You are (we are) one light, / Myriad each one, / Reflecting among an infinity / Of lights from moment to moment.
You are (we are) one light, / Myriad each one, / Reflecting among an infinity / Of lights from moment to moment.
You are (we are) one light, / Myriad each one, / Reflecting among an infinity / Of lights from moment to moment.
THE TIME WE HAVE, Meld 1 was #3
Jazz in North America, November 2020.
It came back into the Top-40 for the Week of January 21, 2023.
You are one / Light among / Many Lights / And we're all / Here to shine
PRAISE MIX #1
q. r. hand Lawrence Ferlinghetti Ustad Salamat Ali Khan
q. r. hand
1. 'today africa, for Willie Kgotsitsile'
with Babatunde Lea congas, Henri Flood timbales, John Baker keyboards,
David Blood electric guitar, Mark Crawford drums-set, George Cremaschi fretless bass, Lewis Jordan tenor saxophone.
from Rebel Poets' Worlds Made Flesh, 1989, San Francisco.
q. r. hand was a man of many caps. He could inhabit sea-lions and distant generations. He was intensely sympathetic. He danced as easily as he walked. He was fit for slim jeans, vests, and T-shirts of Florentine blue and goyave. The righteous present called to him. He planted his feet and spoke as if in prayer to the microphone. He raised one forefinger to the stars.
Photo courtesy of Catherine Franque Perkins (q. r.'s niece) and a nice tribute in the Mission Local by Clara-Sophia Daly.
2. 'our hemisphere'
with Babatunde Lea congas, Henri Flood timbales, John Baker keyboards,
David Blood electric guitar, Mark Crawford drums-set, George Cremaschi fretless bass, Lewis Jordan tenor saxophone.
from Rebel Poets' Worlds Made Flesh, I/R, 1989, San Francisco.
q. r. was forever encouraging and enthusiastic and yet he never lowered standards. He counseled the struggling, He ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the spectacularly accomplishing--such as the feats he and John Ross saw in N.B.A. playoffs. He and Alfonso Texidor introduced me to two dynamic and excellent contributors, Daniel Higgs and devorah major, to the second Rebel Poets' compilation. He hunkered at a front table for jazz saxophonists and drummers. He wrote that you would need a jet to stay with David Murray's sound. He hosted Malcolm X in 1964, New York City.
He loved to collaborate and to improvise. The WordWind Chorus of q. r. and Brian Auerbach and Lewis Jordan and Reginald Lockett was of decades' standing. He knew that by blending together in individual strains his people and all people might achieve optimal voicings. Reginald wrote about q. r.: 'Q.R. Hand’s poetry traverses the terrain of form, music, and language. This is an inspired, well crafted poetry that is political in intent and spirited in execution and defies any comparison to any literary precursors or contemporary schools of thought. Q.R. Hand is an entity unto himself; a true visionary walks among us.'
Reginald, Brian, q. r., with the great artist/
saxophonist Lewis Jordan unfortunately
cropped out of this Internet image.
KZSU of Stanford has the WordWind Chorus' album We Are Of The Saying up online!
q.r. and Malcolm at a meeting for organizers in New York City, 1964.
3. 'all asound us'
with Babatunde Lea congas, Henri Flood timbales, John Baker keyboards,
Mark Crawford drums-set, George Cremaschi fretless bass, Lewis Jordan tenor saxophone, John Karr electric guitar,
from Rebel Poets' Worlds Made Flesh, 1989, San Francisco.
Here I quote from Al Young's Introducgtion to q. r. hand's 2006 book, whose really blues. Al I first met at a Stanford University English Department party in Autumn 1971.
He was solid to me then and his work grew in stature for me the more that I knew it.
He was Poet Laureate of California--a wise choice!--in 2006.
4. 'Al Young's Introduction to q. r. hand's 2006 book of poems, whose really blues.
q. r. reads at a birthday celebration for John Ross, Café La Boheme, 2008.
q. r.'s 2006 book and its art-work by him.
5. 'numberless at the sands of the seashore for singers of the
georgia sea islands'
with David Boyce saxophone, Kevin Carnes drums-set, Babatunde Lea congas
from Rebel Poets' America Fears The Drum, I / R, 1992, San Francisco, remastered
with David Farrell in New Orleans, January 2021.
q. r. was a welcome and uplifting part of both Rebel Poets' compilations. His lyrical energy set a standard. His positive energy was always a boon. He was funny and he was deep and he was eternally surprising in the reaches of his mind and spirit.
6. 'four takes from a short and personal history of summer', read from q. r. hand's 2006 book of poems, whose really blues.
7. 'each time', ibid.
