Of Cromagnon man and Kalahari healers

Marjorie Shostak and Nisa

In May of last year I wrote how Margaret de Wys successfully sought the help of an Ecuadorian shaman to heal and recover from breast cancer. It's a romantic idea that healers from indigenous communities have a certain knowledge lacking in the industrialized world. There's some truth in it (it seems to me) that traditional healers know things about the properties of obscure plants and the often mysterious workings of the human body, that are unknown to the western scientific world. But let's not forget that the science of the western world has advanced to such a degree that healing of diseases, especially those of the industrial world, such as cancer, has a very good success rate, perhaps as good, or better, than traditional methods. The American anthropologist Marjorie Shostak, a decade before de Wys, and on different continent, was not as lucky. Shostak sought the help from her friend Nisa, a !Kung San woman from Botswana. Nisa, in 1970, had been the subject of a book by Shostak: Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. [Harvard University Press, 1981] The book gained importance and became a standard of anthropological literature. Sound recordings made during her three year stay among the !Kung appeared on two discs by the Folkways label. The record Instrumental Music of the Kalahari San appeared in 1982. Like last year the tune Sitengena with one man's voice is listed in the top 100. Read here about the recording.

Cromagnon: Austin Grasmere; Brian Elliot; Sal Salgado

The two colors behind Shostak and Nisa are olive green and olive brown, hardly to be called random. The first time I used the Random Color Generator at randomwordgenerator.com a month ago I these three colors behind three members of the 60s garage band Cromagnon. I didn't write down the names of colors then but they do come up with wonderful (but not truly random) colors. I learned about this obscure band from New York City when I was looking into the ESP label that is the home of many free jazz musicians I'm interested in. ESP refers to the language and not psychology. It was founded in 1963 to showcase esperanto-based music, but after its only second release, a disc by Albert Ayler (Spritual Unity, 1965) the label focused on free jazz and other experimental music. The song Caledonia from the album Orgasm of 1969 (later reissued as Cave Rock) is a real tour de force heavy metal song with bagpipes prominently heard with fuzz guitar, bass and drum. Taped sound effects also feature on the recording. More music from ESP will feature in this year's 100 as well as another recording of the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.