THEOCRACY REIGN IVINE ORDER OF THE NYAH BINGHI TRIBUTE TO ANCIENT BONGO ROCKY
by Ras Flako

Incient Bongo Rocky had repatriated to Ethiopia a decade ago with his Iloved Queen Baby I, since then he has served with distinction as Elder Statesman and Ambassador of the Rastafari Nation. He has headed delegations and meetings with Heads of State, politicians, AU representatives, as well as local and regional dignitaries on behalf of the Shashamanie community and the Nation of Rastafari.

‘Bongo Rock’, as he was fondly called was an inspiration to all those came before his presence , many were blessed by his word sound in cyberspace ,he set the example for Reparation with strong determination and was the focal point for to visitors to the Shashamanie Tabernacle

The wonderful works of the Ancient was manifested on the Shashamanie Nyah Binghi grounds whereby he used his small funds to decorate the place making it show piece to behold, Incient Congo Rock was unrepentant and declared the divinity of Qadamawi Haile Selassie without apology, his global appeal was for mass repatriation to Africa and the continuous struggle for African liberation and redemption from Neo-colonialism

Congo Rocky had multiple ailments and had being been suffering for some time and had lost considerable amount of weight. It is hardly necessary to say more of his suffering however we express ourselves profoundly about the greatness of his character, and about his dedication to a purposeful life, his selfless devotion to help those in trouble, his respect for truth and justice and his burning patriotic zeal for Ethiopia all of which touch our heart deeply at this hour

So when the flesh is down InI will keep his memory high, knowing that Qadamawi Haile Selassie is forIver Even though the storm of aggression that upset the tranquility of the world was a severe test of ancient Congo Rocky moral endurance, it did not overwhelm him, it was to him a test of faith to obey the great and merciful Qadamawi Haile Selassie

Now is the Iwah of transition, as life journey closes .Ancient Congo Rocky, you have slept but although you depart from us physically, your works and your name will always remain among us

Dry up your tears and chant Rastafari, dry up your tears and chant fear well to Incient Priest, Patriarch and Iloved Ancestor Congo Rocky

Guidance and blessings

Ras Flako Tafari

Nyah Binghi Ancient Council

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THE DEFINITION OF ADAMARI

Adamari (Qedamawi or Qadamawi) is Ethiopian for ‘first’, and may also mean ‘old’ or ‘holy’. Haile Selassie was often reffered to as Qadamawi Haile Selassie I, The First, by reknown artists such as Bob Marley, Dennis Brown & Garnett Silk.

Long Live the Ka & Ba of Arrow

Soca star Arrow dies

	Arrow’s ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ was the biggest-selling soca album of all time

Outside the Caribbean, many know soca music, a fast-paced cousin of calypso, through Arrow’s biggest hit Hot, Hot, Hot, recorded in 1982.

Sixty-year-old Arrow, whose real name is Alphonsus Edmund Cassell, had been fighting brain cancer for over a year and had been back and forth for treatment in the US.

He was one of the forerunners to the advancement of soca Veteran Calypsonian Sparrow

However, upon returning home to his native Montserrat, he fell ill recently with pneumonia and was hospitalised in neighbouring Antigua.

Businessman

Arrow was known locally as a businessman as well as an international soca star.

Mike Jarvis interviews Arrow’s brother

He set up his own record label in 1973 and ran a shop on the remaining habitable part of Montserrat after the volcano destroyed large parts of the island.

His song ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ became the biggest selling soca hit of all time.

Arrow had always stated how much he loved calypso, the precursor for soca music.

And he had named himself Arrow in honour of calypso veteran Sparrow.

Born and raised in Montserrat, Arrow grew up in a musical family where both his older brothers had been Calypso Kings of Montserrat, Hero, Justin Cassell and Young Challenger, Lorenzo Castell.

He first performed at age 10 at a concert at the Montserrat Secondary School.

He started singing calypso in 1967 taking the junior monarch title and four times the Monserrat crown.

Arrow was a very popular performer at the Caribbean King of Kings Calypso Competition in Antigua.

He was the first soca artist to perform at Jamaica’s Reggae Sunsplash.

He recorded his first single in 1972, Dance With Me Woman.

He recorded his first album in 1974.

