Sun Ra Touches Down in Den Haag

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  Den Haag, Netherlands
Saturday, April 1, 2006

(The Dolphins, April Fools Day)--It's been considerably quieter since my American companions have left town and I'm getting a chance to get back into my regular groove, taking nice long walks around the city centrum and stopping in to visit with friends at several of the coffeeshops and cultural installations in my path, then retiring to a safe place (like this one) with wireless access to settle in, answer my mail and get some work done. This was balanced by having a few thousand laughs with the inestimable Bob Fogelnest, who stopped over from Den Haag where he defends international criminals at the behest of the Court from time to time. He's meeting a potential client this week and has a couple days in between sessions, so he comes over here for R&R and treats your correspondent to some terrific meals.

There are also the regular visits from my Louisiana compatriot Gus "G.R." McIlhenny, a scion-on-the-loose of the Tabasco family of Avery Island, Louisiana who's been sent to me by the great Dr. Prof. Barry Kaiser in New Orleans-and Dr., thank you for that, and extra thanks to the lovely Ms. Venus for her gracious, thoughtful and timely contribution to the Golden Bard Travel Fund. Gus has made some very timely contributions to the Fund himself, and along with comparing notes on our scores of mutual friends from the Crescent City and sharing many a guffaw, he's been getting me all geeked up with his tales of the future and how we're going to secure a houseboat for me to live on.

Now, this is one of my fondest dreams, to live on the canal or on the river in Amsterdam, topped only by my dream of having my own joint, the Coffeeshop John Sinclair, where I can properly control the music (as DJ Harry Duncans would put it), have a pad and an office upstairs, smoke weed and drink coffee on the house, entertain my friends and meet my colleagues.

Maulawi

To get to the houseboat would be a great first step, and I'm listening hard every time we talk while Adam Brook is researching the houseboat situation for us on-line from Detroit.

The most excitement this week arrives in the form of a short jaunt over to Den Haag for a second episode of the Night of the Sun Ra Films with Ben Schot. Tonight's offering takes place at an abandoned finishing school and former police station called the Huishoudschool that's been taken over by young Den Haag artists and made into a crude cultural center with a gathering place in the basement where we show the films and a rock & roll band-the same one from Nijmegen, as it turns out-will play afterwards. There's also a terrific deejay named Dr. Obscuro who's spinning sides by Alice Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Maulawi before the show.

Hearing the "Street Rap" from the 1974 Strata Records LP by Maulawi oozing out of the sound system in this basement joint in Den Haag whips me right around what I call a "full circle"-this album was the current release by Strata Records when I joined the collective at 46 Selden in Detroit in the spring of 1975, just in time to work on Strata's next LP, Saturday Night Special by the Lyman Woodard Organization. Last summer I was starving in Detroit for 6 weeks when Frank Bach and I unearthed a couple of copies of the Maulawi LP in his garage and Brad Hales at People's Records at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Forest sold them for us for a lot of money.

Space Is the Place

And just yesterday I had received a nice long letter from Charles Moore, one of the principals of Strata Records who also leads the Blues Scholars when I'm in Los Angeles. He and Wayne Kramer are making a record together right now, and 10 years ago the three of us and some other characters made a record together called-guess what?-Full Circle.

Man, it's great to be alive long enough for things like this to come around again and again in the course of life! Burroughs used to call these "intersection points" and, not that I don't normally feel connected, but events like this make the connections more discernable and even more vivid. Another instance was at the Huishoudschool where Matty, the guitarist and leader of the featured band, tells me how much seeing the Sun Ra films in Nijmegen last week had blown his mind and inspired the band to play some very different music. Then he gestured at the walls around us and told me the building used to be a police station and he had been brought there as a youth after being apprehended by the police for some juvenile mischief-making nearby. He confessed that he was from a "criminal family" and had escaped the ravages of a life of crime by playing music and matriculating into the local arts community.

The evening started slowly but the room filled up by the time Bob Mugge's great film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise came on the screen and it was really kicks to watch this room full of young Dutch people soak up the sights and sounds of Sun Ra & His Arkestra and listen attentively while Ben and I filled in some of the background on the incomparable Ra. The collective that organized the show cooked and fed us a nice meal and treated us with great warmth and respect. I hope they'll have me back one day for a performance, it'd be wonderful to see them all again.

Now it's time to turn my attention to the composition of my monthly On The Road column (#17) for the Little Rock Free Press. I'll post it here when it's done, along with the Radio Show that'll be podcast on Monday, April 3rd.

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