Personnel

ESO / EHS Personnel

The Great Southwestern Desert
post-Apocalyptic 'Sand Pirates' Band

The Mysterious 1885 Victorian "Steampunk" Band

The 1965 "Newport Folk Festival Band"

The Elegant Savages Orchestra, somewhere in Bassanda, c23 July 1965. Mark IV "'65 Newport Folk Festival Band,"
a potent influence on Bob Dylan, Yezget Nas1lsinez in front. Photo by long-time BNRO photographer Cifani Dhoma.

The '62 "Beatnik" Band

The '62 "Beatnik" Band, photographed backstage, Tallinn, c early June 1962.
(L-R) foreground: Federica Rozkhov, JDW, Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, Žaklin Paulu (seated);
second row: SMK, Chaya Malirolink, Terésa-Marie Szabo (with Baby Szabo), Ceridwen Moira Ifans,
Морган Ŭitmena, Antanas Kvainauškas, Kaciaryna Ŭitmena, Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie
third row (seated): NS, Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī
fourth row (rear): “Részeg Vagyok”, AA, Mississippi Stokes, Etxaberri le Gwo,
Raakeli Eldarnen, Jakov Redžinald,
Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi, Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire,
JE, Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, Fionnuala Nic Aindriú

The "Classic '52 Band"

The "classic band", Summer 1952. Click on faces for Personnel files. Photo by Cifani Dhoma.

Rationale: The power of personal myth

Ailsa Àn Xīng Niphredil: voice, dance
Aislinn mac Aluinn (Meşe Kolları): violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, bagpipe
Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton: dance
Ani Hamim Gassion: voice, dance
Antanas Kvainauškas: clarinet, tarogato
Aredhel Rían Ó Duinnshléibhe: voice, dance
Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta: flute, dance
Avdyusha Hughes Ivanovich: keyboards, voice, dance
Azizlarim Jangchi: dance
Binyamin Biraz Ouiz: saxophone, voice, dance
Bronislava Nijinska: choreographer
Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš: horn, dance, voice
Ceridwen Moira Ifans: clarinet, tin whistle, recorder, pibgorn
Chakira Iyatunde Rapiria: dancer, of the Thirteen Wise Companions
Cifani Doma: photographer / documentarian
Danuta Ewelina Jankowskia: dancer, of the Thirteen Wise Companions
Dāwūd Ala Alnuhra: conductor / mentor / violist
Džonatan Výrobca: Bassist, historian, iconographer, oenologist, Rift theorist
Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne: flute
Elzbieta Purves: cello
Emmiana Garrett Danesi: dance, concertina, tin whistle
Erzbieta / Ealisaid “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici: oboe, graïle (Occitan shawm), bagpipe
Estefanía Ó Raghallaigh Kápak: percussion, dance
Etxaberri le Gwo: fiddle, banjo
Federica Rozhkov: fiddle, voice, dance
Feye Keijukainen Arndt: voice, flute, dance
Fionnuala Nic Aindriú: flutes, piccolo, tin whistle
Gersemi “Gersi” Nieltytär: horn
Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur: visual art, dance
Ishayo Abn Rodrigo Medina a/k/a El Mestizo: saxophones
Ít Vũ Công: flute, piccolo, dance
Jakov Redžinald: fiddle
Jēkvēlina Vovk : voice, dance, magic, kolesnoye skripku
Jens Dahout na Uilyam: conductor
Jérome Courvalle: cello
John Rud Ericsson: voice, dance, utility instruments
Kalir Ourse Le Bois de Bouleau: dance, The Thirteen Wise Companions
Karsten Mitigwaki Hegyváros: saxophones
Kelemen Misha Forsàidh: guest percussion
Kristina Olenev: dancer
Kristofer Askol’dov: pr
Krzysztof Arczewski: bass, drone cello
Kulamani Llandaff Callan: violin, voice, dance, electrical sensitive
Lisle Goncharov: dancer
Maçdalija Gundisalvus: cello
Mahá le Loutre Red Elk: hornist, Zen archer
Marushka Dugarte Orjuela a/k/a Marya "La Gitana": fiddle
Marusia Churai Poltava: cello
Mississippi Stokes: guitar, voice
Madame Múdry Urodzený Gora: voice, voice pedagogy
Nāṯānas Hús: voice, shamanic dance
Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī: viola, violin, tabla, dance
Nollag Käsityöläinen: piano
Rashka – Rahmani Boenavida: guitar, piano, voice, trumpet
Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel : violin, voice, dance, joiking
Részeg Vagyok: drums, percussion
Rāḥīl Marrone‎: Clarinet, bass clarinet, bass guitar
Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī: violin, dancer
Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire: drums, percussion
Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie: voice, dance, violin
Sionainn “Boudicca” Biraz de St-Denis: dancer of the Thirteen Wise Companions
Stála Violante O Gealbhain: dancer of the Thirteen Wise Companions
Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk: voice, dance
Terésa-Marie Szabo: fiddler, dance, straw boss
Tereza Viscart Mullaine: flute
Thorvaldur Ragnarsson: trumpet, accordion
Viliyam Daviv and Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi: viola & violin
Vilyum Balandjeor: guest conductor, admiral
Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai: guitar
Yannoula Periplanó̱menos: flute, whistle, Theremin, electronics
Yiskāh MacFarlane Ni Molindar : trombonist, archer, swordswoman
Yūhannā Casco Encabezado: tuba, design
Žaklin Paulu: percussion, voice, dance
Zoya Căruțaș: saxophone, flute, voice
Морган and Kaciaryna Ŭitmena: voice, dance, telekinetic communications