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For info click here and here

Discovering our Egungun (Family ancestors) By Babalawo Sangogbemi Ifalade (alafia gaidi)

By Babalawo Sangogbemi Ifalade (alafia gaidi)

Our family ancestors Often Want us to simply acknowledge them. We should only call upon those who sit at the right hand of GOD in heaven (Mojuba ikunbelese Olodumare iba ‘iye orun) and invite them to bring their spiritual energy to our lives.
We should pray for those who lived in a chaotic and pain-causing fashion, often creating problems with and for other family members – but we should NOT invite their disruptive energies into our lives. We should instead pray for their upliftment, development, and education -and that they take their time in Orun (Heaven) to repair their character, mind, body, and spirit so that they will not come down to Aiye (Earth) causing further disruption in our families.
We must also investigate our living lineage to better understand our family’s works to insure a good destiny (Ayanmo) for all members.
An easily accessible way to do this is to interview the oldest surviving member of your family that is available to you.
The following list of question is meant as a guideline to simulate even the questions of a familial, personal, temporal, or regional nature as they relate specifically to your own family.

Questions:
1.what was the name of the oldest person in our family that you personally knew as a child?
2.Who was the funniest person in the family you remember as a child?
3.What was your favorite dessert prepared by someone in the family when you where a child?
4.How did you wear your hair back then?
5.What was your favorite song?
6.Did you have a favorite outfit back then that made you feel special when you wore it?
7.Who in the family do you think was a good singer/dancer/artist?
8.Who in the family do you think was very smart/intelligent?
9.Who in the family back then, always seemed to have a good word (advice) for everyone?
10.Where was your favorite place to go with your family back then?
11.Did anyone in the family love to fish or hunt?
12.Was there anyone in the family that spoke more than one language?

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My Sister Jules sent me this article in a email. What she said was brief but so profound I had to share it:

Our ancestors are speaking from their graves — “I am here! Recognize who you are.”  We must pay close attention to our ancestors and what they have to say. God bless the youth that found them.

Posted on Sun, May. 2, 2010

Heroes’ graves forlorn, forgotten

At a Camden site, little glory for black Civil War vets.

