him, and he was responsible for ‘em. He was the chief, so they would come to him with ALL their problems. Anything, he’d have to solve anything. There were people comin’ in off the streets asking for money all the time. And Fela, you have to realize, there was always 10 to 15 people around him but him and I were sitting there having a private conversation like you and I are right now. He always had a court around him… He was like the village chief. He showed me what that was like and I was helpin’ him with the music. I was with Fela the whole time—I [even] used to go to court with him when they were giving him a lot of problems..

Fela’s house was burned down, they burned down the free clinic he’d established for the people. I don’t remember if he was in a cast at the time, but he was HURT.

Q: So during those six months, was he performing live?

He’d do performances in the courtyard of the hotel where we stayed. And we did mostly studio work. We were in the studio a lot at that time. A lot of the time Fela was just kinda showing me around. Fela would ask, “Lester, you feel like playing tonight?” I’d say, “Yeah.” So he’d find where a band was playing, and then he owned a bus, about 30 people would get in the bus and we’d sit in and play, you know. [chuckles] We’d get to the club, the club owner would have a big table set up for all of us. It was something else. His band, all the guys were really great, the whole band…and they really treated me well and I had a good time. We played all the time, I’d go around and hang out with all the different cats, show cats different things about the music. Rehearsing with them a lot. It was quite educational, believe me.

What did you learn?

It’s a way of learning how to adapt what you know and fit it into what’s being played at that time, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. It broadens you, anytime you play in a different set of circumstances. I’ve
tried to play in just about any kind of situation. I could play with a bus. A motorcycle. A baby crying. You’re learning how to deal with all these different sounds. It’s all about sound. You don’t play bebop licks with a
truck going down a highway, you have to have something that works. [laughter]

Fela and I just hung out. Fela was interested in music, he was a jazz fan! [laughs] He liked jazz… Like I said, he’d heard of me before. So most of the time, we talked about the music. Music and its ramifications. What it implied. What is it. What can it be used for. It’s about… Basically, I always believed art is functional. It’s not just something you put in museums, it’s better for it to be used for something functional: educational usage, therapeutic usage. But it should be USED. Music should be used, not just as entertainment. I’m not saying it’s NOT entertainment. It’s EVERYTHING. It’s entertainment, it’s religion, it’s a lot of things. That’s what most of what our conversations would be about: the spiritual aspect to the music, what binds all these different types of musics together.

That’s why we say “great Black music.” I think Black music is the only music that can be subdivided down into ten subdivisions, and each division is like world astounding-type music, you know what I mean?

What was it like being in the studio with Fela?

When Fela was in the studio, we were either learning the tunes or playing the tunes or recording the songs. He was very serious about the music, and he was serious in a way I can respect. He would do a lot of parts on the organ or keyboard or something. He would maybe write something out for his own reference, but after that he would go play it. He always created our songs in the studio. He’d do a part and show it to the horns and say, do that. He’d work em out on keyboard. I just did what he wanted me to do. If he’d suggest something, I’d suggest something, we’d just do it. But he had kind of the same work ethic as me. Like when I work, I’m going to work. If I’m gonna play, I’m gonna play. If I’m working, I’m working. If I’m making a record, I’m making a record. So we got on great.

Why did you leave?

After seven months, I was starting to get migraine headaches. Between eight wives…seeing all that entourage Fela had… the police and the soldiers… When they suggested I leave, I was ready to go! [laughs]

What happened was, word came down that people were asking, “Who was this guy from New York? We heard he’s a troublemaker. It’d be best for him to get out of town.” Which I rapidly did, because I didn’t want to end up in a Nigerian jail! And I had to bribe—this is the type of corruption going on there—I had to pay 50 bucks at the airport to a uniformed guy just to get a plane reservation!

Later on, someone gave me a tape of those same guys in the band. And those guys were still playing like me, especially the trumpet player, still playing some of my stuff! We had a good time…

I’d always try and see Fela when he came to New York [later on].

Ginger [Baker] said Fela was a truly humorous man…

Oh yeah, he was.

Always in his underwear…

In his underwear, smoking those big ol’ joints… [laughter]

BILL LASWELL on Fela Kuti (1999)

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:45:33 +0000

BILL LASWELL
by Jay Babcock

Bill Laswell is a bassist, producer and, having worked with countless important musicians from dozens of countries, one of the vortex points around which the musical universe revolves. I spoke with Laswell about his controversial work with Fela…

Q: When did you first get into Fela’s music?

Bill Laswell: When I started listening to Cream and stuff, I started to read interviews with people like Ginger [Baker] about where they were getting their stuff from. Just like [Eric] Clapton was getting ideas from blues guys, I realized that rhythm musicians were getting a lot of information from Africa. I immediately started looking for the records, especially Afrobeat. Just that syncopation, the up feel. You get ideas about putting rhythms together.

Those early bands Fela had were really tight. This African guy told me James Brown had just ‘messed him up’—well, Fela had bands that were almost like that. I don’t think as aggressively tight, but it had a feel, an Afrobeat, African feel, with a modern sound.

How did you end up producing Army Arrangement?

At that time in Paris in ‘84 or ‘85, Celluloid was the label that all African, or West African, everybody, was going to them for some reason. And they got ahold of Fela’s contract and his catalog and they just started calling the shots. Fela was on his way to New York to come and we were going to mix the record when he came.

On the way to New York, getting on the plane in Nigeria, he had something like ten grand in cash in US dollars, I think. He was immediately put in jail, the tapes arrived, and the Celluloid people were like, ‘Well great, let’s go ahead and mix it. Let’s capitalize on the fact that he’s in jail, we’ll get more press.’ But the tapes I received weren’t really musical or necessarily well-recorded. So we felt that if we just mixed it, it wouldn’t bring anything new to what Fela’s legend was. So we added Sly Dunbar, Bernie Worrell and Aiyb Dieng from Senegal.

Did you ever meet Fela?

[When he got out of jail,] Fela did a press tour in the States. He was at the Gramercy Hotel in New York. I went there and he was sitting around his room wearing a shirt and some underwear and sitting in a lotus position on the couch, a bunch of people coming in and out, and we spoke for a few minutes. He was kind of amazed that I would come because he had said that he didn’t like what I had done. There was an African magazine where I was quoted as saying, “It’s much better to mix an artist’s work if they’re in prison.” Some really stupid shit. And that freaked him out. And he was saying that there was a sound that wasn’t African that I put on the album. [But] it was a Senegalese drummer, so of course it’s African.

It’s very interesting because everybody thought I wouldn’t go meet him, so I just went in anyway. By that time he had started to deteriorate, he wasn’t as strong. You could feel he wasn’t the person he was. He just
wasn’t the presence that he was before. And it showed in the music too, because in the ’70s Fela had a really strong band and then he just got kind of more lighter and lighter. And then a lot of weird shit came into that scene… That was a heavy scene. They were around some heavy people. Cuz he was the BIGGEST thing happening in Nigeria, and there’s some heavy stuff in Nigeria—not all positive.

GINGER BAKER on Fela Kuti (1999)

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:28:12 +0000

GINGER BAKER
by Jay Babcock

Best known for his work with Cream, Ginger Baker is one of the all-time great drummers, a versatile master at ease in a number of the world’s drumming traditions. He also has a reputation as an imposing interview subject. Still, at his wife’s recommendation, I called Ginger at his South African home at 7am, interrupting his morning bath. Here’s how the conversation went.

Q: When did you meet Fela?

Ginger Baker: I knew Fela since the very early ’60s, when he was at the World College of
Music. He used to play trumpet, and come and sit in the all-night jams which I played in… 1960-61… I went to Nigeria in 1970, that’s when I saw Fela again. I [inaudible] there from 1970 to 1976…

I’m sorry, did you say you were living there during that time?

[voice rising] I lived in Nigeria from 1970 until 1976!

[pause] Uh. Okay. What can you tell me about making the record with Fela?

Absolutely nothing. [pause] That was a combination of a lot of things before it, that we made the record, and a lot of things after it. It wasn’t just a one-off thing, I mean I did a five-week tour with Fela’s band when
Tony Allen was ill.

Oh, okay—

“Oh, okay.” Yes. ISN’T THAT FUCKING AMAZING? “How extraordinary!” Fucking, man…

When did you do that?

During the period I was in Nigeria! Do you think I keep a diary and write things down?!?

No, I’m just trying to get it straight—

Between 1970 and 1975! That five-year period.

Okay…um…some people say…How much of Fela’s sound, do you think, came from James Brown, and how much of it was his own thing?

100% of it was his own thing. Completely his own thing. Absolutely nothing to do with James Brown.

Really?

Fela blew James Brown off the stage when he came to Nigeria.

Wh-what…did they—

“Whu-whu-ohmygawd-whoa-have I got a story here!” Fuck, man. You’re talking to someone who [inaud] here.

[pause] Um. When did they play together? Do you remember the circumstances? Was it a big stadium show—

I can’t remember, exactly. You’ll have to check it out. I’m sure you’ve got records you can check out.

Um…so how did [drummer] Tony Allen work with Fela?

Tony Allen tuned the band up. Virtually in charge of the whole situation.

But the arrangements for the songs were Fela’s?

That was Fela.

So you were there in Nigeria when Fela had an incredible band.

That was the best band he ever had. The very first band had a tenor player called Igo Chiko…before Fela played tenor, Igo Chiko was the tenor player, who was pretty fucking cool. He had a row with Fela and left the band and that’s when Fela took up tenor saxophone. [pause] The band with Igo Chiko was THE happening band.

And that’s the band you recorded with?

That’s the band I toured with too.

So Tony was ill and you filled in for him?

Yeah, Tony was sick.

How did that work out?

