Moanin’.

© 1960 Charles Mingus: Blues & Roots

Bass: Charles Mingus

Piano: Horace Parlan

Alto Saxophone: John Handy

Alto Saxophone: Jackie McLean

Tenor Saxophone: Booker Ervin

Baritone Saxophone: Pepper Adams

Trombone: Willie Dennis

Trombone: Jimmy Knepper

Drums: Dannie Richmond

This is when you are laughing and then find yourself laughing and the groove is so sweet; who cares if you are alone and laughing…

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

Salt Peanuts.

© 2003 Salt Peanuts Live at Massey Hall – 50th anniversary of Dizzy & Charlie Parker at Massey Hall, Toronto.

Composed: Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke & Charlie Parker.

Vocals/Piano: Herbie Hancock

Bass: Dave Holland

Trumpet: Roy Hargrove

Alto Saxophone: Kenny Garrett

Drums: Roy Haynes

As smooth as the original.

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

Strange Fruit… The Gold Standard.

© 1992 Diana Ross Live

© 1993 Diana Ross Live.  Stolen Moments: The Lady Sings… Jazz and Blues.

Bass: Ron Carter

Trumpet: Jon Faddis

Trumpet: Roy Hargrove

Without doubt, the strongest Diana Ross live performance ever.  Poignant.  Moving.  Those large beauteous eyes mirror a lot of pain and rage during its performance.  Again, if you can’t sing it because you know damn well you can’t, why bother wasting the time on the likes of you?

A true mystery to me it remains why when one hates Blacks with such unbridled passion, one would end up squatting all over Black culture, Jazz, as though it were the latest Settler craze.  More to the point, there are no racially predatory persons creating Haida or Inuit art… and with good reason; then again, neither are expressions of Black creative genius.  Culture is a non-negotiable.

Alas, there is the racial predator aggressively overrunning the culture then turning around and acting as though to somehow include Blacks in Jazz – which after all one has already declared does have its roots in Klezmer – is tantamount to the Oscars where every 3/4 centuries or so, one will deign to consider tossing a best actress Oscar a Black female’s way.

The same Black female whom, in this the new age of minstrelsy, Diana Krall in her invisible blackface can never proximate.  However, this is about market share and having the right look and simply getting the lion’s share of fame and fortune for being born of the womb of the racial predator.  La Krall who in the pop idiom would have never risen stratospherically to the heights she has; certainly, she would never have had more than a second album.

She is a marvellous enigma – an icon in that sense for what she represents.  “I can get more market share than you” and that’s that.  She is cold and sterile like the gun that gunned down way too many young Black men – like the gun that set Ferguson, Missouri ablaze – whose lives clearly do not matter to some.  To see what a true fraud La Krall is – she who seemed nothing more than a venereal wart on Oscar Peterson’s arse, an arse which was too good to be wiped by mere Blacks when finally he was parked in palliative care – just listen to her do a damn good Joni Mitchell impersonation on her current album.

Sitting there at the piano, botoxed within a breath of being on view in her casket, La Krall coolly cops that ‘phuch ewe’ swagger she owns so well – just as Eminem does.  Yes, indeed, it is all about money and as race ever trumps either class or reason, there she drifts through life in Bentleys where others, the real McCoys, can hardly afford a Lada.

Again, why should we Blacks culturally settle for a Lada when we can, by right, damn well afford a Bentley?  Alas, who knows whether Cassandra Wilson is dead or alive anymore?

More than ever, these pale imitators no more give a damn about Blacks or Black culture than the next Klansman.  Roberta Gambarini is the best impersonator of Carmen McRae going… nothing more.  There they squat, this elephantine, oppressive presence all over Jazz, pulling an Eric Garner thereby suffocating and stifling the very breath of Black culture.  Seriously, who are Emilie-Claire Barlow, Holly Cole, Sophie Milman but mirrors of the grudging contempt for which one holds Blacks and Black culture.

Never once did I, or Merlin and I for that matter, manage to gain entry into Montréal Jazz Bistro when it sat on Sherbourne Street.  Indeed, the one time, we made it to George’s Spaghetti house, having previously tried to without success, was as the guests of David Tipe; the evening was cut short after a stranger wondered over to the table where we sat and in the midst of making small-talk blurted out something about ‘niggers’.

Without the support from the moneyed classes, there can be no arts, no culture.  Racism is economics and the result of the focussed economic oppression of Blacks – all fostered by the demonisation, marginalisation and dismissal of Blacks, in particular Black males, by a cinema/television culture, the architects of whom are the same persons who squat all over the culture and would be so smug as to blithely claim on live radio that Jazz has its roots in Klezmer.  Some alternate reality that.

