“Technology has made a big difference.” Chelsey and I were talking. Discussing some edits for my forthcoming book, Cosmic Deputy. She has moved here to New Orleans from somewhere north of the Mason Dixon line and has decided to hang in the crescent for a minute after matriculating at the University of New Orleans.

Chelsey is my editor.

Later after our meeting I got an email from Dynamite Dave Soul, a Chicago-born New Orleanian. He’s a DJ. Like Chelsey, he and I are from vastly different generations. The music he traffics in is the music I grew up with.

When it comes to music New O. is a crazy city. Back in the day, one time we had Earth, Wind and Fire levitating the Superdome and literally a few blocks away, at the very same time, P-Funk was stinking up the Municipal Auditorium–the same place where Clinton and company had premiered the Mothership P-Funk earth tour. Yours truly was with P-Funk and is now here to celebrate it. 

Any-who, Dave Soul got a new joint, called Soul Glow, which you ought to get if you are at all interested in party music. He uses the technology to mix the sounds of the seventies and eighties with classic New Orleans “Bounce Music”.

What he’s doing can’t be done without computers and without turntables. The deal with turntables is that Black folk broke open that whole scene and specifically the techniques of mixing. The use of technology.

Of course, one of the premiere, or should I say pre-eminent, progenitors of technology and soul was that man from Saturn, Sun Ra. And the deal is that he took us and the music into the outer space of using computers to make music. Whether or not he knows it, Dave Soul is just a popular son of Sun Ra.

You can hear the music of an earlier era all up in Dave Soul’s new joint. A younger generation, doing their thing, via extending, re-mixing, and building on what their parents had done. Which, after all, is the way of the world. It’s just that most of us are not conscious of the musical timeline and the resultant cosmic, stylistic mash-up.

I don’t think Chelsey and Dave Soul know each other, even though they are close together in earth years. Whereas I’m from another time, and place. But, in many ways, I’m a bridge. Not so much bridging the old and the new to each other, as much as connecting conscious elements of whatever generation to the here and now world at large.

I haven’t talked with Dave in a minute. Nevertheless, I’ll put this out in the atmosphere. Sort of like responding to the sonic probe he dropped on us. I’m sending back good vibes. And I know I’m thinking this way because Chelsey slide through asking questions and making notes, and in her own quiet way getting me to think about making connections.

So when I saw this Dave Soul email about his new release, I had already been prepped to receive brother Soul’s vibrations.

And it bees that way: something completely unrelated can prepare you to receive some other kind of message, which in turn, (i.e. the serendipity of different worlds colliding), enables you to think of something new, something different. Something that is not Chelsey, and is not Dave Soul. But which you would not have experienced if you had not talked with Chelsey and later received a musical message from Dave Soul.

Everyday, every minute, different things are going on. Sometimes we can momentarily put the random abstractness of the universe, into a straight-line. And that putting allows us to see a third existence for a hot minute. And, if we blink, we miss it. But if we woke, we dig it. Be inspired by it. And write some random stuff that has us thinking about something we otherwise might have ignored entirely.

Like my daughter Kiini, would laugh and say: co-ink-ki-dents are truly the way of our world.