Baraka House, After Hours
I'm working with some Baraka archives and wrote this about one in particular. It feels relevant this week especially in relation to why we make certain calls, what we are called toward.
Sun Ra, who Amiri Baraka would speak to daily in Harlem, 1968, when the Black Arts Repertory Theater was active like a multi-tiered revolutionary block party including jazz music, theater, literature, dance, and speech acts that cannot be quantified by genre, has a song called “Hours After” that feels like the swooning, swelling score for an after hours speakeasy, perhaps the one that is this tourmaline recording of an small afterparty at Amiri Baraka’s house during that same era. The subdued irreverence here is gorgeous and incantatory. The conviviality is deceptive because they are in mourning too, and choosing between inflections of grief and grandeur moment to moment. Over an hour in a voice that sounds like Baraka’s begins to recount an alien abduction. He tells us he was taken up in his sleep state, to some higher frequency dimension where he saw the earth surrounded by ships waiting for their signal to act and either rescue or destroy the planet. He called their position a holding pattern. He took himself back to the hold. The hold was backstage on the slave ship. Where the captive got to moan together before reappearing to sing and dance and entertain on the decks. Surrounded by spaceships, the new hold is the earth, plagiarized by nation-states into a series of divided territories.