Clean living in difficult circumstances

Mod sorcerer about town

2011-05-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of things happening this month, on Sunday 22 May, I'll be playing records at Nomad Codes: an evening of modern esoterica. Taking place at the Horse Hospital and organised by Strange Attractor, Erik Davis will be talking about his new anthology, Nomad Codes, published by Yeti Press. He will also be reading from his essay 'The Cult of the Peacock Angel' (published in SAJ4) with live exotica accompaniment by the Raagnagrok All Stars. There will also be live music from Christos Fanaras, and I'll be on the decks before and after the performances playing selections from my ever-burgeoning stash of Voodoo records. Expect Haitian exotica, Cuban Orisha mambo, Brazilian Orixa bossanova, New Orleans brass band, Mardi Gras Indian funk and Obeah reggae. Yes, occult music you can cut a rug to.

Then on Tuesday 31 May, I'll be speaking at the October Gallery as a part of parapsychologist geezer Dr David Luke's "Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness" season of events. The title of my talk is "Smoke and Mirrors" and it's based on an article about London psychogeography that I've written for a forthcoming anthology (more details on that soon). It's the bitter fruit of having worked in the square mile for the last few years, with its potent cocktail of ancient magic and high density of appalling wankers in bad suits. Here's the blurb:

Smoke and Mirrors

Writer and witchdoctor Stephen Grasso unveils the hidden occult landscape of the City of London. Dark rum hits old stone at the crossroads and we enter heavy Voodoo terrain, tuning into the dub echoes of history. The mysteries of the boneyard and the buried river slide into focus. The lunar temple of St Pauls Cathedral opens its doors for witchcraft, and the chained giants of the Guildhall break their bonds. The nefarious cyclopean towers of the square mile are struck by lightning and wicked houses are marched on by zombie chimney sweeps and the intranquil dead. Our Lady of the Thames pulsates outside of time bringing life and freshness, and opening the way to the rebel territories south of the river where sorcerers dream and conspire. The wanton Green pushes up through grey paving slabs and a parliament of trees sits in judgement. The primal jungle under London speaks its mind. Senses are washed clear and duplicitous spells are undone. All cities have magic.

Monday in New Orleans

2011-04-15T07:26:00.001-07:00

We arrived in New Orleans on a Monday. The last time I visited the city was for Fete Ghede 2007, but this time - my third stay in New Orleans - was for a full seven days. It lent itself to a Seven African Powers sketch, albeit an informal one, with various spontaneous tributes made to the Lwa and Orisha each day.

We were staying at a B&B on Esplanade Avenue, a couple of blocks up from the controversial Interstate 10 overpass that blights North Claiborne Avenue in the Treme. Originally the street was a grand and historic oak-lined road similar to the Esplanade, and served as a public green space and a location for the black carnival and Mardi Gras Indian traditions. In the late 1960s, efforts to oppose the construction of the Interstate by the predominantly African American residents of the Treme were ignored, the mature live oaks uprooted, and the grim concrete monstrosity built to loom over the area and wreck its character.

In the early 2000s, several of the concrete supports for the interstate were painted to resemble oak trees by local artists, in mockery of the loathed planning decision and as an echo of what was lost. During our stay, the junction formed by the Esplanade and the Claiborne overpass ended up being one of the main crossroads where I made nods to the spirits, by dint of having to walk through it every day on our way into town. Not a safe spot to be spending time at after dark, with even its dayside aspect taking on the heavy Kalfou Danjere vibe.

In urban magic, and certainly in London, it tends to be that callously built tunnels or roads that cut through ancient boneyards or areas strongly associated with magic end up as tainted highways of the dead. Howling ghosts careering down bleak motorways of spirit. Working at a crossroads on one of these points taps you into that, and it's always potent but not exactly very savoury. Just walking beneath the overpass had more than a touch of that, and while I didn't feel it was appropriate or necessary to reach down into that gear as a visitor to the city, it's always good etiquette to make the right nods. I made it my practice to leave a coin for the crossroads spirits whenever I passed beneath the I-10 as a way of honouring the ghosts of the landscape disturbed and interrupted by the brutalist construction.

Whenever we visit New Orleans, the first point of business is to open things with a service for Legba. Since we arrived on a Monday, this was particularly essential, given that Monday is Legba's sacred day of the week. The crossroads we decided to use for this was the intersection of North Rampart and St Peters, which is the closest crossroads to Congo Square, ground zero of New Orleans Voodoo. There is a majestic oak tree at this corner, which serves as an improvised Poteau Mitan in the landscape. The last time I made offerings at this spot, on my previous visit, I was stung by a giant caterpillar in a region far too close to a delicate area for comfort. I took it as some strange Burroughsian marking at the time - when I had stopped freaking out that a hideous stinging creature had crept into my trousers - so I approached the crossroads again with some degree of trepidation.

Not knowing the area very well, I failed to find a liquor store by the time I got to Rampart Street, but fortunately New Orleans has the concept of the "go-cup", which means alcohol can be bought in a bar and then carried out in a plastic glass to be drank anywhere you like. I have mixed feelings about the go-cup. While it is clearly a marvelous idea, I've spent most of my adult life cultivating the ability to down a pint of lager in a short space of time before the pubs shut. A hard-won skill that is made obsolete by the notion of the go-cup.

Just up from Congo Square, I found a bar called "The Voodoo Bar", which seemed like an appropriate place to purchase my offering. I ordered a double rum in a go-cup, and the bartender looked at me aghast as if I'd strolled in and said "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn". I quickly realised that they probably don't get many geordie witchdoctors round this way, and I might as well have been speaking in the barbarous tongue, so said it again a bit more slowly and clearly to a much better reception. Rum in hand, I approached the crossroads and did the necessaries. Libations made, and cigar and coins left by the tree, we made our petition to the Opener of the Way, asking the Old Man to permit us entry to the mysteries of the Crescent City and watch over us on our journey.

Legba is often syncretised with St Peter, in his role as keeper of the keys to Heaven, so it is appropriate that one of the roads forming the Congo Square crossroads is St Peter's Street. It cuts right through the French Quarter, and in the psychogeography of New Orleans, walking down St Peters from N Rampart feels like following a processional route into the heart of the city.

We made a casual drift around the French Quarter, reacquainting ourselves with the sights and sounds of New Orleans, or in the case of Bourbon Street, the smells of New Orleans. I had somehow forgotten the acrid stench of Bourbon Street, like a week-old ashtray crossed with a bag of beer-sick and the bins outside a kebab shop, left to fester indefinitely in the baking sun. In the imagination of some people, I guess Bourbon Street *is* New Orleans - but it can be a grim stretch. Worth a visit, but mostly a steaming pit of daiquiri-soaked frat boys on a bleary-eyed quest for tits. Daiquiris in New Orleans are like bucket-sized, highly-potent, rum-based slushies - which come in a variety of artificial flavours. I like the pinacolada flavour. If you buy a large enough daiquiri, you sometimes get a free shot of something fluorescent and nasty served to you in a test tube, as if the giant-sized rum slushy isn't sufficient.

Navigating away from this lunacy, it was time to get fed. I think I'm equally in love with the food of New Orleans, as I am with the city's music and Voodoo. Every occasion to eat in the city is an event in itself, and one of my favourite places to get fed is Coop's Place on Decatur. It's basically just a bar that does food, and is a bit of a dive with loud video poker machines and a gruesome toilet out the back. But it really fucking *does* food. They specialise in the New Orlean's standards of gumbo and jambalaya, which are both excellent, but their whole menu is worth trying. I've eaten at Coop's every time I've visited the city, and on this trip we ended up eating there four times. Ms Rose ordered the blackened redfish, and I went for the red beans and rice.

Louis Armstrong was such a fan of this meal that he used to sign his letters: "red beans and ricely yours, Louis Armstrong". It's a blend of kidney beans, pepper, onion and celery cooked down over around two hours into a creamy paste and flavoured with thyme, bay leaves, cayenne pepper and pork bones left over from Sunday's dinner. Traditionally eaten on a Monday, it's served over a bed of white rice, and normally accompanied by cajun sausage or a pork chop. Monday used to be washday, and the idea was that the pot of beans would sit on the stove all day while the laundry was done. I couldn't resist having a cup of their seafood gumbo as a starter, which involves shrimp, crab claws and oysters in a spicy stew.

Fortified by all of that, we drifted along to Frenchmen Street in the nearby Faubourg Marigny to catch some music. The main drag of Frenchmen Street has about ten bars on it, and each one has live music every night. Most of the venues don't have a cover charge, and just ask that you buy one drink per set, which any sane person would do anyway. The joy of this is that you can do a bar crawl along Frenchmen St and hear a stack of great bands in a single evening. Although the calibre of musicians is so high that it's difficult to walk away from a set once you've been lured in. Among the things we took in were innumerable killer brass band and bluegrass outfits, and a funk band with a female Japanese drummer who sang an a cappella Japanese-language folk song for victims of the recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster that befell the country.

The main thing I wanted to catch, however, was the Glen David Andrews Band, who have a residency at DBA on Frenchmen. Andrews is an established performer in the city, which meant there was a still rather modest $5 cover charge on the door, especially considering he does multiple sets and plays for hours on end. In London, you might expect to pay £15-£20 for a 45 minute set, but here £3 gets you music till the small hours.

I didn't really know very much about Andrews ahead of the gig, aside from that he is a cousin of Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, and thereby also related to Jessie Hill, the R&B singer who did "Ooh Poo Pah Doo". I'd seen some youtube footage of him performing a few gospel numbers such as "Just a closer walk with thee", but I wasn't really sure what to expect. Initially there were only three guys on stage: bass player, keyboards and drums. They were a tight funk unit playing instrumentals, and when it got three tracks into the set I just assumed this was the band. Surely nobody is going to make a ludicrous dramatic entrance this far into the set? Maybe Andrews is the bass player standing up front? I didn't really have a clear picture in my head of what Andrews looked like, and while I thought he played brass, it's not inconceivable that he might be a multi-instrumentalist or that his band just did instrumental funk numbers. That must be it.

But no. Suddenly a trombone hit a few notes from the back of the bar. The band immediately fell into step with it. Another trombone riff came from behind us, but we couldn't really see what was going on. An improvised musical dialogue started up between the band and the bone player, and it almost seemed like the latter was fucking with them, deliberately playing a bit and then stopping so that the band were left hanging waiting for something to happen. I couldn't figure out whether this was some random musician that had stumbled by and was jumping in, or if it was someone in the back of the bar playing a bit while they finished their drink.

After ten minutes or so of this, there was further commotion at the back and suddenly the crowd parted to allow the mystery bone player to emerge. Strutting like Ghede in dark sunglasses and alternately playing trombone and singing lyrics in his soaring gospel voice, it became clear that Glen David Andrews had entered the building.

There's a review on his website from the local music mag Offbeat that says: "There's over the top, Over The Top, OVER THE TOP, and there's Glen David Andrews".

Accustomed as I am to gigs where musicians barely move or acknowledge the audience, and the crowd stands around with studied nonchalance, Andrews performance was the antithesis of that experience. Almost like James Brown in his intensity, he would frequently drop to his knees, climb up on speaker stacks, lead the audience to wave paper napkins in mock-second line parades out of the bar and back in through the other door, urge his crowd to crouch down for part of a track and then jump up and down till the floor shook, and so on. DBA is not a very large bar – it's about the size of an average pub venue in London – but that didn't stop Andrews from crowd surfing through it three times during his first set. Commandeering members of the audience to lift him up and parade him back and forward through the crowd like a flying king.

Ms Rose and I were only a few hours off the plane and more than a bit jet-lagged, so weren't exactly in the same place as everyone else seemed to be during all of this. We sort of *did* stand around at the back in a nonchalant London style, but despite the screwed sleeping patterns and Reichian armouring, the spirit hit during his version of "I'll fly away" and I danced a bit, which made me feel a lot less conspicuous in the bar.

Through his set he rolled out all the New Orleans standards, from Jessie Hill's "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" to John Boutte's Treme Song, covering everyone from Dave Bartholemew to Dr John and sprinkling in a liberal number of gospel and brass band standards.

Towards the end, Andrews invited various guests onto the stage with him, including a sax player and some sort of jazz poet geezer - which would normally have me running in the opposite direction, but who was actually quite good, narrating strange tales about how humans learned to dance by copying spiders. Apparently humans are afraid of spiders, but spiders resent humans for their plagiarism. Lastly, "Uncle" Lionel Batiste took the stage for a few numbers.

Batiste is the 80-year old bass drum player of the Treme Brass Band, who has been playing music in the city since he was ten years old. A mentor to many younger musicians, the trumpet player Kermit Ruffins has said that Batiste "taught [him] how to act, how to dress, how to feel about life."

Andrews told an anecdote on stage about when Uncle Lionel and the Treme Brass Band played at a function attended by former vice president Dick Cheney. At the end of the performance, Cheney went to shake the hands of the various musicians, and when it was Uncle Lionel's turn he allegedly pulled Cheney in close and whispered: "that's the first time in 20 years that I've put my hand in shit."

This was only the end of Andrews' first set. He was due back on stage again after an intermission, and it was rumoured that his cousin Trombone Shorty might turn up later that night. However, the jet lag was badly taking its toll, so as difficult as it was to tear ourselves away from the gig, Ms Rose and I had to call it a night and head back to the B&B.

Saint Patrick Dambala

2011-03-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

Dambala Wedo is the serpent Lwa of Voodoo. He's the head of the pantheon, the sky serpent and creator of life. His colour is white, his traditional offerings include an egg atop a mound of white flour, and he is syncretised with St Patrick. In a slightly counter-intuitive way, St Patrick's act of casting the serpents out of Ireland is reframed as evidence of his power as a snake shaman. The image of the Saint illustrates his command over serpents, which in Voodoo terms, makes him a priest of Dambala. The snake Lwa is also frequently syncretised with Moses, due to the latter's ability to transform his staff into a snake. Another obvious snake shaman in the Bible.

There is a rich stream of records associated with Dambala, as the Great Serpent has been an inspiration for many tracks. It is important to note that, unlike western and Biblical interpretations of the serpent, Damballah is not seen as the tempter or the adversary in any capacity. He's actually the god of peace and equilibrium, and sometimes syncretised with Christ or the Holy Spirit.

