BIRTHDAY GRATITUDE + PRAISING VOLUNTEERS, AS MUSICIANS OF RIVERS ANSWER MOONS HONOR TWO FROM WWOZ

July 14, 2024

Today I turn 74. What an unlooked-for age! How unlikely to have lived this long! Given the six crashes at age 20 and 21 (three on motorcyle, the three in cars or truck at more than 50 MPH), and the injuries and the numberrless escapes in Woods and Oil-Field from flying Tongs and rushing Rivers and rolling logs from ages 23 to 29, I’m very lucky—blessed as if by some series of Intercessions—to have lived past 30.

This century, too, and this year of 2024 I’m inexpressibly grateful to many. Grateful for far more than can be said! Let me try, nonetheless, to sketch and sound a very incomplete roll here.

Grateful over this past year immediate family and friends. To MARYSE, COURTENAY, KENTON, PALOMA and those many of their own immediate families to whom they connect me! Grateful to all this year for the Great Help after my fall off that Cannondale bicycle into a broken hip and helpless prostration in the January darkness on the Neutral Ground just one block from home.

Grateful to musicians of River Answer Moons in 2024 and in years from 2020 onward—ROGER, KIRK, DON, HERMAN and HERLIN, MICHAEL, MARIO, and guest ERICA and to engineers DAVID, RICK, and ADAM, and to KATE and her Team for bringing Tracks round the world.

Let me ask you to enjoy one of those musicians here, KIRK JOSEPH, as he finds music to go with my reading the poem ‘Jose Cruz’ one month ago. Thanks particularly to CATHIE and DEANNA for again administering such care to those who came.

‘José Cruz’

KIRK JOSEPH on Sousaphone improvises accompaniment to this poem about one sun-bright volunteers at New Orleans’s community-radio-station WWOZ, the closing piece in RIVERS ANSWER MOONS’ first Set in Marigny Opera House, June 5, 2024.

Surprise! KIRK learns that he gets to entirely IMPROVISE to the poem ‘Jose Cruz’..

		           ‘JOSE CRUZ’ 

José Cruz—feather of light, eye of a bird—
Gave Maryse and me the portrait
Of Toussaint L’Ouverture
That he’d found in a Shop,
Then framed with his cabinet-maker’s craft,
In his third-to-last month of material being,

Cancer had bent you, José Cruz,
Like a knife over seven years.
Vertebra by vertebra, the disease’s fangs
Ate your spine like acid
Invades bone. Still you smiled up from your stoop,
José Cruz, with that so-sweet smile 
That it seems only hearts 
That know from pain can find.

“How is Carmen?”
You asked, José Cruz, 
When you, Maryse and I last met.
You champion! You conquerer yourself! 
“Émerveillé!” (one rapt with wonder) Maryse exclaims.
Angel with the most precious secret! "Give!--Give!--Give!"
Feather never less than a sun and a moon, José Cruz,
With your upturning light!

			First version 2015

After KIRK has brought audience at the Marigny Opera House to cheers and claps and shouts!

Let me continue with THANKS…. Grateful to musicians uncountable and incalculable from 1988 onward—to the Suspect Many and DHYANI, GEORGE, JOHN and JOHN and JOHN, and then GLENN, LISLE, INDIA, LARRY, MYLES, HENRY, USTAD SALAMAT and USTAD SHAFQAT … and on to the “activists” in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly, and greater New Orleans who have been my main company since 2000—SAKURA, MALIK, MARIE, MATT, WILLIE and MARY, MARK, JIM, …

Leading me to the “volunteers” who made Housing Is a Human Right (HIHR) happen, the Zippy 5-K happen, Common Ground in New Orleans, Rebuild Green (and donors such as MUNA and OLIVIA and JONATHAN and TOMMY) in the Upper 9th Ward, Restore Wesley United in Central City, and to KAVANAUGH, EVAN, ALFRED, TOM, KATRINA, and another HENRY, for their help there and in returning to performance and music. Here’s link to a piece on the TruthOut website that appreciates Common Ground volunteers from the vantage of 2013.

