Wednesday May 6 * doors at 7pm, event starts at 7:30 * Free / donations * Reserve a Spot!

At an intersection of Black philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics, Vortex, Baba sounds through the people, the histories, and the profound diasporic-cultural vibrations gathered at Baltimore's iconic Druid Hill Park. Vortex, Baba traces the personal and collective lives of Baba L'Salaam, Adon Aesh, Jamal Moore and other Park Vibe players rooted in a drum circle community sustained from 1960s Black Arts radicalism onward through today's rising generations. Joining immersive literary journalism and philosophical explorations, Gerald Majer interrogates immediacies of race, feeling, and sociality. Preview: https://books.google.com/books/about?id=673GEQAAQBAJ

"Dennis Boyd strikes once, twice, forever, and the stainless steel disc minutely shivers and rings bright as he keeps moving around the circle, visiting in front of each drummer for a beat, beats, a bar.

Mobile and motile. He doesn't own a phone, he doesn't own a drum, but people can find him if they know his tracks and footsteps.

A rhythm monk, beat anchorite. Abyssinian hermits on inaccessible desert rocks listening to emptiness or God. Wise ones smiling and tranquil in village marketplaces as if they're listening to all the people's voices running together and they're hearing the sonic chaos as lovely orderly music.

Street and alley bricolage, storage caches, knapsack archive. The metal disc that anoints the beats comes from a junked pressure cooker. The thing rings like it's supper. Chimes, like everything's ready: time for the blessing."

Gerald Majer is author of The Velvet Lounge. His writing appears in Callaloo, Chicago Review, Georgia Review, and Yale Review.