Here's a traditional Haitian Vodou chant for Damballah:

Perhaps the most famous song for Damballah is the track recorded by Exuma in 1970, which was later covered by Nina Simone on her album "It is finished". Simone also did a cover of Exuma's "Obeah Woman" on the same record, which was originally a funk 7" with a vocal by Patricia Rollins. Here are the two versions of "Dambala". Simone's cover is interesting, as she's very much occupying priestess space, but the original has an urgency missing from her more plaintive and haunting rendering:

In 1972, Chicago-based jazz funk group The Pharoahs put out a record called "Awakening", which contained a track called "Damballa". The group's drummer, Maurice White, would later go on to become a founder member of Earth, Wind and Fire who themselves put out a track called "Serpentine Fire".

It seems there was a UK roots reggae group active in the 1970s called Dambala. I don't currently know anything about them beyond what it says on their youtube page:

Dambala was an English roots reggae group that were formed the late summer of 1975 in West Hampstead by Gus Anyia and Alvin Christie. They released their first record in 1978, the disco »Zimbabwe«, a co-production with Dennis Bovell and Jimmy Lindsay.

All of which is pretty intriguing. It's hard to say whether they simply took their name from the Exuma record, or if their existence points to some forgotten history of London Voodoo crossing over into UK roots reggae. Probably the former, but its not totally inconceivable that someone involved in the band may have had a practice or an interest in such matters. More research needed.

Lastly, I came across this by random this morning, which is perhaps the most curious of all. It's a dance track from 1990 called "Damballah 2000" by The Voodooists. This particular version is, apparently, the Bocor mix. No idea what the story is here, but it includes samples from Haitian chants to Damballah over the beats, which again may point to some level of practice or interest on the part of whoever made it. More research is required here as well.

Happy St Patrick Dambala's day. He doesn't drink Guinness, but I do.

Strange Attractor Journal 4

2011-03-10T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have it on good authority that copies of the long-awaited Strange Attractor Journal 4 are back from the printer and available as of today. As the blurb from the website puts it:

From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in animals; voodoo soul and dub music; ancient peacock deities; Chinese poisoning cults; the history of spider silk weaving; heathen mugwort magic; sentient lightning; Jesuit conspiracy theories; junkie explorers; Dali’s Atlantis; the resurgence of Pan (in London’s Crouch End); anarchist pirates on Madagascar; an ancient Greek Rip Van Winkle; French anatomical waxworks; Arthur Machen’s forgotten tales and Alan Moore’s unpublished John Dee opera.

Featuring written contributions from:

Richard Barnett, Mark Blacklock, John Cussans, Erik Davis, Paul Devereux, Roger Dobson, Joanna Ebenstein, Stephen Grasso, Gyrus, Ken Hollings, Mike Jay, Phil Legard, David Luke, Eleanor Morgan, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Michael Neve, Andy Sharp, Robert Wallis, Sean Walsh.

Artwork by Joel Biroco, Julian House, Phil Legard, Eleanor Morgan, Arik Roper & Nathalie Tayton

The book cost £14.99 and can be bought via the Strange Attractor website.

It features my lengthy essay "Haunted Soundsystem", on the vinyl legacy of the African Diaspora magico-religious traditions - encompassing early New Orleans jazz, the blues and gospel of the US south, 1950s Haitian exotica records, 1930s Cuban dance bands, Trinidad calypso, Mardi Gras Indians, Brazilian bossanova and tropicalia, and Obeah and Pocomania-influenced reggae and dancehall.

To promote the book I'm participating in the first of a new season of Strange Attractor Salons at the ICA this evening, where I will be speaking and playing records. It seems to have sold out already, so thank you to everyone who has bought tickets.

Here's a list of other talks that are happening in this season of the SA Salon.

Mardi Gras 2011

2011-03-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

This Ash Wednesday blog update is prefaced with an apology for not really doing a series of Mardi Gras themed posts in the run-up to the day, as promised. (Not that anyone is actually reading this). I've been far too busy with Mardi Gras Voodoo the last few days to dick around writing up blog posts.

The traditional colours of Mardi Gras in New Orleans are gold, purple and green, which represent power, justice and faith, respectively. Our Mardi Gras altar involved a huge flag in those colours draped over the main altar, with the dolls and statues of Papa La Bas (the New Orleans road of Legba), Marie Laveau and Dr John. Candles in gold, purple and green were dressed in van van oil and lit to conjure those powers into the house. In Voodoo terms, the purple signals a link to Ghede and the dead, and the green a link to Gran Bwa and the mysteries of the forest. The gold, of course, brings the solar quality into the mix.

While I've slacked off on updating the blog this week, I have recently stopped being so curmudgeonly about social media and created a Twitter account. I was initially resistant to such things, but I figure it is a good exercise in trying to communicate in less than 10,000 word chunks of information. It's also quite good for posting up youtube links to interesting tracks and suchlike, and I've been getting quite into that. If you participate in the Choronzonic maelstrom of a million garbled voices chattering like the hideous piping that accompanies manifestations of the blind idiot god Azathoth, you can follow my twitter account here: http://twitter.com/#!/gypsylantern

So, somewhat belatedly, here's a round-up of the Mardi Gras-themed tracks I've posted on twitter in the past week.

"My Indian Red", first recorded in (I believe) 1947 and attributed to the Baby Dodds Trio with Danny Barker on vocals, is one of the earliest instances of Mardi Gras Indian chants making their way onto vinyl. Louis Dumaine's 1927 track "To-wa-baca-wa" predates it, but it's an instrumental and is just named after a Mardi Gras Indian chant, rather than actually being one. I've previously blogged about "To-wa-baca-wa" here, as it's an early precursor of the "Buckets got a hole in it"/"you keep a knockin" riddim.

(Can you still call it a riddim if it's not from JA? I think you can, as it's exactly the same process of an underlying rhythm being versioned and used as the basis for an endless number of songs. See also the "Tipitina" riddim, which is the basis for a stack of R&B tracks beyond the Professor Longhair tune. But I digress...)

"My Indian Red" appears to have been released on the Zenith label in 1951, with the Indian chant "Corrine died on the battlefield" as the B-side, and then again on the King Zulu label in the mid-50s. There was another release of Indian music the same year with "Chocko Mo Feendo Hey" and "Tootie Ma is a Big Fine Thing" on the sides. I've only ever seen these records as 78s, but I hold out hope that I might come across a version on 45 at some point. Or else just buy a turntable that spins 78s, which is sort of an inevitability really. Whichever happens first.

The tracks are, however, available as bonus tracks on the CD reissue of The Baby Dodds Trio's "Jazz a la Creole" record - which is worth tracking down in itself, but even more so with the Indian tracks appended. Baby Dodds is the foundation drummer of New Orleans jazz, who influenced practically everyone. His grandfather was a drummer in Congo Square, before the open Voodoo services were outlawed, and certain tracks on Jazz a la Creole - specifically the drum improvisations - sound almost like West African drumming through the lens of a jazz drumkit. I almost won a vinyl copy of "Jazz a la Creole" last month, but was sniped at the last minute by some scoundrel. The vinyl version doesn't have the Indian tracks on it though.

"My Indian Red", also known as "The Indian Prayer", is the most sacred song of the Mardi Gras Indians, the first chant sung by the Big Chief as he leaves his house with his tribe on the morning of Mardi Gras to begin the processional route through the city. Danny Barker's jazz reworking of this chant swings like a gate soaked in WD40 and left open in the eye of a storm:

To put the track into context, here is a clip from HBO's drama series Treme (by David Simon who did The Wire), which is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. One of the central characters is a Mardi Gras Indian chief (played by Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon in The Wire) who returns to his devastated city to set about re-establishing the Indian traditions amid the wreckage.

Mardi Gras Indians, as documented here previously, are like spirits of freedom and resilience, the ability to overcome the odds and never bow down to anyone or anything. It's sort of like a Warriors lodge, that expresses its power through the folk art of costume, song and dance. In the series Treme, the Indians seem to represent something of the City's soul and its ability to come back from the tragedy of Katrina, intact and empowered despite everything that happened. The following sequence occurs in the last episode of season one, when you finally get to see the Indians on the march, on the morning of St Joseph's Day, after much build-up and anticipation.

The other Indian tribe that they encounter enroute is Congo Nation, led by the jazz saxophonist, Donald Harrison Jr, occupying his role as a Big Chief. The flagboy of the tribe is carrying a banner with a photo of his father Donald Harrison Sr, who died in 1998, and was Big Chief of four tribes with their roots in Congo Square tradition, including the Guardians of the Flame. In Treme, the Clarke Peters character, Albert Lambreaux, plays the Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame tribe, and his jazz musician son Delmond is loosely based on Donald Harrison Jr. One of the most interesting things about David Simon's Treme was the interplay between fiction and reality, with many locals appearing as themselves.

In 2010, Tom Waits and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band released a limited edition 78rpm of "Chocko Mo Feendo Hey" and "Tootie Ma is a Big Fine Thing" to benefit the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Programme. At the release of the record, an additional donation of $200 when you bought a copy in person at the Preservation Hall in New Orleans, got you a custom 78rpm player to spin it on. There's something a bit perverse about releasing a 78, but I think they also put it out on CD and MP3.

Tom Waits does a great cover of the two tracks, but they don't quite match the energy of the Danny Barker versions:

Lastly, here's some footage of a Rebirth Brass Band second line through the Treme from Mardi Gras 2009:

Mardi Gras season

2011-02-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

It's getting deep into Carnival season in New Orleans, the parades have started and Mardi Gras Indians are at work sewing their suits. I've been listening to a lot of WWOZ lately, the New Orleans radio station, as it streams 24 hours and is extremely good. Just listening to it really gives a sense of the party spirit and anticipation for Mardi Gras, news of warm-up gigs, interviews with flag boys of Indian tribes, accounts of parades that the DJs have seen so far, and so on.

I thought I'd do a series of Mardi Gras related posts with various tracks and suchlike, starting with "Got to get ready" by Trombone Shorty and Big Chief Peppy from the 2005 album "Orleans & Claiborne". Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews is the grandson of the R&B musician and songwriter Jessie Hill, most well known for the track "Ooh Poo Pah Doo". Andrews was a band leader by the age of 6 and got the name "Trombone Shorty" because he was playing trombone before his arms were long enough to reach all the positions on the slide. Big Chief Peppy is the chief of the Golden Arrows tribe.

I heard this track on WWOZ yesterday, and it instantly caught my attention because it was a Mardi Gras Indian recording that I had never heard before, and has a contemporary funk sound to it. I'm sure there's a stack of contemporary Mardi Gras Indian stuff out there that incorporates a hiphop style, and which I haven't heard yet, and I'm looking forward to tracking some of that down on my upcoming trip to NOLA.

And here's Trombone Shorty's grandfather doing "Ooh Poo Pah Doo"

Glad Tidings Natty Dread Bring You!

2010-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day!

A Beatnik's Wish

2010-12-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

As it is literally the night before Christmas, today's track is "A Beatnik's Wish" by Patsy Raye & the Beatnik's. I don't know anything about this track, other than that it is available as a 7" on the Roulette label and also appears on the LP "The Beat Generation".

"Twas the night before Christmas and all through my pad,

I'm cooling it Dad"

Santa Claus Dub

2010-12-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

The latter half of my xmas mix CD is comprised of reggae tracks, and selecting them turned into a kind of shamanic journey to the underworld, in terms of all the terrible novelty xmas reggae I had to listen to in order to find the gems. Yellowman covering "Jinglebell Rock"... "Twas the night before xmas" by Eek-a-mouse... Chilling stuff. There are some gems though, such as King Tubby's fiendish dub experiments on the theme of "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus"...

James Brown's Signs of Christmas

2010-12-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

James Brown did a shitload of xmas records, and unlike most purveyors of novelty festive tunes, the great majority of his xmas tracks are actually really good. They are more like killer slabs of James Brown funk, that just happen to mention Santa and reindeer and suchlike a few times. Nobody wears a Santa hat quite like James Brown, and the red and white pompom does nothing to dilute his essential James Brown-ness. "Signs of Christmas" is one of my favourites from his seasonal repertoire.

"Molly wants a bike, Jimmy wants a kite, Billy wants a sled, Mother wants a bed, Daddy wants a boat (now row it) and sister wants a coat"

Feliz Navidad by Celia Cruz

2010-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today is the winter solstice, which happens to coincide this year with both the solstice full Moon and a total lunar eclipse. It's the first time this conjunction of Sun, Moon and Earth has happened at the solstice since 1638. An astrologically interesting occurrence that is perhaps best addressed with a Celia Cruz record:

Santa's second line

2010-12-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

Two New Orleans-themed xmas tracks today, the first is "Santa's second line" by the New Birth Brass Band:

And the second is "Shakana Santa shake it" by Big Chief Bo Dollis and The Wild Magnolias. Not exactly The Wild Magnolia's finest moment, but I can't believe I actually managed to find a Mardi Gras Indian xmas record!

The Vince Guaraldi Trio

2010-12-19T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today's advent calendar track is "What child is this?" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, from the Charlie Brown Christmas record. Guaraldi composed all of the music for the Peanuts TV specials until his death in 1976 from a heart attack at the age of 47. Charles Schulz's Peanuts is interesting for a number of reasons, but particularly as it's the longest story written by a single person, spanning 50 years from 1950 to the day after Schulz's death in February 2000.

Aside from his work on Charlie Brown, the pianist is most famous for the record "Cast your fate to the wind / Jazz impressions of Black Orpheus", which as the title suggests is a jazz reworking of Antonio Carlos Jobim's soundtrack to the 1959 Brazilian/French film Black Orpheus or Orfeu Negro. The film is an adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, relocated to the setting of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. In the end sequence, Orpheus' journey to the underworld is dramatised by the protagonist attending a Candomble ceremony where a cigar smoking woman is possessed by the spirit of his lost Eurydice.

Guaraldi also previously played in a band led by the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, alongside the conga player Mongo Santamaria, a practitioner of Santeria and devotee of the Orisha Shango, and who later recorded several tracks for the Orisha.

Not even Charlie Brown has escaped a tangential brush with African Diaspora magico-religous traditions.

The Guaraldi track below "What child is this?" is an arrangement of a popular Christmas carol written by William Chatterton Dix in 1865, and set to the tune of the traditional English song Greensleeves. Dix wrote the carol, along with other hymns, when he was confined to bed for several months following a near death experience caused by a sudden almost fatal illness.

The melody of Greensleeves itself is rumoured to have been written by Henry VIII for his then lover and future queen Anne Boleyn - the relationship which, of course, was responsible for the break between the Church of England and Roman Catholicism. Boleyn is subject to persistent rumours of witchcraft, and several reports of dubious provenance claim that she had six fingers on one hand.

It is, however, widely assumed that Henry VIII was not the author of the song, as it is written in a later Italian style of composition that did not achieve popularity in England until the Elizabethan period, long after his death.

