DHYANI DHARMA MAS and His Marvelous Guitar. All Three Musicians Play with Great Heart in "Fat Snake Cruise".

What Happens When You've Played Gutiar since Age 4

Above: DHYANI in Darmstadt 1980s, DHYANI in concert 1990s, DHYANI with USTAD SALAMAT ALI KHAN and CLENN SPEARMAN in a montage made by ARISTIDE PHILLIPS from his Video for the Track “Solitude" / “Raga Puriya in the album by the group URNA, titled Journey To The Beloved. The fourth member of URNA ia the likewise great USTAD SHAFQAT ALI KHAN.

Alove, more artistry by ARISTIDE, evoking the attention with which DHYANI brings out what his guitar has to offer.

On a different note, “Fat Snake Cruise” is an ANGRY song. An angry ROCK song. It came to me around the same time, circa 1994, that “Many Fine Years Of Bombing.” arrived our of our collective air. 30 years ago the Clinton Administration and its bombings of Iraq appalled me into furies of remembrance and recognition. The slaughter-by-missiles of civilians in Bagdad threw back to me images of children shrinking away from bombs or gunfire in Vietnam and Nicaragua (where I was in 1987 and ‘88), Panama and Chiapas (where I was in 1994). The attacks’ raison d’etre took the form of a Continents-spanning metaphor for its Evil, Force, and Pathologically Devouring Purpose—”Fat Snake Cruise”.

As a close advisor just said: “Fat Snake needs a Prison Diet.”

“Fat Snake Cruise”

with MYLES BOISEN electric bass, DHYANI DHARMA electric guitar, TOM SCANDURA drums-set, bullroarer, and percussion, and DON PAUL voice, whirly-toy, and percussion.

“FAT SNAKE CRUISE”

Fat snake rolling dry riverbed                                                      
Fat snake cruises over our heads                                               
Fat snake's colors pretty as flags                                               
Fat snake's scales falling like rags

     Imagine!   Imagine!   Imagine!

Fat snake so old it never was born                                             
Fat snake so long it touches each Pole                                     
Fat snake's eyes brighter than jets'                                           
Fat snake's tongue has got talking heads 

Fat snake moves like Desert Storm                                            
Fat snake leaves waste after holes                                             
Fat snake must hunger for more                                                 
Fat snake bound to eat a home whole

       Imagine!   Imagine!   Imagine!

Fat snake slithers up your child                                                  
Fat snake's senses bead for the kill                                           
Fat snake's skin cold to the warm                                              
Fat snake coils round the young form                                       
Fat snake squeezes tighter than tight                                       
Fat snake chokes and crushes screams                                   
Fat snake swallows from head or feet                                       
Fat snake fatter                                                                            
 Fat snake fatter                                                                               
Fat snake fatter                                                                         
From the end to dreams.

I happened to see my neighoor in North Beach, San Francisco, LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI on Stockton Street just after finishing “Fat Snake “
”Hey,: I said, “can I show you something?”

The next day Lawrence took the trouble to climb stairs and knock on my door. “I taped your poem up on the entry-door to the store,” he said, meaning City Lights Books.

“Wow! Wow! That’s so good! You are always S0 generous, Lawrence. I love you!”

(Lawence’s email to me in 2012, responding to my forwarding to him again my review of his book Americus I, can be read HERE. He refers to a tree, one that I’d planted and after wind-storms replanted in front of 1852 Stockton. ‘//// P.S.  Your Permanent Contribution to North Beach is flourishing on Stockton street. It is now twenty feet tall!’

On to DHYANI—DHYANI DHARMA MAS—the artist to be celebrated in this Post. Dhyani was my closest and most prolific collaborator in the S.F. Bay Area from 1989 to 2005. We met in early October 1989, soon after I got back from one month of living close to radiators in Leningrad, Barcelona, London and Paris. The novelist PETER PLATE had extolled this musician, his then name Jean Luc Mas, after Peter and I got acquainted through the first Rebel Poets’ compilation-album, Worlds Made Flesh.

Above, the front and side of Cassette for Rebel Poets’ Worlds Made Flesh, with graphic-art by SETH TOBOCMAN, another person whom Peter Plate introduced to me. Then: the Poets and Musicians involved in this compilation.

Peter said: “I’ve seen a slew of these guitar meister-slingers, but this guy, Jean Luc, does things I’ve never seen or heard before. You two should meet.”

