"Life Is Change And Love 's In Life". DHYANI DHARMA MAS electric slide-guitar, BABATUNDE LEA drums-set, and GEORGE CREMASCHI electric fretless-bass. A very Power Trio from the SUSPECT MANY band.
Earlier Stands The Human Being Substack Posts have sung high praises of the wonders that Buddhist Gypsy DHYANI DHARMA MAS performs on Guitar.
Acoustic Guitar; 12-String Acoustic and Electric Guitar: 6-string Electric Guitar; and—now—Electric Slide Guitar. Perhaps you’ve heard someone play with the furious expertise of Dhyani on this Track; I’ve heard nothing that much compares to what he renders here. The speed, precision, and ferocity.
His background explains some things. Beginning Gutiar at age 4. Removing to a Buddhist monastery at age 8—his mother’s intuition. Training under Andreas Segovia with Paco de Lucia as a teen-ager in Spain—that tutelage partly of his Roma heritage. Playing with the Paratroopers Rock band at the same time as he was Pierre Boulez’s assistant in the Paris Opera…. I was VERY BLESSED to have Dhyani as a creative collaborator over the 15 years 1989 to 2004.
GEORGE CREMASCHI is a musician and creator of fantasic capacities. George’s Bass is flawless, whether Acoustic or Fretless Electric, on overy one of the 13 of 14 We Could Use The Train Tracks on which his plays. He’s out rhythm and our rolling Gibralter. He was/is as principled a person as he was/is a worker and creator.
George circa 2010.
with JOHN KARR a rehearsal, Spring 1990.
BABATUNDE LEA helped me out from the first Track I cut at Olde West in San Francisco, Summer 1988. My brother KENTON HULME led me into music and supported me into songs. JAMES SCHAEFER was our Drums-Set player. Babatunde then played congas, a huge bag-full of percussion, and more on the two Rebel Poets’ compilation. The Last Poets were lucky to have him, too. He’s among the most all-round of grounded of musicians.
“Life Is Change And Love ‘s In Life”
Life is change and love ’s in life
What you expect when you play with a knife?
Think you can drink, your thirst slake,
And not wake up with a crazy headache?
You go that far, you hope that high
You can’t escape how natures lie
No one ’s ideal, no one ’s so right
Want that much you make your own plight
(BREAK)
It ain’t all good, it ain’t all bad
A matter of need, not one of should
It ain’t all over, it ain’t all past
All things must rise like they ebb and smash
You’re just fine, you’re just yourself,
When you know that you don’t need any help
(SOLO and OUT)
Now, the couplets of “Life Is Change […] “ may seem rather a gauntlet of harsh jolts. The song came to me along freeways between Albany, New York and Detroit, Michigan, May of 1989. A performance at the Detroit Institute of Arts had been set up by JOHN SINCLAIR. I would get to meet John and poet/performer RON ALLEN at the show. The date was my last in “a tour”—call it—that started at Bullet Space through THOM CORN on the Lower East Side, went to a bar in New London with the beautfilly lyrical MAUREEN OWEN, and did two performances at the Berklee School of Music in Boston with ever-astute ELIZABETH MCKIM as host and co-reader. Albany was dinner with RAY and JANICE NEWKIRK, friends from distance-running.
Another friend percolated on my mind over the Albany to Detroit drive. He’d lately lost a girlfriend, a fiery girlfriend, into whom he’d invested a lifetime of hopes, say. He’d admitted to me that he could “hardly move.” I knew the feeling from a year before. Hence the couplets, meant to be recuperative, and the Blues tune … that DHYANI, BABATUNDE and GEORGE made a proper dynamo.
This Substack will post poems by Ron Allen—as evocative, sincere, unique and warm as writer as is imaginable—from the first Rebel Poets’ compilation, Worlds Made Flesh, soon.
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