It was terrible, I got fired every night, they threw eggs and bottles at me and told me to fuck off cuz I was a white man.

Ah…

What do you think?!? No, of course it was FUCKING ALRIGHT! OTHERWISE I WOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT!

[pause] Well. I mean, had you been sitting in with the band much prior to that?

Yes I had, I used to sit in regularly with the band because people used to ask me to, especially Fela. Fela and I were very, very good friends. You know…Fela got very political. His music, instead of being humorous,
became very political and he upset the Nigerian Army, which is not a good thing to do. [long pause]

Right. I’m pretty familiar with the politics, as much as I can be from reading these books and—

No, I don’t think most people know everything that went down that led up to that event. I know more of it than most people. I mean, there were a whole load of events that lead up to it. It wasn’t suddenly… The Nigerians got very, very worried about Fela. The Kalakuta Party held a political rally in Lagos City Stadium and got 250,000 people there!

That’s the thing that’s so hard to grasp, isn’t it, how extremely popular he was, and how radical. But was it simply an anti-corruption thing for him, or was he a socialist—

No. I blame the people who were around Fela at the time. Fela himself was an incredibly humorous, wonderful fellow. Some pretty radical people got very close to Fela. I think they mis-advised him some. I really believe Fela could have become president…How good a president he would’ve been, I don’t know. I mean, how good a president would I be? [laughter] He took a couple of wrong turns, that, to me, were very un-Fela-like. It really wasn’t like Fela. It was the committee…We used to sit round a table the shape of
Africa. Called The African Table. And I was on that committee for two years.

So as Fela got more popular—

They got over-confident. Several of Fela’s people heavily provoked the military, yes. Not a very good idea in a place like Nigeria.

Bill [Laswell] told me [see sidebar interview] Nigeria was one of the most corrupt, evil places on the face of the earth…

Absolute rubbish. Absolute rubbish. When I mentioned this, when I was in Ghana, about the corruption, the reply I received was, ‘Where do you think we learnt it?’ The British government is the most corrupt government in the world. Or it used to be. I think the American government is now the most corrupt government in the world. And if you don’t think that, if you can’t see that, then there’s something wrong with you. [pause] Corruption in Africa is on a finer scale compared to the corruption in the United States
or the United Kingdom. They cover it up pretty well, they’re not quite so open about it. That is the fact.

Well…um…what about the harassment by the military, by the police?

Harassment of Fela? [chuckling] The harassment was a two-way thing.

Really? What do you mean?

Well, you know, Fela won a court case against the Nigerian police where he won a lot of money, when his house was first raided, when they came to arrest the underage girls that Fela had just married…

…And there were other times when he embarrassed the police?

Pretty much so, yeah. Some of it was very cleverly done. After the police thing, Fela got really angry about the army being on traffic duty with whips. And he brought out a record called Zombie. That was the period when things started going awry. I think I had left Nigeria by this time.

Oh. Right—

See, Fela was in the same position I am. There’s an awful lot of stories, exaggerated, done by people like you…[laughs]…tend to get things arse about face, you’ve probably got everything I’ve said arse about face…

[Nervous laugh] I’m getting it all on tape, Ginger, I don’t want to misquote you…

Yeah, but when you edit the tape, you could come up with…I’ve had it done to me so many times. Fela has, too. Really, Fela was a wonderfully nice fellow, you know, who was EXTREMELY popular. He was far more popular than James Brown in Africa by a country mile. I don’t mean ’slightly.’ Fela was an incredibly popular fellow, and his music was incredible, especially, you know, in that period of the early ’70s.

What did he have that his competitors didn’t?

He didn’t have any competitors. [laughs] There was nobody doing what Fela was doing. It was just…heh…you had to go to Fela’s club to see that. You didn’t see anybody that wasn’t moving. The whole place was jumping. He had several clubs-the Afro-Spot, the Shrine, various places. One stunt he
used to do…when the Shrine was on the opposite side of the main Lagos road, they would close the road before the gig, and cause a traffic jam for miles in both directions. [laughs] Completely block up Lagos. When Fela was ready to go to the gig he’d go across the road on a donkey, with all the girls and the band in a procession. And every time he did a gig they’d stop Lagos’ traffic from moving. Completely. The whole of Lagos. This was a couple of times a week. The shows would go for hours. Two sets a night. If I was around, they insisted that I sat in.

The favorite number everyone wanted me to play with Fela was “Gentleman.” You ever hear that? That was when Fela was at his peak! It was humorous stuff. Fela had an incredible sense of humor, and [it was when] he was doing his tongue in cheek humorous stuff was when he was really hugely popular. He then started to get too political in his music…Well, it upset a lot of the band. Cuz the band were all, they were just like musicians. They were getting scared, is what happened. A lot of those really good players, you know, gave it up eventually because it was getting very heavy. Ask Tony Allen. [laughs]

In the movie you made [Ginger Baker: In Africa], when you meet up with Fela, he just looks like the most generous, sweetest, good-humored person…when he comes out the door and is greeting you all in his underpants—

[laughing] Fela lived in his underpants. He used to get dressed to go onstage, but most of the time Fela walked around in his underpants.

It just looked like he was always in his underpants. And always smoking something.

Yeah, well, that was the whole thing of the Kalakuta Party, it was a smokers’ party, which is why the government was so anti the thing.

What did he smoke?

Marijuana. Natural Nigerian grass. NNG. You know, most people in Africa-most of the population smoke—but it’s illegal.

I’ve seen a few videos of Fela live…he’s really yelling at the band, making sharp motions—

Fela was…ah… Have you ever been to Africa?

No.

Well, you need to. [laughs]

Yeah, see, I don’t know if he was being playful, or if he was serious—

Fela could get very, very angry…All musicians get pissed off, eventually. Fela was a very nice man is what I’m trying to tell you. Very humorous fellow, just great fun to be around…

BOOTSY COLLINS on Fela Kuti (1999)

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:03:30 +0000

BOOTSY COLLINS
by Jay Babcock

Bootsy Collins is one of the greatest bassists of all time: a member of the baddest version of the JB’s, a funk-force with the Parliament-Funkadelic empire in the ’70s and leader of his own impossibly stanky group, Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Currently at work at his home studio (which he jokingly calls “the Bootzvilla Rehab”) on multiple projects—including a new Rubber Band album, a new Funkadelic album and a reunion with all of the surviving members of the original JB’s—Bootsy took a few minutes to speak with me about the JB’s’ famous visit to Nigeria in 1970…

Bootsy Collins: Everybody was talkin’ about Fela when we got there, and about how he was like the African James Brown. And everybody was tellin’ us he was THE man. So after we did one gig in Lagos, Nigeria we all just went over. Me, Bobby Byrd, Vicki Anderson, Jabo..

Q: What was getting to the club like?

Oh man, that was wild! Cuz you know their police force was the army. They were serious. You know, everybody treated us really good from the day we stepped off the plane. But this army, they didn’t take nothin’. I mean, they didn’t care who you were. It was like everybody was scum of the earth, man. [laughs] So we were on the way, and the Army just stopped us out of the clear blue and then they started asking who were we, and where were we goin’. And of course we were dirty, you know? We’d just played and we was
out havin’ a little fun. So we had a few dirty thangs on us. And it was like, ‘Well what do you have in the boot? What’s in the boot?’ And what I had just done, I had just put my dirt in my sock. And I thought the guy was talkin’ about you know what’s in my boot, like what’s in my shoe. [laughter] I was through, man! I thought I was gonna be gone forever. But luckily Vicki Anderson figured it out, that he was talking about the trunk. Cuz I had my dirt and everybody else’s dirt in my boot, man! [laughs] So they didn’t check nothing but the trunk, then they let us through.

We went on to the club and as we was pulling up, I’d say about a mile and a half, two miles before you got to the club, you could hear these drums, you could hear this rhythm goin’ on. And as we were approaching, you just moved, you just started movin’. We didn’t even see nobody yet, we just heard the music, because the club that he had was roofless. And when you start gettin’ in the area, you just start vibin’, cuz I mean, those drums and the music that they had goin’ on…! And the things that you’re told about Africa—we had no idea that they had electric guitars, you know.

You though they’d be playing folk music…

Yeah, we had no idea! And we pulled up and all this was goin’ on, man. They came and got us and we went to a room. This was when…Fela, he hadn’t went on yet. He was still in the dressing room. And man, we walked in the room and the smoke knocked us down! [laughter] They was handing these cigars around that was like… We was in heaven! So we vibed with him, we talked, and we went out to see the show. He came out and did his thing, man, and we had never seen NOTHIN’ like that, or FELT anything like that, you know. It was AMAZING, and I guess by going there and seeing that, I kind of absorbed whatever I was hearing and whatever I was seeing. I just brought it back with me, and it became a part of me.

Now when you guys went to the club, James didn’t go, right?

No. We tried to get him to go but he…you know, he’s always into his thang, you know. And he probably didn’t want to see somebody, you know, other than him on the stage. [laughter] But you know, that’s the way he is.

Did you all go there more than one night?

It had to be two or three nights. Because we played there. It had to be two or three nights that we played right there in Lagos, the capitol. Everybody loved us. It’s the James Brown show, everybody was there. We played in a stadium. It was amazing, man. Uh-maze-ing.

So you’d finish playing at the stadium and go over to Fela’s—

Oh yeah. We had to go, man. And we developed a real good relationship, man. It was like…the way he spoke, we understood what he said and he understood what we said. It was more of a vibe goin’ on. And man, when these cats hit the stage and when the drums started, I mean…whatever you was doin’, you just stopped doin’ that and your body just start movin’! [laughter] See, at that particular time in my life, I was so AMAZED, period. I mean, about EVERYTHING.

