How You Gonna Keep Em (Down On the Farm)

Maybe this will give you something of an idea of what daily life is like at ARI. Above, working visitors from Japan and the US and Piccolo, a participant from Kenya, pull in the soybean harvest.
Andy with fresh picked tomatoes.


Market jam session
There was a rainbow the evening this was taken. But we really just wanted dinner.
Sarah mixing rice powder for animal feed.
Swea from Myanmar showing off his greenhouse, built from bamboo.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Greetings from Japan! Andy and I will be here for the next few weeks at the Asian Rural Institute, an organic farm and training center two hours north of Tokyo - that is, if you take the shinkansen bullet train. Below is our first report to the Episcopal Evangelical Society, which provided some of the funding for our trip.

We have been at ARI for only a few days now, but we already feel we have been accepted as part of the community. On our first morning, Sarah woke up before anyone else, convinced that it was noon when it was in fact 4 a.m. Impressed by the tranquility of the surrounding countryside in those early hours and a glorious sun shower, she took the first day head-on.

After silent prayer and calisthenics, the first task of the day was to go through the greenhouses and harvest ripe tomatoes – what a joy! Our group leader is a former ARI student from Nepal, and another coworker is a pastor from the Philippines. Cutting Chinese leeks with a Japanese volunteer led to a fascinating cultural discussion of the differences between Japanese and American expressions of emotion (or lack thereof). We gathered the last of the green beans, which are starting to thin out, and headed back to the farm shed. All of the produce needed to be sorted and weighed according to size and type. Sorting and cutting the leeks turned out to be a big task bringing several people together.

This time is known as “foodlife” at ARI, a term which emphasizes the importance of experiencing and laboring for the food which sustains our lives – an awareness that is often lost in industrialized lifestyles. “Foodlife” time involves the most memorable tasks of the day for us – the times when we feel most connected to the earth, whether this is cutting grass for a young calf to eat and watching him nuzzle for his mother’s milk – or stomping down a barrel of rice bran and tofu biproduct to make animal feed. These are the tasks that remind us of how important it is to live sustainably and how hard we have to work for it.

After touring the duck farm and livestock pens, we joined the community for lunch. For afternoon work, Phillip, a long-term volunteer from Germany, took us out to a soybean field far away from main campus for the afternoon, where we had to “earth” the young plants, which involves protecting them with soil in the places where the tiller exposed them a little too closely. Though this was done in the rain, it was in the company of a lively bunch of Japanese university students and the time went quickly. It was amazing to discuss sustainable development and the Green Movement as we worked with this group of smart, dedicated people. One begins to understand exactly what ARI means by “learning by doing.”

After evening foodlife and dinner with a newly arrived Methodist missionary, we started to feel the jetlag coming on again. We still have some settling in to do, certainly in terms of schedule adjustments; indeed, we have much to learn. The biggest message of the trip so far has been one of humbling servant leadership, expressed in aching muscles and a blissful exhaustion.

You must always have a secret plan

This speaks to our time.

On the Road to a Green Future

I've been using the past few blog posts to share a few of my New Haven Magazine articles in a net-exclusive. Here's one published in April's Green Issue.

Mahatma Gandhi once famously advised, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The Indian leader’s words resonated this winter with two young Yale graduates who, dissatisfied with merely studying and talking about the issue of climate change, decided to put their shoulders to the wheel.
Caroline Howe, a Durham native and Yale School of Engineering graduate, and Alexis Ringwald, a graduate of Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, are the masterminds behind the India Climate Solutions Road Tour, a project that led the pair and a cohort of about 20 students and supporters, many of them members of the Indian Youth Climate Network, on a five-week, 3,500-kilometer journey from the south Indian city of Chennai, north through 15 cities to Delhi, where they arrived February 5.
The fleet left Chennai on January 3 in three solar-roofed, plug-in electric cars, which can travel about 90 miles on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries; and a truck converted to run on biofuel made from sustainably harvested jatropha, a native Indian plant, which carried the equipment for the solar-powered band, Solar Punch, that joined the troupe on the road.
Add a truck running on used vegetable oil and piloted by a friendly Czech named Stanislav, which joined the crew midway, and a car with solar panels on the roof that was rigged with power outlets to charge the team’s laptops, cell phones and cameras while they were on the road — and you have a caravan likely to attract some attention in rural India.
“It felt like we were driving in the midst of a revolution of the future of transportation,” says Howe, speaking via Skype from New Delhi.
Bidisha Banerjee, an Indian national currently studying at Yale’s Forestry School, was on the road tour as well. “We were touring India at a pivotal moment during its history, when thousands of roads are in the process of being built, and thousands of power-lines are just about to be laid,” she writes in an e-mail. “Too often, it's easy to feel powerless about the climate crisis. During our trip, I realized that there is still a vivid possibility for India to achieve a low-carbon development path.”
Because of the rapid growth in India’s economy (eight percent annually), which supports one of the world’s biggest populations, the country is currently poised to become the third leading consumer of energy by 2030, and the third leading emitter of greenhouse gases by 2015. Given that India is already experiencing electricity shortages, the search for alternative energy innovations has developed a true sense of urgency.
Yet not all or even most of India’s population burns a great deal of energy. The country’s highest income group emits an annual average of 4.97 tons of carbon dioxide per capita, close to the world average. India’s low overall per-capita emissions is due to the fact that most of its population makes less than $125 per year and contributes a negligible amount of emissions. The painful reality, though, is that the poor, who rely on climate-sensitive industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing, will be impacted by climate change first.

