top of page
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.
'The Same Way the Water'
​
'Motor Land'
​
These two poems and another from the album-in-progress Make Magic GO!, 'Santiago, East and West of Cuba', Alex and Hamid and I recorded in
the Marigny Studio of New Orleans, June of 2018, at the same time as were
gathered with Kidd Jordan to record for filmmaker Melissa Gregory Rue.
​
Rick G. Nelson was our engineer. All the principals for recording with Melissa and her husband Dave are pictured below. Photos are by the gifted and hard-working and innovative Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.
Melissa Gregory Rue, Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, Don Paul, Alex de Grassi, Rick G. Nelson, and Dave Rue.
The GALLOP Quartet with Kidd recorded for Melissa's feature-length documentary "Live Out Loud!"
The GALLOP Quartet with Kidd recorded for Melissa's feature-length documentary "Live Out Loud!"
Alex and Hamid recorded for the soundtrack to Melissa's "Esperanza's Turn"---an imaginative, compassionate piece that's already won awards in 2020.
Make Magic GO!, is also a book. It travels from Reno and California, 1956, to the Pacific Northwest and southeast Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and Cajun Louisiana and Tanzania, Japan, Brasil, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Chiapas, New Orleans, Haiti and Cuba, 2018. It's a sentimental journey and traveler's notebook of the poignant and extraordinary. It runs through woods and several kinds of fields. It cites songs billions know and registers shocks we same billions felt. It meets more eye-popping and/or funny
moments and beautiful people than can be counted.
Alex and Hamid are perfect, interpretive companions for this trip. They get everything right away. We first met on a Sunday afternoon, April 13, 2014, in Paul Canales' Duende restaurant of downtown Oakland. We essentially met in Duende's stageless upstairs performance-space, as Hamid and I had driven up from L.A. after shows at Beyond Baroque for a gig set to start at 3:00. "Hello, Alex, I'm really glad to have you here," Paul said to me
--how's that for a likeness? And it was great--instant sympathy and rapport--among this Trio from initial explorations onward. We did about 12 poems and songs at Duende with a nice crowd, joined by Donald Robinson and Biggi Vingelo for the closing few, then a differeent dozen at the S.P.A.C.E. Theater in Ukiah the next night. Improvisation total, sincere, and often fun.
bottom of page