defunkt

Joe Bowie’s Defunkt Millenium

20.4.Prague, Czech Republic
21.4.Usti , Czech Republic
23.4 Jazzahead, Bremen DE
24.4 Aachen, DE
25.4 Paard Van Troje, Den Haag, NL

Gayatri mantra by the Agape Choir

The Agape Choir www.agapelive.org performs one of humanity's maha-mantras, the Gayatri at yogamala '07.

Advanced spiritual adepts used to have to say this while standing in the ocean or a river bcuz they would chant it with such perfection it would generate too much heat in their bodies.

Great Black Music Project Podcast: Kelan Phil Cohran on his time with Sun Ra's band

In this 20 minute Interview for the Great Black Music Project, Kelan Phil Cohran talks about his time with Sun Ra's band in the 1950s.


Great Black Music Project Podcast: Kelan Phil Cohran on his time with Sun Ra's band from Floyd Webb on Vimeo.


Kelan Phil Cohran and The Legacy of Sun Ra
Composer, pianist and poet Sun Ra's cosmic philosophy, rooted in the swing music of Fletcher Henderson led many to experiment with connecting new and old jazz traditions. Former Sun Ra band member, trumpeter, educator, composer and fellow shaman Kelan Phil Cohran (pictured) continues to redefine this music.

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The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathe in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

by Langston Hughes

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St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church

December 1, 2007

On Religion

Sunday Religion, Inspired by Saturday Nights

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

The Rev. Max Hoff, left, and Archbishop Franzo Wayne King at the St. John Coltrane church.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

SAN FRANCISCO

Beside the altar of the storefront church on Fillmore Street stand an electric piano, two basses, a drum kit and three microphones. The hymnal, such as it is, consists of a music book, open to a piece titled “Blues For Bechet.” And on the side wall hangs an icon of the congregation’s patron saint, a golden corona circling his head, as he holds a tenor saxophone with flames in its bell.

This being a house of jazz as well as of God, the Sunday morning service starts on Sunday afternoon, early rising for any musician who played three sets on Saturday night. As the worshipers trickle in, whether regulars from the neighborhood or pilgrims from abroad, a call comes from behind the rear wall: “Let the procession be formed.”

Then the ministers and deacons and acolytes stride into view, led by a rangy man with a tenor sax dangling from a strap around his clerical collar. He is Archbishop Franzo Wayne King, founder and pastor of this faith community, the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church.

For the next three hours, the service proceeds with an aesthetic that is half jam session and half revival meeting. A traditional Christian liturgy — including the Lord’s Prayer and readings from a Gospel and an Epistle — takes places amid a series of intense, almost incantatory performances of Coltrane compositions.

“The kind of music you listen to is the person you become,” Mr. King says in his sermon. “When you listen to John Coltrane, you become a disciple of the anointed of God.”

In the third row, Mikkel Holst understands. He has traveled from Copenhagen to San Francisco in no small part for this church.

“It must be one of the best jazz experiences of my life,” Mr. Holst says after the service. “The funniest thing about it is, I’m not religious. But when I put on John Coltrane, a chill goes down my spine. I was thinking, if I lived here, I could see myself belonging.”

So the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane’s own experience and message.

During a fervently creative life of just 41 years, Coltrane produced a body of performances and compositions that have remained deeply influential among jazz musicians and listeners, as well as devotees of improvisational rock. By now, 40 years after his death, he rests firmly in the canon of American music.

In both implicit and explicit ways, Coltrane also functioned as a religious figure. Addicted to heroin in the 1950s, he quit cold turkey, and later explained that he had heard the voice of God during his anguishing withdrawal. In 1964, he recorded “A Love Supreme,” an album of original praise music in a free-jazz mode. Studying Eastern religions as well as Christianity, he went on to release more avant-garde devotional music on “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”

In 1966, an interviewer in Japan asked Coltrane what he hoped to be in five years, and Coltrane replied, “A saint.”

Franzo Wayne King, then, was simply the person who took Coltrane at his word. Growing up in Los Angeles, the son of a Pentecostal minister, he knew firsthand the importance of music in African-American Christianity. His own tastes, however, ran more to James Brown than jazz.

That started changing the day in the early 1960s when Mr. King’s older brother, Charles, played him the Coltrane recording of “My Favorite Things.” Mr. King began to explore and appreciate Coltrane’s earlier work with Miles Davis. Even so, when a friend showed him the album “A Love Supreme,” Mr. King read the very religious liner notes and decided the music could not be for him.

