This is the fourth version of a choral piece originally titled Haunted.
Took about 24 hours. I was never happy with the vocals, not the meaning so much but my abilities. The idea was a Mahleresque double symphony focused on the children of war, of what can we do because we are not doing much in the rescue of kidnapped, maimed or killed young women in Africa and across the middle east into Pakistan and India. But I was uncomfortable calling it a symphony because there is a programmatic atmosphere to it such that it felt more like the last moments of a haunted dream, seems forever, 80 minutes or so and I eliminated the vocals because they kept sounding processed rather than the measures of a Southern voice beaten and rejuvinated, then beaten up again. So, here we have it. A feeling of failing to protect young women in 1/3rd of the world. We measure the progress and enlightenment of a nation based on equality to the point that it is not even a subject. So much of the world is fighting to move forward against all opposition, while others are completely unevolved or are slipping backwards to the detriment of woman and the general good of the land. I know equality goes against Old Testament, Koran, Confucianism/Taoism, and does rest in my faith in humanity. If we say someone is just kinda equal, sort of equal, not equal, then we begin the landslide of being property, to the living hell of Gog and Magog (Revelations version of warring states, not Genesis or Ezekial where identity is person and place) whereas it exists in much of the middle East and Africa where slavery is either legal or wears the mask of indentured servitude. And for me, this is how music speaks. We remain God’s children, servants and emissaries, but we also seek equality for all in a democratic republic or social democracy. If we allow ourselves to descriminate against woman, to hold her down, then where does it stop? Biblically we have Mary Mother of Jesus Lord, Mary Magdalene, Lydia, Tabitha and Phoebe who each have necessary roles of moving the faith forward. Deacons. No Mother, No Son. Virgin of Guadalupe because she is our Lady of the Western Hemisphere. In Korea when it was Buddhist they had the first female ruler, the Great Queen Seonduk. Then Confucianism came in a few hundred years later and pushed woman back down, but the oikos (homelife in Greek) belongs to woman. There is much to argue here, so I simply present it as a musical work, a concerto to woman. She’s only had the vote for a hundred years now in America. Who are we, where are we going? I hope to being better human beings. But I worry. There will There will be plenty who find this adn my thoughts all wrong, violently wrong, and all I can say is turn the page.
New World Trio: For Pope Francis
I apologize that Soundcloud no longer allows actual embedding of the songs as they are directed to the SoundCloud site. Good thing is that SC does not hassle you and has no charges. But I really hate what they did to the way we can hear or present our music.
Epilogue, For Lori: Elephants and Seahorses, a waystation to the Heaven
Mendocino Blues Poetry
A set of songs and poems, thoughts and food articles. I hope you enjoy.
Peace. Love. Faith.
(this photo against brick walls is from my lean years)
Quartet for the mountains and the riverbanks
https://soundcloud.com/h-lamar-thomas/zones-21-talking-with-jarad-1
So, I was talking with Jarad about some new music engineering equipment he brought over, a bit fascinated, a bit afraid, the Logic thing is so clear, bu t I was tired from yardwork. While we talked I was playing/recording smooth Windham Hill type piano mood music on the smooth jazz side. So, I finished it up. And then I could not find it. worked on notes for a quartet for later. Thought why not work on this piece as a question mark of sorts. Like Brahams in a bad mood wanting to pick a fight with Korngold (time travel, Tardis involved of course). So here’s the thing, I worked and played and changed instruments, added, subtracted, played, cut, moved around, and here we have what sounds like a good day in the musical fusion world. Odd, Brahams felt like he was pacing the room cussin’ me out the whole time. The ode to The Heaven is near the haflway mark where resolutions begin to appear. I hope and would fiercely honored if you listen to this and let it have a few plays before making an opinion.
Wandering Blue (for)
3 grand pianos in different settings.
Afternoon Jazz for Mike H. and Joe C.