Thank goodness there was a strong Black middle class, little more than a century ago, without which there would have been no birth of Jazz.  No Coltrane, no Ellington, no Mingus and on and on and on.  There has been a steadfast erosion to near obliteration of the Black middle classes such that anyone today without an awareness of music history would think it incredulous that Blacks should claim to be the innovators of Jazz.

Naturally, of course, the same cinematic agendum that would keep Blacks all but invisible and extinct when not risible, violent and or marginalised has never once seen fit to have cinematically documented the lives of any of these true geniuses of Jazz which one keeps claiming is a true American art form, yet until Michelle Obama took up residency in the White House, it had never before been performed therein.

Black history month is about celebrating and most of all it is about never for a nanosecond losing sight of who the racial predator is and despite Nikki Yanofsky – the darling little Montréalaise with the bought career – claiming, “Oh Ella we love you!” well to channel the very spirit of Frederick ‘Mr. Hat’ Jones, I declare, “Bitch please.  Ella don’t give no damn if you can turn piss into wine.  We ain’t having it!”

Sing Strange Fruit or just go make country music; an idiom, I might add, where you never see Blacks claiming ownership thereof or time-wasting patronising.  After all, Country is the music of the very people about whom Strange Fruit was penned.

Alas, your racially predatory animus is so intense that you can’t but squat all over the culture, with total disregard, and thereby make it your own.  Besides, what do you care what we think?

Go on, go ahead, let’s see you sing Strange Fruit with all the pain and rage as Diana Ross… to say nothing of Billie Holiday.  

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

Al Jarreau – Take Five.

© 1976 Live German Television

Piano/Rhodes – Tom Canning

Bass – Jerome Rimson

Drums – Nigel Wilkinson

© 1959 Take Five, Dave Brubeck, Dave Brubeck Quartet

Time Out:

Piano – Dave Brubeck

Alto Saxophone – Paul Desmond

Bass – Eugene Wright

Drums – Joe Morello

Home

http://www.davebrubeck.com/live/

#Black History Month

#BlackLivesMatter

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

Diana’s Resolve… Extra-Human Tall Whites Arrive.

Diana-Princess-of-Wales-Nelson Shanks 1994 oil on canvas

One of the last dreams I would have, before moving to Montréal from Vancouver, would be a most ominous dream of Diana, Princess of Wales.  At the time, my life was in flux as I hurriedly packed up my art collection and made preparations to fly out of Vancouver to Montréal. 

As Pandora da Braga had lived in Paris for ten years, after having worked in the Prime Minister’s Office – Prime Minister, John Turner – studying then working as a journalist in the city of lights, I would make wonderful friends of my own in Paris. 

Naturally, they all implored me to move to Montréal because they could then visit me and not have to worry about not speaking English.  Of course, if you can’t live in Paris, Montréal will make a damn good substitute – the locals’ hideous xenophobia notwithstanding. 

To say the least, I was only too happy to take flight from Vancouver which had proven a racially suffocating hellhole once too many for my legendary impatience… to say nothing of pride and integrity.  Since I am not in the world to suffer the racial predator overlong, it was time to move on when I chose to.  Knowing when to take leave is key to survival in any situation. 

The astral plane dream encounter with Diana, Princess of Wales was inordinately lucid and possessed of a clarity that spoke to its prophetic potency.  Of course, on awaking from the dream, I had completely misread the message of the dynamic being played out.  At the time of the dream and on awaking, I had assumed the subject of ominous prophecy to be Prince William rather than Diana, Princess of Wales herself. 

The dream proved rather sobering.  The evening when the news broke of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death, I stood in my Montréal living room and screamed horrified because in that moment I had finally gotten whom the subject the prophetic dream was; it was Diana, Princess of Wales. 

There was the same density and foreboding in this dream as in all dreams which presage death.  There was no mistaking the ambiance of the dream; death palpably hung in the air. 

At the time, it was Sunday, July 27, 1997 and whilst the Moon then transited both Taurus and my twelfth house, I did nothing more than pack and run off to Stanley Park after dark to get one more last session of hot sex in the midst of five-hundred-year-old moss-furred Sitkas. 

Oh what delicious fun times!  Nothing beats having sex in the middle of nature; it is so primal, so spiritual, so shamanic and elemental. 