So the India Climate Solutions Road Tour set out on a mission to raise awareness of climate issues, and in search of solutions.
“When we charged [the vehicles’ batteries] at petrol [gasoline] stations, people really saw it as the future, because they don’t [necessarily] want to be working in petrol,” says Howe. “It’s noxious fumes they breathe in every day. They know it’s polluting their planet and their children’s future.
“Students along the way were really drawn in, especially by the band. They played Hindi songs and everybody went crazy.”
Ringwald adds that her favorite charging stop, “and our only princely charging stop,” was an impromptu one at the home of the Prince of Rajpipli, who runs a vermiculture business, has an organic farm and a wind turbine installed on his property. He also is building a solar hospital.
After finishing her undergraduate degree in political science in 2005, Ringwald was sent as Yale’s envoy to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India for the summer. She ended up writing her master’s thesis for the Forestry School on the potential of biofuel in India, and returned to south Asian soon after as a Fulbright Scholar researching the business aspects of renewable energy and climate issues. She contacted Howe, a Yale engineering student whom the university had sent to TERI to work on green building issues, and the pair floated the idea of developing a project together at the conclusion of their fellowship years.
Recalls Howe, “What we wanted to do was to create a project that would profile the opportunities to both young people and to entrepreneurs and financers about the fact that there are so many opportunities here in India — and at the same time demonstrate that India is in its own way taking action and needs to be supported.”
On the road, Ringwald explains, they began to develop “incredible distributed networks, amazing energy. It became bigger and we realized we could make this something pretty loud.”
Along the way, they made countless stops to recharge and talk with locals about climate solutions. The electric cars are a homegrown innovation — manufactured domestically in India by a company called Reva. Like refrigerators, they draw electricity from three-pronged power points. According to Howe’s calculations, “At ten rupees a kilowatt-hour, the car could get fully charged for about a dollar, which would fuel the car for 200 kilometers [90 miles]. It takes six hours for a full charge.
“People aren’t covering the solutions [to climate change] — they’re covering the problems, because the problems make a better story,” Howe says.
“So we created a journey that would be a great story to tell.”

The trek was a remarkable one. Banerjee recalls highlights: “Meeting with organic farmers practicing drip-irrigation in Andhra Pradesh, visiting green buildings and a smart solar micro-grid in Hyderabad and learning from a college in Rajasthan that trains rural poor from around the world to work on key issues like solar-power generation, water-harvesting, health and sanitation. I was inspired to meet so many architects of possibility — from farmers to engineers working at Reva, the world's best-selling electric car company, which is based in Bangalore.”
At the Energy and Resources Institute’s climate conference in February, the group submitted a report to the Union environment ministry asking for policy changes to battle climate change, and gave New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman a spin around the block in one of the Revas. On February 18, Howe and Ringwald were granted an audience with the president of India, Pratibha Patil, who congratulated them on their work.
So what climate solutions did the tour identify on its travels?
“Almost every city in India has made a law that every building that’s built should have rainwater harvesting systems,” says Howe. “But Chennai is one of the few places that has very effectively implemented it, so every building we saw had a rainwater harvesting system, and that was really exciting.”
The road tour also made a stop at Peace Garden in Vellore, a school devoted to the environmental education of rural children. It also boasts sustainable buildings and a growing permaculture site. Sustainable agriculture practices already in use across the country include drip irrigation, seed saving and crop rotation. Some communities make their own reusable banana-leaf plates and clay cups to reduce waste.
“It’s not just about tech transfer, about us selling American innovations to villages in India, but developing what makes the most sense here and what’s been in use here, and helping that scale up,” says Howe.
At the Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Bangladore, 14 data centers have been consolidated to save on cooling costs. The facility also has 7,500 temperature sensors that are part of a centralized system which allow for spot cooling, which spares approximately 40 percent of the cooling energy.
Ringwald was especially excited about the program at Barefoot College, where village women from around the world are trained to become solar entrepreneurs. “They come and they get trained to understand solar energy equipment, how to put together batteries with lights,” she says. “And they take this knowledge and technology back to their villages. So that brings electricity to their village along with women’s empowerment, which I think is really beautiful and inspiring.”
While young environmentalists can do much to help make low-tech climate solutions available on a larger scale, Howe and Ringwald recognize that the large-scale problems require policy changes at a higher level. “We’re trying to spread the message that some policies do need to change in order to better support these solutions, both nationally and internationally,” explains Howe. “As we look toward the international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, we need to be looking at how developed nations can really be supporting technology and innovators in countries like India.”
Banerjee agrees. “I believe that it is imperative for both India and the U.S. to commit to drastically reducing their carbon emissions this December during the U.N. negotiations in Poland,” she says. “We are at the start of a global social movement much like the civil-rights movement. Unless we can help build a new economy and a new energy system, we will have done a grave injustice to future generations.”
Ringwald says the most important thing for people confronting the climate crisis to do is to be creative, open-minded — and daring. “The crazier idea, the better,” she asserts. “We need unconventional ideas. We thought [the tour] was insane, and everyone told us it was insane, and it was crazy. But we learned a lot, and reached a lot of people.”

In the Groove

When Jesse Hameen II plays a show in his native New Haven, word travels fast: “Cheese” is in town. The past ten years have seen the amiable jazz drummer, whose nickname comes from his brilliant smile, return to live in his hometown, keeping up a busy performing career and releasing a new solo album, all while giving back to the community as a teacher and a mentor.

A September article in the New York Times rightfully places Hameen at the center of a New Haven jazz scene that is reclaiming a measure of its former place of prominence.

“It’s really gratifying being back, because I’m able to make a difference over here,” says Hameen. “It’s the gratification of knowing that we were able to do something to give back to the city, to bring jazz to life here, to put it back in the lives of the people.”

Born in 1941 and raised in the Elm City, Hameen was raised in a musical family. “My family, they’re into gospel,” he explains. “Some of the best gospel musicians in the New Haven area, a lot of them are in my family. My parents never once told me my drums were too loud or to stop practicing. I said, how could they tolerate it like that? You couldn’t ask for more supportive parents.

“I played drums my whole life. My mother said that as soon as I came out of the womb I was playing.”

In 1950, at the tender age of nine, Hameen started his own band with drummers Paul Huggins, currently of the African American Cultural Center at Yale, and Billy Fitch. “Paul taught us the Afro-Cuban thing,” he says. “I was playing the congas and the bongos. By the time I was ten, we started performing professionally.”

Hameen enlisted in the Air Force in 1958, before the U.S. became embroiled in Vietnam. His service took him to London, where he honed his chops after hours among heavyweights like Joe Harriott and Ginger Baker. Hameen returned to the States in 1962, as jazz was making the transition from fiery bebop to bluesy cool.