The subject of Greensleeves is "My Lady Greensleeves", a figure associated with sex and promiscuity. The green sleeves is thought to refer to the grass stains that a woman might have on her dress if she made love outdoors. The pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a depiction of "My Lady Greensleeves" in 1864, which, at least for me, is suggestive of a sort of pagan Queen of the Forest or Fairy Queen of The Green.

Guaraldi's "What child is this?" is another track that I find really evocative of winter, and particularly the birth of the new light, symbolised by the infant Christ, amid the bitter depths of the hardest season.

I like how all of these associations come together, from Black Orpheus, to Charlie Brown, to Mongo Santamaria, to the composer receiving the words during a near death experience, to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, to Rossetti's fairy queen, to the essential mystery of Christmas and the rebirth of the year.

Baby it's cold outside

2010-12-18T06:04:00.001-08:00

In the wrong hands, this song is a terrible instrument of torture - but the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald version is brilliant. They can even get away with the "say what's in this drink?" bit, without conjuring to mind seedy Rohypnol-based goings-on - unlike in that horrible version with the aged Tom Jones and the welsh indie starlet...

A Saints Christmas

2010-12-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

Today's xmas track is "A Saints Christmas" by Kermit Ruffins, the New Orleans trumpet player, founding member of Rebirth Brass Band and star of David Simon & HBO's post-Katrina drama series Treme. My CD mix features two tracks by Ruffins, his arrangements of the traditional carols Silent Night and Little Drummer Boy. But neither of them are on youtube, and this one is, and it's quite funny and has a music video to go with it.

Ruffins put out this track on his 2009 record "Have a Crazy Cool Christmas", and it's his Christmas wish to Santa that the Saints, New Orleans football team - whose nickname is "the ain'ts" because of their historic inability to ever win anything - would get to the Superbowl. Perhaps Santa Claus conspired with the Lwa on New Orleans Voodoo, because the Saints defied all expectations that year, and not only got to the Superbowl, but won it - giving the recovering city's confidence a huge boost.

Ruffins has a jazz quintet called the Barbecue Swingers, which has played every thursday night at Vaughan's bar in the Bywater area of New Orleans since the early 90s. He is famous for cooking barbecue after midnight at his shows. I like the line in this track where he says: "I don't need no big old barbecue pit – wait a minute! That's not true!"

Charlie Parker's White Christmas

2010-12-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

Today's youtube advent calendar entry is Charlie 'Bird' Parker's arrangement of "White Christmas". I had no idea Parker did a version of White Christmas, until I came across it at random while researching interesting seasonal tunes to put on my CD. It has the improvisation and killer soloing that you would expect from Parker, but is recognisably the then-recent Irving Berlin hit. I love the spoken intro where we're told that "it's Christmas morning, and the Bird's got a little surprise for you on White Christmas". It's sort of difficult to imagine Parker wearing a Santa hat as he plays his saxophone on xmas morning, but there is something really crisp and wintery about his sound on this track.

A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood

2010-12-15T07:22:00.000-08:00

Between now and Christmas day, I'm going to endeavour to post up youtube videos of (often very) tangentially Voodoo-related Christmas records extracted from my recent mix CD compilation "A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood". I'll aim to post up one a day, or thereabouts, like a musical advent calendar.

Here's Louis Armstrong with "Christmas in New Orleans" and Billie Holiday with "I've got my love to keep me warm".

St James Infirmary Blues

2010-10-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

Another post to warm up for (or perhaps add a chill to) the Season of the Dead.

"St James' Infirmary Blues" is a track that I've long associated with Papa Ghede. It's been covered many times, exists in several versions and has an interesting history. The lyrical concern of the song involves the narrator visiting St James Infirmary to identify the body of his dead lover, "stretched out on a long white table, so pale, so cold, so fair". But it becomes a meditation on mortality, as the narrator starts discussing his own funerary arrangements, and there's something in its drama that - despite the lyrical content - is somehow life affirming.

Louis Armstrong did a definitive version of the song. I kind of see Louis Armstrong as a child of Ghede in a lot of ways. He spent his youth in poverty and starvation in a rough part of New Orleans, and knows the pain and suffering of the world, but is unflinchingly life affirming in his personality and his art. There's something very Ghede about that, in both his deep understanding of the human experience and in his vibrancy.

Cab Calloway also did an extremely atmospheric cover of "St James' Infirmary", and I find it difficult to choose between his very different take and Armstrong's version. Calloway's recording of the song was used in the Fleischer Brothers' 1933 animation "Snow White" featuring Betty Boop as the princess. Calloway did the voice for the character Koko the Clown, and the animation was rotoscoped from film footage of Calloway dancing and appearing to "moonwalk". It's a good one for Halloween, this video, and pretty psychedelic as 30s animation goes. Cab Calloway as Koko the Clown as Ghede.

"St James Infirmary" is, however, a blues reworking of an English folk ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake", which dates to at least the 18th century but is likely older. It tells the story of a young soldier who spends his money on prostitutes and is dying from a venereal disease. The St James Infirmary of the title refers to St James Hospital in London, a leper hospital that was closed in 1532 when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St James Palace, hinting at an older pedigree for the song.

There are many versions of "The Unfortunate Rake", which is sometimes retitled "A young man cut down in his prime" or "Young girl cut down in her prime", with the theme of the song often reflecting various social and political issues of the time. Folkways released a record in 1960 called "An Unfortunate Rake" which compiled 20 different versions of the track and the variations that evolved from it.

Here's a version by Shirley and Dolly Collins called "Young girl cut down in her prime"

The original folk ballad travelled to the New World and appears to have inspired two distinct traditions, the first stand evolving into the jazz standard "St James Infirmary Blues" as recorded by Armstrong and Calloway; and the second evolving into a country ballad known as "The Cowboy's lament" or "The Streets of Laredo", retaining the same old melody and lyrical themes.

Here's Johnny Cash performing his version of "Streets of Laredo":

And here's a clip from the HBO series "Deadwood", where Ian 'Lovejoy' McShane performs an early version of the original "Unfortunate Rake" ballad, in character as potty-mouthed saloon owner Al Swearengen:

Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott and Solomon Burke

2010-10-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

The Season of the Dead approaches, and as this year has seen the passing of Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott and Solomon Burke, I will be setting lights of remembrance and playing their records as part of my Fete Ghede service – so I thought I'd post up a few tracks in their memory:

Autumn in Norwood

2010-10-28T02:19:00.000-07:00

Indians coming! Get the hell out the way!

2010-06-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Last week I posted up some tracks by Mardi Gras Indians, so I thought I'd do a few follow up posts focusing on music inspired by the Indian traditions or tangentially related in various ways.

According to Thomas L Morgan's informative essay "Mardi Gras Indian influence on the music of New Orleans", the first recording to reference Indian chants was Louis Dumaine's 1927 instrumental "To-Wa-Baca-Wa". No youtube link for this one, but you can hear it on the dark world of spotify here if you are so inclined.:

Louis Dumaine – To Wa Bac A Wa

Morgan says it bears little audible resemblance to the Indian chant "Two-way-pocky-way" that it namechecks in the title, but observes that the melody is a precursor to the Creole jazz standard "My bucket's got a hole in it", which it clearly is. You can listen to Kid Ory's version of the latter track here:

Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band – My Bucket's Got A Hole In It

I'd love to find out a bit more about Dumaine, as both the title and melody of "Two-wa-baca-wa" point to an interplay between early jazz and the Indian traditions, which is highly likely as they both emerged out of the same small area of New Orleans. It's generally accepted that Congo Square in New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz, which suggests that jazz and New Orleans Voodoo share common origins. But early jazz recordings with an overt Voodoo theme are few and far between. The Mardi Gras Indian traditions seem to be an important link in this chain, as they could be viewed as a living strain of Congo Square spiritism that seems to envelop and encompass the music of the city from the early days of jazz to the present.

All of which seems like a good opportunity to gratuitously play Eddie Bo's 1970 track "Check your bucket", which picks up the theme of "My bucket's got a hole in it" ultimately derived from "Two-wa-baca-wa":

The plot thickens when we look at Louis Armstrong's recording of "My bucket's got a hole in it", which unlike many of the earlier versions, includes lyrics. Armstrong adds in a verse built around the refrain "You keep on knocking but you can't come in". And sure enough, if you listen to Louis Jordan's 1939 recording "Keep A'knockin' (but you can't come in)" it retains the same melody as "My bucket's got a hole in it" and the earlier "To-wa-baca-wa":

As does Little Richard's 1957 cover version, in which the ghost of the Indian chant "Two Way Pocky Way" is again re-versioned and sets fire to the world in new rock'n'roll form:

Parallel to all of this, the band leader and producer Dave Bartholomew – one of the primal forces of New Orleans music - co-wrote (with Pearl King) an answer version to the old jazz standard in 1955 titled "I hear you knocking", which has a similar melody but a slower tempo. The original (and for me, the definitive) version of this track was recorded by Smiley Lewis, but it was later covered to greater international success by Fats Domino. Here's the original Smiley Lewis version:

It's likely coincidental, and definitely a bit of a stretch, but all of this business with knocking on doors, trying to get entry, refusing entry to an unwanted visitor, and so on, does conjure up something of the mysteries of Legba, the West African god of the crossroads and keeper of the gate. Legba appears in a variety of guises across the African Diaspora, ranging from the Haitian Papa Legba, to the Cuban Ellegua, to the Devil at the Crossroads who Robert Johnson (or more accurately Tommy Johnson) was alleged to have made a deal with in return for his guitar skills. He is central to all Voodoo practice, and there's a specific New Orleans version of Legba called Papa La Bas. In his 1988 book The Signifying Monkey, the African American literary critic Henry Louis Gates says:

"Papa LaBas's name is a conflation of two of the several names of Esu, the Pan-African trickster. Called 'Papa Legba' as his Haitian honorific and invoked through the phrase "eh la bas" in New Orleans jazz recordings of the 1920s and 1930s. Papa Labas is the Afro-American trickster figure from black sacred tradition. His surname, of course, is French for "over there" and his presence unites "over there" (Africa) with "right here". He is indeed the messenger of the gods, the divine Pan-African interpreter, pursuing in the language of the text "The Work", which is not only Vaudou, but also the very work (and play) of art itself"

"Eh La Bas" has been recorded numerous times, notably by Kid Ory and his Creole jazz band. No decent youtube versions of it, so we have to delve into spotify again:

Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band – Eh, La Bas

Music historians are often quick to assert that the phrase was in common usage as Creole slang, meaning simply "Hey, you over there", and that it has nothing to do with Legba or Voodoo. However, the existence of a Papa La Bas in New Orleans Voodoo, combined with the Congo Square roots of jazz, does suggest there may have been some level of double-meaning implied within the early performances and recordings of "Eh La Bas". The "over there" mentioned in the song could well be a euphemism for the world of spirit. In Haitian Vodou, Legba is called with the phrase "Papa Legba, ouvre le barier" or "Papa Legba, open the gate", as it is he who permits or denies access to the spirit world and the mysteries of Voodoo. You keep on knockin', but you can't come in.

One of the founding fathers of New Orleans jazz was undoubtedly the Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Born in the Faubourg Marigny district of downtown New Orleans, he got his start playing piano in a Storyville brothel at the age of 14. Morton actually claimed to have invented jazz himself in 1902, developing the style out of ragtime.

In 1938, the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded a series of interviews with Morton for the Library of Congress, focusing on the early days of jazz in New Orleans. Due to the explicit lyrical content of many of the songs from the pianist's Storyville days, some of the material he recorded for Lomax remained unreleased until near the end of the 20th century. Lomax recorded more than 8 hours of Jelly Roll Morton talking and playing the piano, and during one of these interviews he talks about having been a Spyboy for a Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and recounts the violence that sometimes ensued when rival Indian gangs encountered one another.

Here's Jelly Roll Morton's recording of "Jungle Blues" from 1927:

A bit spoilt for choice with Jelly Roll numbers, so just for the hell of it, here's a recording of "Hesitation Blues", which sounds like its probably from the Library of Congress tapes:

Lastly, here's a transcript from the relevant section of the interview with Lomax:

"That’s the sign of the Indians. That would be some of the boys, when they would be travelling in the city of New Orleans, that is, during the Mardi Gras. They’d prepare for the Indian tribes . . . I never known any more than four or five tribes in the whole city, of all the thousands of people that there were there. Er, these, er, people they had the idea that they wanted to act exactly like the old Indians did in the years gone by, and they wanted to live true, to, to traditions of their style. If they happened to meet a friend of a tribe, or a friendly tribe to them, they would pitch in and start to dancing.  Er, this was one of the biggest feats that ever happened during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Even when a, when the, the parades that cost millions of dollars would be coming along. If a band of Indians was coming — come in — why the, the parade wouldn’t have anybody there. Everybody would flock to see the Indians.  They would dance, and they would sing, and they would go on just like the regular Indians. They would be armed with fictitious, er, spears and tomahawks and so forth. And incidentally, sometimes, some of ‘em would break the rules and have some real material to fight with, with steel, and so forth and on. Some even had pistols. And I have known many cases where there have been killings in the city of New Orleans with the Indian bands.  Now here’s the way they would sing, er, when they would be dancing. They’d form a ring and one would get in the centre and he’d start his kind of a Indian dance. And he’d be singin’, throwing his head back and downward, and stoopin’ kinda over and bending his knees, and doing a kind of a, a jug dance, I’d call it. And they would say, er:

"T’ouwais bas q’ouwais."

And the whole bunch would answer back:

"Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais."

See, they would, er, they’d have a kind of a rhythm, er, with the, with their heels. Like this:   [demonstrates rhythm with heels]

"T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais.

A la caille-yoko, A la ca woh, Oh, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais."

When they would say other things, they would, er, they would stop for a minute and throw their head back, and say:

"A la caille-yo, A la ca wais, Houwais bas q’ouwais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Hou tendais, T’ouwais bas q’ouwais, Ou tendais."

Now there would be, from time to time — if they didn’t meet a friendly tribe towards them — er, which, er, I thought, when I was a child, it was really Indians. I thought they had the paints and everything else on ‘em just like the Indians would, and some with the blankets, and so forth and so on. Women never was in these masquerades at all.  They’d meet, er, some . . . a real enemy. The enemy would walk up to — that is, er, what you call the spy-boys. They would use them about two blocks ahead. I had a little, er, experience in it myself. I happened to be a spy-boy. They was always kids that did the spyin’. These were real men that did this Indian dance and, and played the Indians. And their main object was to make the enemy bow, and they would use this word. When the spy-boys would meet another spy-boy, they said, “Bow-wow. Bow-wow. Ah, bow-wow.” I don’t remember all the words they used to use. And they’d point their fingers to the ground, “Bow-wow.”  And if they wouldn’t bow, then they, they’d use the Indian call.  [whoops]  And when they’d use that Indian call, why, that was to call in the tribes. And there’s many time, in these Indian, er, these Indian things came up there’d be a killin’. The next day there’d be somebody in the morgue."

