moon traveller herald

I'm so gla d to be here tonight I'm so glad to be in your wonderful city And I got a little message a friend told me a few months back Talking about the Re verend Solomon Burke , you all know him dont ya? And these were the very words that he told me, children. He said Everybody needs somebody Everybody needs somebody to love... also see 2005 note on passing of Wilson Picket

Labored this weekend on Electronic Bard System Monograph on work of Ed Sanders. Always encountering news stuff... the Ondes Marento , the Mellotone, Harry Parch. In conversation with Ed I was introduced to Parch. He is noted for a tuning system with 43 notes in an octave. Most especially, Parch created his own instruments (see Jelly fish-like glass bell example above), to get the sound he wanted. Friday's NYTimes discussed Parch: "In the Forest of Instruments, Signs of Evolution." Parch is in a pantheon with John Cage, Robert Moog, Leon Theremin, Raymond Scott. With Cage, I'd venture that Parch influenced the Performance Art movement in New York in the '60s - a formative mileu for Sanders. New York in those years was a mesh for sure. This mesh including Dylan, Tiny Tim, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Cage and Glass, Andy Warhol and Phillip Guston. Several times Sanders pointed out he did not go as far as Parch - Sanders used 31 notes - or 'cents' - on his M...

I may kill this blog if Google does not improve its support of basic MS commands and functions.

Hey did I tell anybody the Moon Traveller is on summer sojourn? Yup, I'm working on a symphony in the Berkshires. Hope that's duly noted. Till Fall yall! When the grants run out!

The blues line is a long line but it reached magnificent acme in the work of artistssuch as Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Chester Burnett, John Lee Hooker, McKinley Morganfield, Roosevelt Sykes and others among an initiate group that grew up (in very many cases) in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and in many other cases survived to venture north to Chicago and Detroit and be recorded. Their work ultimately influenced culture, art and music, including 1950s' and 1960s' rock n roll and rock. These blues poets forged art under conditions of poverty and repression as well as amidst frantic social and technological upheaval, and their music reflected a syncopated and prophetic world that still obtains. In "Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," poet John Sinclair takes the meager history that has built up around the above mentioned and other essential blues artists, applies a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form, and magically and quite sympathe...

A couple of years agoe we had a discussion, trying to remember encounter with Ginsberg and Dylan. We each remembered different things in different relief. Kind of like the four gospels, which diverge somewhat. I wrote a version down around 1976 or 1977, that Jan and Val Mazelis ran in Shoreline Erosion, which I have altered since then to be more a flat out prose poem. Because it was nearer the event I take it to be possibly accurate. Last summer when I saw Dave in NYC he'd just gotten note from late Allen Ginsberg via a friend who'd he told this story too. Al's advice at end same as start: First thought best thought! I have at times since then this to brood over : Read Chronicles. Where schmucks were parking out on Dylan’s roof - like raccoons - as no doubt he tried to sleep. We weren’t too different. Can’t take back lost time or call as a witness those Wheels on Fire. I wish I’d been less than dumb star infatuated fan. Wish I hadnt told Ginsberg I was 'looking for s...

Before a bardic push, a respite. Reading on the backporch, 2010.