“New Haven during that time was one of the meccas for jazz,” he recalls. “Hartford was pretty good, but New Haven was the spot for Connecticut.”

The clubs were concentrated in the Dixwell neighborhood, most within walking distance of Hameen’s home, like the Playback on Winchester Avenue, which was owned by New Haven native Willie Ruff, who now conducts the Yale Jazz Ensemble; and the Monterey Café, run by New Havener and vaudeville performer Rufus Greenlee.

The Monterey, Hameen recalls, “was more than just a jazz club; it was a rite of passage. You got all ready to go — you had a certain code of conduct in there. It was the kind of thing people brought their children to. The place was packed seven nights a week.”

With jazz jumping all around him, Hameen worked six months at the post office to earn himself a new set of drums, and then took off on a series of road tours that eventually landed him in New York City. He began freelancing, traveling with Charles Earland to Puerto Rico, and then to Las Vegas and the West Coast. He has played with the era’s top names, including Grover Washington Jr., Irene Reid (for whom he has produced two albums and written numerous compositions), vocalist Leon Thomas, hard bop pianist Tommy Flanagan, Lou Donaldson and soul star Curtis Mayfield, to name a few. He converted to Islam in 1979 and changed his name from Jesse Kilpatrick Jr. to Jesse Hameen II.

But to many native New Haveners, he will always be “Cheese.”

In 1995, Hameen decided to move back to New Haven to care for his ailing parents. “My parents were so supportive of me, that when the time came I had to take care of them,” Hameen says. “I told my mother, ‘I’m terrified to come back to New Haven, because my business is all built up in New York. There’s no way I’m going to be as busy up there.’ She said, ‘Well, don’t worry, God’s going to bless you.’”

What Hameen found surprised him. He became involved with Jazz Haven, a non-profit which supports and advocates for jazz music and musicians and produces the annual summer New Haven Jazz Festival.

Explains Jazz Haven President Doug Morrill: “When Jesse came back, he wanted to offer something to New Haven. He is very much a community person, and jazz is a wonderful community-building vehicle.”

Hameen was also appointed the chair of the lauded jazz studies program at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, a role that gives him the chance to teach and mentor young jazz musicians, among them young pianist Christian Sands. He is also on faculty at the Hartford Conservatory.

“What makes Jesse different from other jazz musicians is his willingness to go the full mile in terms of keeping the music alive,” says Morrill.

“I believe that being a musician is not just an individual path, but that people should benefit from it,” Hameen says. “My goal is to be a human excellence advocate.”

His recent album Sign of the Times, his first solo project in over 20 years, was released last August on his independent Inspire Music label, and rings with the sounds of jazz that is New Haven’s own — well traveled and world-wise, but determinedly funky.

“New Haven has a sound — a bluesy, funky sound,” Hameen says. “Just like people all over the country have their different accents, their different personalities — that’s their voice. On my CD I like everything to be groovy. That’s what we are in New Haven, is groovy.”

The album combines six bluesy, recently penned compositions with three other Hameen originals from a 1993 session featuring New York trombonist Benny Powell. All of the tracks are filled with the rich sound of the Hammond B-3 organ, an instrument Hameen has tapped often in his career.

As its title suggests, it is a timely album in many senses, with songs like “Conducive Environment,” which features Hameen’s two-fisted explosion of a drum solo in 6/4 time, and “Tighten Your Belt,” a funky number which allows the group to really lock in.

“All of my songs have meaning,” Hameen said enigmatically in a November concert. “‘Tighten Your Belt.’ We all know what that means,” he said, alluding to the current recession.

Of President-elect Barack Obama, Hameen says, “Whether he was elected or not, the fact that there’s so many people who are willing to accept an African-American President is a sign of the times. That shows that the climate has changed, that people are now realizing that it’s the content of a person’s character and not the color of their skin that’s happening.”

While Hameen was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and plans to undergo radiation treatment, he says he feels strong: “I feel good, my ideas are flowing, I’m still writing. I practice every day.”

This article was published in the January 2009 issue of New Haven Magazine.

Genius Next Door

Laco Deczi doesn't answer the doorbell.

He's too busy telling lurid stories about the exploits of the Russian mafia in communist Czechoslovakia, answering his cell phone in any one of four languages, and going out to flip the charred fish on his prized backyard grill. He intersperses his tall tales with occasional phrases on his trumpet, sounds filled with a haunting purity and nostalgia that transport the listener to a time and place distant in mind and memory.

In Bratislava, Slovakia, where Deczi was born in 1938, and throughout what is now the Czech Republic, you would be hard pressed to find a person on the street who does not know his name and his music; on his Czech tours, he performs for audiences of up to 1,000, including diplomats and presidents. A film biography of his life, titled Voľná noha, was released in the Czech Republic in 1990.

The trumpeter and prolific composer enjoys a different kind of celebrity in his East Haven neighborhood. He spends his days puttering around in an old white Mitsubishi with the bumper hanging off, catching snappers in the Long Island Sound, and recording in his home studio. He knows where to get the best pizza in town, who will cut you a deal on car repair, and who could be persuaded to give you a deal on waterfront property. With his fly-away hair, bare feet, and tan shoulders, he looks more like a beach bum than a jazz star. Still, Deczi is a consummate performer and storyteller, and slips in and out of recollections as his hard blue eyes focus and then unfocus on the world around him.

“I live[d] in communism, and listened [to] American music on short-wave radio,” he says, in a heavy accent. “At this time there was no records, nothing.” Among his heroes were hard bop trumpeters Blue Mitchell, Fats Navarro, and, especially, the virtuosic Clifford Brown, who he calls, simply, “a genius.”

Deczi worked his way up through the cafes and bars in Prague, and started writing his own music when he was about 20 years old. Throughout the 1960s, he was a part of vibraphonist Karel Valebny's SHQ Ensemble, a forward-thinking post-bop group that, no doubt, encouraged Deczi's propensity for the avant-garde. He started his own group, Jazz Cellula at the end of 1967 to perform his original compositions, inspired by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

Then, in 1970, Dezci got the education of his life when he began what would become a 15-year stint with the state-sponsored Czech Radio Big Band. “That was probably the best big band this time in Czechoslovakia,” he says. “For those 15 years, I got a [lot of] experience, because all those musicians were better [than me].” He started to gain some recognition as a soloist, and released his first solo album Sentimental Trumpet in 1971.