You were young—

Yeah! I was over in Africa when I was 17 years old—

…you’re 17, you’re touring Africa with the greatest band in the world, and you’re going to a club and seeing another one of the greatest bands in the world—

Well actually I thought THEY were the greatest, period. Even before I got into James Brown’s band, the James Brown band was number one to me. But once I got there and saw Fela and them, then I had second thoughts about it. I mean, seriously. The James Brown band reminded me of that same non-stop groove, you know: you gotta move. And then when I heard these cats, it was like another dimension of that. A dimension that I had never experienced before. And it had a deeper feel to me. I couldn’t explain it, you know, but it was something I had been involved with but not as deep. When I heard them, that was the deepest level you could get. That’s the only way I can explain that. Not that I’m doggin’ myself along with the rest of the guys, but that’s the way I felt. When I heard that, it was like, ‘Man, this is IT. We gotta try to be like this!’ [laughs] And I knew we couldn’t! We had to be what we were, but at the same time, that was some helluva inspiration. When I got with Parliament and Funkadelic, if you listen to ‘Stretchin’ Out,’ that was me playin’ drums. And that was my version of what I had picked up. [laughter]

Wow. Thanks for taking the time to reminisce with us…

It digs up some great memories, man. And a lot of times if you don’t talk about that stuff, it’s there, but you don’t really experience it again. And it’s a good feeling, man, just to rap. That sparked a whole ‘nother…Now I gotta go back downstairs and make sure I can do that beat again! [laughter]

TONY ALLEN on Fela Kuti, Afrobeat, solo career, more (1999)

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:40:09 +0000

TONY ALLEN
by Jay Babcock

Tony Allen is the original funky drummer. As a member of Fela’s ’60s highlife group Koola Lobitos, Allen, Tony traveled with Fela to the U.S., where Fela developed Afrobeat. Allen’s complex, seemingly eight-armed and eight-legged drum parts—an encyclopedia of inventive groove spread over dozens of albums—were the only parts of Fela songs not composed by Fela himself. Allen released an incredible series of solo albums in the late-70s and early ’80s, three of which featured Fela and the Afrika 70.

Allen left Fela’s band in the early ’80s; his first post-Fela album, the beyond-essential No Discrimination, featured on its title track this pivotal, sensible lyric of goodwill and good humor: “Black or white, we are all from the same universe/…We have plenty of things to do with each other.”

With the help of French label Comet Records, I spoke transatlantically with Tony from his home in Paris on the eve of the American release of his extraordinary, don’t-call-it-a-comeback late-nite dance-funk album, Black Voices.

Q: Everybody’s interested in Afrobeat again. How come?

Tony Allen: Well…I’m wondering too myself, you know. Wondering. What is going on. These are things, I’ve done them for years, back a long time ago. I never changed my style, y’know, just kept on playing Afrobeat all the time. So maybe they just decide to start listening to it now. I don’t know…

It’s good to hear a live drummer again on the dance floor.

[laughs] Yeah. On the dance floor, yeah. You know, I like play dance music all the time. I love playing dance music. I play other things, but when it comes to me, myself… I don’t have big band really, ‘know? I already tried big band before [in Europe], but it never worked before because this place is not like Africa, where you have cheap labor and those other things, you know. So this time around, I’m playing with…it ranges from…it depends on the project. From quartet to quintet, sextet. But sometimes me myself, I just play with deejays. I choose the records and then we play like that. I just know how to play music. I’ve created something, the way of my playing. I would want people to copy it. That would give me more good feeling, pleasure.

That’s not so easy. Your stuff is so complex—

I play like four drummers, normally. [laughter]

Bootsy Collins was telling me about when the JB’s visited Fela’s club and saw you all perform.

The musicians were always with us every night when they finish their gig. They end up in our own club. They really had a good time there. But not James Brown himself. He never moved his ass to the club.

Ginger [Baker] said [see sidebar interview] Fela’s musicians grew tired of the harassment by the government that was the result of Fela’s provocative music and political stands. Was that why you left the group?

For me, a little bit of that. I was tired of that. I just wanted to play music and not have anybody harass me just for doing nothing, you know. That was a few times. But it had to stop because I could not stand the bullshit. I just take care. I just want to play my music. And when it was getting too tough, I just relaxed. It’s useless, for one month, we are fighting about 20 people at a time. It’s useless. And it’s not 20 people talking about, it’s a whole government. You know how many people make up the government there. Cannot fight them.

Even when Fela was at his most powerful, he still couldn’t…

[That was] the main reason why they didn’t shoot. Be careful, you know. They want to make sure that not anything goes wrong because they afraid of the weapon this guy has: the music, and he has a microphone, and he has a record. He was getting too much for them…

Did you see Fela after you left the band?

Oh yeah, yeah. We stayed friends, although there sometimes there was something like misunderstandings between the journalists and me and he, kind of like, misquotations sometimes come from the journalist. We just kept on going like that, everything. Then when I am in Nigeria, I go to his house, I go to his Shrine, sit down, say, ‘It’s a nice day.’ And when he is here in Europe, he always called me, ‘I’m at the hotel.’ The last
time I saw him, the last concert was in ‘92, I was sit in with him.

FELA: KING OF THE INVISIBLE ART

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:16:46 +0000

FELA: King of the Invisible Art
by Jay Babcock

Fela Anikulapo Kuti: 77 albums, 27 wives, over 200 court appearances. Harassed, beaten, tortured, jailed. Twice-born father of Afrobeat. Spiritualist. Pan-Africanist. Commune king. Composer, saxophonist, keyboardist, dancer. Would-be candidate for the Nigerian presidency. There will never be another like him. This is the sensational story of Fela, the greatest pop musician of the 20th century, featuring the words of Fela’s friends, fans and the Ebami Eda himself.

“What can I say? I wasn’t Hildegart!”
Fela always knew the power of a name.

If you are African—and especially if you work with music, which shares a link of common invisibility with the spirit world—you must have a spiritually meaningful, beneficial name. Without the correct name, Fela explained, “a child can’t really enter the world of the living.”

He didn’t like the name he was given when he was first born, in 1935: his Nigerian parents had followed a local German missionary’s suggestion. So Fela died and was born a second time, on October 15, 1938; this time his parents called him Fela.

“Bear the name of conquerors?” he asked Carlos Moore, author of Fela: This Bitch of a Life, in 1981. “Or reject this first arrival in the world? The orishas [spirits] they heard me. And they spared me. What can I say? I wasn’t Hildegart! It wasn’t for white man to give me name. So it’s because of a name that I’ve already known death.”

In 1975, at the height of his popularity and power, Fela changed his middle name. “I got rid of ‘Ransome.’ Why was my name ‘Ransome’ in the first place? Me, do I look like Englishman?” Fela’s full name was now Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, which meant in whole, ‘He who emanates greatness, who has control over death and who cannot be killed by man.’

That same year Fela also started to cheekily call himself Black President, eventually releasing an album bearing the same title in the midst of a thwarted campaign. And sometime in 1986, following his release from Nigerian prison after serving 20 months on trumped-up charges, Fela began to call himself the Ebami Eda, which translates roughly as “the weird one,” or more delicately, as “the one touched by divine hand.”

Fela was touched, alright. But he was not only a visionary musician who created a whole new style of music—Afrobeat—and left behind an incomparable body of recorded music. No. Fela also simultaneously spoke truth to power, and then recorded it as a 12-minute dance-funk song, with a title like “Government Chicken Boy” or “Coffin for Head of State.” He endured brutal physical punishment and constant imprisonment. In the end, he died from complications associated with the AIDS virus. His heart was broken: he had sung so much, fought so hard, amassed such popularity, and still, hardly anything changed for the better in his beloved, heart-shaped continent of Africa. So: following is the story of that big generous, humorous, creative, divine heart that Fela had: from its early heartbeats, to Afrobeat, to the beatings it took, to its final, slow heartbreak.

“Disobedience was our ‘law.’”
Fela was born into a family of discipline and disobedience—two qualities he would absorb and exploit later in his life. His father was the strict Rev. Canon Israel Oludoton Ransome-Kuti, an ordained minister, grammar school principal and first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. Fela’s mother Funmilayo, beside being the first known female car driver in Nigeria, was a leader in the country’s nascent socialist-nationalist and suffragette campaigns: she even traveled to Russia and China, where she met Mao.

“My mother was quite heavy politically,” remembered Fela. “And ohhhhhhh, I liked the way she took on those old politicians, all those dishonest rogues.”

As a teen, Fela was already playing the role of witty rebel against authority that he would later refine and perfect. “In school I formed a club when I was sixteen, the Planless Society,” he said. “The rule of the club was simple: we had no plans. You could be called upon to disobey orders at any time. Disobedience was our ‘law.’”

Like many children of the Nigerian middle class, Fela was sent to London to study at university. But Fela, now a trumpet player, wasn’t interested in the professional careers in medicine and law that such students (like Fela’s brothers) usually pursue; instead, in 1958, three years after his father’s death, he enrolled at the London Trinity College of Music.

Fela was joined in London by his childhood friend J.K. Braimah, who jokingly told Moore, “Fela was a nice guy, a really beautiful guy. But as square as they come! Whenever we would go to parties he would fill up on cider first. Then he would start challenging the others to dance. He didn’t smoke cigarettes, let alone grass. He was afraid to fuck! We had to take his prick by hand, hold it and put it in the cunt for him. I swear!”

Fela eventually met (and married, in 1961) his first wife Remi there in London. With some West Indian and Nigerian friends, he started a jazz band called Koola Lobitos, but had trouble finding gigs. Fela sat in at jazz gigs around town; one of the musicians in the scene at the time that he hooked up with was drummer Ginger Baker [see sidebar interview], who would be one of Fela’s life-long friends. Meanwhile, Fela and Remi had their first two children—daughter Yeni in ‘61 and son Femi in ‘62—and Fela graduated from Trinity with certificates in practice and theory.

