Jazz Doctor: Milford Graves Poem by Paul Hartal

His playful eyes are framed by a bearded face.
The energy comes through the roots, he says.
If you cut the stems, you're truncating power.

His place exhales an alchemical aura.
A stairway painted in bright rainbow colors
leads to the music research laboratory.
Next to it, in the lavish garden citrus trees
grow amidst healing herbs and exotic plants.

The walls of the house are covered
with a rococo of mosaic stones,
pieces of reflective metal
and chunks of discarded marble
that stand apart from the gritty character
of the 110th Avenue in Queens.

The basement glares in psychedelic colors.
The interior is filled with musical instruments
computers, electronic stethoscopes,
botanical remedies and acupuncture dummies
marked with tinted pathways
along the meridians.

Among many other things, Milford Graves
made trips to the Far East, studying with
Chinese and Japanese masters
of acupuncture, as part of his development
as a critic of allopathic mainstream medicine
in the context of western culture.

Many days ago
he was a police boxing champion
and invented his own martial art technique,
a perpetual motion form,
which borrows from aikido and African dance,
sort of a physical jazz
that hits hard and fast.

Milford Graves came
from Jamaica to New York City,
where he liberated percussion
from its timekeeping role.

In the 1950s and 1960s he emerged in America
as an intrepid pioneer of avant-garde music;
an innovative and different drummer
who marches to his own beat beyond bebop.

He altered, extended and broke down
the conventions of free jazz.
His music is characterized by fast tempo,
improvisations of harmonic structure
and of melody.

His free biological music synthesizes
the corporal and the mental,
corroborates and celebrates
the unity of the body and the mind.

The human heart, he says,
is a musical heart.
The heartbeat is a source of rhythm,
And the music made by the heart is nothing
but free jazz.

As a holistic therapist
Milford delved deep into researching
The relationship of music and health,
The healing power of throb and melody.

In his basement laboratory he uses
electronic stethoscopes
and computer monitors
to analyze heartbeat rhythms and pitches.

People vibrate differently, he says.
Their frequencies vary
And if you know how to use music
it becomes a healing force.

Decades ago he had a revelation:
An idea struck him in a New York book store
About normal and abnormal heart beats.

He knew that the heart beats like a drum,
And the drum beats like a heart,
and he began to investigate
the secret of the heart with computer programs
that measure earthquake tremors.

With the collaboration of other musicians
he created compositions
based on the collective rhythms
of their hearts.
Using a stethoscope and special sensors
detecting the electrical impulses of the body
he listens to the cardiac rhythms of volunteers.

A healthy heart, he notes,
produces a steady musical rhythm.
Like a good jazz drummer.
it beats in triplets of 1-2-3,1-2-3,
rather than in the eight notes
of 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4.

And if raised in a few octaves,
the cardiac sounds crystallize in melodies.
However, the rhythmic and tonal complexities
Of the heart, its conflicting poly-rhythms
or unexpected off-beat syncopations
are truly uncharted, unknown territories.

In some of his computer programs
Milford applied Cuban and Nigerian music
to analyze human heart rhythms and pitches.

Sometimes the heart beats too fast,
or too slow, or in an irregular rhythm.
This happens when cardiac cells
misfire because of some flaw
in the electrical system that controls the heart.

Milford points out that these arrhythmias
As well as many other heart disorders,
arise from stress related problems.
But the good news is that by music therapy
and biofeedback it is possible
to redirect and retrain an ill heart.

To listen to cardiac rhythms and
"to hear if a melody sounds right or not,
you've got to look at it as an artist,
not a doctor", he says.
Because, "if you're trying to listen
to a musical sound with no musical ability,
you're not feeling it."