Happy birthday, Peter Tosh!

Peter Tosh (October 19, 1944 – September 11, 1987) was the guitarist in the original Wailing Wailers, a pioneer reggae musician, and a trailblazer for the Rastafari movement. Born Winston Hubert McIntosh, Peter grew up in the Kingston, Jamaica slum of Trenchtown.

His short-fuse temper and unveiled sarcasm usually kept him in trouble, earning him the nickname Stepping Razor after a song written by Joe Higgs, an early mentor. He began to sing and learn guitar at a young age, inspired by the American stations he could pick up on his radio.

After an illustrious career with the Wailers and as a solo musician, his life was cut short when he was brutally murdered at his home. Though robbery was officially said to be the motivation behind Tosh's death, many believe that there were ulterior motives to the killing, citing that nothing was taken from the house.
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Troy Davis

The sun on the horizon
bodes dawn, unknown by your body
led away, labelled dead
and walking at once, a book
open in their hands, of psalms
read like love poems on the hour
of your death—
they killed you a dime's death
with no miracle, no book
to save your history.
After those as strong as you
in space where hounds
howl at the heel, and who
were captured, lamps raised
to pin them in darkness
like van-lit deer,
the pain of jubilating
black voices sang, jazz,
the drugged corner of your eyes
exuding what some
came to see, the crawl
of latex on your rubber tree,
on the dark of your arm.
A brutal dragging of Georgia's
red meat across the dirt.
At this time of books
and scientific acumen it remains
unknown why you must die,
on the the brink of a twilight
of latent reason and love.

Pomegranate

The crop, on the ledge of
a terrace where big boulders
cave under it, is heavy
with sap. The mountain
has never seen anything like it,
no shepherd tasted the variety,
no mother cooked such
flesh, made in the months
of summer by love for mouths
that crush and move the tongue
along the top of the palate,
licking and pressing the wine,
strong as Eden's orchard
whose blood we tasted, follicle
of kings, folly to the world,
flesh Lucy's children ate
when the world was fresh.

Tšepe

Kommanda Obbs 2 - YouTube

Happy birthday, Abdullah Ibrahim

'Since he first fled South Africa in 1962, Ibrahim's increasingly spiritual and meditative jazz has won followers across Europe, the US and Japan and made him an icon at home. In the 50s as Dollar Brand (he took the name Abdullah Ibrahim in the 60s when he converted to Islam), he led Cape Town's short-lived flowering of bebop-inspired jazz. When the apartheid clampdown came, he became one of the most successful, and - with some 100 albums - prolific, musicians in the exodus, alongside the singer Miriam Makeba and the trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

For Rob Allingham, a music historian and archivist at Gallo records in Johannesburg, Ibrahim was unique in "making it in the international jazz world without qualifications". A protege of Duke Ellington, he developed free-form jazz in New York in the 60s, playing with John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Yet his fusion draws on Cape Town roots. Nigel Williamson, a music critic and compiler of a recent Ibrahim retrospective CD, says that "more than anyone else, Ibrahim united African roots with 20th-century American jazz; he's always had a profound sense that jazz is African music". Ellington told him: "You're blessed because you come from the source."'
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If you like jazz, even a little, you must get some Abdullah Ibrahim (visit this link and click on "listen to samples") for yourself. Listening to him, I hear African choral music and American jazz all at once. 2002's African Magic is one of my favourites. Mr Ibrahim was born on 9 October 1934. Happy birthday to him.

Morning

You—after midnight had rumbled
and lightning had stabbed its knives
into your heart, and you’d listened
to its after-claps in the spitting rain—
rose, took yourself like a coat
from behind a door, down the steps
of dawn still asleep, spread along
blinking lanes of wet asphalt.
Neon lights winked at streets as if
at the arriving morning. And now
below his window whores laugh
as if they know you're gone—
whores all of them, as next to himself
he lies, near his missing half.