'About Reinaldo [...]' with RICHARD HOWELL, TONY KHALIFE, and KAYLAH MARIN

Stands the Human Being

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'About Reinaldo [...]' with RICHARD HOWELL, TONY KHALIFE, and KAYLAH MARIN

Angels CAN do more than sing

Don Paul

May 30, 2025

Transcript

Welcome to glad surprises—thanks to Richard Howell, Tony Khalifé, Kaylah Marin—and to the pair who brought the four of us into improvising together, the poets and performers Opal Palmer Adisa and Devorah Major!

I happened on this recording of ‘About Reinaldo […] while digging in this or that computer and hard-drive for a digital “Blue-Eyed Boy” from the 1989 album Against The City / We Can Have Everything. The “About Reinaldo […] in this Substack Post is from an Album whose existence—to be abashedly honest—I’d forgotten since moving to New Orleans in January 2006, Center Of Some Dreams.

Center of Some Dreams arose out of a gathering in San Francisco’s then new Club Nouveau Jazz, nearby Ghiradelli Square in the western edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, organized by my friends and fellow Rebel Poets Opal Palmer Adisa and Devorah Major.

Devorah was in 2004, as I remember, the Poet Laureate for the City of San Francisco. She and Jamaica-horn Opal formed the Daughters of Yam duo to perform and record their poems with music. I’d co-produced their first cassette album, fierce/love, with John Purcell, Saxophones, and Bassist Dewayne Oakley and Drummer Anthony Brown in 1991. We’d remained collaborators and friends. Around 2002 I’d mastered their second album, a great one, The Tongue Is A Drum, produced by Edsel Matthews of Yoshi’s in Oakland, with their musicians and co-creators Richard Howell Saxophones, Kash Killion cello, and Babatunde Lea drums-set and percussion.

The gathering on September 1, 2004 was to “try out” what looked to be a very promising venue, Club Jazz Nouveau. We invited poets Agneta Falk and Jack Hirschman and musicians Henry Kaiser and Jonathan Richman to perform at our “party.” It made for a lot of happy first-time meetings. The recording of ‘L.A.’ is for sure. I think, the only occasion on which Jonathan plays Drums-Set and Henry Bass-Guitar together.

This ‘About Reinaldo [ …] ‘ is pure Improvisation and as such may be Inspiration to anyone creating impromptu and from scratch. Neither Richard or I had met singer Kaylah Marin or guitarist Tony Khalife before this night.

All that I said to Kaylah and Tony regarding ‘About Reinaldo […]’ before we performed it: was that “a feeling of Duende, something like Camaron expresses, might work” for it. How we gelled—how Tony and then Kaylah jumped full-on into the piece and dug deep and high, while Richard’s was hitting, as is his character high and apt riffs of heart—you may judge. I think all three are here, as Marsyse said: “GREAT!” As for moi, well, I miss many lines from middle and closing stanzas of the poem, and hence blocks and nuances meant to set off the whole are lost … But—thank Heavens—the three’s voices are always impassioned and the piece works, I think, as a “wrenching” (Maryse again) illumination of the needless suffering Reinaldo Arana and then Norman Valee, were forced by the State to undergo.

The subject of ‘A.I.D.S.’ raises Dr. Anthony Fauci to our view. Let me for this Post simply offer three Links that show how Fauci killed hundreds of thousands of Gay men with the AZT Treatment that he knew was toxic during the 1980s and 1990s … just this Dr. from 2020 onward killed millions with his insistence over four years that the United States’ and the world’s public needed mRNA ‘ ‘vaccines’ “ against “ ‘COVID’ “.

For Anthony Fauci to be Prosecuted, Exposed, Convicted and Imprisoned due to his Crimes against humanity would uplift our world.