The dream was a beautiful farewell from Diana, Princess of Wales.  I am sure that she would be immensely proud of how Prince William has fared since she bade him fare well in that dream. 

Sweet dreams as ever. 

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Pandora da Braga and I visited with Diana, Princess of Wales, at night-time, in this the first dream.  I spoke to her of her great insights to world politics.

As well, I told her of how much she had learnt in this lifetime – the great insights garnered from her experiential awareness of human suffering and the human condition.

This woman was incredibly powerful in this astral plane encounter.

You had a sense of her very soul itself being present in her body.  As this was an astral plane encounter, one was not experiencing Diana, Princess of Wales the glamour puss, the manipulative or, for that matter, the fucked-up basket case.

You saw the power behind the incarnate persona and understood why she was born to be Diana, Princess of Wales.  All that emotional baggage ultimately was mere façade.  This was a very steely tough customer.

Her eyes were always very direct and clear; they were not soft and dewy or doing the virgin bride Diana Spencer routine.  She wore a powder blue suit and was in supreme control.

She then went to a near dark bedroom to check on Prince William, the future Duke of Cambridge.  The heir apparent was lying in bed, foetally curled up whilst soundly asleep.

He looked so tiny and so frail and vulnerable that one had to wonder if he were an asthmatic or suffered from seizures.  Even though asleep, Prince William seemed emotionally needy.

I was much reminded of Clarice Seberg-da Braga in this woman’s resolute steeliness.  I stood a few feet away whilst Diana, Princess of Wales stood leaning over the side of the bed next to her sleeping firstborn, Prince William.

The energies here were those of a retirement home or an orphanage.  The vibration here was both dense and very sad; it was a most sombre ambiance here.  I even passingly wondered if Prince William were in danger of dying.

When I spoke to her, she had said nothing and seemed remote, removed and otherly focussed.  However, she was undividedly listening to me.  Her focus was intense, with a singleness of purpose that was so unlike her incarnate persona, it was hard to believe that she could have become so legendarily emotionally fucked-up.

For being in this woman’s presence, one realised that this individual has seen a lot.  By far, much more than mere mortals see in the course of three or four lifetimes has she.

Her energies surprised me as they were massive.  One had to exactly wonder who she has been in past lives.  I had a sense of her that she was an early mature soul.

Prince William Wedding

*This would indeed prove a rather prophetic dream.  I remember been so upset at this dream that on awaking, I went and looked up Prince William, Duke of Cambridge’s astrological chart to see if there were any indicators that he could possibly die early in life or imminently.

So ravishing was Diana, Princess of Wales that it never occurred to me at the time of the dream or on awaking, to have looked at her chart to see if there were any signs of her possibly dying imminently.  Of course, there in her chart was a very ominously looming Pluto square transit which went exact the day she died.

I might also add that it is an afflicted Pluto which is conjunct her natal Mars.  Think what you want but there is no way that Diana, Princess of Wales was not assassinated.

She was, in the dream, clearly resigned to her fate.  She was obviously aware of her role in the historical drama being played out and she, finally, fulfilled her role with great aplomb.  END.

**Of course, at the time when living in Vancouver, where the dream was dreamt, I had attended a dinner party at friends’ Sentinel Hill bungalow where a gay South African of British aristocratic heritage spoke at length about Charles and Diana and their ‘child’.  Said he, Harry was not the child born out of wedlock – the second born was a real Windsor prince.  The real bastard had been her firstborn which meant a lot, especially since the Bourbon father was Catholic – little else was then divulged.  This was in late 1995 – with Nelson Mandela coming to power, he like many whites fled South Africa with a sizeable colony settling in the lower mainland – when Charles and Diana clearly were headed for divorce.  That dinner party was the second time that I had heard this rumour about Diana’s sons. 

A couple of years earlier, after I broke off relations with Manhattan cabaret singer Frans Bloem as a dinner guest of his proved a vile racist Jew, who vehemently denied that Blacks had any connection, let alone claim, to Jazz.  I promptly decamped for the rest of my vacation from Frans’ West Village apartment to Chelsea with an old dancer friend, whose lover had died of AIDS and left him fabulously well-off.  One evening, we went to a dinner party on the Upper West Side where the view across Central Park was to the condo where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would die short months later.  Present at the lovely dinner of a wealthy Mexican, whose home was truly grand, was a Spanish aristocrat; he spoke at great length of Diana and Charles – it was the time of their recent separation.  The minor Bourbon royal was keen to let it be known that Juan Carlos, the King, was William’s father and not Charles.  This he said with great pride and who knows, added he, maybe one day the Church of Rome would reclaim Westminster Abbey and Britain become annexed to Spain.  END.  

william and catherine

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Then, in this the second dream, I entered a film which advanced back in time.  I was taken back to the beginning of my reincarnational cycle here on Earth.  That is to say that for my soul’s experience here on Earth, it was the beginning of time.

