DANIEL
« CHÉRI-BIBI » PARIS-CLAVEL – DOMINIQUE MISSLIN – NDH MUSIC – BEFORE
REGGAE – 2013
Jamaica is a mythic place in this
world and probably in a few others too. I came across it a long, very long time
ago when I was involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement and of course in the
wider approach that was mine of the Black movement in the USA, after Africa
mind you, I learned the Soucous and the Bouchez before I knew what the calypso
and what’s more the Ska was or were. I must admit I had even twisted before and
I was fully in what Leopold Senghor called “Les Arts Nègres”. I came back from Africa loaded with Rochereau and Docteur Nico and so many
others.
After Africa I went to the USA
and on the homecoming night of my high school in North Carolina, what was not
my surprise when I found myself dancing alone to the music of the black band
over there on the stage and all around me there was a ring of students,
teachers, black and white interlaced to my pleasure and taste and they were all
admiring my dancing not on the simple superficial rhythm that generally serves
as the tempo to the singing, but to the deeper trance rhythm that was three or
four time faster and if my arms were mostly following the slow rhythm my feet
and the rest of my body was following, galloping along with the faster rhythm.
When I finally realized what was happening, because I was in a total blizzard
of blindness at this moment, I just did not understand at the time what was the
problem, especially for the Black students around me. That’s how I had learned
to dance to the various rhythms of African music, and especially to the rhythm
that goes deep into your mind while the heart more or less follows the slower
pace. At least for a while. When the heart gets up to the faster rhythm, then you
see stars, you see the sky, you see God and his angels and you start believing
that beyond that dull surface of everyday humdrum and monotonous life there is
a world of beauty and light and happiness and love and love and love again and
that love has no longer anything to do with sex because you are entirely in
your spiritual and supernatural mind and
you have left your hormones far behind or below.
Then you know that there are no
races in the human species, just one species and some various nuances, shades,
hues that are in fact the beauty of the whole species, to be multifarious like
an apple tree in spring when it blooms. It is all in pink and yet there are not
two blooms that are exactly the same shade of pink.
Since then a lot of rum has flowed
under and flown over the bridge of many noses and the world has changed. It was
the time when decolonization was only granting independence to all the peoples
who were not free. It was not an easy process and it took many leaders who were
assassinated like flies, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy, and thousands of others, to move our species up to some kind of
understanding that our Black brothers are not apes and that their white
brothers are not necessarily the monsters some were, have been and still are.
There will always be a Willie Lynch in all generations, even if the most recent
couple in that line is two brothers from Chechnya, naturalized in the USA and
turning back and biting the hand that had picked them from the mud of their
ditch in the Caucasus and they just blew up a couple of bombs among peaceful
people for no reasonable reason at all. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders have
their reasons that reason does not understand.
It takes time for the Whites of
this world to understand that all the shades of darkness and color are as
beautiful as the rainbow after rain and for all the non-Whites of this earth to
understand that they have to share their old traumas with those of the Whites
and build another world. And yet it is coming and this collection of music is one
of the most important testimonies of that period from 1950 to 1962 when it all
tilted up and then down again after turning around and it was then ready to
start moving forward again in some more realistic way than before, and with
everyone trying to pull in the same direction. It would be though a folly to
believe that at any time in history everyone can really be pulling in one
single direction.
These twelve years in Jamaica
corresponded to the twelve years during which all the colonized Blacks in
Africa and all the segregated and discriminated Blacks in the USA and some
other countries started to “decolonialize” their minds and to recapture their
spirituality and their vision of the future of the human species as a vast
field of understanding, exchanges and love, love, love, beyond hormonal pangs and
yet without negating these hormones, the hormones becoming an option for those
who felt them, an accepted option for all and by all (the government of the
hormones by the hormones and for the hormones as it is said of the people
somewhere else) and we are still far from the goal when we see how so many
still believe that love has to be kept within some particular hormonal pulses,
impulses and drives. For them, for those, same has to be the rule for these
hormones if we are dealing with color and different has to be the rule if we
are dealing with sexes and genders. Understand if you can? I can’t admit that
contradiction as being human. It is purely ideological and it has little to do
with religion, mind you, but a lot more with the old, very old, drive of Homo
Sapiens towards conquering the immensity of the unknown and dangerous world
around them. They had to multiply the legs, the arms, the chests, the breasts,
the mouths and all that goes along with these elements, thoughts, languages,
migrations, activities and so on to an end that is always as evasive, though
not inoffensive, as the wind on a stormy day.
But we can only hear what is
being born in this period from ska to calypso, from boogie to doo wop and so
many other styles emerging from the
manure and compost of history.
It is so easy to reduce all that
to some class or race or sex discourse in spite of the fact that it is the
power of the deepest and most enduring anthropological force in the human
species that is at work here. The road is going to be long and the Messianic
destination is not yet reached. If you try to feel that music in that direction
you will understand that you can be in love with Miss Jamaica and yet never
rape her or be raped by her because it is love we are talking of and that Miss
Jamaica is your mental doppelganger and life will decide what and who that Miss
Jamaica will be. If she is a musician she might be our muse. If she is a thinker
she might be our guru or our messiah. But she has no reason to be of any sex,
any gender, any color. She has to be of the sex, gender and color you want her
to be for your pleasure and your future.
If you can go deep down into your
darkest layers of the foundations of your soul, you might come to realize that
there are many rhythms in your body and that happiness is the coordination of
them all in order to produce a controlled and regulated movement that we call
life or dance. Then music is the language of the human soul and it is a purely
human invention, universal in all its dimensions, even if the polyrhythmic
power of modern music found its sources in the percussions of the African
continent and survived all the lynching frenzy and brain washing hysteria our
human hierarchical mind has imposed and still imposes and will probably always
impose to some it considers as subhuman, non-human or just inferior, the human
mind of those who are sitting on top of the wall. But they just forget, those
higher up potentates, that Humpty Dumpty sooner or later has a great fall.
And it is going to hurt if you
haven’t prepared your bones for the fall. Get into that music and grow some
wings for the future. And remember even if someone is a bore and tries to
dominate you, you can always be resilient and resist and follow the example of
carpenters in France
who sang all together in a workshop when the foreman was being a dictatorial
dummy a song that gores back to the Middle Ages:
« Elle a cassé sa jambe
« Sa jambe en palissandre
« C’est en montant
« Sur les ch’vaux d’ bois
« Qu’elle a cassé
« Sa jambe en bois. »
(She broke her leg, her leg in
rosewood. It’s when she climbed on the wooden horses on the merry-go-round that
she broke her wooden leg.)
And then you just start all over
again, and if you can sing, you can whistle, and if you cant whistle you can
hum, even if it is out of tune, provided it follows the proper tempo, and it
can last two hours, as long as necessary to kick the foreman out of the
workshop. When I see the way the Blacks have resisted to the worst ever
holocaust in human history, I really believe they were all carpenters and they
all knew how to sing the worst devils into a deadlock. They had dreadlocks in
their minds and they could hold on these to survive one more day and one more
night to transmit one more recollection, one more heritage to those who will
survive them and who will then one day turn these recollections and that
heritage into the all absorbing spiritual tool that will become the soul of the
whole humanity. Welcome to the antechamber of one of the universal souls,
Reggae.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 10:07 AM