Jackie Mittoo, Roland Alphonso and Lennie Hibbert show Jeb Loy Nichols a secret world. 

Roland Alphonso with Lennie Hibbert and Jackie Mittoo
Pure Soul
High Note
1968

How awful is the news; how quiet is my morning walk.  To my left and right are hedgerows, bracken and brambles, low branches, dark earth, sheep grazed fields.  My life, thank goodness, is small; the ills of the world are huge.  Never before have the horrors caused by the accumulation and maintenance of wealth been more evident.  I made the mistake, last night, of listening to the news.  How do the presenters not break down in tears?  How can they stand it?  How can any of us, we happy breed, stand it?  War everywhere.  Menace everywhere.  If people aren’t being killed here, they’re being killed over there.  Genocide and folly.  And in the midst of it all Jeff Bezos spends 20 million dollars on his Venetian wedding.  Oprah comes, as does Leonardo DiCaprio, as does Bill Gates, as do various Kardashians and Trumps and celebrity types.  I’m reminded of last year when, in the months before the American election, there gathered on a super yacht a similar group; Oprah, Barack Obama, Springsteen, George Clooney, Beyoncé.  The mega rich.  When, I wonder, did it become acceptable to be so awful?  The grabbers, the accumulators, the spoilers, the marketeers.  But I know: it was ever thus.  We now suffer under the weight of two oligarchies, an oligarchy of the left, and an oligarchy of the right.  (But are not all oligarchies the same oligarchy?  An oligarchy of more, of excess, of greed, of extravagance, of ambition?)

I need music.  Now.  I need music without words.  I need music that was born outside the marketplace, that was born of joy.  As Archie Shepp said: jazz is a lily in spite of the swamp.  Or as Abbey Lincoln said: music is the magic of a secret world. 

There are three musicians that always give me what I need; Jackie Mittoo, Roland Alphonso and Lennie Hibbert.  I put on Pure Soul and get all three.  How do you describe something so sublime, so gentle, so perfect?  You don’t.  Language limits.  You listen and you dance.  You play it again.  For a moment you forget the news.

Later I’m thinking: we must learn to fail.  We must take a stand against success.  We must be indifferent to it.  Does a squirrel care about Jeff Bezos?  Does a rabbit care about Bruce Springsteen?  No.  They do squirrel things and rabbit things and leave humans to their awful pursuits.

But alas; I’m neither a squirrel nor a rabbit.  I often wish I was.  I wish I lived outside the horrors invented by my fellows.  I sit in the evening and think: whatever it is you do for a living, do it less.  Make less, produce less, do less.  The accumulation and maintenance of wealth can only lead to one place.  What has wealth ever solved?  It has looted the world and left us with consumerism.  It’s created infinite waste and given us models and lifestyles that only serve to further trash the world.  If the time ever comes, I’ll raise a sabre against the rich.

I go back to Pure Soul and play it again, as if bathing in its goodness.  It cleanses.  Momentarily.  I try not to think about the mega rich.  Particularly the liberal oligarchs who talk against Trump.  As if this is a recent problem.  As if the system that they enjoy, that made and maintain them, isn’t to blame.  I want to say: the problem wasn’t built by, or around, a single person.  The current problems were inevitable.  This is a system built on numerous and continuing disasters and genocides.  The genocide of Native Peoples, the genocide of prairies and the natural world, the genocide of buffalo, of countless species of animals, the genocide of hope, the ongoing, daily genocide of factory farmed chickens, cows and other living beings.  This is a system of death. I want to say that all the poems ever written, every song ever sung, every piece of art, every book, can’t make up for the global ill treatment of animals.

I say nothing.  I listen to Pure Soul.  I tell myself to shut up.  To be as the squirrels are.  To be quiet.  To fail.  To be disappointed.  To laugh.  I tell myself again and again to do less and less.  To be less.  To have less.  To be, if possible, Pure Soul.  

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