One immediately interesting thing about that transcript is its rendering of the Indian chant "Two-way-pocky-way" (or "To-wa-baca-wa") as the Creole patois "T’ouwais bas q’ouwais". The same spelling is used in Lomax's biography "Mister Jelly Roll". Thomas L Morgan's essay suggests a possible translation of the phrase as "I'll kill (tuez) you if you don't get out the way, " with the response "Entendez," or "I hear ya!" There may well be a strong basis for this, as the phrase "Get the hell out the way!" is itself in usage as an Indian chant, and features liberally on the track "Hoon Na Day" by Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles, which appears on the 1991 release "Super Sunday Showdown".

"Two Way Pocky Way" itself is a Mardi Gras Indian standard, and there are versions by the Wild Magnolias, The Golden Eagles, The Wild Tchoupitoulas and many others. But here's The Meters, with their recording "Hey Pocky Way":

Big Chief got a Golden Crown

2010-06-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm currently a bit obsessed with Mardi Gras Indians, to the point that I've almost exclusively been listening to Mardi Gras Indian music for the last month or so. My interest began when I bought a copy of "Handa Wanda", a New Orleans funk 7" by Bo Dollis & The Wild Magnolias. The track was released on the Crescent City label in 1970, and is – as I'm sure you will agree – killer:

Masking Indian for Mardi Gras is a New Orleans tradition with at least 100 years of history – and closer to 200 years according to some sources. It originates in the city's African American communities, and although you get Uptown and Downtown Indians, it is specifically associated with the area of Treme near Congo Square, the birthplace of both jazz and New Orleans Voodoo. Mardi Gras Indians are principally African American men (and some women), rather than Native Americans, although some participants may have mixed African/Native American ancestry.

In the early colonial days of Louisiana, enslaved Africans were brought to the region because the local indigenous population were impossible to hold captive. They would escape, and disappear into the swamps never to be seen again. Their intimacy with the terrain meant that they could survive in the bayou and live off the land in places too hazardous for the white slavers to follow. Exasperated with this, the plantation owners bought in enslaved Africans, whose unfamiliarity with the landscape meant their chances of surviving in the bayou were minimal and they could be hunted down far more easily if they escaped.

However, as happened elsewhere in the Americas and the Caribbean, the disenfranchised indigenous peoples formed alliances with escaped slaves and taught them how to survive in the wild places. They took them into their tribes and helped to free others. In this way, the image of the Indian is an image of freedom, and masking Indian on Mardi Gras is a way of honouring these ancestral benefactors. It is a revolutionary statement of self-determination and independence lived outside the reach of white society and its rule.

In the early days of Carnival, the central parades and masked balls, organised by groups such as the Mystik Krewe of Comus and the Knights of Momus, were open only to the upper echelons of New Orleans society. These organisations often had similar origins and ideologies to the Ku Klux Klan, and were therefore neither open or palatable to the large black communities of New Orleans. Mardi Gras Indians are one of several traditions that arose as an alternative means of celebrating Carnival outside of the jurisdiction and sanction of white culture.

Historically, masking Indian was a life or death business. When rival Indian gangs encountered one another on Mardi Gras Day, there would be violence and often fatalities. It was considered a time to settle scores, taking advantage of the fact that everyone in the city was masked for Mardi Gras, and the police already had their hands full patrolling the main parades. Many Mardi Gras Indian songs are filled with allusion to this violence. However, since the 1940s, largely due to the work and influence of the late Big Chief Tootie Montana, the emphasis on violence was superceded by an emphasis on costume and performance. Now, when two tribes of Indians encounter one another, there is a stand-off culminating in one party being declared "the prettiest", rather than being shot or stabbed. Here's some footage of two Indian tribes facing off:

"Who got the motherfucking diamonds on?"

Indian outfits cost thousands of dollars to construct, and often take a whole year to put together. It is a self-taught indigenous folk art that owes as much to West African costume, with its colourful ostrich feathers and flamboyant beadwork, as it does to traditional Native American attire. Interestingly, the sequined patches of the Indian costumes are almost identical to the sequined flags of Haitian Vodou, and often depict spirits in the same way. A new costume is constructed every year, but often these patches are reused, or passed on by older retired Indians to the younger generation to incorporate into their outfits.

In many ways, the Mardi Gras Indian traditions are a form of New Orleans Voodoo with its roots in Congo Square. In Reid Mitchell's book "All on a Mardi Gras Day", Big Chief Monk Boudreaux talks about being possessed by Indian spirits when he wears his costume, and describes channeling entire songs and chants in the moment, without having heard or thought of them before. It's not just about dressing up on a certain day, but is a year-round spiritual calling that involves regular bar-room practice sessions and committed suit-sewing. Many other African Diaspora magico-religious traditions incorporate a similar veneration for Native American spirits, such as the presence of Caboclo Indian spirits in Brazilian Candomble and Umbanda.

Handa Wanda was the first commercial release by a Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and was followed by an eponymous debut LP in 1973. One of the many highlights of this record is "Smoke my peace pipe", which arguably brings the funk more than the preceding single:

Another Indian tribe, The Wild Tchoupitoulas, also released an eponymous record in 1975, backed by The Meters and produced by Allen Toussaint. The Meters are widely considered one of the progenitors of the New Orleans funk sound, and their frontman Art Neville happened to be the nephew of George Landry, AKA Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas tribe. Masking Indian is a family business, and in addition to bringing his own band in on the session, the recording also featured his brothers Charles, Aaron and Cyril Neville – playing together for the first time before they ever found independent success as the Neville Brothers. Here is their recording of "Big Chief got a Golden Crown":

While I love all these records, my favourite Mardi Gras Indian LP is "Lightning and Thunder" by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles. Boudreaux also features on the Wild Magnolias record, alongside his childhood friend Big Chief Bo Dollis, but this is a very different record – closer in spirit to the bar room practice sessions. There is little instrumentation and no extended funk work-outs, just chants, tambourine and percussion. It sounds positively Haitian in places, and very reminiscent of Voodoo ritual music, from the chants to the cowbell. The whole record is amazing, but their version of "Shallow water, oh mama" is an epic stand-out track.

Unfortunately, there are no soundclips available of this on youtube at present, but here's some footage of similar Indian chants delivered in their rawer form, with just tambourine and vocals. This clip is from the funeral of Big Queen Chief Barbara. The guy in the yellow hat is the son of the legendary Big Chief Tootie Montana.

A bunch of flowers, some cheap toys and an unconvincing apology

2010-06-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Once again, like some sort of deadbeat parent, I show up here with a few meagre offerings to try and make up for six months without a visit or a phone call.

I've been fairly busy with stuff and have a few articles coming out here and there, which I thought I'd mention on the blog. I hate doing self-publicity, but it does help small press publishers if their authors make some sort of effort at visibility, so here's a quick update of what I've been up to.

I have an article called "Things fall apart" in XVI, the new anthology from Scarlet Imprint. It's a collection of essays based around the theme of The Tower, the changing global circumstances that we are currently facing, the idea of apocalypse, and the role of magic within this landscape.

It features essays by Ramsey Dukes, Raven Caldera, Peter Grey, Alkistis Demech, Julian Vayne, Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule, Peter Carroll, and others.

My article in the book criticises the self-defeating dystopian narratives of apocalypse that infest a lot of contemporary thinking and writing on magic, it talks about my gradual drift from chaos magic towards Voodoo as a means of engaging more practically and constructively with 21st century turbulence, and addresses problematic magical interpretations of not-so-natural and largely man-made catastrophes such as September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.

You can read more about the book here.

The original working title for this book was "Atu XVI", but this seems to have been shortened to "XVI", presumably because "Artoo Sixteen" does sound like it is referring to a small barrel-shaped robot when you say it out loud. The proposed companion volume "C93PO" also now appears to have been scrapped.

The launch do for this was last Friday at Watkins Books in Cecil Court, London. Watkins is London's oldest occult bookshop, and sadly went into administration earlier this year as a symptom of nefarious activities within the book trade which you can read about here. Happily, it seems to have been saved at the last minute by a new buyer. Shout out to the Watkins sorcerers who managed to pull that one off, I reckon.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that the occult books were back on the shop floor again. Watkins has always had a very good selection of books on magic, but for the last couple of years they had them all hidden downstairs in the basement like some dirty little secret. The shop floor turned itself into a ghastly new age emporium full of crystals and self-help books, and anything half-decent was hidden away and replaced with lowest common denominator bollocks. It's slightly vindicating to see that business model fall on its arse, and the good stuff put back up front again. Pandering to the muppet contingent, in the long-run, never pays the bills.

Peter and Kika from Scarlet Imprint were running things at the launch with their effortless style and panache. There was a reading from Peter, from his introduction to the book, and generous helpings of vodka and caviar. Although the caviar was a bit much for my proletariat tastes, so I stuck to the crisps. After the launch, Ms Rose and I dragged a contingent to C&R in Soho for some tasty Indonesian food. We had hatched a plan to go on to Jukebox Jam, at Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club on Denmark Street, but nobody else was up for it so we skulked off back to our forest lair. The impending occult revolution really does need to get itself jiving and lindyhopping in immaculate vintage tailoring to the sounds of late 40s and early 50s jazz and R&B spun from vinyl, and I thought last friday was the ideal opportunity to force that unholy collision of worlds, but it was not to be.

Later in the year, I have another article coming out in the next Strange Attractor Journal.

Titled "Haunted Soundsystem", this article is an overview of the influence of African Diaspora magico-religious traditions on music, tracing a trajectory from references to hoodoo conjure in pre-war blues lyrics, to Congo Square Voodoo and the birth of jazz, African Spiritual Churches, Mardi Gras Indians and New Orleans Funk. It also takes in Cuban and Brazilian Orisha music and its influence on Latin Jazz and New York proto-disco; the influence of Jamaican obeah, Kumina and Pocomania on reggae, and the quiet Voodoo undercurrents of grime and dubstep in London.

The book should be out some time in the Autumn, and will likely be filled with lots of quality stuff, as Mr Pilkington is the Don. I've said I'll DJ from my ever expanding Voodoo-related vinyl collection at the launch, so watch this space for details.

I'm also doing a talk at Treadwells bookshop in London on the same theme on 24 September, and plan to set up my turntables and play extracts from the records at that event as well.

Other interesting stuff coming up at Treadwells include an interview with Phil Hine on Thursday 24 June. From the blurb:

"Phil Hine is one of the most widely-read authors of Chaos Magick, but his life in the world of magical and spiritual exploration is both wider and deeper than many realise. The thirty+ years of experience on a hard-hitting journey makes him one of the esoteric community's most challenging practitioners and thinkers. Queerness meets tantra; occultism meets anthropology; curmudgeounly skepticism meets committed mysticism -- these contradictions meet anyone who sits down for a serious talk with Phil. Tonight brings thoughts and issues which occupy and perplex, arising from a life in magic."

Also coming up at Treadwells is a talk on the decidedly creepy tale of "Gef the talking mongoose" by Chris Josife on Thursday 8 July. Chris is a librarian at the University of London, who singlehandedly occupies the liminal space between ancient Sumerian linguistics, fortean investigation, soul music and modernist tailoring. For the last few years he has been investigating the case of "The Dalby Spook" on the Isle of Man. In the early 1930s a poor farmer's daughter claimed to have made friends with a little animal who quickly learnt English, a smattering of other languages, and even sang songs. He lived with the family for a number of years, by turns a mischievous, helpful, and menacing presence.

You can read a bit about the tale here, and I strongly suggest that you do...

The story of Gef received much publicity in the 1930s, and may well have inspired the character Brown Jenkin, from H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witchhouse". Here are some extracts from the linked website that give something of the flavour of the tale...

"On one occasion he rather offended Voirrey's mother by singing a lewd parody of Home on the Range he had picked up from some bus drivers. "You know Gef, you are no animal!" scolded Margaret. "Of course I am not," retorted Gef. "I am the Holy Ghost!"

"On another occasion, Margaret found herself being pelted with stones as she walked home. "Is that you, Gef?" she called out. "Yes, Maggie the witch woman, the Zulu Woman, the Honolulu woman!" taunted the impertinent mongoose."

"In 1970, a reporter from FATE magazine managed to track Voirrey down for an interview. She proved reluctant to discuss her former life with Gef. "Yes, there was a little animal who talked and did all those other things," she admitted. "He said he was a mongoose and we should call him Gef... But I do wish he had let us alone.""

Chris will be presenting his research into the mystery, based on the archives of the psychic investigator Harry Price and his own independent enquiries on the Isle of Man.

That's it for now. I will endeavour to update the blog more regularly, and hopefully get back to writing about records again on here in the near future.

Haiti

2010-01-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

I had planned to reactivate this blog shortly with a series of further posts about the latest stack of Voodoo-related vinyl that I brought back from the US last month. Obviously under the circumstances, that's not going to happen for some time.

I don't know how to begin writing about the devastation in Haiti. When I close my eyes I see the images of unimaginable death and destruction from the past week projected like a horrific accusatory slide show. I've been reading various accounts of battered and traumatised survivors congregating in what is left of the streets of Port-au-Prince to sing and pray through the night to God and the Lwa. Maintaining their faith in the face of an apocalyptic event.

Language is insufficient. Blog writing is inappropriate. Chatty mouth doesn't get people out from under buildings.

Aside from donating, praying and setting lights, I thought I could at least collate some relevant URLs and offer a perspective on some of the stone cold evil commentary that I've seen in the media recently.

First and foremost, here is a list of information and resources for helping Haiti, collated by a friend of mine. Doctors without borders seems to get a lot of praise for their work. Partners in health gets a recommendation from Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, who has written a great article in today's Guardian (which unfortunately contains some truly callous and despicable sub-human entries in the comments field). And Waxidermy (home of "weird records that suck") are running a series of charity auctions of rare and collectable vinyl with all proceeds going to Haiti.

Also in the Guardian today is the collected twitter entries covering the earthquake and its immediate aftermath from Richard Morse, hotelier in Port-au-Prince and musician in the band RAM. Hearteningly, the 5:45 entry on Tuesday tells us that Morse's mother – the singer and folklorist Emerantes de Pradines Morse – has survived the disaster. I have previously blogged about her 1953 record Voodoo, recorded under her maiden name Emy de Pradines.