Fela and his family returned to Nigeria in 1963, where Fela took an unfulfilling job as a music producer with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, which he eventually quit. He had already formed a new Koola Lobitos band, but was finding it difficult to gain momentum in Nigeria’s economically depressed nightclub scene. A 1967 tour of neighboring Ghana, where the “highlife” style of music was booming, greatly impressed Fela.

“The whole country was swinging so much that I said to myself that this is the right place to come and play,” he told Mabinuori Kayode Idowu in his 1986 book, Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit.

But before long, Ghana’s Pan-Africanist president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup. The Nigerian government was engaged in a bloody, ridiculous civil war with Biafran secessionists. And mid-’60s James Brown-style Soul music, especially the version played by Ghanaian Geraldo Pino, was gaining favor in both countries. Fela was getting pushed out.

“Everybody was playing soul, man, trying to copy Pino,” he told Moore. “That’s why I said to myself, ‘I have to be very original and clear myself from shit.’”

So in 1969, when Fela was given an offer to tour America with his band, he took it.

“No gigs! No bread! No visa, no work permit! No shit! Nothing!”
The band was wowed by New York City.

“I said to myself: ‘Look those motherfucking tall buildings! Africans ain’t shit! Just savages, man!’ Oh I was so impressed by America! So blind, man!” Fela recalled. “Today I’d say ‘Skyscrapers go up that high? To scrape what? Jo, make ‘em scrape dirty streets of Harlem!’”

In a weird coincidence, Fela had met famous South African singer Miriam Makeba on the plane en route to the U.S.; she gave him the name and address of her agent in New York. But the agent refused to represent an unknown like Fela. Previous logistical arrangements began to fall through.

Fela: “Nigeria was now three months behind us. And we weren’t IN the America we’d dreamt of. No, man. We were IN trouble! No gigs! No bread! No shit! Nothing! And our visas finish-o! I said, ‘Now we’re illegal immigrant motherfuckers! No visa, no work permit… Stalemate!’ Terrible times, man.”

The band ended up driving all the way across the country in search of gigs, finally bottoming out in Los Angeles in August, 1969 without a permanent residence.

“It was kind of difficult at first but ended up okay,” Fela’s drummer Tony Allen told me about life in L.A. [see sidebar interview for more.] “We got some friends that offered us places. There was one guy, he gave us a whole house, without heater! No hot water! One day the Gas Company man, just passing by, saw us. We say, ‘Our problem is we don’t have hot water or heater.’ He came in, and he saw that in the chamber outside, the control was broken. Dead long time ago! So he just went into his car and took a brand new one, bring it up, took off the old one there, fixed it up and opened the gas for us.”

Some band members took factory jobs while Fela tried to hustle up live gigs and a recording contract. A local musician and drum maker named Juno Lewis saw Fela’s group perform and heard that they were to play at an NAACP function at the Ambassador Hotel.

It was at this gig that Fela’s life changed.

“She blew my mind, really.”
Sandra Smith was a young Los Angeles anthropology student radical who had recently joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and was interested in all things African: history, contemporary politics, dance and music. On her friend (and troupemate) Juno’s tip, she went to see Fela’s band play at the Ambassador in August, 1969.

“I walked into the Hotel’s Ballroom, wearing this blue bellbottomed jumpsuit and I just happened to look up onstage,” Sandra told me. “And Fela was looking down. It was like a simultaneous connection, a BEAM that connected just the two of us. And I felt some energy like I had never felt before. At the intermission, Juno said somebody wanted to see me at the bar. And there was Fela.”

The two quickly became lovers, with Fela moving in with Sandra at her parents’ house. Sandra: “As we spent time together, I got to know the musicians, I got all involved in their business. They needed help, and I just got involved.”

The band got a regular gig playing at Citadel de Haiti, a struggling nightclub run by Bernie Hamilton (who would later feature in the Starsky & Hutch TV series) in a red brick building at 6666 Sunset Blvd.

“We played there for about five months, six nights in a week,” remembers Tony Allen. “Bernie gave us a house and we played in his club. It was grooving, you know.”

“Anyone that was anybody—Jim Brown, Melvin Van Peebles, H.B. Barnham, Esther Phillips—came to see Fela,” says Sandra. “It was all word of mouth.”

Sandra was singing onstage with the band, who were playing a mixture of Fela’s jazz compositions and his unique arrangements of contemporary soul favorites like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” On his nights off from the Citadel, Fela would sit in around town at jazz gigs, or play private parties—including one where a drunk Frank Sinatra got in a heated exchange with Fela.

Meanwhile, Fela was busy writing and arranging music on a piano in the living room at Sandra’s house. The band would rehearse using acoustic equipment in Sandra’s backyard. Despite hardships—like Sandra having to take an extra job to buy a new trumpet for Fela when his was stolen—the arrangement was a good one, and allowed Fela to begin developing a new kind of music.

“He’d play at the club, we’d party, and then he’d come home,” remembers Sandra. “Until 3 o’clock in the morning, we were up, we’re talking. I remember him telling me how Africans are so stupid. Huh! I had never gone to Africa, but then I was coming into the knowledge of Self, and I believed that Africa had queens and kings and everything. I was intense. Then I started introducing him to things. I guess he was quiet and listening to me, but I thought I was learning from him.”

Fela started reading the books that Sandra was enthused about: history books, Eldridge Cleaver, and what would become his favorite, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“Sandra gave me the education I wanted to know,” Fela told Moore. “She talked to me about politics, history, about Africa. She taught me what she knew and what she knew was enough for me to start on. She’s beautiful. Nothing about my life is complete without her.”

Sandra: “At that time, James Brown had ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ Fela was singing in Yoruba, you couldn’t understand anything he was saying, but the music was getting better and better. He was getting deeper into his African roots. African music is about the chanting. Fela had all these rhythms and all these arrangements, and it was getting so dynamic! But when I asked him what he was saying, he said he was talking about what he likes in his soup! And I was saying, ‘No. You need to sing some conscious lyrics. You can pass a message on in the music.’”

Fela took Sandra’s words to heart and began composing his first conscious music: songs like “My Lady’s Frustration” and “Black Man’s Pride.”

Afrobeat had been born—in America.

“We Got Real Funky Then”
Fela and his band were ratted out by somebody in L.A. Their visas had expired, and they headed back to Nigeria.

“We got real funky then,” remembers Tony Allen.

Fela changed the band’s name to the Nigeria 70. He wrote his first hit record, the humorous “J’eun Koku” ["glutton"]. He bookended his performances and public appearances with the Black Power clenched-fist salute he had learned in America. He started holding “Sunday Afternoon Jump” dance concerts at a venue modeled after similar shows he had seen years ago in Ghana. The club itself—two stories, no roof, packed with dancers, trays of very cheap “Nigerian Natural Grass” aka NNG (marijuana) everywhere—was now called the Afro-Spot. It quickly became the place to see the happening band. In 1970, even James Brown’s band came to the Afro-Spot, visiting each night after they finished one of their series of gigs downtown [see Bootsy Collins sidebar]. Singer Vickie Anderson wanted to know who had written the brilliant arrangement of “…Phoenix” that she heard at the club (it was Fela); Tony Allen claimed that Brown’s people sat by his kit each night, attempting to chart his drum patterns.

With Remi and the children now settled in their own house, Fela went about creating what was essentially a hippie commune—with an African twist.

Fela: “I’d think to myself, ‘Ah-Ah! What is this city shit-o? One man, one wife, one house isolated from everybody else in the neighborhood? Is an African not even to know his neighbors? So why all this individualism shit? This ‘mine.’ This ‘yours.’ That ‘theirs.’ What’s that shit? Is it African? That’s how the idea of setting up a communal compound—one like Africans had been living in for thousands of years—came about.”

So Fela moved into a large house at 14-A Agege Motor Road in the Surulere district of Lagos, bringing with him his band’s female singers, roadies and anyone else involved with his organization. “It was only two floors and there were 100 people, but we were happy,” Fela said. “It was beautiful, no problems.”

The singers—who also danced onstage—were Fela’s lovers. He now carried himself as a traditional African village king, or tribal chief, and his women were his “queens”…but they were more than that. He also called them his witches.

Sandra visited Fela in Nigeria during that year. “I had a great time, being with Fela. But at the same time, there was a lot of jealousy and animosity towards me by his wives.”

Sandra was poisoned by one of the girls, becoming so ill that she had to take refuge at Fela’s eldest brother’s house; Koye was a doctor and he and his wife looked after her. But even far from Fela’s jealous wives, she was attacked.

“I had a dream that this ghastly-looking thing was hovering over my bed, clawing me with lots of hatred and anger,” she remembers. “And I thought it was just a dream, until I saw my body the next morning, covered with claw marks. Koye’s wife was a witness to it. That’s when I knew African witchcraft was REAL.”

Sandra returned to the U.S. soon after.

“He Just Wanted to Get Higher!”
In the next three years, Fela’s music exploded in vision, quantity (an incredible six to eight albums a year) and popularity. He changed his club’s name to the Shrine, saying that he wanted it to be “some place meaningful, of progressive, mindful background with roots. I didn’t believe playing any more in nightclubs.” He told England’s The Independent, “We smoke in the Shrine, all the time. The shrine is not a club, man. It’s a place where we dance, we get high, we play drums to evoke the spirit. The power of the Shrine is very strong—the spiritual power…this is why we can smoke dope with impunity.”

Fela had become a marijuana smoker of epic proportions. Besides smoking giant joints filled with igbo (Indian hemp), Fela had now developed his own marijuana recipe, which he called goro.

