"Rwanda" by Faruq Z. Bey & The Northwoods Improvisers

Posted on October 14, 2008 by marcbeaudin

There are lions and oribi roaming through the savannah during the opening mystery of this song. Dark birds of prey follow their movements.

Mike Gilmore, Nick Ashton and Mike Johnston create a percussive landscape filled with shadow and flashes of light. The flutes of Faruq Z. Bey and Mike Carey begin the journey like winds over the tall grasses and rolling hills, heading toward the volatile waters of Lake Kivu.

When the bass of Johnston thunders into being, you are moving across the surface of the lake, feeling each crest and trough of the blue-black waves of Kivu. The flutes are now calling the barefoot fishermen to dance, dreaming of barbel, catfish and tilapia.

The Tenor Sax of Bey first, and then Skeeter Shelton, pull you into two worlds: you’re still on that deep and dangerous African lake, but at the same time, you are now viewing the streets of Detroit from the backseat of a slow-moving Buick. It’s late summer and the windows are rolled down. The tires hiss and the streetlights flash across your face.

Gilmore’s marimba solo brings you back to that Rwandan plain. Though now you are the lion, stalking the oribi. The saxes come back in, this time with Carey joining the drive and leading the expedition.

Finally, your are returned to the opening mystery. The bass and percussion dissolve the water and land into ethereal winds, and those dark raptors rise in widening circles until they disappear into the silence.

[Faruq Z. Bey & the Northwoods Improvisers Website]

An excerpt of this song is featured in the book trailer for The Moon Cracks Open:

Find more videos like this on Book Marketing Network

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The Moon Cracks Open Book Trailer

Posted on October 5, 2008 by marcbeaudin


 

Thanks to:
Mike Johnston and Faruq Z. Bey & The Northwoods Improvisers for the use of their song “Rwanda”
Kellie Schneider for the use of the illustration “Holy Pigeons”
Meg Kearney, Mike Johnston, William Heyen and Doug Peacock for featured blurbs

Poem excerpts from “La Sona de la Mar” from The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds
Photography of Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes and Mackinaw Island by the author

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Coyote of the Birds

Posted on October 5, 2008 by marcbeaudin

(I like that title. Reminds me of “Harold of the Rocks.”)

Anyway …

Something I didn’t notice until after the publication of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds is the prevalence of Coyote dancing through those pages. I think, somehow, he and Crow are the two main characters of this story. I was already aware of Crow’s stature in my writing (he will show up in poems about anything — always an unannounced yet welcome guest). But Coyote is different.

At first, only his voice appears. He himself remains hidden. He’s heard first in “Federico Garcia Lorca Reminds me of Robert Frost,” a poem that seems to speak to the frailty of a life lived isolated from nature:

” … When a coyote knifes the darkness
you think of sirens …”

And then, nearly a dozen pages later, in “Southeast of Red Shirt”:

“… Coyote’s song rings in my ear
like the afterglow
of a lightning flash …”

In both poems, his voice comes at night, as a knife and as lightning. Both cutting the fabric of the darkened sky. But when we finally see him in the flesh, it is in the light of day:

“… They trick the sun as
Coyote tries to
but always gets distracted
by his own dancing shadow
(These being shadow, have none) …”

Here is being compared to his counterpart, his opposite, his double: the Crow. They spin around each other like the Yin and Yang elements of the Taoist symbol. Coyote is of the night, but brings day with his lightning flash. Crow is of the day, but made of night. Together they turn the wheel of the sky around the world.

The final time we see Coyote, he is bringing day back into night; continuing the endless cycle of birth/death/birth. In “The Illness of Windows,” a northern junco has died by flying into the window near our feeders at Green Point Nature Center. The idea is that it is our human weakness that necessitates buildings, and therefore windows; and if it weren’t for this weakness, this illness, the bird would still be alive. But coyote enters at the very end of the poem to remind me that forms change, but Essence is eternal:

“… I place the stiffening body on the grass,
deciding against burial:
the coyotes, at least, have a love of glass.”

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