“I didn’t want to get on a God trip,” he recalled. “If I wanted that, I’d go to church. Because in my upbringing there was an erect divide between jazz and blues and the church. You had to choose one.”

Or so he believed until 1966, when he took his girlfriend, Marina, on her birthday to hear Coltrane at a San Francisco club, the Jazz Workshop. A buddy who was the doorman seated them up front, and there Coltrane’s trademark “sheets of sound” washed over them, almost literally.

“It was my sound baptism,” Mr. King recalled.

In the wake of Coltrane’s death and newly married to Marina, Mr. King created a small congregation called Yardbird Temple in reference to the nickname of another jazz great, Charlie Parker. At that point, the followers worshiped Coltrane as an earthly incarnation of God, while considering Parker a kind of John the Baptist equivalent.

Such a theology, of course, put Mr. King and his flock outside the boundaries of Christianity. He moved back inside them in the early 1980s, when he met George Duncan Hinkson, an archbishop in the African Orthodox Church. The denomination, founded in the late 19th century in South Africa, took root in America largely through Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement. Its adherents worship a black Christ.

Ordained by Archbishop Hinkson, Mr. King made the necessary concession to become a member congregation. “We demoted Coltrane from being God,” he put it. “But the agreement was that he could come into sainthood and be the patron of our church.”

As such, the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane Church has operated for a quarter-century. Mr. King’s wife and several of their children participate in the services as “ministers of sound” and have played at several European jazz festivals. The visitors over the years have included Coltrane’s widow, Alice Coltrane, and the jazz-influenced rock guitarist Carlos Santana.

The church combines its unique hagiography and soundtrack with staples of black Christianity, from personal “witnessing” to various forms of social action. In its previous location, the congregation ran a vegetarian soup kitchen; its current place, which lacks a full kitchen, distributes clothing and nonperishable foods.

Mr. King’s daughter, Wanika King-Stephens, is the host of a weekly radio show of Coltrane music, “Uplift,” on a local station, KPOO-FM.

Francis Davis, an author who attended the church while researching a coming Coltrane biography, “Sheets of Sound,” said, “I kind of went there expecting, I don’t know, snake handlers or something crazy.”

Mr. Davis continued: “But it wasn’t like that at all. These are good people They’re doing what churches do. Which is feed the hungry, minister to people’s emotional and spiritual needs. And if you’re looking for free-jazz solos on a Sunday morning, this is the place.”

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

Church of Coltrane slideshow

Coltrane's Home

November 11, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

House of Blues

By LARRY BLUMENFELD

LET me take you where classic jazz was made back in the day. We’ll meet not in some dark smoky Greenwich Village bar but on a quiet lane in Dix Hills. Indeed, important jazz landmarks lie well beyond the five boroughs and past big-city limits. The roots of a musical genre and a culture identified as a quintessentially urban American experience are nonetheless planted in suburban soil.

The recent decision by federal and state officials to add the former home of saxophonist and composer John Coltrane in Dix Hills to both the National and New York State Register of Historic Places reinforces this idea as it honors one of jazz’s great legacies.

Coltrane lived in the 3,000-square-foot brick and wood-frame ranch house on Candlewood Path, just south of the Long Island Expressway, for three years, until his death in 1967. In 1964, in a dormered upstairs room, he composed the best-selling album “A Love Supreme,” a suite of music as famous for its spiritual heft as for its enduring appeal.

Coltrane was a family man as well as a jazzman. He drove a station wagon — that is, in addition to his white Jaguar XKE. Dix Hills was a haven for him, a place where he found time and inspiration to compose deeply spiritual music. And it was a quiet, peaceful spot for him and his wife, Alice, who was also a formidable composer and musician, to raise their three sons — John Jr., Ravi and Oran — and Alice’s daughter from a previous marriage, Michelle.

Once Coltrane had his landmark suite carefully outlined on manuscript paper, he headed off to another suburban spot to record it — Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. For jazz fans, Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studio is yet another shrine. Still active, it’s where the tracks for thousands of jazz recordings, dozens of them classics, were laid down.

