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.
Ghost Music The Center of A Phase
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]Dig this. This is what I am talking about when I speak of music reaching for the distance of the heart to God, there is none, but many of us try to destroy this blessed assoiation and all I can do is see it in just about everything I do: presence. When the asshat patrol cruises through and lays an electric earth on top of a spiritual phase, out of the nocturnal into dawn. I hope someone finds pleasure in this, I pray I find my angels Raphael and Padre Pio on a good day. I find I am in the margins talking to none but the Lord in the bardo, I am drifting and it feels the touch of my protector Angels and Saints, let me know your way, let me know this bardo state, this purgatory, and I pray, meditate that time itself lets go and I just get to enjoy a song for a while And that is what this was born from just minutes ago, this is my soul in the morning light. Where is yours? If it is work, that’s cool, just remember to let your heartbeat with the love of our Lord, of Love and Patience. Create or destroy, we must move the flesh that blocks our journey to faith. always moving and building, and it is alright. Put a bit of faith in all we do, hunh? How about it? Hope Faith Love and a good laugh from time to time.
And that is what I am doing here, hoping this song gives you a smile. Please. Just a little bit, edges curved upwards, top teeth shining through to greet the part of us that is Rising, Rising towards what is Holy every day.
Thank you Saints Raphael and Padre Pio, the Compassionate heart of Christ the Lord, and the patience shown by Mother Mary. Thank you. Thank the Holy Spirit which unties us all.
Don’t freak out or back away from me, alll I am doing is basically repeating blessed writings and meditations. Trying to play as much as I can while I am able, while I am here.
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