While creative expression and free speech were strictly controlled under the communist government, according to Deczi, the communists did not consider jazz to be too great a threat: “The communists don't bother [with] jazz, because they don't know what it is. There's no words. You can strike up the rock band, with the words, and make a protest. But doodly-doodly-doodly-doo, that's nothing strange,” though many the world over consider jazz to be a prime example of expressive freedom.

Deczi escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s on papers which were forged for him by an artist friend. He landed in Berlin, where, he said, “The Germans took care of me.” African-American trumpeter Carmell Jones, who gained his fame with Horace Silver's album A Song for My Father, was also living in Berlin at the time, and Deczi took the chance to study with him. Jones died in 1996, a date Deczi repeats each time he looks at the photo of Jones he has tacked to his studio wall.

On an invitation from Sonny Costanzo, who Deczi described as an “excellent trombone player, very special,” the trumpeter came to New York City for a visit in 1984. He was soon gigging regularly with Costanzo's big band in the New Haven area, and in 1985 moved permanently to the United States. Costanzo's death in 1993 meant the loss of a mentor, but Deczi found other collaborators.

Drawing on players from his gigs at small clubs in New York and a few musicians from New Haven's Cafe Nine session, Deczi founded Jazz Cellula New York in the mid-1990s, which has since released about a dozen albums of Deczi's original music on the Arta, Multisonic, and New York Sound labels. The ensemble currently features the talents of Eric Meridiano of France on piano, Nob Kinukawa of Japan on bass, and Deczi's son Vaico on drums. They have recently completed a Czech tour in which they performed for the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, among other dignitaries, and plans are in the making for a live album to be released soon. Business back in the States, however, remains slow.

“It is problem,” Deczi says, “because there used to be much more work, more money here. Now it's very bad – for everybody. I am up and down. Everybody lives the jazz musician life.”

“Laco's story is one of both joy and sadness,” says friend, harmonica player, and former Republican State Party Chairman Chris DePino. “America has given him freedom of expression to create musically. In Czech, Laco is a household name, with millions of people who grew up with his music turning out in droves to see his concerts. Here, his experience has been that of an everyday, struggling musician, working to get the attention of a non-interested public.”

“He came from a place where you could go to jail for saying the word 'marketing,'” DePino adds.

Now, when Jazz Cellula tours the Czech Republic, Deczi is awarded with a homecoming fit for a jazz prince. “When we toured the Czech Republic, there was never a moment where the house wasn't packed, and the audience wasn't listening,” says DePino. “With those former communist bloc folks, it's like anything goes with them; they cherish their freedom more than you can imagine. They relish people exhibiting creativity in front of them, because that's something they were never able to do.”

Deczi is a man of many talents; he paints, writes film scores, and has published a book on jazz improvisation in Czech. By some estimates, he has written over 300 compositions, some of which were lost when he escaped from Slovakia. One of his dreams is to write for symphony orchestra. “I listen [to] all music,” he says. “I listen [to] African music, Arabian music,” which might be a clue to the source of the fascinating harmonic and chromatic scales he uses in his writing.

At the age of 70, he shows no signs of slowing down. Leapfrogging the stuck-in-the-mud disease that can afflict some jazz practitioners, Deczi seems eternally in touch with the youthful pulse of his audience. He explained, “We've got a [big] young audience. The old one is in the cemetery, rooted, like a flower in the ground.”

Perhaps it is that Deczi's compositions are so utterly danceable, full of interesting polyrhythms and exotic scales, completely infused with the sounds of his Eastern European roots, giving his music a distinctive voice that is a rarity in a music market saturated with sound bytes and often unfriendly to music which requires a longer attention span.

It is true that, had he had the opportunity to develop his music in America from the beginning of his career, he might have achieved more commercial recognition. Then again, a Laco Deczi who had not endured and trumped communism would not be Laco Deczi at all. It is the struggles he endured that molded him into the supreme individualist he is today. In a world full of copies, Deczi is undoubtedly unique. He disdains both free jazz and high society as parallel evils. He throws nothing away, preferring to repair it, a technique one can perhaps see in his compositional process as well.

The man is hopelessly in love with his music; he is constantly penning new tunes, and finds no greater joy than to sit uninterrupted in his studio, perfecting Jazz Cellula's most recent recording. Sitting and listening to their new live album, one gets the sense that Deczi's star is on the rise, and if this is any measure, listeners here will come to realize what an enormous talent they have living just next door.

I originally published this article in the October 2008 issue of New Haven Magazine.

Return to Goree

How many returns will I make to this place, to this space? How many times will my path criss-cross the others and what shape will they design? Here we are again, where it all started and where it will all end: Return to Goree.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

-William Stafford

Running in place

So it's been almost two months since I last posted. I've been busy. It strikes me that I have spent most of this fall not only adjusting to life back in the United States, but life in a new place and truly in a new mode of existence, in which no one even remotely validates the choices I have made. I don't know quite what to do with this. There is no one standing there saying, "Your experience is valuable. This is significant no matter how meaningless it may seem at the time." This doesn't mean that I don't still believe it; but when people press me, I have fewer things to say in defense of myself. And yet I feel, and feel is the word, that I am in the right place. I haven't been here for long enough to know where I'm going, but maybe I'm not going anywhere right now and that's ok. If here is where I'm going, then that's just fine with me.

For a while, I was working 40 hours a week for a slightly controlling film producer and director who has Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, a regressive muscle disease that currently has her confined to a wheelchair with her arms paralyzed. She is in the middle of launching a national tour for her documentary on racism in health care. I don't know whether it was the particular dynamics of this job, the personalities, or the tasks, but 40 hours a week is a lot of work, especially when it's not exactly what I find rewarding, challenging, and inspiring in life.

