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How lucky we are to know GREAT COMPANY!
Above, I'm a happy fella with Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul in Little Haiti, Miami, January of 2023. after Maryse and I brought computers and JAMBARS for students in Haiti. Photo by Maryse.
Mme. Franck Paul, Maryse's aunt, now 87, is founder and Principal of College Canapé-Vert in Port-au-Prince. Click to visit our Partners in education at stickingupforchildren.com. Again, many are those who do good ... without an iota of A.I.!
Leftward, lights are strung about a Live Oak in New Orleans City Park by a Park volunteer, Christmas-time of 2022. We make these freely adorned lights Symbol for the TRACK-A-DAY feature that's staring on July 30. 2023. Over 100 songs and poems for music have come to me since 1988. What better can I do than give back from the brilliance that partner musicians have delivered?
First track offered on the Sticking Up For Children (SUFC, don't-cha-know?) Jukebox is "Bobee (What A Spirit Walks That Way)" from Roger Lewis' album ALRIGHT!. We start with three excerpts from Roger, Herlin Riley and Kirk Joseph of the Rivers Answer Moons band and then. come Wednesday July 2, "Bobee ..." with Herlin and me on vocals.
Happy as we may be to enjoy great families and friends, wherever we live, we know by now, July of 2023, that we, the working-class and middle-class people of the world, are under Global
Attack. Those Corporations that lack conscience (the 100 Strategic Partners of the World Economic Forum for prime examples) have embarked from 9/11/01 into " 'COVID-19' " forward
on programs to use Big Lies and 21st-century technologies (technologies that are our classes' inventions) to reduce our freedoms more into mass enslavement or mass 'Sudden Death Syndrome'. Our genius, however, rebels and re-arises with irresistible compassion and creativity. My pieces in the Flipping the Script blog over on the WeAreRevolutions website and pieces on the Stands the Human Being blog and Substack are offerings that combine with many, many--millions unto billions--who REALLY 'Improve' humanity through their insights and resistance.
ALBUMS. Three from I/R Records are among the top 25 Jazz albums charted by Roots Music
ReportS for the year 2022. Listen on Bandcamp and Download in full fidelity there.
The World Economic Forum and its 100 Strategic
Partners among especially exploitative Corporations of the Neo-Colonial world are waging a War Against Humanity that has accelerated over the past four years under covers of " 'COVID' " and " 'Climate Change' ". Call it the WEF WAH for short.
The series of WEF Files profiles, offered here through my Stands the Human Being blog and Substack presents leading Agenda Contributors to the WEF as extremely driven and energetic individuals ... who have become pathological imbeciles in their services to the WEF's global Techno-Fascism, the WEF's 21st-century 'New World Order' of enslavement by Banks of the Northern Hemisphere.
Among the profiled are J. Michael Evans of Ali Baba (and once of Goldman Sachs), Helen Hai of Binance and the United Nations, and more obvious subjects such as Bill Gates, Chrystia Freeland, and Justin Trudeau.
"Prosecute 'Em!", cataloging crimes against masses of
humans during our " 'COVID-19' " era, is part of my
'Stands the Human Being' blog and Substack.
You are one / Light among / Many Lights, / Ever-changing, / Invaluable, / And meant to shine / Ev'ry moment of our lives.
GALLERY
Come On In
MUSIC and LISTENING
After the show for my 70th birthday-party, with the great creators Herlin Riley and Roger Lewis, at Sidebar NOLA, July 14, 2020. Image by Maryse Philippe Déjean. Painting by Isabelle Jacopin of France and New Orleans, her "Little Music Maker" for Sticking Up For Children, in the background.
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Decades ago. Listening to Raphe Malik and Glenn
Spearman during our 'Threeway Freeway' show in
Berkeley, CA, 1993. Photo by Eleanor Lindgren.
With Glenn (and Myles Boisen, Donald Robinson, and J.R. Routhier) in the Elbo Room, San Francisco, 1995/
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Recording "Love Is The Main Flame" with Joi Joi (Michelle Jacques, Louise Robinson and Darlene Spears) in Olde West studio, San Francisco, 1981,
With Kidd Jordan and Morikeba Kouyayé in the session at Rick G. Nelson's Marigny Studio that recorded Women Center Earth, Sea, Sky. Stills from video by Aristide Phillips.