“He cooked a bag of grass about [two feet long], which cost just two pennies for like two weeks, soaking it with spices, honey and oils. Cooked it right, right, right down til it was THICK,” says Fela’s son Femi. “Very thick! All that came out was about [an amount that would fit in a small coffee cup]. You’re only allowed to take about a spoon, and then, in maybe two or three hours, you are just so high, it’s unbelievable. It lasts the whole day, two days, three days. Fela trained a couple of people to cook it, and for six years, man, I was the only one who had authorization (except for him), to serve it round the house, to give it to anybody who
wants it.

“He just wanted to get higher!” laughs Femi. “He even did cocaine for a while, a month or so, but he said it stopped his sexual desires so he didn’t like that. So he made goro. When they were traveling, he always made sure the embassy gave him a note, saying the goro was medicine. Which it was. He said that was the main reason he took it: it helped his sexual desire and his creativity.”

Fela’s commune was beginning to attract all sorts of folk, from street hooligans and runaways to the nation’s political underground. According to writer Bayo Martins, “A radical left wing organization known as the Nigerian Association of Patriotic Writers and Artistes formed a think tank around Fela for the ideological development of Pan-Africanism with his Afrobeat Music, organize mass rallies and publicity strategy which made sure Fela was constantly in the news. It worked. In no time Fela had become a national household word in Nigeria. Contracts for international concerts were starting to flow in.”

Fela’s confidence knew no bounds. He would ride a donkey across the street from his compound to the Shrine before each night’s performance, stopping traffic up for miles. He purchased his own printing press and started publishing fearlessly inflammatory broadsides against the dictatorship in the name of his new youth organization, the Young African Pioneers.

Fela’s neighborhood became a hotbed of anti-government activity. Finally, the military could take no more.

How to Make Hit Records, Fela-Style
On April 30, 1974, the commune was raided and Fela was arrested for possession of marijuana. Released on bail, he returned to his compound and re-named it “Kalakuta Republic” (”Kalakuta” being the name of the prison cell he had occupied for two weeks), erected a ten-foot barbed wire fence, declared that the Republic was its own nation wholly independent of Nigeria, and recorded a hit album (Alagbon Close) that chronicled the arrest.

The police raided the house once again, this time attempting to plant weed on Fela. He asked to look at the evidence—and ate it, right in front of the surprised officers. Once again, Fela was hauled off to jail, where the prosecutors demanded that he produce feces containing the marijuana. Fela wouldn’t. He was set three days in Timbuktu, a floating cell anchored in the Lagos Lagoon behind the prison. Eventually he defecated the weed in secret, and provided “clean” shit to the authorities, who rushed it to the lab for analysis. The results were negative. Fela was released, and immediately wrote another hit album—entitled Expensive Shit—detailing his experiences.

At this point the Nigerian Establishment was so upset with Fela’s continuing attacks on their corruption—and his lampoons of their efforts to stop him—that he was safe nowhere, not even in other countries. Out on bail, Fela embarked on an international tour, only to be cut short in Cameroon when Nigerian police came across the border and arrested three of his Queens for not reporting to their parole officers in Lagos.

Then, on November 23, 1974, Kalakuta was raided for a third time in one year. This time the police weren’t interested in arresting people so much as physically punishing them. Everyone in the compound was beaten; Fela himself ended up spending nine days in the hospital, being treated for a broken arm and receiving eleven stitches. Of course he wrote a song about the whole affair; and of course “Kalakuta Show” was another hit.

“Fela went through the entire gamut of our criminal system, from unlawful assembly to sedition to incitement to the highest of offenses,” one of Fela’s attorneys recalled in the 1999 TV documentary, Femi Kuti: The New King of Afrobeat. “So virtually all the time Fela’s cases were politically motivated and therefore there was no cause to consider withdrawing from defending him. We always believed that Fela would come out of jail stronger, and that was what happened.”

The Sacking of Kalakuta
By 1977, Fela’s every move was an embarrassment and affront to Nigeria’s corrupt ruling class and military government. His hit records named names in both the songs’ ridiculing lyrics and triple-vibrant, meticulously detailed sleeve artwork. He gave sensational press interviews. He declared Kalakuta an independent state. He claimed that he would be voted President of Nigeria if fair elections were held. It was all too much, and another government attack was inevitable.

So Fela installed a 65-kilowatt generator to electrify Kalakuta’s fence. “You see the type of shit I was forced to do then?” he said. “Just to protect myself and my people, not from robbers, but from the authorities!”

The government invited Fela to participate in an image-conscious music and arts festival called FESTAC 77—but he refused. “One big hustle! A rip-off!” he retorted. Instead, Fela played concerts each night in his shrine; in attendance each night were many international artists and journalists (including most famously, Stevie Wonder) who came to see the most popular African musician of all strut his stuff. Fela took full advantage of the situation, condemning the government generally and in particular its “Operation Ease the Traffic” program, which involved soldiers whipping drivers during the “go-slow” (rush hour traffic jams). The authorities were infuriated by Fela’s actions, and after FESTAC concluded, the military took direct action.

On February 18, 1977 about 1000 soldiers surrounded Kalakuta and began a 15-hour siege. There was mortar fire. The generator exploded and the house caught fire, at which point Fela and his people surrendered. Fela’s 78-year-old mother was thrown from the second-story. The Queens and other Kalakuta residents were beaten; some were raped and tortured. The compound itself was burned to the ground, as was the free clinic run by Fela’s younger brother Beko. Beko was seriously injured. Fela himself went to the hospital and was then imprisoned on typically ludicrous charges.

Although the incident received plenty of attention from the international press (including a lengthy account in The New York Times), the Nigerian government’s probe of the event concluded only that a residence at 14-A Agege Motor Road had been burned by “unknown solders.”

Out of jail, with one arm and one leg in a cast, Fela reacted to this latest injustice as he always had: by making hit records. This time it was two albums, entitled Sorrow Tears and Blood and Unknown Soldier.

“When I Do Things, I Do Things Honestly”
Homeless and penniless, Fela and his 80-person entourage lived in a hotel [see Lester Bowie sidebar interview], and then for a short while in his brother Koye’s garage. Fela was now encountering difficulties with his record company, the Nigerian branch of Decca, which had changed management hands and was now hostile to releasing Fela’s inflammatory records, no matter how popular he was. It was a plain breach of contract, and Fela wanted the money he was contractually owed if such a breach occurred. The label refused, so Fela and his people went to the Decca offices. And stayed. For seven weeks.

“The Decca offices has very big sitting room and thick carpets everywhere, so we laid our mattresses down and stayed there in comfort,” he explained.

Fela finally left for Ghana, where, by 1978, his anti-police “Zombie” had become a big hit, especially with the students. He returned to Nigeria briefly on the one-year anniversary of the assault on Kalakuta, playing a show at Ogbe Stadium in Benin City. During the festivities around the event, he married all 27 of his singers simultaneously in a traditional ceremony.

“A man goes for many women in the first place,” Fela said later, defending his polygamy. “Like in Europe, when a man is married, when the wife is sleeping, he goes out and fucks around. He should bring the women in the house, man, to live with him, and stop running around the streets!”

Later he told the Washington Post, “When I do things, I do things honestly. I didn’t sleep with any women outside my marriage.” And he revealed to the Lagos Weekend, “Me, I fuck as often and as long as I can-o!”

Fela returned to Ghana with his band, but the popularity of “Zombie“—and Fela’s habit of preaching the Pan-Africanist philosophy of Ghana’s former leader, Kwame Nkrumah—made the Ghanian authorities nervous; before long Fela was deported from Ghana for being “liable to bring about a breach of the peace.”

On April 13, 1978, Fela’s mother died, having never fully recovered from the injuries she sustained in her fall during the Army’s rampage at Kalakuta. Outraged that Olusegon Obasanjo—the ruthless military dictator
who had never apologized for the sacking of Kalakuta (and who in 1999 is Nigeria’s democratically elected leader)—was leaving office with full honors as the country transferred to supposedly democratic rule, Fela
plotted his revenge.

“I just couldn’t let him get away like that,” Fela said. “Obasanjo’s soldiers had killed my mother. That man will have to answer to that one-o!”

Fela had a life-size replica of his mother’s coffin built, which he delivered to Obasanjo’s home in the Dodan Barracks on the morning of October 1, 1979. Accompanied by his Queens, his son Femi and others, Fela
drove the bus through roadblocks towards the barracks.

Fela: “Oh, my wives, those women are courageous-o! The sentries lifted their machine guns and rifles. I told them, ‘My brothers, will you also shoot my women?’ They lowered their weapons. We arrived at gate. We
lowered coffin to ground. We turned round. And we left. At that same moment it began to rain. Heavily! Oh, that rain-o!”

“If You Can’t Be Creative, Then Split! Disappear!”
The seeming end of military rule in Nigeria in 1980 gave Fela new hope of finally being elected president. He formed a political party called M.O.P. (Movement of the People) and attempted to get listed as a candidate on the ballot.

“If I can take [Nigeria], then Africa is settled,” Fela argued. “All of Africa will be liberated. If there is only one good government—a straight and progressive, clean government that knows what it is doing. No compromises, no Marxism-Leninists, no capitalism. Africanism.”

During Nigeria’s ‘80-’81 academic session, he gave more than 60 lectures at universities; one such lecture is printed in its entirety in Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit. In his lectures, Fela related an ancient history of Africa grounded in pioneering Afrocentric Egyptologist Yosef Ben-Jochannan’s Black Man of the Nile. His critical history of colonialism was principally based on the influential thinking of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Pan-Africanism. Fela’s acerbic criticisms were relentless.