There were lots of heavy-looking satellites here.  As a result, the celestial lights are strange as compared to contemporary times.  There was a sense of purple intensely coming through from the light spectrum.

Too, blue came through strongly here rather than the intense ‘white’ with which we are so accustomed.  A very interesting phenomenon this was.

This was a very rocky terrain as I stood looking down to a spectacular vista below.  Next, there was a mass influx of people who came from another planet.

There had been a mass exodus to Earth.  The arrivée extra-human’s spaceships were not all that sophisticated comparable to today’s space shuttles.  When they disembarked, they were an unusually tall race of Whites.

They averaged over seven feet each, on the short side, pushing nine feet; even the women were in excess of seven feet tall.  They were a shabbily dressed group.  Too, they looked truly shell-shocked; it was as though they had had to take flight in a hurry.

Seemingly, there had been a massive apocalyptic crisis which had precipitated their sudden departure.  As a result, they had ventured here to take up residence on Earth.  They seemed as if refugees from a war zone.

They were, the whole group of them,  quite a mess.  Immediately, they set about on a campaign to subjugate the planet and make it theirs.  Theirs was a focus that was driven of their having been from elsewhere.

This was hostile territory that had to be tamed and made to order; the new planet, Earth, had to support their agenda and nothing more.  This was the beginning of a reign of terror which clearly endures to this age.

They had a series of rulers, who came with the mass exodus, all of whom were male.  They were a militaristic culture.  They were the quintessential warrior warlords; brutish and sadistic to the core were they.  They had no qualms about killing.

They couldn’t have cared less, after all, about the people whom they were killing; after all, they were all merely humans and not of their extra-human race.

They were brutish specimens, the hunter-warrior extra-humans, with thick full beards.  These were a people who had known nothing but a long history of warfare.  They were bred to be killers.  Truth be told, they were deadly and at war with life itself.

Alas, it was a sad but true fact and one that was rather insightful as to the real deal behind history of this planet.  As life on Earth ultimately proved a non-viable long range proposition, they elected to adapt to Earth by breeding with select humans.

The group which proved, in the long term to be most viable for their genetic stock to endure and prosper would become today’s Caucasians.  As a result, the hybridised Earthly humans became as if at war with themselves.  Incidentally, all the racial groups were hybridised; however, what would become Caucasians were deemed most desirable.

I have always thought it very interesting that the all-dominant White tribe is home to Europe, the only continent on the planet where the inhabitants never constructed pyramids.  They, pyramids, are in Africa, the Americas and Asia but not to be found in Europe.

These people were truly Hitlerian in their savagery.  I could see how easy it was for the true Earthlings to have been subjected by these people.

The locals were a peaceful people who lived close to and in accord with nature – that included the pre-hybridised Caucasians.  Then along came this exodus of Tall White extra-humans who proceeded to subject both them and nature.

This seemed to have, perhaps, been in New Zealand but it was obvious from what I learnt here that the invading Whites had touched down in several locales on the planet.

Theirs was an agendum whose task demanded timely action over a given breath of time.  They were intent on suppressing the Earthlings, all over the planet.  When their extra-human stock began dying out, they then elected to hybridise the native humans of Earth.

Obviously, at the end of this campaign, they would then choose to settle in Europe.  What was really telling in all of this was the fact that all of life in the Universe is cyclical.

To that end, we see history being repeated in modern times with the campaign begun by Christopher Columbus.  There is nothing ennobling or uplifting about this European exodus which, as per the panorama I witnessed, mirrored the campaign of the Tall White extra-humans on their arrival to Earth.  Though less savage, the strong Tall White extra-human genetic markers in Caucasians has affected their outlook on being focussed here on Earth.

As a result, the hybridised Caucasians humans’ raison d’être has been about warfare, rape and separatism.  Notice, too, that until the rise of Judaism, there were no patriarchal religions on this planet.  Religions weren’t of any use, prior to the arrival of the Tall White extra-humans, as all the people of Earth were living in accord with nature.

Too, the rise of Judaism marked the ascent of the notion of a single god and, most of all, one which was vengeful, warring and decidedly patriarchal.  Like the orthodoxy of Judaism, it was anathema to the arriving extra-human Tall Whites to mix or cohabit with the true Earthlings – at least until their long term survival proved impossible.

