Don't know where it all started, you make choices and find your self off planet.
Always was a tinkerer, had to have stuff to mess with. Folks bought me art supplies, didn't know what to draw. Listened to all kinds of music, read comic books, hotrod mags and my brother's under the bed mags. Got really turned onto jazz in college under the tutelage of pot. When I moved past the vaporware, jazz was still there.
I liked Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, the whole spiritual jazz scene. I thought Miles Davis was into voodoo or sorcery and Wayne Shorter a tour guide to very cool places. Now there was Eddie Harris and his electric sax. His use of the Echoplex, chorusing and multi-octives was otherworldly. I imagined myself as the Silver Surfer, riding a board through space, playing a sax. I really had the cosmic urge. He growled, chirpped, whistled, playing the horn and the electronic labyrinth. He was always funky in space, though he was trying to be funky on earth. He doesn't get mentioned like Sun Ra or George Clinton in the Afrofuturism, I am guessing because Eddie is identified with pop-jazz and didn't have a theatrical persona. I thought his comedy sucked. I would have wrapped myself in tinfoil and shot sparks from a Tesla coil. Eddie Harris was multilayered, exploring multiple avenues of jazz. He could do blues, ballads, pop and Coltrane with or without the electronics. So Eddie Harris is high on my Afrofuturism meter.
I also don't have a theatrical persona so to speak but, I think one is forming. I think it would be a great asset to have an alter ego with the ability to use a different criteria to live by. Yeah, psychological problems and possibilities abound but often negative casualties are quoted. What if both the ego and the alter ego were not a divergent split but a selectable parallel unity of mind, based on context? It would possible to switch to the more positive tract once all your connections understand your resolve and the folly of linking you with a tragic past. I think Afrofuturism allows for this. Good bad or ugly, we can work this Black thing out via our own minds. The channel is open.
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