“If it’s for ya, it’ll make you strong.”

The Bassanda Personae--Rationale

Here’s the recruiting and morale rationale for the Bassanda personae:

All artists are mythographers, and one of their most fundamental creative acts is the invention of an implicit or explicit personal myth.

When you are a young person, especially if you are a young person drawn to the arts in a society that doesn’t particularly value them, the prospect of making a future as an artist can be daunting and uncertain. Especially if you are a young person raised in a family without much artistic consciousness, or lacking economic opportunity, or educational access, or any other values than strict materialism (which can manifest as the senseless desire for either expensive objects or expensive experiences)—in such cases, you may not have much idea what the life of an artist looks like. To enter into the great unknown of (formal or informal) apprenticeship in the arts, in 21st century late-imperial post-industrial America, is an act of significant uncertainty and requires significant courage. Because we so often lack community-based models for the life of an artist—the potter down the street or the painter up the road—it’s hard for a young person to feel optimistic about what the life of an artist has in store. So many young people in late-stage America have to step off into the training for a career without much experience, or many role models, or much family or community comprehension—mostly just an inchoate, often inarticulate drive and desire which pulls them toward that life, in the face of financial, familial, societal, or spiritual obstacles.

So tools, images, models, visions, and practical experiences which help the young aspirant concretize a day-to-day and decade-to-decade vision of being a working artist can be deeply empowering. This is at the heart of what teachers of arts practice do—we not only describe but also demonstrate, not only verbalize but also model, what it is to be a working artist. In the performing arts, especially, we do this by involving our students in the collaborative processes by which new art and arts experiences are born: playing in the band, dancing in the corps, brainstorming in the improvisation sessions: we teach our students how to be artists by collaborating with them in making art.

This is the most concrete, tangible, inspirational pedagogical means at our disposal; as the great jazz composer Thelonious Monk said of jazz: “I can show it to you better than I can explain it to you.” Yes, we employ lectures and textbooks and case-studies and documentaries and primary sources and seminar discussions and all the tools of the Western pedagogical tradition—and, if we are even minimally competent teachers, many efficacious tools from beyond and before that tradition—but as practitioner and pedagogues of the performing arts, we employ, even more centrally, the models of apprenticeship, of demonstration and imitation, of experiential learning, which have been part of artistic training since the dancing shamans depicted in the cave paintings of Cantabria and Lascaux.

Art is by definition a visionary experience: an artist envisions an expression—a painting, sculpture, monolog, dance, composition, improvisation—prior to its realization, and then works to bring that realization into concrete form capable of being experienced by others. All humans have visions, but artists must find ways to embody those visions sufficiently that they can be experienced and shared. This is why art, and artists, serve communities: because it is our profession to envision and then embody a community’s shared sense of experiential beauty.

But in order to envision, and then embody, these expressions, these objects and processes which strengthen a community’s shared sense “yes, we agree that this is beautiful,” the young artist must locate, envision, and then embody a sense of her or his own creative identity. All artists, whether intuitive or intellectual, need their own autobiographical myths—the conviction that their own metaphorical, emotional experiences can be the source for artistic objects and processes which speak across a community. The young artist, particularly the aspiring artist born into a society which devalues creativity, can often use some help in concretizing that empowering personal myth. Young artists tell stories about their teachers, imitate the teacher’s personal manner or quirks, share anecdotes about admired avatars of the past, share dreams and fantasies, line their instrument cases or easels or makeup mirrors with treasured photographs—all in service of constructing a personal myth, a persona, of sufficient metaphorical and inspirational power that it provides the courage and stamina to be an artist in the Americas for the long haul.

