Last night I got my music groove back. I thought I had lost it, I thought I had grown numb to feel music. But Music that wine of beauty, that sexy bitch proved me wrong all over again. T.S Eliot said "You are music while music lasts". He could have been writing about me. A potent magic that is created when people gather to make music.

It always makes me wonder about our ancestors: those cave men. I imagine they must have arrived at this thing we call a note, a rythm or a beat in the deep silence of a winter night. The sky must have been dark and snow must have been falling. Game must have been hard to get by and they must have been sad and starving when a Man took up a reed and started blowing his sorrow into it. Another Man must have overturned a hollow log, covered with a pelt and began thumping it. Be bop bip bop. And then a dance would have begun, others would have joined in and complete the circle by clapping their hands, by whooping and hollering.

One can still hear these basics in their strongest form in Native American Music. People find the high pitched cries that usually are an important part of that music to be strange. But I think they don't listen they just hear superficially. It is the same primal cry of the muezzin whom I used to hear in grade 10 when I used to wake up before the sun around 5.00 am coming from a mosque on a nearby hill. It has the same color of Handel's Hallelujha. Now I don't know much about music, I don't know anything about music theories, chords, ragas, harmonies and all the other technical stuff but this is what I do resonate to and I am trying to put into words the echoes of that resonance.

There is another thing that fascinates me and that is seeing any music magicians perform. An aura immediately envelopes a human the second he opens his throat and sings. This aura enables us, the people who are facing him,to create music too. This may appear non intutive. But let me explain. An artist I think, deals us silence. He does nothing but play with the silence within himself and in doing so invites us, the bunch of glassy eyed folks, to do the same with our own inner silence. And when that happens we become musicans ourselves.

We in a way begin to own the music. We had the notes within us. I belive of all the songs that were ever written or will be written are known to each of us for they are what this fabric of silence is made up of. What these music-magicians do is enable us to reconginze that by drawing the golden filaments of silence out and throwing those at us. Music in a sense is then a journey into ourselves. Also watching these dangerous people empowers me with a sense of belief that I too can find routes to that fabric,that sheen, that radiance within.I call muscians dangerous because they are. Dictators have long reconginzed this fact. The first batch of people who have always been sent to the gulags have been artists: musicans, writers, dancers and other madmen.

Also have you ever noticed how, and this seems to be generally true across cultures; saints, gods, spirits have always been visually depicted with a halo, with a light shining around them ? One can see that same light when a great musician is playing his guitar with his fingers racing on the fret board at a dizzing speed or when she closes her eyes, stretches her arms and the words of the song are raising in a crescendo before they finally explode from her lips.

Bob Marley, that Rastafarian magician once said "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you don't feel any pain". And Buddha's first Noble Truth of Life was that of Dukkha, a Pali word that loosely translates to Suffering. So does this mean that music is one way out of this suffering we human beings invariably endure? I can't answer that well enough but I sure am on one hell of a trip to find out.

"May the music posses you and may you always possess music" - Sting