That aside, the extra-human Tall Whites went about suppressing the planet.  They did so in a reign of terror that was truly horrific.  They murdered and savaged the Earthlings with ferocity that one would a species which was not one’s own.

The Earthlings were being killed as though they were an infestation of vermin who had to be culled and controlled.  This they did in their campaign to make the planet viable for their extra-human Tall White stock.

So very telling as this is precisely the repeated/mirrored history which we are living today.  A history, indeed, in which the White Tribe has spread over the planet in the last half millennium, displacing the local Earthlings in their path.  Sadly, so dominant is the Tall White extra-human genetic makeup in hybridised Caucasians, it has been as though their fellow humans were not also human.

This has being most actively pursued in Africa at present which thanks to racism makes it permissible.  Truly horrific a spectacle this proved.  Devastating were the campaign’s results, to say the least, on the locals then as now.

*I must note here, though, that the original Tall Whites were little related to today’s Whites.  Not only were they close to nine feet tall, if not more, they were pasty to grey-white in colour.

In the true sense of the word, they were Tall Whites rather than Caucasians.  END.

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When planning to go to a movie, in this the third dream, I had asked Ian Banks Jr. if he would accompany me.  Flatly, he replied no.

The look on his face was truly hostile as if to ask if I were out of my mind to have asked him.  I was very stunned, in fact, by his reaction.

In any event, I readily recovered and went off looking for a seat in the theatre.  I ended up close to a White couple with three small kids.

The children were talkative but there was nothing objectionable in their behaviour.  I actually quite liked being near them with their refreshing playfulness and spontaneity.

As the house lights went down and everyone grew quietly anticipatory, I seamlessly refocussed from the dreamtime to the waking state.

*On awaking, I felt exhausted from the travel involved in moving back in time to seeing and experiencing the arrival of the Tall White extra-humans.  I took the time to remain in the pyramid, after having recorded the dreams, to meditate with crystals and thereby restore my energies.  END.

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Photo/Art: HRH Diana, Princess of Wales

Oil on Canvas

64 x 40 Inches

© 1994 Nelson Shanks.

Provenance: Collection of Charles, Ninth Earl of Spencer.

© 2011 HRH Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

© 2014 HRH Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

http://www.spencerofalthorp.com/

http://www.nelsonshanks.com/

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

Do Nothing ‘Till You Hear From Me!

© 1994 Lena Horne music by Duke Ellington & Sidney Russell

The first time I heard this music, I was arrested by the opening chords as I stood still in the middle of my living room on the third/top storey of 878 Gilford Street in Vancouver’s West End.  At the end of Lena Horne’s passionate singing, I screamed and laughed uncontrollably with tears running down my face.

I had been standing half naked before getting ready for work and decided that the experience was too great to do something so ridiculously banal as go in to work that day.  Naturally, I had been standing with tape recorder in hand – after having just recorded the dreams dreamt.  Quickly, I grabbed a new cassette and recorded the newly released song from the CBC FM radio station as Ross Porter had waxed on long enough about the new Lena Horne Jazz recording for me to have pounced into action.

I spent the rest of my stay in Vancouver listening to this recording at least four times weekly.

This is the music that let’s you leap off into truly sublime dream experiences.

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

Robin Williams 1951 – 2014.

What-Dreams-May-Come-poster

Sweet and blissful dreams, you ravishingly beauteous of magical shamans…

The love we bare you will spirit you through the night and into that beauteous light…

I love you more…

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Photo: poster for Robin Williams film

© 1998 ‘What Dreams May Come.’

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

Happy 90th Anniversary James Baldwin.

James Baldwin Art

Watercolour

© 2013 James Gayles

http://www.jamesgayles.com/

Born in the year of the Rat and on the same day (August 2) as me, James also happens to be an entity mate.  Though I never met him, Merlin did.  As we drove from actor, Joe Morton’s Upper West Side tiny apartment from his annual Halloween pumpkin kill in 1982 – we were en route to Times Square and Frederick Jones’s where we would first meet, had also met Joe Morton for the first time that night – Merlin spoke lovingly of James Baldwin whom he had met the year prior through a Black American writer friend of Frederick’s whom I never met as he had died in a car crash in July 1982.  James ever will remain one of my favourite writers.  Of course, it goes without saying that whilst he was alive, I dreamt often of James thanks to our being entity mates.

Happy birthday entity mate.  

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