So I quit. This was a good thing; I felt I had freed myself before getting permanently trapped.
I am being forced to make a lot of big decisions lately, and I'm finding that I am most at peace when I choose the most rebellious option. So I am currently doing one of the things I said I would do. No, not apply to graduate schools, actually. I am working part-time as an editorial assistant, freelance writing and playing music gigs. So far it's paying my ridiculously low rent for the room I share with Andy, buying some nice food, and keeping the car running. I think that's a success.

On my day off this week, I took the Metro-North train into New York to visit Columbia. I got off at 125th Street, took the bus down to 116th, and found myself in East Harlem, seven blocks from campus. Oops. So I walked back to Morningside Park and up the hill and to a great seminar on Caribbean music in the ethnomusicology department. There was more fun to be had at a lunch lecture with three scholars from Brazil, who talked about the value of participatory research, where researchers who travel to foreign countries work cooperatively with the people there, rather than continuing to objectify them as ethnomusicology and anthropology have done historically. This addressed one of the major reasons why I have had doubts about going into ethnomusicology - that it has colonial overtones of superiority, power, and the control of knowledge. This issue came up in the seminar, too, when the professor brought up the work of a controversial Ghanaian scholar who has accused the discipline of ethnomusicology, even in this day and age, of doing violence to African culture in its study of African music. The professor noted that he had been offended by this scholar's negative appraisal of the discpline as a whole, without acknowledging the past 20 years of advances in cultural studies and activist musicology. But isn't this always going to be an issue? Even if we could say that the age of colonialism had passed (and I don't think we can), aren't the issues of power and privilege still in constant play in our interactions with other societies? Aren't we bound to consider that as responsible human beings? My subsequent meeting with this professor was a little bit of a turn-off, but others in the department held my interest. The question now is timing. To stay, to go? I'm happy here, but is there more out there? Should I reach higher, jump through flaming hoops of fire?

Who knows. Tonight I cleaned the shower and that seemed like accomplishment enough.

Rewind

This is an excerpt from my Watson final report. It is strange for me to read it now, having settled back into the New England groove so (un)easily.

The essence of this year, I have to think, is really about the trip back, about coming home. I wrote in my project proposal about the “strange homecoming” of jazz when it returns to its native shores in Africa; in fact, those words were part of my project's original title, which I intended purely as a musical analogy. I had not realized at the time how this phrase foreshadowed the queer loop of a journey that I am now completing. I have traveled so many places this year and felt strangely and suddenly at home, left so many communities knowing that I had a place there. I felt my definition of home shift to include people and places wildly different and yet so welcoming and accepting. My challenge now is the return: coming back so profoundly changed, and effecting change, to a place that I have really, officially, and fondly called home for many years. I wrote that American culture carried the “remnant essence” of African culture, “like a seed on an animal's back, to its point of origin. When it arrived it found that many things had changed in its absence.” I now see that, as in many things, this proposing and hypothesizing really ended up describing the arc of my personal journey just as much as the cultural journey I was tracking.

I suspect that quite a few Watson fellows have found meaning in T.S. Eliot's lines: "We will not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." Having done my share of exploration and come 'round to start and finish both, I find that perhaps I do not know the place, or that maybe it does not know me. This “strange homecoming” is the realization that, as Jerry Garcia posited, “Wherever you go, there you are.” It is, in short, the understanding and experience of constant, identifying alienation. So, not knowing and unknown, having not yet reached the end, and with no turning back, I return to Eliot's first line. “We shall not cease...” My Watson journey does not, in fact, end with a homecoming. The arrival quickly becomes the departure as it has so many times before, and the freedom and self-reliance of my Watson mentality spills like water over a dam into the next phase of my life.

A fellow remarked at the Watson conference that he was not sure whether he felt more alienated as a lone traveler on his fellowship year or as a returned fellow with experiences that set him apart from his family and friends. And yet I am beginning to feel that this alienation actually places us in a position of insight and profound agency. What thing is there that I could not do now, having waited four hours for a tow in the middle of Mpumalanga? Having sailed up the Niger River to Timbuktu? The question is no longer if a challenge is surmountable but how. I had a discussion with Funsho Ogundipe about what it means to find out who you are and what happens once you do. He says you never go back – a true conversion experience. I don't know how much I believe in the instant change model; I prefer a long term growth diagram. But Funsho is dead right that with self-realization, there is no turning back. There is only forward and onward and upward. So this is the story of my journey as I watch it recede backwards and in reverse into the rear-view. These are the stories I tell, as I explain myself to others, and, ultimately, to myself.

As I look over my writings from West Africa, I think it was everything I had been looking for and more. Mali was a late addition to my project and completely astounded me with its depth of musical history and connections to the legendary homes of African civilization in Egypt and Ethiopia. I had never expected to find such incredible hospitality, but, with few exceptions, I found people passionate about my work and willing to help; the musical relationships I made will last me a lifetime. The opportunities I had to record with Funsho Ogundipe in Ghana, with Vieux MacFaye in Senegal, to study with Kofi Ghanaba and Djelimady Tounkara, and to perform with Bassekou Kouyate, Toumani Diabate in Mali and Baaba Maal in Senegal may never be paralleled. These people served as musical and spiritual mentors as well. I had more opportunities to teach music than ever in my life, which intimidated me at first, but I quickly found that it is something that I really enjoy, and in which people are genuinely interested. Maybe it was my status as a clear outsider that brought these opportunities so quickly my way, but regardless, this status served me well.

As a musician, my ears sharpened with more exposure to oral traditions, and my confidence grew as I became infinitely flexible, playing with groups from many different genres and cultural contexts. I gathered musical ideas everywhere I went, and started to hear new music that I could call my own. On a personal level, I discovered my potential for strength and self-reliance; but I also became acutely aware of the importance of community strength, of networking, and of interdependence.

I am just now beginning to process what I went through in South Africa, which was really a break with my experience in West Africa. I had been looking forward to South Africa for a long time, because I had read so much about South African jazz and its connection with social change. But I felt my experience there, for whatever reason, ended up being somewhat separated from the musical cultures that interested me; I found myself longing for the dirty soulfulness that had so completely enveloped me in places like Mali. I had been looking forward to Cape Town's relative comfort and organization, but this turned out to be a great deceiver, as this was the location in which I felt the least secure in all of my travels. With my levels of security and home-ness constantly in flux, it was a big shock for me to experience such a stark revision of my expectations.

