v1. Philosophy, the City, and the Belly Dancer

The Dance of Life

The motto of Dubrovnik is Libertas. That motto is lived each and every night at the Troubador Hard Jazz Caffe, where, when I was there in July, 2002, manager/bass player Marko Breskovic provided an environment of free music and warm conviviality. With sons Toni on piano and vocals (and sometimes trombone), Niki on drums, and Vlaho on congas, the music just poured out.

The first night I found myself accompanying a belly dancer, Susan Frankovich, on harmonica, as well as playing congas. Here's some live music I was able to record with a little recorder in front of the band. First, a wild Gypsy Balkan version of Summertime, accompanying and improvising to Susan's dancing:

Gypsy Summertime in the Balkans: Live at the Troubador Hard Jazz Caffe
Marko Breskovic, bass; Toni Breskovic, piano & vocals; Niki Breskovich, Drums; Gene on harmonica; Susan Frankovich, Belly dance finger bells

Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 5, 2002

And a cut from Duke Ellington's C Jam Blues, Gene on harmonica: C Jam Blues Cut

A brief sample on a Spanish motif, Gene on congas:   Spanish Sample

 The Troubador is a place locals also come to relax, talk, and listen in the outdoor summer warmth. During my stay the first week of July I played music there every night, never knowing quite what was coming up next nor caring, really. The carnival of life just poured out.

 The second night Marko introduced me to a diva from South Africa in the audience, who was on holiday with her husband and daughter, and we talked of her transition between opera and broadway musicals, and of music more generally.

 The third night Marko's 15 year-old niece belted out "I Will Survive" like a seasoned pro. Another night I sat at a table with a Croatian sailor, his wife, and Susan, talking about the sailor's life at sea around the world, of how his wife can now travel with him.   Susan spoke of how she arrived in Dubrovnik from Arizona with ten dollars and the desire to go to Spain, to dance her way to Spain. She was dancing on the edge, free. Through the touch of her finger bells and entrancing gestures, her rhythm rhapsody called out our improvising.

     Hypnotizing hips shake the gaze of entrancement onto themselves. Unwary tourists walking through end up entranced, like Odysseus lashed to the mainsail with his ears unblocked, end up turned into participants in the hypnotic dance of life underway, transfixed until the song is over.

 No exit, only entrance, entrancing entrance. We musicians, entrancers entranced, pouring out the energy that the moment is pouring in, sacred vessels of the music which pours through us.
 This was heaven on earth, in the flesh, in the music, in the air, in the dancing, in the stones, in the people in the city in the moment. Pouring music out of the not-yet into the now, the ambrosia of life, pouring out creation. Being the creation, fully immersed in it, in the dance of life.

 Life flows as heaven on earth at each and every moment if we open our hearts and our awareness and our love and allow ourselves to feel it as it truly is:
infinite creation.
For as the medieval poet Rumi put it:

...We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

Jumpin' Gene Halton

Left to right: Jumpin' Gene Halton, Susan Frankovich, Marko Breskovic, Frano Grce

2. Philosophy, the City, and
the Athenian Philosopher

Wednesday July 10, 2002
Eugene Halton facing the gates of
Socrates' prison cell
which faces the Acropolis
Athens, Greece

         Socrates the tekton, imprisoned finally in stone, doomed to view the Acropolis while awaiting his end. There stood in his vision and in ours today the Parthenon, temple of Athena, in all its glory, and the other great works from Socrates' own lifetime and well before.
         The sacred Acropolis, what went on in Socrates as he gazed upon it?
         What did he think of the Parthenon, for which Pericles emptied the treasury to build?
         Did Socrates, himself a stonecutter, help build the Parthenon? Are his stones still there, standing immortal? Or scattered amid the ruins?
        The man who would not write inscribed by his wordless deeds in the enduring stones?
        And his prison. After a lifetime of working stones, only to be locked in a living tomb carved from the rock.
        Did Socrates, unknown to his devoted students, do stonework on his prison itself, carving, say, the indentations in the floor of the left entry?
Eugene Halton

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from ending of Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates and Phaedrus converse in the country outside the city walls, a prayer offered by Socrates:

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.