THANKS especially to KIDD, HAMID, and ALEX, and MORIKEBA, too.

To CYRIL and GAYNIELLE for beginning Sticking Up For Children and then THANKS to Scores of Supporters and Sponsors and above all THANKS to the Teachers, Students and Administrators who persevere in maintaining Schools and Classes for EDUCATION in HAITI. JENNIFER MAXWELL and her FOUNDATION and then the JAMBAR FOUNDATION are inimitably central in advancing progress (“SUSTAIN SUCCESS’) with SUFC over decades. I would run out of space for calling the names of musicians who stepped up at once for SUFC: IDRIS, YASIIN, EVAN again, JOHNNY, STANTON, JAMES, DAVID, BONNIE, DONALD and CHERICE and HERREAST, STEVE and LINDSAY, CHARLIE, ALFRED, ALEXEY, FANFAN, … And Supporters: PAUL, LESLIE, SUZANNE, KARLOS and STEPHANIE, the BAZAN family, KEN and MELBA, CAROL and JO-ANN, LUTHER and HOLLYWOOD and LOUIS and LISA,AND GERRY and LISA, and MATT and CALVIN, and EVE and DAN, and …

Too MANY to remember and properly acknowledge! So many that I’ve surely left out many who were and are KEYS to making much happen.

Today myu BIRTHDAY GRATITUDE primarily celebrates the literal 1000S of Volunteers who have helped for free and at cost to themselves the projects listed above.

Particularly I want to honor another Volunteer who served WWOZ, the Community Radio-Station in whose Treehouse and later homes MARYSE grew in her several Positions … over 32 years, SUZANNE CORLEY.

‘SUZANNE CORLEY’

Rivers Answer Moons engaged in ‘Suzanne Corley’—KIRK, HERMAN LEBEAUX, DON VAPPIE, and ROGER LEWIS.

‘SUZANNE CORLEY’

Suzanne rides tall in the saddle,
Bronze and copper, the Book of Kells, 
Lapidary, of and yet far 
From the Holler,
Wind her challenge and wind her friend.
She’s so Romantic that it hurts.

Those Mountains that she had to leave
Still were her Grandma’s wit, 
Fixed like a fox in gloaming. 
Paths to light must be of no doubt.
Suzanne knew Brasil 
Before she played for us its musics.

For sure! Books open into the world.
"Beautiful music, beautiful songs."
A dancing woman and a dancing man.
Let her share them as they’ve given to her.
Castanets--Berimbau--flaring coils, folds and leaves.
Strange how long adventures tempted.
Strange how through care depths of love grow.
Strange almost to Celtic laughter 
How awful news can be!
What this poor body and fierce will could bear!
Courage! Courage! Suzanne offering Saturdays
The ‘World Journeys’ that had found her a
And Sundays with Mike their parties,
Parties laid out for pleasure like her walls 
Of reds or greens or orange—
Tropicalia and Caravaggio…. 
Courage and compassion 
Were the arrows in her married.

			First version April 27, 2021

Also, I would be awfully remiss if failing to HIGHLIGHT to their Deserved Heights and Breadths two whose never-ending contributions and imaginations bring New Orleans-based riches to the world: ANGELA KING of her GALLERY and her EVOLVE events and JACKIE HARRIS of the LOUIS SATCHMO ARMSTRONG SUMMER JAZZ CAMP and—looking Northeastward to Queens, New York City—the LOUIS ARMSTRONG HOUSE and its many activies.

Special Thank-You’s to JENNIFER and JAMBAR and to KATRINA and Frey Vineyards

and to surgeon Dr. CLARK and chief Physical Therapist FRED for Dr. Clark’s installing and Fred and his very good team’s nurturing “Little Packy”, the 2-pound “stirrup” / ‘Total Hip Replacement’ of Titanium that has become a trusted and vital friend since his arrival, two days after I was face-down on Neutral Ground, last January.

THANKS VERY MUCH to Substack, as well, for providing such ample and easy-to-use capacities of MEDIA!

More can be seen and heard about José Cruz and Suzanne Corley and another superlative Show-Host over WWOZ, K Balewa, on this Substack of March 2023.