But I am glad I went to South Africa; though I left feeling stripped raw, I am glad I spent so long there, and ultimately very satisfied that my experience was exclusively a Capetonian one. (I will have to save Johannesburg for the next time around.) The chance to build such an extensive network of friends and colleagues, to really use the resources in the music library at the University of Cape Town's College of Music and the Center for Public Memory, would have been interrupted by an attempt to shift my focus to Jo'burg. So I gained depth at the expense of breadth, which is just fine by me. Cape Town was a place where I could practice on a regular basis, put together a performing ensemble, attend the same jam sessions consistently, and generally become a fixture on the scene.

During my last few months in South Africa, I think I recovered my sense of what it is to have time to myself, what it is to know what I want and to go after it. I came out of this period accepting fewer excuses from myself and others and with a propensity for the frank and honest that can be shocking. I also channeled my emotions into my music; I came out of this period with a thick notebook of compositions, which I owe, in part, I think, to the prodding arm of Mac McKenzie, possibly the best musical partner I could have asked for in Cape Town. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the end result of the months I spent performing and composing with Mac was a musical synthesis of my whole year, a sonic expression of what these experiences had done to me and for me, how they have broken me and healed me, torn me down and built me up time and time again.

Home

After a truly enlightening Watson conference in steamy Tennessee and ten days in the breezy, buggy North Woods of Minnesota, I am home. Worcester hasn't changed a bit. People tell me I look the same, but I know that on the inside hidden parts I am not.

In a week, I am moving to a house in New Haven, CT, which I will share with Andy, who will start in the Forestry and Divinity schools at Yale in September; a geophysics doctoral candidate who played the baritone horn in the opening ceremonies in Beijing; a retired history professor and his librarian wife. My job search continues.

This blog will go on, I think. I'm taking suggestions for new titles.

Sometimes you can't make it on your own

Sometimes I don't blog because I feel like there's nothing new. Well, here's some news for you:

Last night, between the hours of midnight and 10 a.m., some individual or group of persons stole the carburetor, air cleaner, spark plugs, and metal plates (parts together valued at approximately $500) from the engine of my Beetle. Now, I am trying to appreciate the absurdity of the situation, but it hurts to laugh. I feel poor, powerless, and absolutely furious. I would go home early, but I don't have the money. Funny.

12 days.

One of these mornings I'm gonna rise up singing

I broke out of my funk last week and took a bus out to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival. I was really impressed. The sheer quantity, not to mention diversity, of events was overwhelming. I mostly hung out around the jazz festival and associated jam sessions, but I also checked out photography exhibitions, street theater, dance shows, spoken-word poetry, and lectures. Then there was the atmosphere. Walk around the streets and you are confronted at every corner with little boys standing stock still, faces smattered with white dust, waiting for - what? A tip? A touch? The Spirit? Marimba music moves the ground from early morning to late night. Campers in the courtyard trade herbs and secrets. Overheard: "I think I tried that the last time I was in Ethiopia." "Chew this, it will bring you strength and good things." Strength for what? To keep from falling of the edge? From losing your grip? Or will it push you over instead, to fall, only to be caught again?

I went to Grahamstown to see three things: Jo'burg avant-garde bassist Carlo Mombelli leading his group Prisoners of Strange, Mark Fransman's newly composed Suite, and the Kouga Jazz Band from Port Elizabeth. Prisoners of Strange was certainly refreshing, especially in the haunting vocals of trombonist Siya Makuzeni. Mombelli is a remarkable composer - so confident, so creative, and so good at what he does. There is nothing standard about this group. They performed a piece scored for six squeaky toys and a kazoo. All of the musicians make frequent use of loops and effects, but always with the determined aim of surprising and creating something new. I interviewed Mombelli, who told me he does think his music is South Africa, as it came out of this environment, although that does not necessarily include township jazz. But he said he prefers to think "intergalactically," rather than nationally.

But the highlight of my festival experience was Mark Fransman's Suite. The concert was advertised as jazz plus a classical string quartet and two bassists with nods to Bartok and Shostakovich, but what actually transpired was much more unusual: an hour of music of heartbreaking beauty. Perhaps it was Fransman's choice of subjects that made the pieces so moving; he dedicated one to Martin Luther King, Jr., another to his mother, and one to his first-born daughter, "At First Sight." Fransman did use two bassists, one plucking bass lines, the other playing harmony with the bow. And the string quartet provided swelling, closely-written harmonies of strange simplicity and beauty, though the avant was not explicitly in evidence. Fransman actually only performed one movement - "North" - from his Suite, a title appropriate for the first movement of a work in progress, indicating very little but the certainty of direction and perhaps the urge to travel.

But my words cannot tell you what it was like to experience this concert. How could you write with such passion, such love, such control? It gets to the heart of matter: people's lives are full of real extremes of emotion - longing, disaster, hope, triumph. Not necessarily always so dramatic, but we are human in these moments. Fransman's pieces stared this reality in the face and screamed and moaned for it. Cried out in passion. I left the hall exhausted, having reached every height and depth of love and pain, any objectivity blown wide open. I want to write music like that.

I realized that, before coming to the festival, I had begun to believe what mainstream society wants you to believe - that works of art are acts of personal expression only, not avenues for serious employment, and certainly not anything worth getting all tingly about. While listening to Fransman's Suite, I found myself reacting to the sounds and images in a way I have not in a long time; I think it is fair to say that it renewed my faith. I was reminded with a jolt that expression is always a two-way street; the music goes out and actually affects people's lives.

The group most directly related to my project was the Kouga Jazz Band, which takes traditional Xhosa music from the Eastern Cape and combines it with jazz, certainly not the first group to do such a thing, but maybe one of the first in the generation of South Africans considering itself "Born Free." The music itself is evolving, the various elements are still finding their place in their compositions. I talked to trumpeter and leader Xolani Faku, nephew of Feya Faku, who, along with Abdullah Ibrahim, was part of the Xhosa-jazz fusion during the African Renaissance back in the day. The younger Faku started out playing jazz in Port Elizabeth, but was also exposed to the music of the traditional Xhosa cultures in the Eastern Cape, especially along the Wild Coast. I asked him about his piece "Ntsikane," written for a Xhosa warrior who was also a gospel composer. Does Faku see his music as political? "We cannot detach ourselves from our environment. As a performer, you have to reflect the situation of the time," he said. "We are more like prophets. The struggle is still on. And music is the only language we have to express these things."