Throughout the week, the Wild Hunt blog has contributed some excellent commentary and collation of the various eye-bleed diatribes about Haitian Vodou that have been doing the rounds in the media. And there has been a bit of discussion of similar issues over on Liminal Nation and Enfolding, Phil Hine's new blog.

It's all just the same old predictable shit really. New Orleans was on the receiving end of similar victim blaming in the aftermath of Katrina. There always seems to be someone out there whose first impulse to images of catastrophic loss of human life is to warp it into something that bolsters their own paranoid political, religious or occult narrative.

Former presidential candidate and apparent worshipper of the Gnostic demiurge, Pat Robertson, got the ball rolling early on this week by informing his audience:

“Something happened in Haiti a long time ago that people may not want to talk about… They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."

There's not too much to say about this that hasn't already been said elsewhere, but it's surprising how little attention the "You know, Napolean III, or whatever" line has received. The Haitian Revolution took place between 1791 and 1803, and Napolean III was made President of France in 1848. Yet somehow Mr Robertson can still gaze emphatically into the camera and assert that he is telling us a "true story". What the fuck, Pat? What the fuck?

This bollocks about a pact with the devil has its roots in the Haitian folk tale of Bois Caiman, that tells of a Vodou ceremony that took place at that location on the eve of the Haitian revolution, led by a Houngan called Dutty Boukman and attended by Voudoissants from all over Haiti. According to the tale, a pig was sacrificed to the Lwa Erzulie Dantor, and a vow was made to overthrow the French slavers and free the people from their subjugation. It is a popular folk tale of Haitian independence.

What I find interesting is the way even those involved in debunking Robertson's bile, often still seem to portray this event as a Faustian pact of sorts. A contract entered into with shadowy powers where a pig is sacrificed in order to ensure a certain outcome. However, a basic grasp of Vodou will tell you that the Lwa are fundamentally understood as ancestral spirits. Erzulie Dantor herself is a fierce protective mother goddess often envisioned as a single mother who will do anything to look after her children when they are in danger. The ceremony at Bois Caiman is therefore best understood as an appeal to the ancestral powers for protection, ahead of the Haitians entering a conflict where they were vastly outgunned.

It wasn't a compassionless contract or business deal with an infernal power, it was calling on the extended spiritual family for support in a time of crisis. The sacrificed pig wasn't payment for services rendered, it was dinner. Erzulie Dantor regularly receives a pig as part of her service, which is then cooked and shared by the community of celebrants. This is not a one-off thing that happened once in the 18th century, it is a regular aspect of Vodou practice which takes place in a context where participants rear and slaughter their own livestock. They would ultimately be killing the pig (or chicken or goat, etc) in order to eat anyway. The dedication of the animal to the Divine beforehand is a way of making the act sacred and having respect for the life that is to be taken so that the community can eat. Interpreting such an offering in terms of a lurid Satanic sacrifice like something from the Hammer House of Horror is akin to portraying the sanctification of Halal meat in a similar light.

Nothing is taking place in Robertson's comments other than the racist portrayal of African ancestor-based traditional religions as a source of evil. The only real difference between the ceremony at Bois Caiman, and a Christian soldier attending church and praying before going off to war, is that the latter employs the services of an abattoir and only has to worry about buttering the bread and preparing the ham sandwiches for the buffet after the service.

It's also worth pointing out that the Bois Caiman story is a folk tale, and as per folk tales, it may not have literally happened. It is perhaps best thought of as analogous to our traditions about Robin Hood.

Later on, cheeky cheery R*sh L*mbaugh waded into the debate, telling us that the disaster was "made to order" for President Obama, as it would allow him to "burnish his credibility … with both light-skinned and black-skinned" African Americans.

I don't even know what that means. "Both light-skinned and black-skinned"?!? Who says things like that? I know I shouldn't be surprised by these nutjobs, but, just, fucking hell...

Keith Olbermann brings the fight to them here:

One unpleasant pattern that I've observed this week is how a right wing talking head will say something disgusting that uses the deaths of thousands as political ammunition. Then someone more liberally-minded will pipe up and rightly call them on it, and the right wing response will be to accuse their liberal interlocutor of using the deaths of thousands as political ammunition themselves because they are stepping up and challenging these inflammatory statements. I fear it is a conspiracy to take all voices of opposition off the board due to self-inflicted desk-related head injuries.

According to wikipedia, the planet sees an average of 18 earthquakes per year on the Richter scale of 7.0-7.9. This appears to support the notion that it's the nation's poverty, vulnerability and lack of infrastructure that has made the impact of this earthquake so catastrophic. Similarly, the hurricanes that devastated parts of Haiti a few years back caused such levels of destruction specifically because of the widescale deforestation that has vastly reduced the once heavily forested landscape that previously provided a natural protection against storm damage. Comparatively, it was the destruction of the once plentiful wetlands around New Orleans, directly caused by excess drilling for oil, that left the city so vulnerable to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, a recent US court ruling found that poor maintenance of a navigation channel by the Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for ruptures in the levee that caused much of the worst flooding in the city. The barriers should have been able to stand a hurricane of that force, but money that should have gone towards maintenance was allegedly skimmed off due to the endemic corruption of local politics.

None of these facts really point towards a supernatural cause belying the natural disasters that Haiti and New Orleans have endured. I'm a strong believer that "The Devil" only really exists as a personification of the horrors that human beings perpetrate upon one another and upon the planet. Such as slavery, for instance. Or being so abjectly terrified of a free black territory that has violently thrown off the yoke of slave owners, that you conspire to undermine its economy and stability in such a way that the repercussions are still being felt centuries later.

My grasp of Haitian history is fairly superficial, but I understand that the emergent nation was forced to pay 150 million francs of war reparations to France in the early 1800s, an amount that would translate into tens of billions today. The west believed that Haiti needed to be taught a lesson, lest other slave colonies might follow it's example and rise up in bloody revolution. It seems unrealistic to my mind that powerful western nations would *not* use everything at their disposal to punish a country that attempted to exist so far outside of their global hegemony in this way; and that seems to be largely what happened. It took the country over 150 years to pay these reparations, severely depleting its natural resources to do so. Haiti was forced into this arrangement – essentially remunerating slave owners for the loss of revenue incurred by their freedom – in order to finally be recognised as a valid entity. For the preceding 60 years before the reparations were agreed to, not a single nation on the planet had recognised Haiti's independence following its revolution. I'd hazard that a line can perhaps be drawn between these concerted efforts at undermining Haiti throughout it's early history, and its current position as the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. It's not fucking rocket science is it. I've seen many commentators describe Haiti as a "failed state" this week, but did it really have much of a chance to be anything else, given how it came into being and the forces ranged against it?

Certainly these factors seem a more convincing reason for why this earthquake has had such a dreadful impact, than the fuck-witted explanation of a Voodoo curse that irrational minds seem to leap towards. If you make an effort to understand Haitian Vodou, as opposed to uncritically soaking up its hollywood caricature, it becomes clear that it is community building and empowering for its participants. It was, after all, the religion that brought together enslaved peoples from all regions of Africa and galvanised them into a force capable of accomplishing the only successful slave revolution in modern history. It's difficult to think of another world religion that has been demonised to the extent of the African traditional religions, and there is a convincing argument that the sheer terror which the success of the Haitian revolution evoked in slave-holding nations is one of the key drivers of that othering process.

Here is a link to an article I wrote a couple of years ago called 'Live and Let Die – fears and misconceptions about Vodou'. It's a response that I drafted the last time I had to deal with a pair of eedjits harbouring stupid racists ideas about African traditions, previously published on the now inactive Key 64 (thanks to Nick Pell for digging out the lost text for me), and now very kindly hosted at short notice by Phil Hine over on his website.

Even (comparatively) respectable news coverage of the disaster in Haiti can't seem to help dropping in a bit of lurid Voodoo-bashing to spice up its copy. For instance, the Evening Standard (London's evening paper) ran a box-out last week on the corruption and unstable infrastructure of Haiti that will exacerbate the current situation, and couldn't help but make the observation that "Voodoo, involving black magic and animal sacrifice, is recognised as an official religion in Haiti". What bearing on the issue does that have exactly? Why would you mention this unless you were attempting to make some spurious connection between the religious lives of Haitians and the disaster? If there was an earthquake in Japan, it would be unlikely that a newspaper would make any reference to the equally animist Shinto traditions of that island. When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004, I don't recall seeing much coverage of the broadly comparable animist traditions of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Fuckers can't resist an opportunity to leer at African spirituality and depict it as ignorant savagery, without actually bothering to try and understand it before splurging out inane copy.

Lastly, here's an interesting perspective on the earthquake from a Haitian Vodou practitioner who perceives the disaster as nature rebalancing itself after decades of deforestation and environmental destruction, "like a horse throwing a rough rider".

However you may frame the event, the important things right now are donating money to the aid organisations that are doing good work on the ground, and expressing unequivocal support and solidarity for those that have been affected and their family members. Slapping down pernicious hatemongers wherever they rear their heads is a secondary pursuit, but that's good too.

Here's Richard Morse's group RAM doing their track "Fey", meaning "faith":

And Arcade Fire's track Haiti with lovely footage shot on location:

Yemaya

2009-08-19T09:29:00.001-07:00

Number 3 in my occasional series of posts about "Radiant Ladies of Voodoo and the music they love". Having just returned from Cornwall and some inevitable Seaside Voodoo, today's post is about Yemaya, the Queen of the Sea and the Mother of Fishes.

Her name is a contraction of the Yoruba words: "Yeye emo eja" which means "Mother whose children are like fish". All life emerged from the sea, and Yemaya is seen as the divine source of all. Her colour is blue, her number is seven, and she likes offerings of champagne, watermelon, pound cake and molasses. She is syncretised with a Black Madonna known as Our Lady of Regla, and is called on for matters relating to pregnancy, fertility, wealth, abundance, cleansing, nourishing and the home. Her presence is like the fresh sea air and her service imparts a sense of well being, comfort and renewal.

One of her most important festivals throughout the year takes place on New Years Eve, where her devotees as widespread as Cuba, Brazil, Florida and Tynemouth will go down to the beach with offerings, set off fireworks, pour champagne into the sea and cast small wooden boats filled with offerings onto the waves to be received by the Goddess.

As per her sister/daughter, Oshun, there is a wealth of latin music dedicated to Yemaya. Perhaps some of the most popular and best known recordings of devotional music for Yemaya are by the Cuban "Queen of Salsa", Celia Cruz. Although publically a Roman Catholic, Cruz was an archetypal child of Yemaya who recorded numerous songs for the Orisha and drew much inspiration from the music of Santeria. Even Cruz's catchphrase "¡Azúcar!" (meaning "sugar"), a reference to the sweetness of Cuban coffee, recalls the traditional offering of mollasses that is received by Yemaya.

Here is a recording of Celia Cruz performing a track entitled "Yemaya" and accompanied by images of the Orisha.

Tubby Hayes' Voodoo Session

2009-07-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

I got my copy of Tubby Haye's Voodoo Session in the post this week, the latest release from Trunk Records and limited to 666 numbered copies. Trunk is an independent label specialising in film scores, library music, sexploitation and kitsch releases, such as the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, UFO, Deep Throat, Ivor the Engine and The Clangers. (There's something a bit perturbing about mentioning Deep Throat and Ivor the Engine in the same sentence).

The Voodoo Session record is from the soundtrack to Dr Terror's House of Horrors, a 1965 British horror film from Amicus Productions starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, among others. It was the first in a series of portmanteau films from the studio, which later included From Beyond the Grave, which has always been a particular favourite of mine.

The plot of the film involves five men on a train carriage having their tarot cards read by Peter Cushing, who reveals the horrible destiny of each of them. One of the stories that is revealed through the cards features Roy Castle (of later Record Breakers fame) in his first starring role as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who encounters a Voodoo ceremony whilst touring the West Indies.

Loving the Voodoo sounds, he makes the mistake of copying down the music of the Voodoo Lwa Dambala and doing his own Brit jazz arrangement of the spirit rhythms at a club in London. Occult peril quickly ensues as a result of having stolen the music of Dambala. He could have at least offered a white egg on top of a mound of flour and asked nicely. It's not fucking difficult.

Castle was drafted in at the last minute to replace Acker Bilk who had recently suffered a heart attack, and his band in the film consists of a historic 1960s Brit jazz line-up including Tubby Hayes and Shake Keane. According to the Trunk website, the Voodoo Brit Jazz number from the soundtrack has been much in demand among record collectors for years, with one copy of what was assumed to be the single selling for £800 before it was discovered that it wasn't the lost recording from the film, but something else entirely with Roy Castle singing on it.

Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records says:

"Fast forward to mid 2009, and out of nowhere I get an email from a good jazz man known as Simon Spillett. He is overseeing the recently unearthed Tubby Hayes archive. This is a set of reels and records taken care of first by Tubby's mother, and then later passed on to Tubby's last girlfriend. In amongst these reels is the original session for this super Voodoo scene.

Simon emailed me the tracks, and I got extremely excited - it was the killer tune, the missing music that music people have been waiting for. A few weeks later the tracks were remastered, and a very limited 7" ep was designed, the idea being to make sure we can make enough money so Tubby's girlfriend can afford to fly abroad and see her family."

The main sequence where Roy Castle goes to the Voodoo ceremony and hears Dambala's drum rhythms, and the later sequence where he plays his jazz arrangement with the Tubby Hayes quintet, is embedded below. It's worth a look, if only for the surreal scene of Roy Castle being admonished for stealing the music of the great god Dambala.

The 7" release itself is awesome, has a great cover and liner notes, and is an interesting pop culture Voodoo curiosity. Since one of the main subjects of this blog is the hidden influence of African Diaspora magico-religious traditions on popular music and culture, I took the recent unearthing and release of this record as a good nod. The liner notes manage to namecheck my mate Danny's pivotal UK jazz saxophonist uncle, Joe Harriott, but neglect to mention anything about Dambala, which feels like a bit of an omission. I'm not sure how auspicious it is to reissue the stolen music of Dambala and not give him his due. Did Jonny Trunk not see what happened to Roy Castle in the film...

New Orleans, Storyville and Billie Holiday

2009-07-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

New Orleans is a 1947 film starring Arturo de Cordova and Dorothy Patrick in the leading roles, but much more interestingly has a supporting cast that includes Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, starring in her first and last film role.

The plot gives a fictionalised account of the birth of jazz, focusing on the destruction of the historic Storyville district of New Orleans and the "jazz diaspora" that took place afterwards leading to the proliferation of jazz throughout the country.

