Blues - TLC 41

In Fujian, China using flakey chalk Lucky wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green board for eighty classless university students.

He spoke of the African Diaspora, history and slavery in America and how indentured humans gathered to make music and dance after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

The blues manifested stories and songs as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

The blues expressed physical and spiritual loss from family, friends and communities. It’s “feeling, emotional, deep in your spirit soul” music. He pulled out his blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes.”

He blew sweet slow stuff, picking up the tempo blasting rifts of wailing train whistles and a sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘If you don’t help me I’ll find someone else,’ by Howling Wolf. When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of truths, myths and legends - or a shaman, seer and adept it’s natural. I am a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After hearing and feeling the blues students practiced making a Western sandwich: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you consume a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat, said 1.6 billion peasants. We’ll eat anything with wings and legs except tables and planes.

New music echoed outside Room 317. Students ran to painless windows. 

Across the street a young Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three-story concrete building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta middle-class community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees and displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yoyos. 

In his left hand he held a silver chisel. In his right a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between stone and iron ages.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. Wind-spirits carried his chorale and tribal memories of family, rice paddies, nature and seasons.

Accompanying him a girl using a brothel broom of tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm creating their symphony of sadness, loss and neglect. They went on tour. Standing Room Only. Sold out forever and a day.