“What America has done to Africa is bad,” he said. “Bringing in arms, bringing Christianity, turning the people’s minds upside down, bringing in fertilizers, doing shit, wanting to bring western civilization here. America and England are trying to brainwash Africans.”

Fela criticized “reactionary African puppets who] go about condemning apartheid South Africa while they go about killing innocent citizens in their countries to sustain them in power.”

He preached in favor of traditional African home remedies and against the medicine of the multinationals: cow urine, for example, was a cure for convulsion, and Africans need “synthetic tablets” to cure themselves of malaria. He argued that UFOs existed; that Nigerian government leaders should consult spiritual oracles, that there were “people in this country with enough knowledge of Africa’s perfect system of government to guide us.”

Finally Fela argued against industrialization, saying “the future of this world is based on nature, not the machine. Science means complications. When science brings out a new gadget it costs more than the others. People have to earn more to buy it. So science makes people run more. What we need is to rest more, talk more, walk more, fuck more and enjoy things in life more.”

Fela told Moore, “When people say America, Russia, China are great powers, I say: ‘No!’ Oppressors, destroyers, massacrists can never be great people. Creativity, not destruction, should be the yardstick of greatness. If you cannot create anything that will make your own life, or that of your fellow human, happier, then get out of the way. Split! Disappear! And give others a chance.”

Life and Death in Paris
“After Fela’s mother died, it was a very difficult time for Fela,” remembers Sandra. “It just went all downhill from there.”

Besides his mother’s recent death, Tony Allen, who had helped Fela develop the Afrobeat sound, had left the group in 1979; Fela’s wives were slowly leaving him; and it didn’t look like the M.O.P. would succeed in getting Fela on the ballot. But what seemed most important to Fela was establishing some sort of contact with his mother.

“He knew that in the African religion that the ancestors play a very important role,” says Sandra. “They believe that once a person transcends to the other side that they’re there to help you.”

Fela had begun to solicit traditional African spiritual mediums, witch doctors and witches. “There were certain people in the house that claimed to be in communication with his mother,” says Sandra. “And he was listening to them.”

“I knew about the spiritual aspect of the African traditions, and I was getting very involved as a teenager,” remembers Femi. “And I told him, ‘Fela, this aspect of life does exist.’ But he kept going out to look for traditional powers, and I was like, he has the greatest power, spiritually speaking, from an African man’s point of view: to be able to create sound and make people think, make people cry, and to gather over 10,000 people because of his music. I was trying to make him see his spiritual power he had in his possession and he did not have to look anywhere else, but just look inward.

“One group of [witch doctors] came with a jacket, saying if Fela wore it and they shot him with a bullet he will not die. They tried it on a goat and the goat did not die. Luckily they got his brother to bring a shotgun and someone says try the jacket on the goat before you put it on. They pulled the shotgun out, put bullets in it and POW! The goat’s head just falls off. That would have been Fela’s head, man.”

In the spring of 1981, Sandra received a call from a hotel in Paris. It was a very shaken Fela, asking her to come see him immediately.

“He felt that they were trying to kill him,” she recalls. “He wasn’t specific. I just jumped on a plane. I went to Paris for three days. The scene at that hotel was unreal. He had some heavy, wicked people around
him at that point. I don’t know how he could have remained sane in such an insane environment.

“I believe that was the weekend when Fela contracted the AIDS virus [that would eventually kill him]. I felt it. This is something that I can’t explain, but it’s real.”

“I Will be President of This Country One Day. Don’t Worry!”
On his return to Nigeria from Europe, Fela had a spiritual revelation, in which he was possessed.

“I saw this whole [world] was going to change into what people call the Age of Aquarius,” he told writer Roger Steffens. “Musicians were going to be very important in the development of human society and that musicians would be presidents of different countries and artists would be the dictators of society. The mind would be freer, less complicated institutions, less complicated technologies. It was in that trance that I saw the whole human race were in Egypt under the spiritual guidance of the Gods.”

Fela immediately changed the name of his group to Egypt 80, and began to perform Yoruba rites in the middle of his performances at the Shrine at an altar decorated with images of luminaries like Malcolm X, Dr.
Kwame Nkrumah and Fela’s mother. The uncle of his old friend J.K. Braimah made spiritual incisions in the center of Fela’s head. And finally, a witch doctor named Professor Hindu arrived from Ghana, claiming he had the power to “kill and wake”—to kill a man and bring him back to life.

Fela said, “That night he performed at Shrine. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen that shit with my own eyes. ‘Kill and wake!’ He’s the man who started showing me the way to truth, to myself, to my mission and to…my mother! He revealed to me that one has to put this white spiritual powder on the face to communicate with spirits. He tells me what to do, what not to do, who my friends are and who are my enemies.”

Femi was more skeptical.

“Yes, Hindu performed a lot of magic,” he says. “And I have no answers for some of the things he did. But when he said he killed somebody, and he did not let my father’s brother [Beko] investigate properly, [almost] everybody became suspicious.”

In December 1981, Kalakuta was once again assaulted—this attack was captured on still camera by the French TV crew that happened to be there filming the documentary later released as Music Is the Weapon. Police raided the compound, plundering the buildings and teargassing and beating everyone, including pregnant women and children. Once again Fela returned from jail, beaten but defiant—and as charismatic as ever.

“I’m getting stronger,” he boasted to the film crew. “In fact I’m surprised at how quickly I’ve recovered, considering the beating I got.

“Something tells me that I am right, that I WILL be president of this country one day,” he said, cheekily. “Don’t worry!”

But once again, Fela was prevented from even running for election; instead, he became embroiled in a new host of absurd charges—this time for sabotage, murder and armed robbery—that would eventually be dismissed.

Prisoner of Conscience
Over the next few years, for various reasons, Fela’s domestic popularity began to dwindle.

In 1984, he agreed to co-produce (or mix) his next album with the American producer Bill Laswell [see sidebar interview]. But on September 4, as Fela was leaving for the U.S. to mix the album with Laswell and do a short tour, he was arrested once again. This time Fela was accused by Nigerian Customs officials of trying to smuggle Nigerian currency out of the country.

Fela was sentenced to five years in jail after a trial that was such an obvious procedural sham that Amnesty International declared Fela a Prisoner of Conscience. A “Free Fela” movement was born, with popular musicians like Stevie Wonder and David Byrne [see sidebar interview with Byrne] signing on.

On Sept. 24, 1985, the case’s judge visited Fela in jail and apologized; he said the ruling government had forced his decision and made him jail Fela. But it wasn’t until April 23, 1986—after 20 months in
jail—that Fela was released, when news of the judge’s secret prison visit finally began to circulate in the popular press, embarrassing the current government. Fela was not the same when he came out of prison.

“I can still see all the marks on his body from the bayonets of the guns and all that,” remembers Femi. “He got beaten so. His whole body was kind of broken. Head injuries, his hands. He was in real pain for a long time. When people were around, he would try to hide it. I think what saved him was the grass, at the end of the day. It helped him handle the pain. He wouldn’t have done it, normally. No human being could do that.

“There will never be another man like him. He started calling himself Ebami Eda, which means ‘the weird one,’ after he came from jail. He believed he was protected by something, by spirits, by the supernatural. Because he did not know where the music came from. It comes from somewhere else, something else that you cannot see. And music is related to that, because music is the one artform that you cannot touch, that you cannot see. You can see the instruments and you can plan in your head the music you will make, but you cannot say how it will sound.”

“Music is a spiritual thing,” Fela said in 1982. “You don’t play with music. If you play with music, you will die young. Because when the higher forces give you the gift of musicianship, it must be well-used for the good of humanity. If you use it for your own self by deceiving people or doing this, you will die young. And I have told people this many times. So, I’m gonna prove them wrong and prove myself right. I’m getting younger! I can play music for ten hours. I’m never tired…because the spiritual life of music that I’ve lead RIGHTLY is helping me now.”

“You tap into something—or, it taps into you,” says Femi. “You have some say, your creativity, in arranging it, in making it your own. But you are still a medium for something, for whatever…message…they want to put out. He was a medium for it.”

“Fela’s career continued to go, but another type of realization had come in,” says Sandra. “Fela told me there was nothing else to sing about, nothing else to talk about, because he’d said it all [and nothing had changed]. He was very sad.

“This was a man who had been very jovial-type person. He became a recluse. Fela was caught in his own world of Kalakuta. He was the king there, and he surrounded himself with a bunch of yes men.”

“He knew what he wanted in the ’70s,” says Femi. “He knew what he was up against. He knew he could die. He was ready. In the ’80s, I think he was now getting frustrated. Fela’s problems started when he went spiritual. Cuz now he wanted an answer, from traditional medicine, he was looking for African technology. For all these years he has been fighting for the African people. Why are Africans not doing anything about what he has been talking about?”

Nevertheless, Fela continued to compose and perform (if not record) some brilliant music, as well as give sensational interviews to the Lagos press.

“I Will Never Die.”
Fela told the press that recent his skin rashes were spiritual in origin—he was “changing skin,” with a new skin scheduled to appear on January 1, 1992. He claimed he was still making love three hours a day—as well as brushing his teeth for an hour and taking 45 minutes in the bath, during which he would do “a series of body-building exercises.” He dismissed as “junk” the 11 members of his band who left him during his 1991 US tour, instead emphasizing that he had a great time: “I had sex with all my girls in my band, and I got two extra American girls. Also I had a regulation that any Nigerian who wanted to see me [backstage] must give me present, and the only present I like is igbo.”

By 1993, Fela was telling the press that “Kalakuta is not an ordinary place, it is the center of the world”—that his witches (who were no longer his wives, as he had divorced all of them following his release from prison) were directing what was happening in the country.

