Baby, I believe in this honey brown love you spread on the world, still. I believed ever since I first wrote about you, on the plane (you know how it is when you are suspended between worlds, momentarily lightened of the loads of national and cultural modality), a place where I had clarity of distance. In some strange epiphany, I wrote that you could sing everything, that you could sing the dog shit in the gutter, and the sound would be that of all the Blues in the world, the sound of all the people who ever journeyed from Goreé to Georgia to Chicago and back, the sound of a Blues in a battered white mansion in London. In other words, anything you sang would become beauty, and I would shiver. Ever since then I have been drunk on you. You taught me solace, that is, how Soul music is solace. How Soul is healing music, and how even in these crazy diffused (dissipated?) and corporate marketing product driven days, something still comes through a voice like yours. What else can I say? I was there, you were too, and it was a difficult moment made easy, over and over. Like when I finally got to hear ‘Giving you the best I got’ on a rainy night in London, and I played it again and again, rocking in the arm of your voice that seems to extend out and on and around every moment. Sometimes it’s so difficult to know that you can only epitomise a moment, however long it may last, before the world reasserts itself as sovereign in my life. Why can’t I live in your voice forever?

NYC 1996