The current studio, set off from surrounding office parks by a wooded drive, has been in operation since 1959; before that, Mr. Van Gelder had recorded the likes of pianist Thelonious Monk in his parents’ house in Hackensack, N.J., while working days as an optometrist. (Monk named one composition “Hackensack” in honor of that place and Mr. Van Gelder.)

The Coltrane house in Dix Hills might easily have disappeared from Long Island’s — and jazz’s — landscape. In 2004, a developer had planned to raze the house and subdivide the property. Fortunately, Steve Fulgoni, a Dix Hills resident and an avid jazz fan, set up a Web site and put the word out about the pending demise of the Coltrane house. A Town Hall hearing was held, and the Town Council declared the house a local landmark, protecting it from demolition.

Two years ago, the Town of Huntington, which includes Dix Hills, purchased the house and the estate’s mostly wooded 3.4 acres. Mr. Fulgoni formed a nonprofit organization and is raising money and organizing plans for a museum that will be dedicated to John Coltrane’s far-reaching legacy while retaining the intimacy and personality of the original house.

One natural model for the project is the Louis Armstrong House and Museum in Corona, Queens. The Armstrong house is a casual center of jazz discovery that invigorates its local community and invites fans and students to study Armstrong’s music by observing and learning about his personal history. The modest red-brick house where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, moved in 1943 draws visitors not just for its rare home recordings and interactive displays but for the stunning turquoise kitchen and mirrored bathroom adorned with gold fixtures.

The Coltrane house in Dix Hills is decidedly more modest inside but every bit as grand in potential. In 2004, preservation advocates spoke before the Huntington Town Council of the saxophonist as “jazz’s van Gogh,” and of the house as “a sacred space” with “priceless educational value.” Of course, there were naysayers — neighborhood association members worried that a museum would disturb their “sleepy residential community.” But luckily, their concerns were dismissed.

Mr. Fulgoni says that the Historic Register designation is the ultimate endorsement and an immeasurable aid to fund-raising efforts. Coltrane’s son Ravi, an accomplished saxophonist who serves on the new project’s board, wasn’t yet born when his father composed “A Love Supreme.” When his turn came to speak before the Town Council, he recalled learning to ride a bicycle in the driveway, long before he would pick up a saxophone. “I thought this house would always be there,” he said, “and I believe that it needs to stand.”

It will. Jazz lives, quietly yet forcefully, in unexpected places, protecting these spots keeps the spirit of great musical inspiration alive in far-flung locations, where it might otherwise be paved over. And it reinforces jazz as a culture marked by individuals, each with his own distinct story.

Larry Blumenfeld, a Katrina Media fellow for the Open Society Institute, is the editor at large of Jazziz magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/nyregionopinions/11LIblumenfeld.html


September 18, 2007

Coltrane's Historic Home

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The home of the jazz great John Coltrane in Dix Hills, N.Y., has been added to the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places. Coltrane, the saxophonist and composer, who was born in 1926 and died in 1967, would have observed his 81st birthday on Sunday. In the home in Dix Hills, on Long Island, where he and his family lived from 1964 to 1973, he composed the best-selling album “A Love Supreme.” Members of the family and participants in the Coltrane Home, a non-profit organization devoted to preserving the house, said they hoped to convert it to a museum and music archive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/arts/music/18arts-COLTRANESHIS_BRF.html

Metaphysics of Music

Jazz Composer and Performer Dr. Nelson Harrison explains the metaphysics of music. Music can be "a metaphysics based on the cooperation between what we know and what we don't." Dr. Harrison holds a Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology, and has toured as a trombonist with the Count Basie Orchestra. He also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Zoology. Host is Pittsburgh Theosophical Society President Andy Nesky.

Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 1 of 6



Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 2 of 6



Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 3 of 6



Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 4 of 6



Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 5 of 6



Outer Streams, Metaphysics of Music Part 6 of 6

Rasul Siddik

Here is a very rare clip of one of the world's top Jazz trumpeters and my good friend Rasul Siddik playing an explosive gig at The Berkeley Public Library in 1996.

Rasul Siddik has been living in Paris for over the past 13 to 14 years, and will be in the states visiting and jammin' in his hometown St. Louis around Sept 9, 2008.

The Now! Artet@The Berkeley Public Library



Musicians as listed on Youtube:

Artet featuring on this outting st. louis native Kash Killion on bass, "eyarb" Bob Braye...booooski!!!!!!on traps, and long time artet collaborator Ghasem Batamuntu on saxxsetra.