“If they want this country to be in total confusion in the next one year, they can do it,” Fela told the Lagos Weekend. He claimed that the recent misfortunes of his longtime nemesis, ITT and Decca businessman Chief Abiola, was caused by his witches. “Abiola paralyzed because he wants to sell Nigeria to America. It can never be. Abiola himself is just beginning to get what is coming for him. This country is witch country. World is witch world. I have said it before.”

Smoking one of his 15-inch-long igbo joints, the 56-year-old Fela even claimed he was immortal: “I will never die; my ancestors have told me so.”

Fela’s Choice
But Fela’s health had begun to deteriorate. It was obvious to those close to him that something was seriously wrong. The sexually promiscuous Fela—who had refused to use condoms his entire life, on the grounds that they were synthetic, non-African and a conspiracy against black men experiencing full pleasure—had AIDS. He refused anything but traditional African folk remedies.

“I think he thought he could not catch the disease,” says Femi. “I don’t know why. But back then, nobody has really taken the disease very seriously. So many people have died from the disease in Nigeria and we don’t hear because nobody comes out to say ‘Yes, he died from AIDS.’ Everybody believes that it’s a shameful disease.”

“Fela did not have to die from AIDS,” says Sandra. “People don’t have to die from AIDS in the ’90s. That was the choice Fela made…When you start to mature, you start to question the way things are. You know, Fela talked about everything. And some people heard it, and a lot of them didn’t. It was very, very disappointing. You wonder if death is better than life. I think Fela reached the point where he probably didn’t want to live. Fela stayed and died in Nigeria, when he could have came out of Nigeria and lived a better life.”

There were, of course, final indignities. Fela was arrested again for drug possession and paraded before the TV cameras in handcuffs. Femi had to beg the authorities to release Fela on bail, arguing that although Fela had been arrested more times than any Nigerian in history, he had never jumped bail. Fela was typically defiant, saying, “It is not drugs. It is grass.”

Fela, who had stopped eating and locked himself in his room, finally acceded to his family’s wishes to visit a hospital. But it was too late.

On August 2, 1997, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died.

Epilogue
Fela’s heart had stopped, but you could still hear its beat.

The announcement in his final weeks that Fela had AIDS had done little to dampen the public affection for the man. On an early Monday morning as Fela’s body was taken by his family to an arena to lie in state, a million people—silent, crying with their fists in the air—lined the Lagos streets in an unorganized show of respect.

“For two days, people didn’t do any work in Lagos!” Femi remembers, laughing. “This is the first time in the history of Lagos that they have not had a complaint of robbery, rape or anything. Because all the robbers,
all the bad boys, they loved him, you know? Everybody was busy at the funeral!”

Today, Kalakuta still stands. The old Shrine has been demolished; Femi has plans to dedicate a new Shrine as early as February, 2000. Seun Kuti, Femi’s younger brother, continues to performs Fela’s songs with the remaining members of Egypt 80; Femi himself has his own career. Fela’s brother Beko was finally released from jail after serving 40 months on typically bogus charges. And 2000 sees the launch by MCA of an ambitious program to issue Fela’s albums (many for the first time) in the U.S.

“He saw all these things going wrong, and he felt he had to talk about it,” said Fela’s first wife Remi in a 1999 TV interview. “Fela had a mission, and people should have listened to what he was saying.

“Instead, they just said he was crazy.”

Righteousness

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:03:45 +0000

From http://blog.felaonbroadway.com/…

Fela! is now playing on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre. Info: http://felaonbroadway.com/index.php

Here’s a review of last year’s off-Broadway production of Fela! from C & D’s column in Arthur No. 31 (Sept 2008):

FELA! A New Musical
at 37 Arts in New York City
Book by Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones

D: So you went to a musical?
C: Yes, I did.
D: How did you like it? Did you laugh? Did you CRY?
C: From the first minute when the actor playing Fela sauntered by, two rows in front of me, on the way to the stage in his pink jumpsuit, led by his dancer/singer/wives, as Antibalas played the opening to “Everybody Scatter,” I was weeping openly.
D: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It is said that dancing by yourself in your living room to Fela Kuti music is the only known cure for depression.
C: If it is that good, imagine what it must be like if you dance with others to it in public! The collective righteous joy is unbelievable. This thing broke me out of my post-David Foster Wallace suicide negative power zone.
D: So it was a full-on simulation?
C: Well… It’s not simply a tribute/costume concert, it’s an extremely brilliant musical-fueled biography of the man himself. The piece is two hours, 40 minutes and is set inside Fela’s club in Lagos, the Shrine. It’s 1976, I think, and he is onstage performing, and preparing to leave Nigeria. He’s had it with the ongoing corruption and idiocy in Nigeria. The government has arrested him, the military has stormed his commune, beaten and raped his wives and thrown his mother out of a second story window, leading to her eventual death. So he’s in and out of songs and monologues, reviewing his life to that point, smoking his big marijuana joints, laughing and crying and leading this band and this dance troupe, putting on this two-tier Afrobeat performance of… It’s spellbinding, just awesome, and I gotta say… As somebody who’s watched every second of available Fela Kuti footage out there, I thought I’d understood, as best I was gonna be able to understand in 2008, the man and the music. Well, I was totally wrong.
D: Wouldn’t be the first time!
C: Quiet. It’s one thing to see the pictures, to see the video, but to actually BE there, with the whole force of the music and the costumes and the VIBE in your face, at full volume, done with such love and care and attention to detail, with so much thought put into it… I don’t really understand how they did it, especially the guy who plays Fela, this brilliant actor named Sahr Ngaujah. Who inhabits him, completely, scarily. It’s enough to make you weep.
D: Which you did.
C: I should report that there is one major inaccuracy: the size of Fela’s rolled joints of Igbo, here it’s like a cigar but really they were more like torches.
D: Like a baby’s arm?
C: More like a bodybuilder’s.
D: That’s something they can fix when it goes to Broadway.
C: All the shit Fela talked about, it’s still true. More true. Bankers, government officials, colonial-minded lackeys, cowards, fools. Vampire Weekend? If only. It’s been a Vampire Millennium. And I can’t think of an artist alive today with the balls, and the trickster humor, and the anger, and the appetite for pleasure, and the gift for performance, and the raw charisma, the undeniable conviction, that he had. Did you know how musicians and other artists are not allowed to express views of the world in America? And if they break the rule, it’s cause for alarm and outrage and Drudge-shaming and record-banning and harassment and slandering and worse from the well-funded right-wing authoritarians. Don’t be political at the Oscars! Now is not the time! Nor at the Emmys. Oprah shouldn’t endorse! And so on. Because apparently they sometimes confuse the message from the government and break the entertainment moment that the viewer was anticipating, and indeed had every right to expect, given their school training and subsequent mediated experiences. The timing of Fela! is impeccable. He couldn’t believe the public would fall for this shit that the people in power were pulling.
D: But we do.
C: Over and over again.

Notes from the Editorial Office

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:55:54 +0000

Happy monday,

Just a quick catch-up on Arthur doings.

We’ve got some new comics up on the blog, including an outta-nowhere submission from cartoonist Owen Cook remembering the great Dickie Peterson, bassist-vocalist of Blue Cheer, who R.I.P.’d on October 15. For an appreciation-in-text, have a good gander at Julian Cope’s just-posted “The Godlike Genius of Blue Cheer”, with its attendant Cheer stream. That’ll do ya.

“Weedeater” columnist Nance Klehm talks to folks who’ve been communicating with plants recently. ‘Nuff said.

Speaking of plant/human communication… Arthur proudly presents, or welcomes, or something, the Emerald Triangle Tour ‘09 band of troubadours traveling around California this week celebrating the annual marijuana harvest. Catch the four chaps—Farmer Dave Scher, Andy Cabic (Vetiver), Jonathan Wilson and Johnathan Rice—playing their own and each other’s songs this week at a roadhouse near you.

Byron Coley and Thurston Moore claim they are prepping another Bull Tongue Top Ten, after their return to the electrofold just two weeks ago. Stay on your toes, ladies and gents.

“Do the Math” columnist Dave Reeves will be back with Part IV of his controversial “Defend Brooklyn” expose after he’s done with his latest gypsy roaming. Commentability has been restored to this series of posts, against our better judgment. I guess we’re hoping against hope that somebody will post something interesting in the Comments section, which does occasionally happen—see reader J. Reed clueing us in to his newly posted Lionel Ziprin videos…

We’re posting Chapters 5-8 of Vanessa Veselka’s incendiary new novel Zazen, this week, one a day from Monday to Thursday. Because it sucks to read longer texts on the internet, we’re offering each chapter as a downloadable, fully printable PDF. Print em out, you’ve got a book.

One more thing: yeah I know it says on the FAQ that Arthur is returning as a print magazine this fall ‘09 but that ain’t happening, not with the economy the way it is. We don’t have the $$$ to start this baby up again and lose money month after month while we wait for things to “return”—especially when the ability to pay minimal bills via advertising and merch revenue may never return (not that it was ever enuff in the first place—oy vey!). But, hope springs eternal. Like, hope that people will buy ad space, or purchase a DVD or a CD or a back issue or a poster at the Arthur Store, or perhaps even tax-deductibly donate whatever they can spare. That’ll help keep Arthur in motion, on one plane or another…

Gratefully,
Jay

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 5

Jay Babcock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:33:58 +0000

“Jimmy handed me some zucchini bread and I looked around like I had been born into that moment. Like I had been somewhere else all along. I saw the glittering incongruity. I was right in the center of it. It’s simple when you’re not clenching up and I was before but didn’t know it. At some point that morning the clenching stopped… ”

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 5 — “1 800 buy COAL” (pdf, 81k)

The World’s First Fantasy Magazine – Der Orchideengarten

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 6 of ZAZEN will be posted Tuesday, November 3. There are 30 chapters in all.