By Mike Newall
Inquirer Staff Writer

The students discovered the soldiers’ gravestones by chance. They were cleaning up a filthy East Camden park three weeks ago when one of their rakes scratched something hard in the grass.
Nerline Petion, 17, a Woodrow Wilson High School junior, kicked away some broken glass and food wrappers and dug her shovel into the soil. A white slab became visible. Another student brushed away the dirt with a big bristle broom.
The faded stone dated from the 1800s.
The classmates spread out and stabbed at the ground.
Clink. Clink. Clink. Buried headstone after buried headstone.
“We’re standing on some people,” Petion shouted. “Get back.”
The Wilson students had unearthed a historic African American graveyard long neglected by the city.
According to Camden County Historical Society records, the remains of about 250 black residents lie in the trash-strewn ground at 38th and Federal Streets. Among them are 123 members of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) who served in the Civil War.
In historical society photographs from the 1970s, rows of ash-colored headstones lined the 21/2 acres formerly known as Johnson Cemetery. Some leaned toward the ground. Others tilted to the sky. Most were decorated with small American flags.
“Major restoration” was done to Johnson Cemetery in the 1970s, said Camden’s public works director, Patrick Keating. Stones were reset, trees planted, and walkways added.
But the disrepair worsened, with many of the stones either toppling or being vandalized, and instead of attempting further restoration, the city tore up the standing headstones in the 1980s and turned the cemetery into a park.
The bodies were not moved.
“They’re still there,” Keating said. “I don’t know what the process would be for moving them.” He doesn’t know what happened to the discarded headstones.
The city left the headstones that sat flat, but they sunk into the earth and, until discovered by the students, have lain for years beneath layers of patchy grass and garbage. A peeling, graffiti-covered sign reads, “Johnson Cemetery Park.” There is little dignity to the place now.
“What a callous disregard,” said Joe Certaine, founder of the Descendants Jubilee Project, a Philadelphia group working with Civil War organizations to identify and restore USCT burial grounds. Two of his relatives served in the USCT.
“This burial place has been desecrated,” he said. “That the bodies weren’t moved to a more befitting resting place, that there was no ceremony honoring these soldiers, is something that begs for attention and action. This is hallowed ground.”
When tearing up the headstones, the city installed a few benches under some shade trees, which have since become a neighborhood drinking spot.
“If it looked like a cemetery, it’d get respected like a cemetery,” said a man drinking a brown-bagged beer who did not want to share his name.
During the recent cleanup, the students removed 25 bags of trash, but the park is still grimy. Fluorescent drug baggies litter the ground as if tossed by a flower girl.
The city mows the lawn, Keating said.
“We do what we can with what we have,” he said. “We got no people, no equipment, no money.”
Many of the USCT veterans in Johnson Cemetery trained at Camp William Penn, just north of Philadelphia. All survived the war, or they would have been buried at battlefields.
At the National Archives in Philadelphia, researchers Andrea Reidell and Graham O’Neill opened Camp William Penn’s leather-bound military service books, and the soldiers buried in the forgotten cemetery came alive.
There was 22-year-old Albert Mitchell, standing square-shouldered in a Camden recruiting office in 1865. With an inkwell pen, a white Army officer named Newtz recorded some particulars: 5-foot-71/2 . . . laborer . . . born in Salem County . . . dark skin . . . dark hair . . . dark eyes.
And a letter described the early Christmas present given in 1864 to Pvt. Fred Ray, who played an instrument in the camp band. But now he was being called to the front lines.
Three days before Christmas, Col. William Wagner, commander of Camp William Penn, wrote to a superior requesting that as a “personal favor” Ray be allowed to stay with the band.
“Any man has the ability to become a soldier, but not every man can be made a musician,” Wagner wrote.
The students discovered Pvt. George Lodine’s faded headstone near the back porch of a run-down apartment complex next to the park.
In the winter of 1863-64, Lodine paraded with the 22d Regiment, USCT through Philadelphia. Gen. George Meade reviewed the troops at 12th and Chestnut Streets.
“The men looked admirably well,” The Inquirer reported, adding that a “large number of the friends of the colored soldiers” saw the men off at the Washington Street Wharf.
Some months later, at the Battle of Petersburg, the 22d attacked a Confederate fort at sunset, braving withering fire while splashing through a swamp and climbing a steep hill. “I never saw troops fight better,” an officer wrote.
At some point, Camden honored the USCT veterans with a bronze memorial set into concrete at Johnson Cemetery’s entrance. But it’s gone now, stolen perhaps, Keating said.
The land for the cemetery was purchased in 1854 for $775 by three black men, including Camden’s Jacob Johnson, Camden historian Paul W. Schopp said. It was intended as a resting place for black Camden residents. The last burial took place in 1915, Schopp said.
One of the earliest Camden residents interred was Benjamin Brown, 33-year-old principal of the Camden Colored School. He died on a Thursday in 1865. Mourners gathered at his home at 828 S. Fourth St., and a coach carried his coffin three miles to the cemetery.
Camden’s first black police officer is buried there, as is Camden County’s first black freeholder.
So are many women. The students discovered Elizabeth Matthews’ gravestone buried near a maple tree. “Gone but not forgotten,” it read.–
The Johnson Cemetery Park spit-and-polish brigade: Cleanup organizer Ramon Sanchez (right), a Woodrow Wilson High teacher, with volunteers who uncovered the forgotten gravestones.

Marilyn Kai Jewett
Progressive Images Public Relations

Duke Ellington Collection, National Museum of American History

Overview

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was an African-American jazz composer, orchestrator, bandleader and pianist who led one of the greatest jazz bands, wrote more than 1,500 compositions and became one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians. He used the term “beyond category” as the highest possible praise for others, and the phrase richly applies to Ellington, for he led one of the most singular musical careers in American history and left a brilliant legacy likely to endure for the ages.

Washington, D.C.

Born in 1899, Ellington grew up in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which during his youth boasted the largest black population of any city in the nation. His parents encouraged him and sought to shield him from the racism rampant in his day. Ellington took piano lessons and began playing the then-popular ragtime music. Early on, he took an aversion to categories and felt that all classes of society could and should mix. Dropping out of high school, he named his first band Duke’s Serenaders.

North to Harlem

The ambitious young musician moved to New York City in 1923, and after a rough start, began to make a name for himself, especially after landing a job at the Cotton Club, Harlem’s most famous nightspot. By the late 1920s, Ellington was developing a unique sound for his band. Above all, the sound depended on the distinctive instrumental voices of his musicians. He hired and featured some of the greatest, most individualistic players, including the alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, the trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton and the trumpeter Cootie Williams.

Ellington’s compositions combined his musicians’ instrumental voices in innovative ways. Most arrangers for big bands voiced instruments in sections — pitting, for example, the trumpet section against the saxophone section. Ellington voiced his instruments across sections, combining, for instance, the clarinet, trombone and trumpet in an innovative fashion to create the ravishing opening of “Mood Indigo” (1930). As a composer, Ellington developed a personal approach to harmony and instrumental voicing. Unlike most other swing bandleaders, he composed most of his band’s music.