I went to the not-quite-Outer-Mission flat on Chenery Street—a little uphill from the convergence of Mission, Guerrero and Dolores Streets—that Jean Luc shared with a rebellious Israeli couple and an antic Argentine videographer named Claudio. Prayer-bowls from India sat on bookshelves that held paperback volumes of Freud in French. Jean Luc burned incense and we drank glasses from liters of Taj Mahal bought at the corner Market. He was quick to laugh and intent in listening and we were fast friends, delighted and uplifted by how we gelled. The guitarist sat cross-legged and found Chords as readily as he might have rolled ingredients into a bread or picked flowers.

Getting together about once a week over the next month, we wrote “Ladies After Midnight”, “We Could Use The Rain”, “Fine As You Are”, “Life Is Change And Love ’s In Life”, and other songs. One session coincided with the Loma Prieta earthquake. Driving up Mission past Cesar Chavez Street that afternoon, I’d wondered why people were spilling out of Bars. “It was really an earthquake,” Jean Luc said. We worked with candlelight over a tray of Pita Bread, hummus, and the glasses of amber Taj while a wavering, static-filled transistor-radio told us of the carnage from collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland across the Bay.

Rehearals formed the core of the first Suspect Many band—John Baker on keyboards, George Cremaschi on fretless and upright bass, and John Karr on guitar and midi-guitar, and Jean Luc on 12-string, slide, electric and acoustic guitar. We were blessed with Babatunde Lea as principal on drums-set for the album, We Could Use The Rain, that we recorded over a three-day Lockout at the Olde West studio, south of Market in San Francisco, December 1989. Kenny Blackman or Randy Gallerin joined us on drums-set for Tracks then, along with Richard Howell on tenor and alto saxophone, Lewis Jordan on alto saxophone, Mike Rose on trumpet, and James Henry on percussion. Peter Eckert was our engineer. Again I was in whirling heaven with the multiplicity of possibilties that a recording-studio gives.

Over the next year Dhyani—he was in process of fully changing his name from Jean Luc, as I recall, to Dhyani Dharma Mas—met often to work on songs that would be part of the next album, Love Is The Main Flame, and we went to hear music.

I learned more about his complex story. He was born in 1956 and raised in Nice, France, son of a Roma father who was high-up in France’s Military—a Roma so trusted that he was among those chosen to arrest the Generals for ‘French Algeria’ after their Putsch disintegrated. His mother was French and Buddhist. He was handed a child’s guitar at age four and enrolled in a Buddhist monastery at age 8. He studied Flamenco under Andres Segovia with Paco de Lucia as a fellow student in Spain. He toured with a Rock band named The Paratroopers. He excelled in Academies of France as a Composer and a Soloist. Pierre Boulez named him Assistant within the Paris Opera. He worked with the also young Luciano Pavarotti and with John Cage and Iannis Xenakis

He married a woman of the Gambia and they had two children, a boy and a girl and both in their photos beautiful.

“Let me ask you,” I said during our second or third session in the front room overlooking Chenery Street, “with all this happening, ayou to Paris and France, why did you leave?”

”Yes, well, but I was in love with the Blues. I loved other musics of the Americas, but especially the Blues. I wanted to know the old guys, while they are with us, and I wanted to transcribe them and document them like they were Classical music.”

Later in 1995, following sessions in Oakland’s Gerrilla Euphonics of the Coaxers recording Rock for the album Fat Snake’s Tongue Has Got Talking Heads, another collaboration arose—the group URNA (the Urdu word for Flight) with Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and his son Ustad Shafqat, tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman, and Dhyani. Completing the recording of Journey To The Beloved were John Baker on syntheziser, Tim Witter on tabla, Zeke Neely on congas, and Rifat Ali Khan (a gifted singer and bandleader) on tamboura.

Dhyani learned 73 ragas in less than two months to prepare with this session with fellow masters. Mark Keaton and Myles Boisen were our engineers.

Here he and Glenn accompany Ustad Salamat between 4:27 and 5:52 HERE for a taste of their capacities. (Thank you again, ARISTIDE, for the evocative and moving video!(

Please hear, too, another sample of Dhyani’s skills and sympathy—the Track ‘Toward End of Candomblé’ from the compilation album WOMEN and MUSIC, Meld #2, selected by the New Orleans Public Library and a panel of listener for the new Crescent City Sounds platform that give high-quality streaming to dozens of albums recently released by ‘New Orleans-sourced’ artists.

DHYANI’s two albums under his own name, available online, are/

DUENDE LATINA with JAMES HENRY and MARCOS SANTOS, 1993

GUITAR CONCERTOS with the SAN FRANCISCO SINFONIETTA ORCHESTRA, 2001

DHYANI DHARMA MAS and Director ULF LEONHARDT STEINER, featuring DHYANI’s “Voodoo In The Mission”

I hope very much that you’ll continue to enjoy DHYANI DHARMA MAS!