João Pessoa, Brazil

Groundation with tour buddies Reemah and Mato Seco in Brazil.

Before I got serious about music, I was a history student, Chinese history to be more accurate, plus Chinese culture, politics, economics, etc… I went to school in Santa Cruz, California, but I’ve spent a lot of time studying in China, and met many Chinese people, and these encounters never fail to stir vivid associations with the historical events and forces that I’ve read about and studied. I’ve read hundreds of pages about the Cultural Revolution and met people who were a part of it. I’ve read about the complex relation between the Middle Kingdom and the people beyond the Great Wall, and I’ve stood on that wall.

Since that time, my interests in history have only intensified. I’ve heard stories about the Berlin Wall all my life, and now I’ve touched it, and met people who lived on both sides of it. With Groundation, I’ve had a chance to see Jerusalem, Paris, London, Rio, and New York City, places steeped in history: echoes of the past that reverberate as we glimpse Taos Pueblo or Mont-Saint-Michel from the windows of our tour bus.

Doctor Robinson lets his hair down.

History echoes through Groundation’s music, something that’s easy to remember when you travel with not one, but two professors in the band. Musically, when I’m in creative mode, I think not only about Bob Marley, but about Don Drummond, and Miles Davis, and Louis Armstrong and even Buddy Bolden, who was never recorded, so we’ll never know what he sounded like, but who represents a certain spirit of the horn that has continued to this day, a spirit for which I am a living vessel.

Sadly, we’ve had limited touring opportunities in Asia, and likewise in Africa, the most historical place on our planet. So when we visit Northeastern Brazil my eyes and ears and nose are specially tuned to the echoes Africa has transmitted to that place from across time and the sea. The music, food, dress, religion; all of these cultures can be, in places like João Pessoa, traced to African roots.

As though to bring home that point, Ponta do Seixas, just southeast of João Pessoa in the Brazilian state of Paraiba, is the easternmost point in the Americas, and thus the closest point between Africa and my world, the New World, where history is represented by a few loose threads towards the tail end of the human historical tapestry.

At Ponta do Seixas you’ll find a bluff above a nice surf spot and beach, not so different from Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz. There’s a little plaque, a lighthouse and a kid’s mosaic of a rising sun. A couple of tourists browse the little gift shop and the row of the food and drink stands which can be found along any Brazilian highway. An old Brazilian fellow chatted with us in Brazenglish about geographic facts, pointing towards the spot where an old couple dozed in the sand, closer to Africa than any other dry person in this hemisphere, and probably totally unaware of it.

The first rays of sunshine touch the shores of America.

Makes me wonder what I’ve missed over the years. I once bought chocolates for my wife at a shop in the former home of Charlotte Corday. I felt rather smug about recognizing the significance of that. But really, is there any significance? Maybe I stayed in the same hotel room John F. Kennedy stayed in the night before he was shot in Dallas. How can I know, and what does it matter? We’re swimming in the wake of the past, pondering the wave of a ship that’s long since sailed as we bob in the currents of its passing.

Cabo Branco