Irving Mills, his shrewd manager from 1926 to 1939, recognized Ellington’s genius and relentlessly promoted him, securing live radio broadcasts, recordings and motion picture appearances.

1931-1956

Leaving the Cotton Club in 1931, Ellington embarked on nearly incessant touring for the rest of his life. He appeared in a number of movie shorts and feature films, including “Cabin in the Sky” (1942) and “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), for which he also wrote the music.

In 1939 he hired a gifted young arranger, Billy Strayhorn, who became his trusted musical collaborator. Together they composed many short and long instrumental works, and Strayhorn contributed dozens of pieces to the Ellington band’s repertory, including “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941), which became Ellington’s theme song.

1956-1974

Though the early 1950s saw the Ellington band in an artistic and economic slump, in 1956 Ellington rebounded to national attention with a sensational performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. Henceforth, he would compose, alone or with Strayhorn, an increasing number of suites or extended works, such as a suite on Shakespearean themes, “Such Sweet Thunder” (1956), and “The New Orleans Suite” (1970).

Ellington had made his first tours to Europe in the 1930s, and from the 1950s on, he toured abroad extensively, performing in 65 countries. Sometimes his travels inspired his compositions, as in “The Far East Suite,” which he wrote with Strayhorn (1966).

Rising Esteem

After Ellington’s death in 1974, his star continued to rise. In 1985, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Ellington. In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History acquired his vast archives — roughly 100,000 pages of unpublished music that he and Strayhorn composed for the band, 100,000 pages of other documents and 500 artifacts as well as recordings, films and photographs. The availability of Ellington’s collection greatly stimulated interest in him, and by making his music much more available for performance and research, sparked a rising valuation of his legacy.

The Smithsonian created a series of stationary and traveling exhibitions about him. In 1995, Jazz at Lincoln Center established the Essentially Ellington High School Band Contest to stimulate interest in his music among young people. In the United States, PBS broadcast two documentaries about him, and public radio presented several commemorative series during his centennial year, 1999. In 2009, the United States Mint honored Ellington on a quarter — the first African-American to appear by himself on a circulating U.S. coin.

Key Recordings

More than 10,000 sound recordings of Ellington were made. Some of his most important include:

• “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927)

• “The Mooche” (1928)

• “Mood Indigo” (1930)

• “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (1932)

• “Daybreak Express” (1933)

• “Caravan” (1937)

• “Ko-Ko” (1940)

• “Concerto for Cootie” (1940)

• “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941)

• “Cotton Tail” (1940)

• “Main Stem” (1942)

• “Black, Brown and Beige” (1943)

• “On a Turquoise Cloud” (1947)

• “The Tattooed Bride” (1950)

• “Harlem” (1952)

• “Such Sweet Thunder” (1957)

• “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959)

• “The Far East Suite” (1966)

• “And His Mother Called Him Bill” (1967)

• “Second Sacred Concert” (1968)

Highlights From The Times’s Archives

Editorial: “Duke Ellington’s Centennial,” April 29, 1999

“Ellington at 100: Reveling in Life’s Mastery,” by Wynton Marsalis, Jan. 17, 1999. The trumpeter-composer assesses Ellington.

“Ellington Emerges, Falters and Triumphs; Catching The Spirit of a Century,” by Peter Watrous, Jan. 17, 1999. A discussion of Ellington’s early career.

“The Duke on Disk, Live, Loosened and Otherwise,” by Ben Ratliff, Jan. 17, 1999. A Times critic provides an overview of Ellington’s available recordings.

“Critic’s Notebook: Ellington: Beyond Category,” by Margo Jefferson, Oct. 15, 1993. A cultural critic looks at Ellington and a traveling Smithsonian exhibition about him.

“Smithsonian Acquires Duke Ellington Trove Of Scores and Papers,” by Irvin Molotsky, April 27, 1988.

“Ellington: Unfailingly Modern,” by Robert Palmer, Nov. 17, 1985. A critic assesses Ellington’s work of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

“Duke Ellington, a Master of Music, Dies at 75,” by John S. Wilson, May 25, 1974. An appreciation by The Times’s jazz critic.

“Duke Ellington, 70, Honored at White House,” by Nan Robertson, April 30, 1969.

New York Times coverage of Duke Ellington, 1981-present

Click here for a searchable archive of New York Times coverage of Duke Ellington at nytexplorer.com, including articles and commentary.

Keyword Search of The New York Times Archives, 1851-present