@ some point in the night i was looking at the book about Sun Ra that N gave me on wednesday...
it's a headpress book, i ended up with about 5 copies of it for some reason, which are going back, but i also have my own copy of it...
it's got a picture of sun ra on the cover - with a blob of perhaps sunlike stuff over him... maybe on his costume, although it's a black & white picture & the blob is in colour...
anyway, i'm asleep... and i'm looking at the cover, and i realise that the blob is my own blood, not much of it, just a little tiny sphere that been squashed between two surfaces...
so i'm about to give the book back, but something stops me... and i realise how i should hold onto that copy, because i've made it my own, it's got my blood on it...
and i feel special...
many hours later i wake up and look at the sun ra book & laugh...
.....................................................
i have all these copies of this book because on wednesday night, me, N & his R... (who he met in thsiland, lovely woman) went to cafe oto to see the sun ra arkestra, led by marshall allen...
it was one of the most inspirational gigs i've been to...
influences from throughout the history of jazz, from the 40s onwards...
able to go to some very scary 60's free jazz type places, which felt like an opening out of the heart... play a chopin piece which was the most beautiful thing i've ever heard... play some old jazz standards in a swinging fashion... (stars fell on alabama).... do lovely vocal melodies with lyrics to do with freedom & peace & love & losing your mind... they ended on a few outrageously cheerful tunes that might have been disney tunes... he did a few arrangements of them apparently...
in particular there's a kind of sun ra tune i've come to love, where parts of the band are doing complex, but rhythmicly working things... african type rhythms & cuban type rhythms... like the guitarist wil be gently plucking a rhythmic pattern... sometimes very quietly... and then gradually, some of the horn players will start playing a slow and aching melody over the top, more & more horn players join the melody... in sometimes strange & beautiful harmonies... the rhyhtm also grows...
just perfect x
also hafa was there - hafa who N has kept in touch with over the years, who i know/knew, back when i knew N the 1st time around... (hafa's blues was a tune we used to do in the cops, one of the few i produced... with hafa's voice...) - in fact, it was only on wednesday morning that i found the minidisk i'd recorded hafa's voice onto, which i'd sampled from...
hafa used to talk about sun ra back then... he knew him...
hafa (from wednesday): if you want to talk about music go & talk to marshall, i never talked about music to sonny, me & sonny used to talk about "the ascension of the name"
this was in the break between sets & me & R were talking to hafa who was a little irate to begin with...
i took me leave and crossed the room to use the toilet, and on my way i bumped into marshall allen and i shook his hand and told him how happy i was that he was there and that the spirit of sonny was alive in that room... he told me that it was what kept him going (he's 80 odd)...
then on my way back from the loo somebody yelled for me and i had a little chat with a guy i've met over in homerton, bass player (very sharply dressed that night)...
it was a truly lovely night... aided in part by a little tickle of something which might have a name but i don't know what the name is...
3 different T's combined.. very pleasant...
x
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