I began to understand that for people like Faku, the jazz-traditional fusion is as much about the urban-rural dynamic as about any politics. He is from the city, but, like many young South Africans, harbors a certain nostalgia for rural life and culture. He explained that he sees a real need for his music to be connected with the revitalization of African culture and its roots. "Detaching ourselves from Africa creates a problem," he said. "By doing this, we could even detach ourselves from who we are." The invasion of homogenized Western culture has been responsible for some of the erasure, he said, but jazz is a bridge - something that links Africa with the diaspora, and should be part of the conversation.

It's easy to forget that, under apartheid, black South Africans were essentially forced to conceive their identity as cut off from the rest of Africa. This mentality has left some ugly scars below the surface. Though the new South Africa is supposedly founded on the principles of ubuntu - that the individual exists because of, for, and in cooperation with the larger group - that "I am because we are" - recent events like the xenophobic attacks reveal that this message sounds deafly to the mindset that accompanies ongoing, debilitating poverty. Can South Africa really be a part of the African community if its leadership continues to operate on a level of increasing materialism and self-preservation?

Sitting in the International Library of African Music, listening to the strange, bluesy sounds of '50s era Zimbabwean guitarists, my research questions suddenly take on a very political tone. To ask about South Africa's relationship with the African diaspora is to breach a subject with its tendrils buried deep in the fabric of this country. There have been actual efforts, conscious or no, to wipe out the evidence of what once existed here. Excavating these roots is nearly impossible, and there are a fair number of musicologists here who are knee-deep in the Sysiphan process. Who was here first? Even the San, Xhosa, and Zulus migrated to South Africa shortly before the first European explorers arrived. Here, at what has begun to feel like the end of the world, claims to land and identity have been contested for hundreds of years.

The natural process for reconciling these differences is through syncretized culture. As Vincent Kolbe told me, "This whole mess got started with culture, and I think that will have to be the way it ends, too." To separate and divide is a colonial mindset. I am beginning to see my project for what it is: a study in post-colonialism. It is about music, yes, but it is really about globalization, about identity in a world that grows ever-smaller, in a world full of multiplying copies and fading originals. It is about how to live on earth.

Now I am back in Cape Town, staring in disbelief as one rainy day follows impossibly after the next. Doesn't globalization capture the essence of my journey? I trip, I fall onto the stage as a global citizen, and only with time am I able to grasp the largeness of what goes on around me. I am older than before, tired, harder, thinner. To go out is one thing, but to come back, changed, to effect changes, is quite another. Is this what I wanted, to grow up? I have a real urge to redress my experience, to rewrite the rules, to own myself. I long to transform, to build myself a cocoon and emerge clothed in radiant color. Though my wings are wet and heavy now, the time is coming when I will learn how to use them.

Sometimes We're Not Prepared for Adversity

Some nights, this incredible mist creeps in over the ocean and fills Cape Town with such thick fog that you can barely see six feet in front of you. It clears a bit when you climb a hill, but you are immediately plunged back into it as soon as you head for lower ground. This was the situation as I was driving home from seeing Mark Fransman's band Strait and Narrow play at the Green Dolphin. The show was great; Mark laid down his soul-styled vocals and socially-conscious raps, and the horns filled in with vintage hard bop lines, harmonized to maximum cool. This week, they are playing at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival - a ten-day extravaganza of progressive, risk-taking music, theater, film, and dance. I am going, to play, to conduct interviews, and to keep my ears wide open.

In other news, I had a large amount of cash disappear from my room last week. After searching the whole place several times, emptying shelves, replacing things, and emptying them again, I have decided that it is not there. Robbed? Again? The house has not been broken into, and I live with only two other people, a Xhosa woman and her 14-year-old son. They offer no information. Thoughts of going home early preoccupied me until recently. No, not now. Yes, now! But in the end, to leave is to lose more than to stay, and there has been quite enough loss already. It is nice to know that I don't have to stay here, but I can choose to stay here - to make of it what I will. And I will make something of it. I am poised to enter a phase of fast-moving festivity, ending the period of hibernation which has preceded it.

What else? I hang out in the UCT music library on any of our frequent rainy days. A gem: That music is tied up with identity should not surprise us. Identity is, in every context, a performative activity. So music, through "performative identifying," can allow us to express a politics, which is essentially an identification with one given group or another. I hang out with church people and talk about the problems and contradictions in the Bible. I teach brass lessons to teenagers at the Athlone Academy of Music. Athalie and I are starting to rearrange some of Bertold Brecht's work with an eye to Capetonian culture. Mac and I are putting together an album, bit by bit.

I like the way laundry looks when it hangs on the line. It has nothing to prove. Not trying to be anything it isn't.

Such a long time to be gone and a short time to be here

Somebody told me today, "Ah, but you only have a month left," as a way of saying, regretfully, that this was not enough time to accomplish a certain task. This stopped me in my tracks. Someone, somewhere, thinks that the time I have left is short? Not long enough? Besides, I don't have a month left, I have 47 days left.

I have been spending more time with Vincent. His is tired and easily irritated but seems to enjoy my company so we get on all right. He has referred me to a number of articles on Cape Town music and the creolization of culture that have spurred me on (see previous post). Sometimes Athalie (a lovely singer-friend) and I go over to his house in the morning and play some music and take him to church and maybe go out to lunch. Vincent is full of stories. He says we are all Atlanticos, which is a word he invented to mean a kind of seafaring creole that travels the ocean without a home, picking up some things at one port, carrying them to the next, leaving some parts of himself behind. We played a concert at the hospice where Vincent is a patient and each went home with flowers and olive plants in return.

