https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N45hYXNu12o

© 1960 Julian “Cannonball” Adderley – Live performance October 16, 1960 recorded at Lighthouse Club, Hermosa Beach, California.

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet at the Lighthouse

Riverside Records

Alto Saxophone: Cannonball Adderley

Cornet: Nat Adderley

Bass: Sam Jones

Piano: Victor Feldman

Drums: Louis Hayes

This has always been one of my favourite live Jazz recordings.  Back in October 1995, a few days after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, I was walking home after some shopping along the south side of Robson Avenue and back to my West End apartment at 878 Gilford at Haro Streets.

From behind, I heard someone yelling and calling out; the man sounded mad as hell.  Artisan soul to the core, I was lost, deep in thought, of some idea construct or other.

I then felt a hand on my right shoulder that violently turned my body around and, though I dodged quickly enough, I ended up with a fist at the right temple.  I swayed and soon there were other punches as I tried to duck and rush away.  The guy, I recognised straight away; I had met him some weeks earlier.  At the time, he was really keen on letting me know that he was Jewish and had been in Israel.

I hadn’t a clue what he was up to, though on the few occasions that I saw him, he seemed to aimlessly wonder about Stanley Park late at night time while I was off to go get my funk on deep into the woods; he had never once made it to the woods.

Soon enough, there were passers-by who formed a loose circle about the spectacle of me being beaten to within a breath of going unconscious.  Not a soul said or did a thing.  No one came to my aid as he violently punched at me while speciously accusing me of theft.

This was the hunt – the racial predator’s favourite sport of socially, aggressively feeding on Blacks which is always enjoyed with the same semi-feral hyena-like laughter and grinning.

From behind, I then heard a violent shout and soon, I heard the familiar voice of a local shopkeeper as he told the boor to get off me.

Grabbing me about the shoulder, his face warped with rage and pain, Bruce Day took me into his tiny little gem of a store, “The Little Hardware Company” which sat just east of Bidwell Street on Robson Street’s south side.  Months later, the store would relocate around the corner onto Bidwell to make way for Robson’s further development.

I was so glad to have escaped the humiliation when retreating into Bruce’s hardware store; I had always slipped inside while waiting for a bus to get to work or just to buy some item or other.  There, too, I had gone when paint-buying to turn my apartment into the right tones of warm colours to best display my fast burgeoning First Nations art collection.

Of course, he was a big strapping man with a more than passing resemblance to the actor, James Spader.  Bruce also had the most beautifully warm smiling eyes.  Casually, Bruce made conversation as though nothing had happened and as soon as the dark warmth of his tiny shop and his cool spirit had embalmed my very soul, I slipped out onto Robson and headed for home.

My busted lip healed soon enough; however, there was ringing in my right ear for long weeks afterwards.

On retiring to my apartment, this was the music that repaired my humanity – Sack O’ Woe.

Jazz is the music that prevents us from waging war with the racial predator who has yet to acknowledge that there is any such thing as the racial predator and that the racial predator is culpable of sweet dick-all when it comes to predatorily fucking with Blacks.

The Simpson trial was not about Nicole Brown Simpson, it was about the murder of Ron Goldman.  To this day, it has never been satisfactorily explored what this man was doing where he was that fateful night.  Either way, I was made to pay for a jury not having returned the verdict that they damn well ought to have.

Alas, music is the most expedient way to transcend the madness that is the racial predator in all his psychotic, violent manifestations.  What pray tell do they know of Jazz when so consumed are they, the racial predatory, with a need to prey on us?

In having enslaved our ancestors and to this day remained hellbent on denying that insult, what more can be expected of the flawed, fractured and compromised collective psyche of the racial predator?  They haven’t  a damn clue how utterly dissembled their humanity remains.

Indeed, Jazz is not yours deems the racial predator.  Jazz is too damn good for the likes of you; so along came a campaign of heroin et al to hunt down this affront to the racial predator’s sense of one’s place in the order of things and sure enough in little less than a century, there he sits smugly copping attitude when speciously declaring, “Jazz has its roots in Klezmer!”

Of course, the fool gave himself away when using the verb ‘root’ which is synonymous with and was coined by the very people who invented Jazz.  Indeed, the very people for whom Jazz is an uneclipsed affirmation of their humanity and untrammelled nobility of spirit.

______________________________________________________________________________

© 2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.