Storyville was the prostitution district of the city from 1897 to 1917, and was set up to limit and restrict prostitution to one area where it could be monitored and regulated. It was based on the Dutch model of legalised red light districts that operated at various ports. Brothels in the district ranged from cheap 50 cent dives or "cribs" as they were termed, to magnificently opulent mansions servicing wealthy clients.

The photographer E.J.Bellocq is famous for having taken a series of haunting images of Storyville prostitutes, the negatives of which were discovered hidden in a sofa and first published in 1971. In many of Bellocq's images the prostitutes wear masks or have had their faces scratched out on the negatives to conceal their identity. Some of the photographs are posed as if the subjects are acting out some strange and mysterious narrative, and more than a few of these scenes are suggestive of Erzulie Freda Dahomey and her mysteries. A few of the women are posed next to collections of objects that almost look like altars, as if the prostitutes were devotees of Our Lady.

The district was famous for its "blue books", that were guides to the brothels available in the area including prices and services on offer. The Storyville blue-books were inscribed with the motto: "Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.)"

There are some nice reproductions of pages from the blue books in the journalist Herbert Asbury's, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, currently in print under the title The Gangs of New Orleans, to cash in on the Martin Scorcese adaptation of Asbury's other book about NY gang culture. Tangentially, Asbury's French Quarter book also has a pretty good section on New Orleans Voodoo Queen's and Root Doctors, that discusses various Voodoo personages beyond the more well known operators such as Marie Laveau/s and Doctor John/s.

The New Orleans film portrays the popular, although incorrect, idea that jazz originated in Storyville. In reality, the emergent style of music was played all over the city, but as Storyville was often a social destination for many visitors to the city, that was where jazz was often first encountered. It was common for the higher end brothels to employ a piano player or small band, and this is where many jazz musicians in the city got their start, including Louis Armstrong.

Storyville was shut down by the Federal Government in 1917, and then later demolished completely in the 1930s. Some of the finest and most historically important buildings in the city were destroyed by a city government that wanted to eradicate all memory of the district's reputation from existence.

Whilst the New Orleans film takes some staggering liberties with history (such as suggesting that one sympathetic white man was the driving force behind the success and popularity of jazz...), it does depict the exodus of jazz (or ragtime as it was then known) musicians from Storyville to Chicago in one of its most poignant scenes. Louis Armstrong, in his 40s in the film, did make the journey from New Orleans to Chicago as a young man, following the closure of Storyville, and initially found his success in the windy city rather than the crescent city.

For much of his career, Armstrong was unable to play at venues in his hometown New Orleans as he often had a mixed race band, and in the south during that time, bands comprised of integrated white and black musicians were unwelcome. A venue would accept an all black lineup or an all white lineup, but bands that crossed the colour line on stage were a no go. A fact that Armstrong always said broke his heart, and gave him checkered feelings towards the city of his birth. The band that Armstrong plays with in the film is a who's who of early New Orleans jazz greats, including trombonist Kid Ory, drummer Zutty Singleton, clarinetist Barney Bigard, guitar player Bud Scott, bassist George "Red" Callender, pianist Charlie Beal, and pianist Meade "Lux" Lewis.

The most interesting scenes in the film, however, are the ones that involve Billie Holiday. Much of the surviving film footage of Holiday performing is from her later period during the 1950s, where her voice is still awesome but you can almost see the demonic ravages of her drug use crawling under her skin. The nightclub scenes in New Orleans give us a glimpse of her closer to the prime of her career, three white gardenias in her hair and inhabiting the Lady Day persona.

Holiday was not happy with the film, understandably, as it was kept from her that she was expected to play a maid until she had agreed to the part. In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, she says:

"I thought I was going to play myself in it. I thought I was going to be Billie Holiday doing a couple of songs in a nightclub setting and that would be that. I should have known better. When I saw the script, I did. You just tell one Negro girl who's made movies who didn't play a maid or a whore. I don't know any. I found out I was going to do a little singing, but I was still playing the part of a maid."

You can pretty much see the resentment on her during the scenes where they have her dressed as a maid. She has the last laugh though, as New Orleans isn't actually a very good film, and the only reason to watch it is for the scenes where she sings.

You can see her squirming with resentment in a maid's outfit here:

And then killing it in the Storyville exodus and nightclub scenes here:

Oshun Tropicalia

2009-07-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Today's blog post is the second in my occasional series of features on "Radiant Ladies of Voodoo and the music they love", and it celebrates my Lady Oshun, Queen of the Rivers, and ruler of love, intimacy, luxury, beauty, joy and all of the things in life that make it not just bearable but truly worth living.

She occupies a similar space in the pantheon of the predominantly Yoruban-influenced African Diaspora magico-religious traditions, such as Santeria and Candomble, as Erzulie Freda occupies in Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo, which are more influenced by the Dahomean traditions of Africa. Oshun shares many of the same mysteries with Erzulie Freda, and they could be considered cousins or sisters, but are not to be conflated. They are very different ladies, and you can learn more from observing how they differ than you can from noticing their points of similarity. I love and serve both of them in my House.

Oshun's colour is yellow, her number is five, her day of the week is Thursday, and she is associated with rivers, mirrors, fans, jewelry, pumpkins, oranges, honey, and all sweet things. She is the quality of sweetness in your life, as well as your own sense of happiness and self-worth. Service to Oshun brings with it a feeling of refreshment, like cool water or sweet citrus, or a soft breeze on a hot summer day. She regularly receives offerings from her devotees at various places of power along the banks of the River Thames, a continuity of practice that recalls earlier riverside devotion to the old London Goddesses Isis and Tamesis. She is syncretised with Our Lady of Charity, the patron Saint of Cuba, and is much loved throughout the South Americas.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given her popularity in latin countries, Oshun is frequently the subject of a lot of Cuban and Brazilian music. A particular favourite of mine is Louvação a Oxum, by Maria Bethania, the sister of Brazilian tropicalia singer Caetano Veloso and contemporary of Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, et al. This is actually a late cut of hers, dating from as recently as 1992, clearly a devotional song for Oshun (or Oxum in the Brazilian spelling), and here accompanied by some lovely imagery of the Orisha and her priestesses.

Erzulie Freda Dahomey

2009-06-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

My Lady Erzulie Freda Dahomey is the Voodoo Goddess of love. Her day is Thursday. Her colours are pink and white. She loves flowers and jewelry, beautiful cakes and pastries, champagne and expensive perfume. She is syncretised with the Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows, because of the tears that she cries for the world. Her heart is pierced with a sword but it does not bleed. She feels everything. Her mysteries are a whirl of parties, and music, and dancing and romance – but the world in all its crassness and brutality always lets her down. Conditions down here on Earth never live up to the beautiful dream of Erzulie. Serving her mysteries is then a celebration of that beautiful, wonderful, unrealistic dream that Erzulie holds in her heart and which may blossom with the same radiance within our own hearts. She is the vivid beauty of nature, the fire of Netzach, the passion of the senses, the fresh early morning dew upon the petal of a rose. She has three husbands among the Lwa – Ogoun, Agwe and Dambala – whose three wedding rings she wears on her fingers, and an infinite number of lovers and admirers. And now she also has her own dubstep label.

Paul.Meme is a DJ and co-editor of Woofah magazine, the essential British print fanzine covering dancehall, reggae, grime and dubstep. He records under the name Grievous Angel, and released the record Belief is the Enemy last year on the Electrik Dragon label to much critical acclaim. Paul's website is a regular source of awesome mixes ranging from 2step to bashment. His series of Dubstep Sufferah mixes and Grime in the Dancehall collaboration with Jon Eden (which appeared as part of the much missed Blogariddims series), are particular favourites of mine and have provided the soundtrack to Vodou services for certain Lwa on many occasions.

Last summer he released a 12" track called Lady Dub (catalogue no: ERZULIE01), the first of his Devotional Dubz series of dubstep/dark garage refixes of r'n'b tunes, this one being a refix of D'Angelo's Lady. Paul told me that the track was conceived as a result of meditational music making one evening beneath a Full Moon, during which he experienced a powerful sense of spiritual connection with Erzulie Freda Dahomey. Thus inspired, he completed the track as a devotional piece for her over the course of that Moon cycle, with the track being finished when the Moon came full again. Lady Dub is essentially a distillation of that joyful contemplation on the beauty and sadness of human life. Paul wouldn't describe himself as a Voodoo practitioner, but he instinctively gets it, and you only have to listen to Lady Dub to hear the presence of Erzulie in its beats.

It was well received, coming in at no.8 in Pitchfork's dubstep 2008 chart, getting single of the week at Boomkat, and plenty of airplay on Rinse FM and the pirates. One of the things Paul said he was trying to accomplish with the single was to offer "a different vision of dubstep, one that reaffirmed the form’s original tolerance for sweetness and vocals while offering the biggest booming 808 sine waves I could manage."

I've been a bit at odds with the dubstep scene myself ever since I encountered difficulty getting into FWD cos I was wearing a pale grey suit with an early 60s cut, which was at odds with their unofficial dress code of scruffy bastard in a washed out grey hoodie. Fortunately, retro tailoring won out over shit Gap t-shirts and combats, as it always will, and they let me in anyway. I enjoyed the tunes, and the physically overpowering bass, but the thing that notably seemed to be missing was the influence of The Lady. There was no glamour, none of her mysteries, an 80% male crowd nodding their heads in unison, and a marked absence of where Erzulie Freda ought to be on a night out. I even got served a bottle of Corona that was missing its lime, which speaks volumes about an abandonment of basic decency.

Perhaps as a symptom of the rough and uncertain times that have characterised the zeroes (I refuse to call them the noughties, they've been the fucking zeroes), both dubstep and grime have lacked that essential component that is the essence of Erzulie Freda. Dubstep is like a South East London night bus journey expressed as music, the florescent lit midnight screech of the 171 as it howls through Peckham's dreaming, the arduous brutalised voice of Croydon concrete speaking of the barrenness of its heart in the only language it knows. Grime is a stark contrast to that, a mad energy rising up out of East London towerblocks and proclaiming its turf over apocalyptic SciFi beats, an urban folk music infused with the collective experience of Bethnal pressure, daily struggle, postcode killings, police hassle, quick thrills, and the dull ache of a blighted landscape. Cut grime and it bleeds testosterone, the microphone passed from hand to hand, bad boy threats in the dancehall, even girl MCs spitting violence in the night.

Where was Erzulie Freda in this? What happened to the sweet vocals and champagne, the dancing and allure, making an effort before you leave the house, creating a space where the brutality of city living is overcome for a few hours and replaced with fleeting and ephemeral worlds of delight and fascination. This is her mystery. She occupies the heart, and whatever the paucity of your circumstances or the grim surroundings you may inhabit, if you can locate Erzulie in your heart, she will transform that which you experience with a wave of her fan. You only have to meet her halfway.

When I put the needle down on the Lady Dub 12", it felt like listening to a spell that had been sent out to redress that balance and to bring Erzulie to where she was most needed. All soundsystem needs The Lady. She's the beating heart of any night out. Queen of the dancehall, captivating and enchanting, turning the night into something you'll remember for the rest of your life. Lady Dub was an invocation. A VIP invite to the Voodoo Love Goddess, seamed stockings and high heels, French perfume and eroticism. Our city groans beneath the weight of inequality and corruption, we've been robbed blind by bankers and politicians, disenfranchised and made to live in fear of one another, taught to be grateful for whatever meagre living we can scrape by. But Erzulie's dream is greater than all of this and will not be denied. In her world, every moment is like the first kiss of an ideal lover, and her presence reminds us of how beautiful nature is, how amazing and filled with possibility London can be, and how much magic there is to be found in a night out.

Like all good witchcraft, the Lady Dub spell seemed to both echo and give solid form to certain yearnings that were already in motion in the culture. Strong magic simply irrigates and gives shape to unformed desire, and suggests an appealing direction in which existing energy and intention might be encouraged to flow. Since its release there has been a significant garage revival, and the unstoppable rise of UK funky, that brings back girly vocals, smart dress codes, and a female audience to a scene that has been dry of these mysteries for too long. Erzulie has re-entered the building, and wants you to buy her a bottle of champagne.

You can listen to Lady Dub at its dedicated myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/devotionaldubz

Or download the entire Devotional Dubz mix put together for FACT magazine.

Then buy one of the remaining 12"s and play it through a proper system like it deserves.

St John's Eve

2009-06-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

The swamps are alive with spirits tonight, and so is the Borough of Lewisham.

Spotify link:

Dr. John – Croker Courtbullion

Voodoo by Emy de Pradines

2009-06-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

One of the main things I want to do with this blog is write about my current obsession with Voodoo-related music, specifically obscure Voodoo-related vinyl, such as the shockingly good record above – which I managed to score on Ebay last week.

It's an extremely rare 1953 recording of "Authentic music and rhythms of Haiti" by Emy de Pradines and the Haiti Dance Chorus and Orchestra. According to the liner notes, Emy de Pradines is the daughter of a Haitian poet, composer and author who wrote under the name of Candiau. I so far haven't been able to turn up any further information about either of them on the internet, but the liner notes are pretty extensive. Apparently, the Haiti Dance Chorus consisted of "12 girls who both dance and sing", and the Haiti Dance Orchestra consisted of Rada drums, bamboo horns, sticks clacked together, cha-cha shakers, and – unusually for Voodoo rhythms – flute and guitar.

The seller included some information about the record label, which also gives it a bit of context:

"Sometimes a record is so far ahead of its time that it’s almost impossible to believe a U.S. record label would press it. This is truly one of those records. This is an incredibly rare New York City Mono 1st pressing on the Deep Groove Remington Label from 1953. In the early fifties, the Remington Label was billed as a “budget” label, although part of the reason was that much of the material on their records was not mainstream and it was cheap to produce at that time. Because of the nature of their material, these records were produced in small numbers and even then did not sell well. However the material on most of the records was outstanding for its field, and the one we are offering here is exceptional.

It could broadly be defined as Haitian Vodou ritual music, and a lot of the tracks are songs for various Lwa, but it's nothing like any of the more widely available recordings of ritual music that I've encountered, such as the various releases available on Soul Jazz. It's almost like a weird Haitian version of a 1950s exotica record in places, mostly due to the very non-traditional presence of the flute and guitar, and the delightful vocal stylings of Ms de Pradines and her chorus.

The tracks themselves are extremely varied, opening with a "Banda" drum rhythm, and then going into a track called "I Man Man Man", in which the names of various Lwa are called out one-by-one until a possession occurs. I recognise Simbi, and Ogoun Badagris, and a couple of others who get name checked, but I've never heard of some the names called out, which are all presumably local line of transmission Lwa specific to whichever region of Haiti the record was recorded in.