8. "Charlie Parker Was Like A Laser, Dizzy Gillespie Said / Ivesyen", from the 1994
album of poetry with Rave and Chill music, ON, by X-Pand (Don Paul, John Baker, and Terbo Ted.
Don (between Marathons as a Master) and q. r., June 1991, photo by Alfonso.
By the Ocean that he loved like Byron loved his Ocean.
San Francisco Chronicle and Jason Fagone with tribute.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
9. 'Let Us Prey' with Henry Kaiser, Synclavier
from Rebel Poets' Worlds Made Flesh, I/R, 1989, San Francisco
10. Remembering Neighbors: Lawrence and the "Fort Point Gang"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti walked up and down and along Stockton Street, to and from the Bookstore that he co-founded, City Lights, and his flat toward Fisherman’s Wharf. He sometimes wore a peacoat. He sometimes wore a Captain’s cap. He sometimes paused to examine the tree I’d planted in front of my flat nearby the corner of Stockton and Filbert Streets.
Sometimes, too, we happened to meet along Lawrence's route. Less often did we stop to talk. Lawrence’s blue eyes were often faraway. His walk could be meandering like that of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger. His mind might be enwrapped in imaginations.
Lawfrence did me many good turns. He did good turns for many. He helped mightily to beget the Beats into popular consciousness. He published and defended Allen’s Howl. He gave Jack residence in his cabin in Big Sur. He hosted Yevtushenko and Voznevsensky. He brought Jack Hirschman front and center and published and promoted, too, generations of poets’ Brigades from Latin America.
He supported Matt Gonzalez’s campaign for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003.
Lawrence was a stalwart. He was of that generation Depression-matured before World War II. He was battle-tested like the “Fort Point Gang” (Bill Bailey, Tillie and Jack Olson, Al Richmond, …) whom I was also lucky to know and regularly encounter in San Francisco of the 1980s. The Gang
of walkers five-miles-daily round-trip along Golden Gate Bay, when the Presidio’s Promenade was unfenced, puddled earth and driftwood … were of confrontations where Police shot striking Longshoremen dead on the Embarcadero and protesters for Unions and workers’ rights died on Market Street, too; the Lincoln Brigade fought Franco’s Fascism in Spain; and a ‘Long View from the Left’ carried through decades.
Lawrence climbed that hill and wrote and his books and painted in his
Hunters Point studio faithfully as the Fort Point Gang maintained their walks and talks. He was always for Whitman and the worker roughs
and Surreal antidotes. He averred from the 1940s and his U.S. Navy Captaincy into the very teeth of 2020’s upside-down definitions that our nation is here to fulfill immigrants’ ambitions and mystic visions of freedom. He deserved whatever cap he wore and his eternal. wrinkled irony of a smile and bright, surprising leaves on any path he chose.
Ustad Salamat
The exhibition perplexed Salamat.
We’d gone to the DeYonge Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for show titled something like ‘Great American Portraits: From the Colonial to the Modern’. Or ‘America’s Gentry: The Landed and the Larded at Rest and at Play’ … Something like that.
The show was assuredly extensive. It filled rooms with scenes of estates’ owners and their horses. Breeches and riding-crops. Ladies and their daughters posed in ruffles and on settees with the subdued vitality of
waxen wreathes. Fox-hunts and hounds and more gentlemen behatted
on steeds. Statues made their advent with more established prosperity.
Pages from the Declaration of Independence and then the Bill of Rights.
Gilbert Stuart, Reynolds, Chapman, … Smoke clears after the British
sack Washington to reveal more Parlors of Alabama, Virginia, and the Poconos, Colonels and Merchants and their highly coiffed wives and nobly
poised sons in backgrounds of purple, pink and pastel….
Within the ninth-or-so such Room Salamat looked at me. He of the Punjab, the northern Sub-Continent—India and then Pakistan—was then
60. He was about five-foot six. He was brown and rounded face was often
a reflection of light. His dark eyes were deep and quick to register nuances.
Salamat and his older brother Nazakat had been dual prodigies, celebrated
in Delhi and Lahore. Satjiyat Ray had chosen Salamat to be voice of “The Music Room” when the singer was 22. Over the past two decades the honorific of Ustad for this artist was universal and he was huzzahed with
honors across Europe. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was his nephew and pupil.
By 1995, Salamat’s voice and artistry were richer and more expressive,
more capable of startling profundity in the Alap and marathon runs in
the Tintal, than ever.
“Where are the musicians?” Salamat asked in this our ninth-or-so Room
of expensive portraits.
His own family and its Shem Gerasi tradition dated from the court of Akbar the Great in the early 17th century.
“Ah, my friend, “ I said, smiling. “You can’t expect musicians here.”