Reviewed For TheFunkStore.com..By/Funk Journalist&Atlanta Radio Personality~"Bustin'"Bob Mitchell
1.Introduction ~ListenNow
You begin with curiosity… whim… want… desire… urge… need… habit… obsession…compulsion…excessive…and landed at the runway of addiction!” So speaks Diem Jones on his “Colloquium for a Drugged Lord”, one of 11 astoundingly candid spoken word tracks from his Black Fish Jazz cd. Self and societal examination gets no deeper than Black Fish Jazz. Self-described by Jones as 3 parts, three ingredients if you will; Black.Fish. Jazz. Black is the color that represents the absorption of ALL, Black is everything, Black is perfection. Fish represent some level of holiness; if you don’t want to smell fishy, don’t eat the fish, indeed, You Shouldn’t –Nuf Bit Fish!! Jazz used to be noted as an African American invention, but now even this is being challenged ,Diem intones over the title track.
It’s a collection of his ‘pooper-scooped’ words and tales and collaborations with some of the finest musicians and spirits on the planet. Including George Clinton, who produced a track and whom Jones unabashedly says his ‘Colloquium’ is for (“any habit can be IT, if IT gets out of hand”). He challenges reality with his message of love, philosophy, and just plain silliness: ‘holy hippopotamus, lets get to the bottom of this’ he exclaims over the title track. Jones’ voice is interspersed through plenty of thick tasty-nasty percussive Third World grooves.
Often both satirical and sarcastic, Jones’ wit combined with his smoove pronouncement and impeccable enunciation slices and dices into the hypocritical mumbo jumbo of present day planet earth and pop culture.
Truth can do many things and come in many packages. Its been said that 99% of the people spend 99% of the time trying to avoid painful truths. That’s what’s wrong in this mutha today. Jones is obviously part of that 1% that wants to dissect truth, expose it for what it is. And he deals the cards out straight up. Truth can do many things. It can cut, stab, burn and convict. But it can also empower, and set a mugg free!!! Just like Diem so eloquently puts
it on ‘The Conspiracy of Greed’, “maybe stinking will promote thinking”.
I have found myself facing a myriad of emotional upheaval when I begin to eat a plate of Black Fish Jazz. Jones takes me on an “Urban Journey to White Flight University”, uh, make that WFU- where they speak the other language. Far from constipating the sordid mindset of consumeristic America further (‘the need to get over, drive a bigger car, have a plusher house, wear the latest, have exotic frolics that support fantasies transposing into insensitive realities’), Jones is bent on stripping away all these false identities a mugg may have surreptitiously and unconsciously absorbed into his or her sponge of a brain ruled by society’s subliminal seductiveness.
Not unlike the brilliant social polemic of late 60s Last Poets as they challenged the status quo, Jones dismantles and cuts through all the BS. Like that statue of Booker T. Washington lifting the veil of ignorance at Tuskegee U, Diem ‘takes the sheet off it’ in the tradition of James Baldwin, with the full blown in-yo-face funk of James Brown. But he never comes off as being angry. Indeed I found myself mad, tearful, confident, eager, anxious, empowered, there were even times when I broke down in gut-busting laughter as I consumed this Black Fish Jazz. Jones manages to pull off a dead serious dialogue with enough wit and silly-seriousness it’s easy to tell he has ingested the good Dr. Funkenstein’s anti-pimp pleasure principle prescriptions. He quotes GC at times, ‘a tale ain’t nothing but a long booty and booty ain’t nothing but a butt’.
Unlike organized religious schemes, Jones does not want to stuff and stifle the truth, but quite the contrary. He opens the lid on it. Dares you to take a peep at it, or smell a whiff of it. You will not like much of what you see or smell but at least you CAN see and smell it now!!! You can find you, if you look for you. It is truly a miracle and a wonder of this life that the human nervous system can operate on so many planes. Diem Jones doesn’t just navigate these dimensions through poetry. He explores them, melds them together and creates a new world out of this multi-dimensionality. If I had to use one word to describe the work that Jones has produced, its WISDOM. Things that you already knew but needed reminding in this kind of way. “Think, it ain’t illegal yet, and it doesn’t stink!”
2.Two Vails Away From The Light
3.Reams Of Tears~ListenNow
4.Urban Journey
5.Colloquium For A Druglord~ListenNow
6.Black Fish Jazz~ListenNow
7.A Taste Of Many~ListenNow
8.Dog Talk ~ListenNow
9.Why Ku-16~ListenNow
10.Indirections
11.Conspiracy Of Greed~ListenNow
12.Today's Times,Tomorrow's Crimes ~ListenNow
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