Road Map? (RIP, Jackie Leven)

"The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice."

--Rudolf Krassner,
quoted in the liner notes
to Jackie Leven's Forbidden Songs of the Dying West.

Here's a bit of Jackie Leven's intensity for you:
click this LINK for "Classic Northern Diversions"--
arterial intensity from the first chord, the first word . . . .

RIP, Jackie Leven.
61 years wasn't enough.
We want more . . . .
Thank you for what you've given.

Thank you to Ian Rankin, Scottish novelist and good guy, for talking about Jackie Leven, the man and his music and the friendship between you, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Marin County, CA.

Moya Cannon: "Who Conducts the Music of Our Dreams?"

ALMA,

I woke up saying the word,
just as, a few mornings earlier, I had woken up
saying 'The Silk Road'.
Who conducts the music our our dreams?
leaving us with only one clear note -- a word for 'soul'
or a name for the most sensuous, the most tortured, of early roads,
a name given at a distance, in hindsight,
by someone who had never travelled it --
not even once clear road either, but several,
a web of camel routes through thorn and sand and storm,
mule tracks over frozen mountain gaps
to where silk worms chewed on mulberry leaves,
spun from their bodies the strong filaments of dreams.

--Moya Cannon