MP3 Boundless Gratitude - How Paper And Ink Came Together

Musical storytelling from the heart of the peace jungle

12 MP3 Songs
SPOKEN WORD: Audiobook, SPOKEN WORD: With Music



Details:
The musical story in this two CD set begins in the musical, colorful, and beautiful Land of Ink, which is about to be discovered and taken over by creatures from the precise, black-and-white, and powerful Land of Paper. It tells the story of Black Ink, a tiny, tiny, tiny, black, black, black ant who sets out to cross the universe, in hopes of finding a power that will save his fellow ink creatures and their land from the terrible curse of Paper Magic.

The story includes a number of my well-received original songs that have always been included in the telling of this story and that been previously released as stand alone tracks. The list includes: Mama Earth Just Poked A Mountain Out At Daddy Sky; The Ant-stronaut Song; A Black Man's Prayer; Walk for Peace; See God Smiling; Abraham's Burden; and I Can Imagine Peace. This first run of audio recordings was actually made and assembled in the Peace Jungle studios and individually signed by Boundless Gratitude!

The story represents almost 10 years of work on an idea that began with my first song, written almost 30 years ago about an ant who was "gonna cross the universe." The ant acquired a name, "Black Ink", in what I would describe in retrospect as the beginning of an intense and continuing artistic exploration of the ancestral memories in my own DNA. I wrote my first (and only to date) musical play, "Free Black Ink" in 1998-99, and I plan to take the finished story on this CD straight to the local theatre that is still waiting for me to come back and produce that play. I also gave my first public musical storytelling performance in February 2000: an early version of the Black Ink story that was very well received at a children's storytime in a local bookstore. My personal exploration continues, but this story project has now matured enough to head out into the world on its own.

I send it forth with liner notes describing what I have learned in the process:

Boundless Gratitude shines,
With sun light that brings
Children out to play
And teases flowers âtil they bloom
On balmy spring and summer days.

Boundless Gratitude is my non-denominational musical storytelling ministry. I introduce myself as Boundless Gratitude because it challenges me to âbe the change I want to see in the worldâ: healing greed with gratitude and healing bigotry with boundlessness. I tell musical stories to honor my ancestral and native cultures and ethnicities within the great worldwide diversity of culture and ethnicity. Each of our unique âgiftsâ plays an essential role in the healing/wholeness of our selves, our communities and our world. So rather than being divided and conquered, I choose to be whole and free by sharing musical stories from what I describe as the Heart of the Peace Jungle.

I was christened at birth, with the Muslim name Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey, in a Nazarene Protestant church and grew up in a West Indian household (my maternal lineage) in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The song that inspired me to pick up a guitar for the first time about three decades ago was Bachâs Jesu. But saying that to someone in the modern Western world leaves vast cultural gulfs unbridged, partially because names in the Arabic language are also commonly used words in everyday speech. So if Hassaun Ali were actually translated into English, rather than just transliterating Arabic language sounds, it would sound something like Beautiful Songbird Exalted Flight.

Jones-Bey combines the Welsh surname Jones with Bey, a title for Turkish royalty. The Jones in my lineage was the surname of whoever purchased my paternal ancestors when they were sold into slavery in the Americas. The Bey comes from my paternal grandfather, Roman Jones-Bey. Like many African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century, my grandfather was seeking to establish a name and a connection to a homeland that would redeem his people from the heritage of slavery and deliver them from the continuing persecution known as Jim Crow. My grandfather changed his surname from Jones to Jones-Bey when he joined the Moorish Science Temple, a forerunner of the well-known Nation of Islam.

Composing and playing my own music, however, reconnects me with an ancient heritage that is neither Arab, nor Welsh nor Turkish, nor Muslim nor Christian. And making that organic connection within my own self seems to somehow free me to genuinely embrace all and reject none. So I introduce myself as Boundless Gratitude to remind myself and everyone else of my ancient race (the human race), and who is a native of our ancient homeland (the planet Earth), and who adheres to our primal faith (which is love) that the richest people are not those with the most possessions, but those who are most grateful. My guitar and I are most grateful for musical stories that in one way or another say, âBlessings are like air and gratitude is like breathing.â We have a repertoire of more than 100 musical stories, about half of which are original compositions.