February 16, 2025
(Beginning the Text here after a Part of “Get Your JAM On!” plays.)
Yes indeed! Everyone indeed has special gifts, as Bob Dylan remarked within his John Wesley Harding Album and as Kirk Joseph said during the Launch-Party for LOUISIANA STORIES at the Angela King Gallery last December. Every person has a distinction, Kirk said, and knowing this is very important for our world, he said, and he couldn’t be, I think, more right.
KIRK JOSEPH on playing: "We all have a distinction.... When we learn as a people to respect that and understand that, then I think things will be more beautiful, and as a human race we will grow.”
Above, KIRK JOSEPH acknowledges audience’s applause after his playing in the improvised duet to the tribute-poem ‘José Cruz’, Marigny Opera House, New Orleans, June 5, 2024.
You over there indeed have a flair for that, and you right here have a flare for this. Nobody can dance like you can walk. Nobody can draw like you can see. And nobody can do a Funny Walk like you can dance. God and Gods indeed made all skin-tones, as Erica Fall endorses in the “Get Your JAM On!” song, and God and Gods would like Black=White-Yellow-Red-Brown and In-Beween to more than get along and to even flourish together. And Louisianans with their.our existing mix, men and women “of crossed Races”, is especially favored for flourishing.
And so … Let us praise the Special Guests of DPRAM (Don Paul and Rivers Answer Moons) on LOUISIANA STORIES.
Please check out Herlin Riley’s two Albums as leader on Mack Avenue, New Direction and Perpetual Optimism. They’re very fine and loaded with excellence and creativity.
Please hear Erica Falls as leader of her band, Vintage Soul. They’re exquisite and they’re ecstatic.
Mario Abney and Michael Torregano Jr. are likewise bandleaders, rich in skills and ideas and energies.
So we have in New Orleans and across Louisiana this Steaming, Intertwining, Heady Mix … that’s also found in Lynn Drury and her band of 2025 and in their Album High Tide. Just last Friday at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans Maryse and I caught Lynn and band deliver a Set that just kept on gelling and rising, as perfect and moving a Set of Songs and Rock’n’ Roll as I’ve heard in, oh, any Valentine’s Day.
Please check out more about Lynn and HER great band.
Lynn sings on the next Track we’ll hear, “Some Rain Tonight”, a song that came to me one Saturday in May 2010, as the ‘BP Oil Spill’ spread its nonsensical poisons into the Gulf of Mexico and the Public suffered more and more abuse. “It’s like they just don’t want us to have any fun,” one young man of a shrimping said to me in Parking-Lot then. “Maybe not even any food of our own,” I said.
Special thanks, again, to that special Patti Smith for putting my essay about the ‘BP Oil Spill’ in the Souvenance section of her Website. Patti, you know, is about the epitome of empathy and soulfulness herself.
More about “Some Rain Tonight” and Patii and that ‘BP Oil Spill’ here.
Right now, February 2025, do we feel: “Crime goes on so long as we keep still”? And is it: “Sure be time we take control” Yes indeed—Yes indeed—Yes indeed!
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