Jacques Ellul: “The Treachery of Technology” (1993)

Jay Babcock — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:20:41 +0000

New music: TINARIWEN “Desert Wind” — a true instrumental

Jay Babcock — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:58:12 +0000

The (apparently) musician-less 4:20 track that closes the new Tinariwen album, Imidiwan: Companions…

Stream:

Subscribe to Arthur’s iTunes Podcast and receive music automatically: click here

A journey into “Der Ochideengarten”

Jay Babcock — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:41:10 +0000

Here’s a buncha high-res cover scans from “Der Ochideengarten,” arguably the world’s first fantasy magazine, published in Germany 1919-1921, courtesy of our friend Will Schofield at A Journey Round My Skull. Click on images to greatly enlarge.

Some background on Der Orchideengarten from Will:

Illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, the World’s First Fantasy Magazine

More images from Der Orchideengarten are up now over at John Coulthart’s feuilleton site….and Will has just added another clutch at A Journey Round My Skull! That should keep you busy.

More high-res cover scans after the jump…

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 4

Jay Babcock — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:40:59 +0000

“I looked up the number of the sports bar and called in a bomb threat. Told them they were all going to die in multiple explosions during the fourth quarter and then I went and looked through the windows to see what would happen…”

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 4 — “Asian Market” (pdf, 56k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 5 of ZAZEN will be posted Monday, November 2. There are 30 chapters in all.

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 3

Jay Babcock — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:52:52 +0000

“Up in my attic room the president came on the radio. Another special broadcast. Computers and digital cable hum in unison throughout the nation: War A is going well and no longer a threat, small and mature. Like a Bonsai. War B is in full flower. Its thin green shoots reaching across the ocean floor like fiber optic cable. Our only defense is attack…”

Download:

http://www.thehandoffatima.com

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Wal-Mart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 4 of ZAZEN will be posted Thursday, October 29. There are 30 chapters in all.

New doc, book on great critic/historian/enthusiast/musician ROBERT PALMER

Jay Babcock — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:36:33 +0000

Press release from Anthology Film Archives:

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN

THE HAND OF FATIMA (2009, 75 minutes, video)
by Augusta Palmer
November 13 – 19

Documentary double portrait of a rock critic & his favorite band
Daughter of rock critic Robert Palmer travels from Mississippi to Morocco to investigate her father’s 1971 encounter with the men William Burroughs called “the world’s only 4000 year-old rock band.”

IN PERSON OPENING NIGHT, NOV 13, FOR Q&AS AND BOOK SIGNING!:
filmmaker Augusta Palmer
Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka
and
Anthony DeCurtis, editor of Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer

Anthology is thrilled to present the US Theatrical Premiere Run of THE HAND OF FATIMA, a double portrait of a rock critic and his favorite band. Robert Palmer was America’s pre-eminent music writer, best known for his book DEEP BLUES and his work for the NEW YORK TIMES. The Master Musicians of Jajouka are a hereditary Moroccan brotherhood who play music older than history, but have also jammed with Ornette Coleman and Sonic Youth. Using Robert Palmer’s writing about the band as her guide, Palmer’s daughter Augusta set out for Morocco in 2005 hoping to find out what happened when her father first met the Master Musicians of Jajouka on assignment for ROLLING STONE in 1971.

The film intercuts verite footage of the filmmaker’s journey with animations of Robert’s experiences in the 1970s, allowing the filmmaker (and the audience) to glean the truth between the lines of Robert’s mystical journey and to understand his all-consuming need for musical transcendence. That need was more than met by the Master Musicians, who were introduced to expatriate Tangiers society by the artist Brion Gysin in the 1950s, and then popularized by Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who recorded an album in their village which became a cult favorite upon its release shortly after his death. Encounters with Yoko Ono, Donovan, Anthony DeCurtis, and the elder Palmer’s four wives round out a journey that culminates with the Master Musicians’ indelible performance in their remote Moroccan village.

This theatrical run coincides with the publication of BLUES & CHAOS: THE MUSIC WRITING OF ROBERT PALMER, a major collection edited by Anthony DeCurtis and published by Scribner.

Anthony DeCurtis, Bachir Attar, and Augusta Palmer will also co-host a benefit for The Master Musicians of Jajouka at Le Poisson Rouge on November 16: http://lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/600

Praise for the film:
“Rather than a simple ‘documentary’ or a look back down memory lane, this is film as an investigation into myth, self-creation and the complexities of personal relationships. I found it profoundly moving, as well as sharp, funny, and bittersweet. … [It’s] a kind of emotional thriller…which picks up on the evidence, pursues the clues, and then ends with a new dispensation, a settling of the dust and a clear way ahead.” –Ian MacFadyen, writer and editor, NAKED LUNCH @50

“Robert Palmer left Little Rock and made good as the chief pop critic at the New York Times, traveling easily and knowingly between the worlds of Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth, RL Burnside and William Burroughs. Revisiting the remote Moroccan village where music may have begun, filmmaker Augusta Palmer explores the transcendent siren of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, coming to terms with her father’s passions and legacy, his drug abuse and ex-wives, his abandonment of her. This daughter’s unflinching portrait of her unsettled, genius father—author, musician, record producer—is a personal journey of reconciliation, of myth-making and myth-breaking. Palmer the father was adopted by the last generation’s Jajouka master, the Otha Turner of their Hill Country, allowing Palmer the daughter — and us — an intimate visit to an elusive world.” -Robert Gordon, Author IT CAME FROM MEMPHIS and director, JOHNNY CASH’S AMERICA

SCREENING TIMES:
Fri, Nov 13 through Thurs Nov 19 @ 7:30 & 9:15 nightly. Add’l screenings on Sat & Sun at 5:30.

IN PERSON OPENING NIGHT, NOV 13, FOR Q&AS AND BOOK SIGNING!:
Filmmaker Augusta Palmer (both shows) and Anthony DeCurtis, editor of BLUES & CHAOS: THE MUSIC WRITING OF ROBERT PALMER (7:30 show only)

Bachir Attar (b.1963) was only 4 years old when he began studying the music of Jajouka under his father, who was the leader of the musicians until his death in 1981. After his father passed away, Bachir inherited the role of leader of The Master Musicians of Jajouka and has since devoted his life to preserving the music of his village. As Bachir says in The Hand of Fatima, he has become an ambassador for Jajouka: “I have to travel to save this music. We can’t just hide it in the village. If we did, it would have died a long time ago.” Bachir has played gimbri, ghaita and lira all over the world, both with the Master Musicians and as a solo artist. He has performed and recorded with a wide range of musicians, including Debbie Harry, Ornette Coleman, Talvin Singh, Bill Laswell, Maceo Parker, Lee Ranaldo, and The Rolling Stones.

and his band:
The Master Musicians of Jajouka are all residents of the small village of Jajouka in the Djebala hills of Northern Morocco. They are a hereditary brotherhood who preserve one of the oldest known musical traditions on the planet. Recognized for their music by the Moroccan royal family, by jazz masters like Ornette Coleman, rock gods like Brian Jones (who recorded the musicians’ first album, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, in 1968), the Master Musicians begin learning complex rhythms and melodies as children in order to become true maalimin, or masters. The Master Musicians play a variety of folk, ancient and newly written musical pieces on traditional, locally made instruments: the double reed rhaita, the lute-like ghimbri, the bamboo flute (or lira) and several sizes of handmade drum. Many of the compositions in their extensive repertoire are unique to the Attar family and their traditions in Jajouka. Boujeloudia , the ritual music of the “father of skins” Boujeloud (whom several writers have linked to Pan), is performed in the village during the week long festival of Aïd el–Kebir. Hamza oua Hamzine , their oldest and most complex musical number, was played by the Jajouka Masters for the Sultan, both in his palace and on the battlefield. The Hadra summons the spiritual energy of the holy saint buried in Jajouka, Sidi Ahmed Sheikh , who is said to have blessed the Attar family and their music with baraka and the power to heal people of mental and physical illness. (For more information about The Master Musicians of Jajouka, please visit www.jajouka.com

Halloween, Philly: Arthur presents Flower / Corsano Duo, Fursaxa w/ Mary Lattimore, MV & EE

Jay Babcock — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:20:50 +0000

Arthur Magazine presents

a HALLOWEEN SHOW in Philadelphia

with

FLOWER/CORSANO DUO
Mick Flower: Japanese Banjo (Vibracathedral Orchestra)
+ Chris Corsano: Drums (Vampire Belt, Northampton Wools, etc.)

plus
ATP recording artist
FURSAXA
w/ MARY LATTIMORE (harp)

plus
Ecstatic Peace! recording artists
MV & EE

Saturday, October 31
Frankford Gardens/ The Compound
at 2037 Frankford Avenue (map)
(enter from Sepviva)

doors at 8pm / music promptly at 8:30

$5

all ages and costumes encouraged

Yes, we will be screening the WORLD SERIES (without sound)

Remember—this is a home, not a bar, so bring your own locally brewed beverage

A new novel, serialized: ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka—Chapter 2

Jay Babcock — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:06:24 +0000

I got the job at Rise Up Singing through Credence. He dated a cook there a few years back, a girl named Jimmy. It has a ‘we all work in hell but that’s okay cause we don’t have to take out our piercing’ kind of theme…

The owner’s name is Franklin. He started Rise Up Singing when every business on the street had bars on the windows.

“I like to think of myself as a coworker with lots of experience rather than a boss,” Franklin said.

I like to think of myself as a boss more than a slave but mostly I prefer to not think about it at all because when I think about it, I can’t stop.

“Okay,” I said…

Download: