Does Your House Have Lions?

"One day in the late sixties, I was on the phone with Rahsaan and mentioned to him that just that day I bought a house.
He responded by asking, "Does your house have lions?"
I said, "What?"
He said, "Lions, you know like in front of a museum or the post office. You know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house with lions."

--Joel Dorn

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Dog Years in the Fourth Ring

I came across this box set earlier today and it brought back a flood of memories.

It's a collection of Rah's music that Joel Dorn issued posthumously on his indie record label, 32 jazz.  It's a 3 cd set and the first two discs are from live performances.  The third disc is Rahsaan's only solo album, "Natural Black Inventions:  Root Strata"--a work that refuses to age and only gets better and better with each new listen.  It deserves its own blog post, and as a matter of fact, I have been threatening to write an essay about it because I love it SO DARN MUCH.

But the beautiful flashback I had when I pulled this album off the shelf today has to do with the first track on the first album.  It's called "Box Tops and Whistling Rings" and it's just a 19-second intro. for the music, but why it matters so much to me is that it's from an interview I did with one of Rah's childhood buddies.

I had recently flown back from Columbus to New Jersey (where I was living at the time), and went to the city one day to meet with Joel.  I played him a section of the interview and he flipped for it and marched me back to his office (we were having lunch) so he could make a copy of it.  It's a story about Rahsaan, as an 8 year old collecting the box tops off of cereal boxes so he could get the prize:  a whistling ring.

His music was truly always with him.

Bright Moments always,
May