The next track is called "Choucoune", a love song of the romantic period dating to around 1900 and based on a Meringue rhythm. This is followed by "Negress Quartier Morin", which is a call and response number where one singer says: "I am going to dance Voodoo, but I cannot dance in these old clothes – lend me your skirt!", and the answer comes back: "No, I will not give you my skirt!" and so on for various items of clothing.

Side A closes with a beautiful song for Erzulie Freda Dahomey, the goddess of love. As the liner notes say: "The singer calls Erzulie until the Goddess enters her body and possesses her. Then perfumed and arrayed in the robe and jewelry of Erzulie, the possessed takes on the characteristics of the Goddess. Erzulie represents love in spiritual form. She is sweet and good and can do no evil."

Side B opens with a lullaby called "Dodo Titit Maman", probably of French origin. It's a funny sort of a lullaby though, given that it is based around the comforting refrain: "If you do not sleep, the crab will eat you; if you do not sleep, the cat will eat you."

Next up is "Rasbodail rhythm", which is probably my favourite track on the record. The notes say that it is influenced by the Taino and Arawak Indian rhythms, the original inhabitants of Haiti whose rites were incorporated into Vodou. I can hear it, as it has that fiery Petro quality to the drums, which tends to signify the Taino or Arawak inspired rites. It's carnival music, and conjures up images of wild, dangerous and otherworldly torchlit processions.

The next track is called "Loa Azaou" and is an invocation to a feared deity of black magic, whose name I've never encountered before. This one is spine chilling. I'm actually a bit uncomfortable about casually playing this track in my house, given what it seems to be calling on and what the notes imply about the personality in question. You sometimes have to be a bit careful with some of these mysterious invocatory spirit rhythms recorded onto old vinyl...

It is followed by "Panamam Tombe", a humourous song about a Haitian president who was forewarned that if he lost his Panama hat, he would also lose his presidency. The song tells the story that on the way to Jacqmel, a wind blew the hat from his head and he simultaneously lost his power. There's lots of stuff in Haitian songs and folklore about hats, and they often seem to function as a metaphor for consciousness or control of oneself. I guess this comes from the importance of one's head as the seat of spirit, and also connects to the importance of haircuts in a lot of African Diaspora trads. There's a well known song for Erzulie La Sirene that has a line about being careful that your hat does not fall into the sea, as that is when she might snatch you away beneath the waters.

The final track is another great one called "Mrele, Mrele, Mrele", the defiant and triumphant cry of a girl whose father is a Voodoo priest and whose mother is a priestess of the mysteries. "No evil spirit can touch me! I call, I shout, I challenge! None can hurt me!" she sings.

The chap I bought the record from was kind enough to put some sound clips up on his Ebay page, which are still live, so I thought I'd embed them here to give a taste of this fantastic treasure. I wouldn't say they are the best tracks on the record, but I'm not set up to convert from vinyl to mp3 myself at the moment so at least its a sample. Enjoy!

Banda drums:

Panamam Tombe:

Equinox Festival

2009-06-21T04:21:00.000-07:00

I attended the Equinox Festival at the weekend, a three-day event consisting of speakers, bands, performers and films, organised by the filmmaker Raymond Salvatore Harmon. I had been invited to give a talk on the Sunday morning, so went along on the Saturday night to check out the venue. I had been intending to get there earlier in the day, but it was Saturday and I had some business with Ghede to take care of before I could get out of the house. He loves a party and came along as well.

After a whole afternoon of Voodoo, I was more than a bit ridden, or at least heavily overshadowed by the time I got there. It's always weird being on the train when you've got spirits on you. Sitting quietly among the commuters when you are massively between worlds with pressure sounds drumming in the skull. I turned up at Conway Hall around 8:30pm, having missed most of the talks, but in time to catch the bands.

I hadn't made it along to any sort of occult event in at least six months. When I worked in the West End, I was in-and-out of Treadwells all the time, as it was just up the road and they always had interesting stuff going on. However, now I'm a city boy, all of that scene has felt really distant. So it was odd suddenly finding myself right at the heart of it again. There were loads of people there that I knew though, and I had a nice evening chatting with old friends and meeting new people.

I couldn't really get into the first band. I wanted drums. Sometimes the spirits get a bit impatient if they come out with you to a party and there is no drums and dancing to be had. I've been in this situation a few times, when things have been heating up all day around the altars, then I take it out to a party and the spirits want to let off some steam, but I get there and its just a bunch of people standing around being detached and cynical in that annoying London venue way. I was having more fun chatting to people, so I went back out to the bar and looked for interesting conversations.

The next band I saw were Yan-gant-y-tan. A collective involving my friend Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor, and a line-up that I think was assembled for the evening. I've performed my spoken word stuff with Mark before, in his Raagnagrok guise, at the Green Man Festival in Wales and at last year's Day of the Dead event at the Horse Hospital. He's the master of electronic krautrock drone weirdness, and Yan-gant-y-tan were on fine form. Even when faced with a random walk-on tambourine man in the last 10 minutes of their set, they proceeded undaunted, although I hope that tambourine geezer – whoever he was – had some good defenses against the evil eye in place...

None of the other bands on the lineup really appealed to me, apart from the headliners who I was intrigued to see play live. I always find myself in a minority at this sort of event, as I can't really get away with any of that goth industrial bollocks that so often goes clammy hand-in-clammy hand with occultism. It just bores the shit out of me. Give me soundsystem and MCs and I'm happy – cos that's what magic is about for me.

Com us, on the other hand, playing their first UK gig in 37 years, was a different matter. I like a bit of acid folk, and First Utterance is a powerful record. Chilling in places, and evocative of that buried primal dangerous English magic that lies sleeping beneath the landscape. It's had Tesco's and Starbucks, call centres and identical high streets built on top of it, and you are brought up by a culture in denial of it when you grow up here, but it's always just beneath the surface, tossing and turning in its sleep. There's never a year when any natural witches aren't born here, and even if they don't consciously know what they are doing, it's in the blood to instinctively stir this stuff up from its sleep and provide a medium for its expression. First Utterance is such a spell.

As ever, the weird Voodoo connections and synchronicities were present. According to the liner notes of their reissued CD, Comus came together in Beckenham, sharing a big house there in a sort of commune setup, and playing regularly at the Beckenham Arts Lab at a club night called Grow organised by David Bowie (before his career took off). The Arts Lab used to take place at the Three Tuns pub on Beckenham High Street, which is still there, although last time I paid a visit it was a hideous soulless chain pub with a blue plaque outside exploiting its Bowie connection. No mention of Comus on the plaque though, oddly enough. Unfortunately I don't have a solid reference for this next bit, but I've heard by word of mouth from a few sources, that the Three Tuns pub also used to be one of the early London venues that hosted soundsystem nights playing reggae, and that this used to happen on alternate weeks from when Bowie was doing his Arts Lab nights.

I used to live in Beckenham, and it was during my time there that I really started to deepen my Voodoo practice. Right from the start, I've always found that British-Jamaican soundsystem culture is massively important to the roads of the Lwa that have made their home in London, so the Three Tuns became a place where I would sometimes go to pour rum and smoke

cigars (back when you could smoke fucking cigars in a fucking pub), have conversations with the spirits, and generally toast the importance of the location. It seemed to me an interesting crossroads point between JA soundsystem and English psychedelia, two things that I value and enjoy, so it felt right to treat it as a place of power in my local urban landscape.

Beyond the personal synchronicities, Comus also have a tangential connection to New Orleans Voodoo. The Mistick Krewe of Comus – named after the same ancient Gr e ek god of revels and festivity – were the first of the Mardi Gras carnival krewes to emerge in the 19th century, and were pivotal in preserving the irregular and informally organised traditions of the old Roman Catholic Creole carnival, and shaping the event into what it ultimately became. According to New Orleans' historian Henri Schindler, writing in Mardi Gras Treasures: Invitations of the Golden Age:

"It was Comus, who, in 1857, saved and transformed the dying flame of the old Creole Carnival with his enchanter's cup; it was Comus who introduced torch lit processions and thematic floats to Mardi Gras; and it was Comus who ritually closed, and still closes, the most cherished festivities of New Orleans with splendor and pomp."

Other iterations of Comus through the ages include a masque written by John Milton in 1634, later illustrated by William Blake around 1815.

Watching the reformed Comus play their set at the Equinox festival felt like standing at a churning crossroads point where all of these tangential and interrelated things converged for a moment: John Milton, William Blake, the carnival traditions of New Orleans and the line of transmission that preceded them, Aleister Crowley putting the first Equinox journal out in 1909, David Bowie setting up the Beckenham Arts Lab circa 1969, JA soundsystem exploding onto English shores and invigorating the nation, me nervously pouring rum at my old crossroads in Beckenham almost ten years ago calling on strange powers I didn't understand, and behind it all the ancient god Comus himself and his cult, transmitted through time and erupting into the present.

Most of all though, there was finally some fucking drums. I felt ridden a couple of times, the white darkness flooding my consciousness as Glen Goring beat out the rhythms on his hand drums. Nothing too heavy or prolonged, just fading out occasionally and feeling engulfed by this old magic of the land that I seemed to be caught up in – the shape of which I honestly don't think I fully comprehend at this present juncture. That's generally how witchcraft goes though, you move instinctively to the currents of it and do what feels right without necessarily needing to fully and consciously understand what you are doing at an intellectual level.

I managed to stay to the end of their set, and then had to make a mad dash to London Bridge in order to get on the last train. I would have loved to stay later and go the the after party, but I had to be up early the next day to get back down here and give the talk I'd been invited to perform at the festival. I was due to be on at 12pm, which was a bit early in the day for such things, but I felt more sorry for Oryelle who was due on stage before me at 11am and had a more performance oriented piece to do. Fortunately though, in good old fashioned London occult spirit, everything was running late so neither of us had to do our thing quite so early.

Still, I was half expecting to be giving my talk to an empty room, since I certainly wouldn't have got up that early in the morning on a Sunday to listen to myself speak. I was wrong though, as the room was pretty busy and a fair-sized crowd had assembled by the time I went on. I did my bit, which seemed to go alright, and then got out of there sharpish.

I was speaking on the crossroads and Papa Legba, and the talk was essentially an extract from the book about magic and Voodoo that I'm currently working on. I'm glad that people seemed to get something out of it, as you can go a bit mad as a writer when you're two thirds through this huge project that not many other people have read. It was good to take a section of it out for a spin and see how it plays to a crowd. I think its actually quite healthy to create opportunities for that sort of contact between your work and its potential audience, especially when you've been working on this massive sprawling thing that only a couple of people have seen or are likely to see for perhaps even another year or so. It was actually one of the things that gave me the impetus to start this blog, so I don't feel quite so much like one of those guys who builds a throne for the archangel metatron out of lightbulbs and toilet rolls in his garage, that he doesn't tell anybody about and which no-one else gets to see.

After I'd done my talk, Ms Rose and I spent a lovely afternoon chatting to friends and meeting interesting new people who were attending the festival. We both totally failed to catch any of the other talks or acts, as the sun was out and we ended up spending most of the afternoon sitting in Red Lion Square, with an occasional bit of Voodoo. One highlight of the day was being accosted by some geezer who had been kicked out of the festival, claimed to be the reincarnation of Dr William Gull and attempted to sit down and hold court among our group as some sort of big shaman trickster. I think he sort of misjudged his audience a little though, as we weren't having any of it, and when even his impromptu melodica playing failed to raise the expected response, he sort of wandered off a bit disheartened. It goes with the territory of occult festivals.

Anarchy in the UK

2009-04-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

Things have been a bit mental here this week with the whole G20 riots thing going on. I've been working in the City financial district since January this year, which is a weird part of London. It's where all the bankers are, but it's also the oldest part of town and full of mysteries. I'm five minutes walk from the boneyard where William Blake is buried, and my nearest crossroads is right next to the site where the notorious Bedlam insane asylum stood during the 16th century. Interesting gear.

I went to the crossroads outside the Bank of England, the night before the protests were scheduled to take place. Poured rum for several of the Lwa, especially for the Baron, who rules over protest, revolution, dissent, social justice and the shaking of the palace. I said my prayers for what was going to take place on my patch the next day, praying that the protests will be heard and effective, and for the safety of those involved, especially those who I knew were going to be caught up in it either as protestors or because they work nearby. I was there late, around ten, and there was just me doing my Voodoo stuff, and other people boarding up all of the windows of the shops and banks in anticipation of some agro. It was like we were all preparing the battlefield ahead of the event.

The next day was to be April Fool's Day, or "Financial Fool's Day" or the "G20 meltdown" as it was variously dubbed. Four different marches led by people in costume as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse started at different points in the city and all converged at the crossroads outside of the Bank of England. Apparently, when they got there, they placed an effigy of a banker in a coffin, and a jazz band played a New Orleans second line for the death of capitalism. As a nod from the Baron, it doesn't really get clearer than that.

The media had been ramping up the paranoia, about what was supposed to be a peaceful protest, for months. Office workers had been advised to dress down, not wear their suits, bring sandwiches into work and not leave the building until the protests were over. I wore my suit, both as a protest against the media scaremongering, and because I'm not going to dress differently to appease some muppets who lack the wherewithall to tell the difference between a banker and a mod.

My office had locked me in, but I insisted they let me out and went out into the heart of the protests, or at least as far as I could get. I was lucky that work was really busy that day, because otherwise I would have joined the protests much sooner and got myself stuck in a police "kettle" all day.

The coppers in London have this technique called "kettling" for dealing with protests. They basically form lines around the protesters and don't let anyone out, so if you are protesting, you have to expect to get detained in a confined space for eight hours with no food, water or toilet facilities, and occasionally get battered by the police or crushed by other protestors. By the time I got out for lunch, the kettle lines were in place so I couldn't get anywhere near the heart of the demonstration. Some friends of mine were trapped inside.

This stuff was happening all over the city though, so I went to check out the climate camp at Bishopsgate, which was a lot more relaxed. I saw a few small "anarchist" groups, all wearing hoods and scarfs to disguise their identity, and having fights with the police here and there, but they were really just young kids out on a day trip to cause some agro. The climate camp itself was really chilled. Mostly students, but some families and older protestors, camping out with tents along Bishopsgate. There were little soundsystems here and there, drummers, dancing, and the smell of ganja in the air. It was a really nice peaceful party atmosphere, and unlike at the Bank of England, the police were keeping their distance and allowing it to carry on without interference.

Some guy in a chef's outfit carrying a sign that said "eat the bankers" gave me a gingerbread man wearing a little top hat to make him look like a banker. I pocketed it to take home for the Baron. He can eat the bankers. Interestingly, there were a lot of people in top hats all over the place at the demonstrations, like groups of Barons, I guess in their heads they were supposed to be dressed like parodies of bankers, but traditionally, the *bowler hat* is the uniform of the banker, and the black top hat only really signifies one thing in my house...