Mac has found us a recording studio. I don't know how, but it is in Muizenberg in a neighborhood very close to the beach with little, tiny, winding streets that remind me of St. Louis in Senegal. There are a lot of immigrants in this neighborhood, so the whole place has a kind of charged feel about it. Mac has been encouraging me to compose more and more. This is so hard, but I really enjoy it when I can just sit and do it. Today we recorded his "Tango" and my "They Stare Because You're Beautiful" with a string section. It was so incredible to hear these harmonies that I wrote played so beautifully and so strangely. I sat with my mouth open, hardly believing it. I wrote another tune yesterday which I think I will call "Djeligoema."

Most days I struggle to be present here at all. I want the next thing - a job, a schedule, a trajectory; I want to know what it is and that everything's going to work out and there's a shape and an arc and a meaning to it all. And if not a destination I would at least like to have somewhere to point on the horizon or an interim landmark of some kind, not as proof really but just as a small kindness that will get me through today and tomorrow and the day after that.

This is the longest I've stayed anywhere. It's been good for precisely two reasons. First, I have built up a community of friends and musicians and contacts and feel relatively well taken care of. Second, I have had a chance to see what loneliness does without the escape of indulged restlessness. Before, when I started to feel too empty in a place, I would move on. I planned it this way, but in a certain sense, I've got nowhere else to go; I've run to the edge of the map. Now all that's left to do is turn around and go back.

Diversions

The conception of creolization proposed by Glissant, and developed by other West Indian thinkers, converges with Paul Gilroy's contention that identity is more a process of movement and mediation than a question of roots and rootedness.
From Denis-Constant Martin: Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities

Flyover

This morning I went hiking with some folks from church. It was cold and it almost rained, and we read the map wrong and got turned around. But it was beautiful. Beautiful to swap life stories and ambitions. Beautiful to have company. Beautiful to have a path to walk and the mountain ahead and behind and below. We had lunch at a farm stall and ate potato bread and organic licorice.

I then went to a last-minute rehearsal at Mac's for our concert for Vincent Kolbe on Sunday. Kurt Diedericks, this young piano player we've been working with, brought along his friend Galina, who plays violin. We'd been working with two string players all week and not getting the results we wanted, but this clicked and was so satisfying to hear the parts that I'd written played with technique and passion. We joked and yelled and cavorted while Mac's girlfriend Renata made vegetable pie and we ate this soon afterward.

So I rushed out of that homey place to the Africa Day film festival, where I saw Return to Goree, a documentary about Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour's musical journey from Dakar to America via Europe. This brought up so many new and old emotions for me, combining all of my homesickness as the film traveled through Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York with all my longing for friends left behind as they went through the streets of Dakar and the island of Goree. Every one of those places has a level of personal meaning to me, and to see them contextualized in the story of the African diaspora was pretty powerful.

For a film that seems to so easily encapsulate the reasons and philosophies behind my project this year, I was afraid that seeing it might make my journey seem cliche or overdone in retrospect. But the film is better than that. N'Dour's experience working with musicians in America is not always seamless; he seems to wrestle with some internal conflict the entire time, not sure what to do with himself. There is a struggle to relate to a society that seems so different, speaks another language, has learned to do things in different ways. This is part of my story: the ambiguity of putting such disparate cultures in contact with one another, but ultimately realizing that there is something very basic and very human held in common. Still, this realization comes out of a story of a lot of pain, and a lot of loneliness and alienation that it is difficult to relate without having experienced. What do you say in the face of this saga that has changed the face of the world so dramatically and so tragically? How can one feel but overwhelmed?

Amiri Baraka plays a big part in the film's section in New York; he performs a piece of poetry with atmospheric drumming: "It might take you hundreds and hundreds of years... to get out. To get out. To get out." His lips push into the microphone, enclosing the vowels and sending shivers down my back. When the music does start to come together, one cannot help but surrender a small smile, even sitting alone in a movie theater. Then, out of the struggle, you can begin to feel and to share the joy. Reunion, wholeness, understanding, empathy, communality. There is a passage with Mardi Gras Indians that made me want to up and pack my bags for New Orleans tonight. Hey Pocky Way.

A word on Africa Day. The big news this week has been the xenophobic attacks against African refugees in South Africa, starting in Alexandra, a township outside of Johannesburg. I felt the tide rising all week as I followed the headlines. Friday I learned that there had been copycat attacks on Somalians living in Cape Town's outer suburbs. Then, yesterday afternoon, there was a non-violent protest outside Parliament against the attacks attended by several hundred whiteys, hippies, and black South Africans. The protest didn't make TV news or the papers. The crews were too busy covering the bad stuff elsewhere.

I find this frustrating, and frightening. The painful irony of it is that tomorrow is Africa Day - a day for African unity. I can appreciate the mentality of a desperate, impoverished South African who is less than thrilled with the waves of refugees entering the country from troubled Zimbabwe. But that does nothing to justify his violence. Africa has had many sins perpetrated against it; for one, it has been cut up on colonial rather than cultural lines, a recipe for what seems to be continuous political unrest. What mystifies me is this sense of entitlement, the idea that because someone is of a certain color, ethnicity, or nationality, that they deserve more or less of the joy of being alive.

I am personally so thankful this week for my own joys: a safe place to stay, contact with people I love, good music and friends - and that my freedom is a freedom to rather than a freedom from.

A Very Fine House

it's a nice house. the kind of house you might visit on a cold halloween night expecting candy and uncomfortably stand in the doorway while the resident gathers the goodies and you take in the strange, pleasant odor of otherness.

On Human Relation

I forgot about flying solo, just a little bit. I forgot about the deafening silence of a house inhabited by one person for days and weeks. I forgot about the circular thought patterns, the maddening stasis of it. There is no one to come home to. There is nothing to react to but yourself, no unpredictable dish in the sink, no scuttling noises in the morning. A sneeze would be welcome. How did we fill our days?

Happiness is not real unless shared. I cannot help but feel more and more that this is true. This is designed as an individualistic endeavor. It's supposed to be about me, about my identity, what I want, what I think. On the best of days I haven't the foggiest, but one thing I do know is this: I am a communal animal. My life is inevitably, inextricably tied up in the life of every other human on this planet. And we cannot live without love. Not really.

Pictures are worth something