Pharoah’s Dance by Miles Davis
by Eiliyas

I swear I believe that I’ve experienced nirvana before in my life.

(wait’s approximately 20 secs to allow for Nirvana the band jokes and puns to subside)

Okay. Well as I was saying. I am quite sure that I have experienced nirvana before.

It was back one day when I was in SCAD. I had spent the day doing god knows what. My piece of shit roommate was away with his girlfriend somewhere and I had the room to myself for a bit. Sometimes I sit and draw and listen to music. It’s one of the things that I haven’t done in awhile but I am now realizing how much I loved the experience of doing so.

I put on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. I always loved this album and I especially loved the first disc(yeah it was a CD) and had been listening to it for years and I absolutely loved it! The opening track Pharoah’s Dance back to back with Bitches Brew was immaculately amazing! I swear I always just played those like they were just one long track.

That’s how it began. The magic of those 2 songs. Played back to back.

Doo-du-doo-duuuu Da-Du-Di-Doooooo  Do-de-du-doooooooooo

Man those notes just sounded like an incantation to me. A call to prayer. A call to life. A call to open yourself up to what was happening as well as about to happen. Man and between that bass, bass clarinet and trumpet floating over the ground.

I have to listen to it again

That trumpet floating over the everything

I have to listen again

That bass clarinet is haunting that floating trumpet and warming the bass, the dusted sparkle of the keys

I have to listen again

The drum is perfect. So perfect. I don’t notice them but I know damn well how important they are to this song and how its helping to accent all. You know what? I think all of these things are not floating around another. Only pulsing. What is this?

I have to listen again

It’s just a pulsing and rhythming into itself. They are as seperate as they together. As other as they are the same.

I have to listen again

They are the same! Rhythm in a timelessness. The state of all. Not all like everything, but all like all all. I am that trumpet. I thought that I was cool as hell coasting over the top of this. I thought I that warm haunting of the bass clarinet, in hindsight it was like a fresh swim in warm water. I thought I was the drum that wasn’t overbearing but conspicuously complicit. I thought I was those keys accenting with my earthen sparkle but I am right and I am wrong. There’s no beginning and no end. My brother may be in Florida, my parents might be in Macon. There might be a Cali or NY. There may have been a time when I was a child and another when I am going to be a man. The world is bigger than my corner. The world is bigger than this continent of North America: Hell its bigger than South America, Africa, Asia, Antartica too. But shit its more than that!

I have to listen again!

Shit it’s bigger than the world! Life! It’s bigger than the world. It’s more than just this planet, its more than just this collection of planets and stars or even galaxies in this expanding universe. Everywhere has its space that it should be in but just as surely those far away place are as just a part of life as I am. Time! The time the preceeded and the time to come and the time of now is all the same. All the same! The vastness of a singularity and to explore it….

…door opens and roommate turns off music.

Complains about jazz music again

He doesn’t realize that he is teetering on death.

You don’t just eject a man from this oneness.

He wasn’t my roommate anymore by the next week.