I hung about here for a while but eventually had to get back to the office. All day there was the constant whir of helicopter blades above the city and the noise of sirens. When I finished work around 6pm, I went back to the climate camp to see if it was still peaceful, and to see if I could see anyone I knew. The police were still keeping their distance and all was well. I walked the length of it a couple of times, then Ms Rose called me on the mobile and reminded me that I had more Voodoo to be getting on with that night and couldn't really hang about. I took her advice and left. As I departed the area, I saw a very large group of police in riot gear standing in a line at one end of the camp. I thought that didn't look very good, but couldn't imagine they were suddenly going to attack the climate camp that had been peaceful and left alone all day.

The Lwa were looking after me that night. The next morning I discovered that literally seconds after I had left the area, the riot police had piled into the climate camp and started busting people's heads open with their batons and charging into the protestors with their sheilds. There are some horrific videos of this on You Tube that shows peaceful protestors with their arms in the air, collectively shouting "this is not a riot" and getting their skulls cracked open by the police. The camp was kettled, and everyone in there was detained until after midnight, and not allowed to leave without having their details taken down and their photos taken for a database.

Immediately before the kettling, passersby – such as myself – were freely allowed to walk through the camp, and were detained regardless of their reason for being there. There was no warning or request to leave the area. The police just seemingly changed their minds about letting the camp be, and steamed in full force with no warning. I've read eyewitness accounts that say things got really ugly around midnight, after the media had left, with police wearing riot gloves pinching the noses and holding shut the mouths of teenage protestors so they couldn't breathe; and allegedly targeting ethnic minorities in the crowd for unprovoked beatings.

I was seconds away from being caught in this. As I made my way towards London Bridge and the south side, I took a detour to check out what was happening outside the Bank of England. As I discovered the next morning, this was another near escape, as the kettles enclosed a wider area shortly after I left and many other passersby on their way home were detained until midnight.

Someone died in that particular kettle. A guy who works in a newsagents nearby was walking through the city on his way home and found himself enclosed by the police. The initial reports said that he died of a natural causes, a suspected heart attack. Apparently police who were trying to help him were pelted with bottles and other missiles while they were treating him. However, later eyewitness reports claim that a few *plastic* bottles were thrown at the police (protected by riot gear) by people at the back who couldn't see what was going on, and that this immediatly stopped when word got back that someone was hurt. Aside from the fact that being trapped in an enclosed space for up to eight hours, jostled, beaten, and denied food, water and toilet facilities, can hardly be considered a "natural cause", and if someone already has a heart condition, could obviously be fatal - the latest reports make it worse. Three eyewitnesses, including an associated press photographer, have come forward and attested that this guy actually got hit in the head by a copper as he was trying to explain he wasn't with the protests and was just passing through the area on his way home. There are photos of him staggering about looking dazed and disoriented as if he has concusion, moments before he stopped breathing.

As I left the City to make my way across the bridge, I looked back and saw billows of thick white smoke rising up from the area outside the Bank where the main protest was. Dunno what it was. Some sort of smoke bomb. Constant whir of helicopter over head. It felt like that film "Children of Men", a nightmare London where the familiar edges over into a bad dream.

I didn't hear about any of this until the next morning. In my lunchbreak, I went back to the Bank of England and there was a memorial service for the man who died. At the time, we didn't know that he wasn't actually a protestor, and there was lots of "fallen comrade" socialist worker banners everywhere. All the statues in the square outside the Royal Exchange building were boarded up, and one of these had been converted into a memorial for the guy. It was covered in tributes, anti-capitalist graffiti and bits of paper stuck onto it with messages of compassion. Everyone was looking a bit shell shocked really, including me, the other protestors and the police. It was like being in the aftermath of a war zone. Again it was kettled by the police shortly after I left, but I'm not sure how long for this time.

The maddest thing was the graffiti on the Bank of England. I'm trying to think of a US equivalent for comparison, maybe something like the Capitol building in Washington. The protestors had been detained in this area, and everything there was covered in graffiti, especially the Bank itself. All the way round, slogans, anarchy signs, the whole exterior of the building defaced. It was an awesome once in a lifetime thing to see. I'm gutted that I didn't bring my camera in that day, cos it was an amazing sight, and they got it all cleaned off the next day.

Most of the media coverage focused on an incident where several protestors broke into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) within the enclosure, and trashed it, broke all the windows, smashed the computers, tried to set it on fire. There is a lot of speculation on the internet that this was deliberately orchestrated so that the police could get their headlines about destructive protestors - which sounds like a silly conspiracy theory - until you hear that every other building within the police enclosure was boarded up and fortified *except* this branch of RBS - the bank that is at the very centre of the UK's bailout situation, and a focus of much of the anger and resentment that led to the protests in the first place. It's a bit weird not to board it up, when literally everything else round there was totally fortified the night before. One of the guys from my office was down there when this was taking place, and he said the police were just standing around while this was going on, not intervening, letting it happen. Eventually they went in and broke it up, but there was a significant pause, and lots of people who were there claim there seemed to be more photographers than protestors around at the time.

I had to work late again on the Thursday night, so left the office around ten and passed back through the Bank area. It was a lot quieter at this time of night, but there was about ten people hanging around outside the impromptu memorial for the guy that had died in the kettle. This memorial was now covered in notes and messages and prayers. There were flowers and candles and people with blank shell shocked expressions on their faces just standing about there, I guess cos they didn't know what else to do. I felt much the same. I stood there for a bit and felt so fucking angry. I still feel fucking angry. A couple of police arrived, and I stood my ground, reading the memorials. They didn't approach anyone, but phoned something in on their radio. I decided to make an exit and headed towards the bridge.

Friday, I went back down again and most of the graffiti was cleared off. There were a couple of protestors still hanging about by the memorial, which looked as if the police had trashed it in the night as it was a lot more sparse and shabby than it was the previous night. I went for some drinks after work, then stopped by the Bank area again around 11. This time it was just me and the spirits. I'll be there again tonight.

Never trust a dome

2008-10-28T14:46:00.000-07:00

The 02 arena (nee Millennium Dome) was hosting an alleged "Festival of New Orleans", that involved Dr John and Allen Toussaint playing for free, along with a host of other New Orleans musicians, plus Lousiana cuisine on offer. They also claimed they would be reconstructing a version of Bourbon Street inside the arena.

We were sceptical about the dome. Ms Rose had previous experience of 02 related badness when her former band was booked to play in an 02 sponsored corporate bubble at some festival – that it turned out nobody could actually get into unless they had a certain mobile phone service and had booked in advance. She recounted it as a grim experience, but neither of us had actually visited the 02 Arena itself – the terrifying mothership that spawns these smaller corporate bubbles and sends them out to annex other festivals like monstrous bubble children.

We were sceptical about how they were going to attempt to recreate the madness of Bourbon Street inside the arena. We were sceptical about the whole affair, but we definitely wanted to see Dr John (who we had been due to see that month anyway but the gig had been cancelled), and the festival itself had been organised to raise public awareness that New Orleans had not been erased from the world when Katrina struck in 2004. On our post-Katrina visits to the City, it was clear that what it needed more than anything was for its tourist industry to start thriving again. So we felt it was important for us to support this effort at rebuilding the public perception of the city, especially when it was taking place on our doorstep, or thereabout. This time the previous year, just before the Season of the Dead, we were in New Orleans ourselves; and it felt as if this year, a portion of the city had come to London to pay us a visit in return.

The 02 Arena has its own tube station, a vast complex that opens out into an industrial wasteland. The psychogeography is wrong here. The whole area feels wrong. It used to be the old docklands, but its been flattened and built over with soulless corporate constructs such as the dome, Canary Wharf and a growing cast of new corporate developments. It's not a part of London where I've spent much time, and for good reason. It feels blighted. It doesn't take much to imagine the spirits of the place, ghosts of cockney docker and Chinese opium parlour, displaced by the redevelopment, evicted from their habitual nooks and crannies and howling on the wind. I don't like it here. It feels like being in an episode of Dr Who, and not in a good way. I'm reminded of how many recent films and TV shows have depicted this docklands area as the location for their apocalyptic London fever dreams. Something about the place does evoke some sort of non-specific eschatonic paranoia, as if it's an unstable point chaud just waiting for disaster to erupt. I remember right after the World Trade Centre fell, there was a gruesome sense of expectation in the air about Canary Wharf as another potential target. Something just isn't right here, and you can almost taste it in the air.

Gazing up at the dome, Ms Rose and I half-expected Daleks to start flying out the top of it. As we passed through the gates, I left a coin for Legba. Just in case. It felt like entering a sideways world, a bad one, they even had an airport-style baggage check at the entrance – but it thankfully wasn't in operation. Their recreation of Bourbon Street just involved some faux-New Orleans street signs and lamps on their main thoroughfare of chain bars and restaurants. I don't recall seeing branches of Nandos and Pizza Express on the real Bourbon St, and it really needed more strippers, sleaze and pissed eople to emulate the original. After about five minutes the fear started to kick-in. This was definitely not a good place to

be.

By the time we got halfway down "Bourbon St", we were suddenly ushered out through a side door by security guard along with about 30 others, apparently in order to reduce congestion. We found ourselves outside, behind the scenes of the main thoroughfare, and were told this route would get us to the main stage faster avoiding the crowded main stretch. It had the slight aspect of being marched behind the chemical sheds by the 02 commandant to be shot. The flapping plastic dust covers and unfinished building site vibe of this area worryingly recalled the Cybermen processing plant, located in the fictional Canary Wharf/Torchwood complex, and for a moment we both felt sure they were going to bring out the drills and try to convert us into brutal compassionless robots bent on deleting all human emotions and replacing our thoughts with 02 marketing slogans. We went along with it, in order to find out what they were up to and try to stop them. By this point I was convinced we would have to try and shut down their operation and save the city, with the help of Dr John, Allen Toussaint and some Mardi Gras Indians. I wasn't sure about those Mardi Gras Indians though. They had the look of dubiously disguised aliens from a terrible Russell T Davies scripted Christmas special.

Our fears were, at least for the moment, unwarranted – as we were indeed led back into the dome area in time to catch the end of Allen Toussaint's performance on the main stage. He was great. Played New Orleans funk standard "Get out my life woman" and a selection of his other hits, and finished his set by throwing Mardi Gras beads and masks to the crowd. Unfortunately, Ms Rose

and I were too far back to have a chance of catching any of these gifts, which was a shame, as a Mardi Gras mask thrown to me by Allen Toussaint would have been an item of some occult significance. It was a great gig, but made somewhat tawdry by the fact that it was performed in such a gruesome pit of hell as the 02 Arena. Toussant throwing you Mardi Gras beads beneath the backdrop of a brutally imposing, vertiginously large advertising hoarding for Barclaycard, as tall and wide as a city office block, its alien proportions dwarfing both the performers on stage and the audience's own will to live.

After his set had finished, we went to get a drink and something to eat, which proved challenging. The 02 simulation of "Bourbon Street" seemed to deliberately mock the spirit of the real Bourbon Street. In stark contrast to the original, with its road signs cheerily proclaiming "It's OK to drink in the street", it was impossible to get served in this fucking dome. I was disconcertingly sober, for an event like this, and it wasn't clear where you were supposed to get drinks from. Throngs of people seemed to be in a similar predicament, roaming the clinical white corridors of the dome fruitlessly searching for a bar that didn't involve a 45 minute wait to get served. I'd made the mistake of not eating before I came out, in order to avoid ruining my appetite for tasty Louisiana fare. However the only options for food seemed to involve joining already gargantuan queues to get into one of the not particularly inspiring chain restaurants, and not a bowl of gumbo or jambalaya in sight. I was fucking hungry by this point, and the oppressive surroundings and lack of availability of basics like food and drink - that you might reasonably expect to find at any alleged "festival", let alone a "New Orleans Festival" - added to the general post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the dome. Was there even an outside world anymore?

Thirty minutes in a line got me a nasty hot dog, which I wouldn't normally go for, being mostly vegetarian these days, but sometimes you have to relax your principles during wartime. Ms Rose spent thirty minutes in another queue elsewhere and managed to produce two pints of lager in plastic glasses. We were instantly swarmed by other "festival"-goers who hungrily eyed our drinks. One guy practically pleaded with me to tell him where we managed to find such rare treasures, and I gestured in the direction of a riotous shamble of a bar queue spilling out of the doorway. Disheartened, he wandered off to join the mass of blank anonymous bodies fighting for space around the bar.

With perfect timing, Dr John took to the stage as we returned from the bar with beer in a plastic glass and dubious dinner. He came on with a gator tooth necklace and an obeah stick in his hand, and sat down at a piano decorated with what appeared to be a human skull. He played a set that kicked off with a good selection of tracks from his "Night Tripper" phase, including "I walk on gilded splinters", "Gris gris gumbo ya ya" and "Jump Sturdy" which all felt like good nods to certain London witches and witchdoctors in the crowd. His set was so good that he entirely transcended the horrors of the dome and even the monstrous Barclaycard ad hoarding seemed to disappear out of my field of vision while he was on.

He closed his set with a few tracks from his most recent record "The City that Care Forgot", which dealt directly with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans. The record (despite having Clapton on it) is a searing indictment of the Bush administration and in places sounds like a witchdoctor's curse on those in power who failed his city so terribly. Some of the tracks were co-written with New Orleans musician and shaman, Reverend Goat Carson (who I actually encountered almost a year previously at Sally Ann Glassman's Fete Ghede ceremony, sitting by the drummers with a massive eagle wing in his hands, but didn't know who he was at the time), and had a deep Voodoo subtext of resistance and accusatory power. Before launching into the track "Time for a change", the good Doctor gave his endorsement of Obama in the upcoming US Presidential elections.

Seeing Dr John play at the Dome, perhaps the most blighted, haunted, apocalyptic site in my city, felt like some sort of spiritual cleansing on the place. The Doctor working his magic at the place in London that needs it most. The centre of the sickness. Singing his medicine songs to my town.

After the gig was finished we couldn't get out of there fast enough. Worryingly, the place seemed to be filling up with even more people, dressed up for a night out and queuing to get into nightclubs along the fake "Bourbon St". Presumably these were the poor souls who live in the sinister "Millennium Village" area that surrounds the Dome, and are unable to leave the complex without being pursued by Prisoner-style white bubbles (like sentient mini-domes) that chase them and bring them back if they stray too far. We made a quick exit, so as not to get trapped in there and converted.