Kidd and I performing 'Fanfare', a poem from and for Glenn Spearman, in Café Istanbul at the May 1, 2014 benefit for Jackie Harris' and her team's Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp in New Orleans.
WRITERS and OTHER WORKERS
With Roger Lewis. Herlin Riley and Kirk Jospeh of Rivers Answer Moons in the Marigny Studio of musician and engineer Rick G. Nelson,
August 2021. Photo by Maryse Philippe Déjean.
Drilli-rigs being assembled along Highway 90, Louisiana, 1977. "Like dark, steel spars of fantastic armada'--from
'Colors Changing Colors' in the book of poems AmeriModern, 1982.
Hamid Drake, Alex de Grassi and me (The GALLOP Trio) after a benefit show at the SPACE Theater in Ukiah, California, April 14, 2014. You can watch four of our performances that night in the 'Wings beyond Wings' video compilation.
COMMON GROUND, REBUILD GREEN, and the WESLEY UNITED DIGITAL ARTS & TRAINING CENTER were efforts that touched thousands in and outside New Orleans after 2005's "Federal flood."
Here I'm with Stanley Covington and O.C. Draughan at our house of Structural Concrete Integrated Panels (SCIPs) in the Upper 9th Ward. It's June 2007. "Sky of huge / Billows and blue / ... " from the song "Louisiana Days, Louisiana Nights." The photo is by volunteer Jaime Hazard.
The wider shot is of Home Builders Association apprentices and Mark Wilson of the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International. It's December 2009, our first month of notable progress in restoring the building that had been home to New Orleans' second-oldest African-American Church at 2517 Jackson Avenue in Central City. The photo is by the artist and teacher Jim Belfon, who gave the project many fine images.
STICKING UP FOR CHILDREN has gone forward from 2013 into now. Please check out our website.
SUFC began an with an idea from Cyril and Gaynielle Neville to Maryse Philippe Déjean and me in February 2013. We've since worked with eight Schools in Haiti and New Orleans and most particularly with the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants (FEPE) orphanage in Port-au-Prince. FEPE was founded by Madame MarieJo Poux in late 2009.
Our current focus is called 'Lekol Toupatou!' in Haitian Kréyol--'School Everywhere!' in English. It's a project initiated by Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck-Paul, Principal at College Canapé-Vert since 1974 and a former Mayor of Port-au-Prince and Secretary of Education for Haiti.
Madame Franck Paul is author of a textbook for first-year students in Haiti, Mon Livre Unique.
She and her team of students, teachers and tecnnicians have COMPLETED the recording of ALL the textbook's 25 Modules and 243 pages. 592 hours of recording!
The hours will be transmitted across Haiti via mobile-phones, tablets and platforms that will enable students to learn in four languages--Haitian Kréyol, French, English and Spanish. As Madame Franck Paul says: "Greetings! People everywhere, know the joy that School will come to you!"
Below is a piece from the September 2020 homepage of SUFC. David Amram joined Maryse and me via Zoom to record several contributions to the curriculim of 'School Everywhere!'.
David is now a glorious 90! Madame Franck-Paul comparably splendid as she starts, as she says, "the Route of 85." They're inspiraions for us all!
Always good fun with David Amram--here via Zoom in September 2020.
Below are stills from video shot by the young artist Aristide Phillips. Aristide is born and raised in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and now lives in Atlanta with his wife Jessica. Aristide helped immeasurably on projects between 2013 and 2016. One was video for the "Soltiude / Raga Puriya Kalyan" track from Urna's album Journey To The Beloved, featuring Ustad Salamat Ali Khan.
The stills below are from Kidd Jordan's and Morikeba Kouyaté's and my session for the album Women Center Earth, Sea And Sky at Rick G. Nelson's Marigny Recording Studio, July 24, 2014. We were into momens of creations.
Finally, a 2020 banner for the Rebel Poets' album Worlds Made Flesh that I produced in 1989.
And a photo of Herlin Riley and Roger Lewis of Rivers of Dreams after our performance last July 14. It was a very good time.
The painting is by Isabelle Jacopin of France and New Orleans.
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