Well, being written between 6 am and 10 am it ain’t exactly afternoon jazz, but that was the feeling I was going for here. These two guys pretty much are in the background of every poem I have or will write, such blood brothers are hard to find and even to think of them I feel blessed that they found me worth having as a friend. So yeah, back to the jazz thing; this is seventies kind of jazz. Still me, can’t take that away, a bunch have flushed me away, but I’m still here Dean, still writing and staying with the crafts God blessed us all to love, and so I do, and so I am, an Artist, and thanks to you two I stayed with it all my willd ass to monk like life, you are my brothers along with Don Chambers, a great man who knows the entiretiy of what is “I” for me. But jazz is hard, so I had to think of them all and what we listened to. Richard Mehlinger and Larry Hicks, Billy Woods and I dug the seventies jazz thing pretty heavy as well. So much Music. So much life to live.
I hope I have done you all well. I hope I have stayed true to poetry and music. I have been so naked and afraid here but it’s the only venue to even get four or five people if not just one to really listen and let the music be the world from which it arose; not the world of our wants and critique, but the thing that is. Here, the that that is is “Me”. I love you.
Parade of the Twice Dead
This is just a strange piece, anyway I listsen to it, it’s strange, too ancient, too far away around a yurk somewhere in Manchunchiria getting drunk while Goryeo captives escape across the plains back to their mountain homes.
But I guess I had to record it.
It’s always this way, I don’t really control so much of what I write in a first draft, this is a second, and I go with where the vocals guide the other instruments. Yeah, there’s a piano, and it is ancient Manchurian music. What about it? What choice do I have? Like I am just the thing itself not the ghost in the machine. haha!
Shanghai Sunset 1805, Zones Concerto
Shanghai Sunset 1805, Zones Concerto
A mix of Chinese and Western Classical instruments for composition of a contemporary, 21st century, concerto. The beginning was a mess. I worked till near dawn. Slept a few hours dreamt I was wrestleing the great bear, the constellation, in a stand of bamboo, it went on for a dream time while, my old Great Pyrennees dog Lonnie (short for Bastion of Avalon purebred thing), his parents had killed a bear while guarding their sheep farm over in Sonoma Valley.
I lived in Mendocino at the time, hence the wonder of this beauty of a 130lb white and silver dog crashing through the bamboo to fight the bear and ….I woke up. And this is what happened as a result of this wonderous dream story.
Please Share. I am sure for some it is a bothersome fly on the windsheild and is brushed aside to the darkness of “hide from timeline”, but I hope you do not and in the end find pleasure in this mix of east and west from a place out of where dreams are born.
Berlioz Haunted Dawn, Happy Dream of Apple Execs on the Scaffolds
After two days of the new Apple OS update I thought of what I wanted, I wanted Berlioz, the psychedelic nightmare and rapture of his Symphony Fantastique or whatever spelling. I just kept hearing it and I have not listened to it in about ten years, it’s just one of those symphonies that I may have over played in my early years of discovering the glorious and powerful intellectualism and heart, soul, that is in symphonic music on down to quartets, duos and solo. But Berlioz. I want Apple execs to be in line behind Marie Antoinette. Let them use Windows they said. ha! Apple was for the people, not you Duck McScrouges rolling in your vaults of gold and diamond.
Yeah, Apple execs and their investment advisors each lined up behind the court of the sun king during the bloody and often confused French Revolution. But I can dream and play what I imagine the sight, all nods to the mad Berlioz who laid that phantasmagoria of a symphony of us that for some reason always comes to mind when I think of greed and hate for the people, just what is justice, what is the law? The law? We see it today all around the world. And we had two chances in 40 years to change things for the best but our leaders misled us, what are we to do, we let these things happen and here we have it today even worse. So I see a relation between them all, I just do. Cause and effect is not simply one thing upon another. Any belief otherwise is just blindness and hubris. So were my wonderful Camel nonfileter years, that sometimes, though kllers in ninja smoke, I would love to lean back and just exhale in pure delight in how great it was to smoke. And I quit because I wanted to live longer with a woman who hated me, as I thought it greatest gift I could give her, to quit smoking. Glad I never went back. it is weak to return both to the source of hatred and to the satisfaction of a fresh Camel non filter, as I watch Apple execs roll one by one into the basket next to Louis and Marie.
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