Thus, if you are a competent and caring teacher, especially in the participatory and collaborative worlds of performance, then you develop some sensitivity to and awareness of your individual students’ inchoate personal myths: the dreamers and pessimists, the idealistic and high-strung, the quiet ones, damaged ones, loners and clingers. Within the boundaries of the teacher-student relationship, you seek to tease out the incipient character traits which will empower each particular student to become more uniquely, completely, and maturely her- or himself. If you’re pressed for time as a teacher, you may just say to the student “try it this way." If you’ve a bit more time and sensitivity, you may say “Have you ever thought about it this or that way?” But if you’re artful and patient, and believe that the student’s discovery of a personal artistic mythos can itself constitute a useful creative act, then you might seek to supply the rough outlines of a fictional back-story which honors the student’s autobiography and nature (insofar as you are permitted to understand it) and simultaneously provides a persona whose narrative may be fiction but whose emotional profile is empowering and true.

To quote Clarke Peters’s “Big Chief Albert Lambreaux” character in David Simon’s masterpiece Tremé, speaking of the costume-song-and-masking social clubs called the ‘Mardi Gras Indians’, whose roots are in the astonishingly rich expressive traditions of New Orleans’ black neighborhoods,

“Well, Indian ain’t for ever'body. But if it’s for you, it’ll make you strong.”

Likewise: Bassanda ain’t for everybody—no matter how much we might wish it so.

But, for some young artists, if it is for them, it’ll make ‘em strong. We believe that too.

From Kristina Olenev:
"You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift."
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

[Photo: Ishayo Abn Rodrigo Medina a/k/a "El Mestizo" (saxophones), Ani Hamim Gassion (voice, dance), and Yiskāh MacFarlane Ni Molindar a/k/a/ “Yiskāh the Protector” (trombone), at Lubbock-Con 2018 /Lubbock-Con. Image by Adolfo Estrada.]

Photo by Adolfo Estrada

Gersi’, Rio Grande Valley, date unknown
Gersemi “Gersi” Nieltytär

horn

b circa 1832 (?)

Danish, Scots, Faroese, Blackfoot, Bassandan?

The actual date—or even century—of her birth is among the most hotly-debated details in her mysterious biography: she is mentioned nowhere in the annals of the 1967 Band, or even in the accounts or daguerreotypes of the Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band—but then suddenly appears, without explanation, in some collotype images of the 1881 “Sand Pirates.” Those images are now held in the Archives at Miskatonic; their provenance, and her presence in them, are confirmed, yet are also both internally and exceptionally contradictory. Did she belatedly join the Band, somehow, in the American Southwest of the 1880s? Were her origins in fact in the Qaerda bo’lsa (parallel wherewhen) of the “Great Southwestern Electromagnetic Burn”? On the other hand, could Karsten Hegyváros have somehow brought her through an undocumented portal to join them after the “Rift Accident” that cast the 1967 Band, on board the electromagnetic locomotive called “The Beast,” back in time? If so—if such a portal existed and if Karsten knew its whereabouts—why then did the Band not use the same route to return to the 1960s? Were her own origins in that parallel Qaerda bo’lsa? Perhaps the most plausible—or the least implausible—account, fitting the known facts, suggests that she somehow encountered the Band in 1881 (wherever her point of origin), and, after sharing many adventures in both the Southwest and the Rockies, traveled with them to 1960s Ballyizget via the “Return from the Burn.” Accounts are unclear: though it should be noted that certain internal clues point toward an uncatalogued section of the Archives which suggests other/earlier/independent Rift travel by historical Bassandans to the parallel “late 19th century” American Southwest wherewhen (see “On the Trail of the Green River Mountain Man Rendezvous,” elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Her Kentucky antecedents were the offspring of very early Scandinavian migrants to the islands of St Croix and St John in the Caribbean who, like the Irish “Red Legs” of Barbados, intermarried with African American escaped slaves and maroons, and—also like them—departed the islands for the mainland by the middle of the 18th century, crossing the southern Appalachians into the Cumberland Plateau: it is thought that these Afro-Danes may be one of the groups whose DNA contributed to the gene pool of the mixed-race Melungeons of Kentucky and Tennessee. For example, in his autobiography, the mountain man Jim Beckwourth (1798-1866) describes a contemporary, Moses Harris (1800-49), an African American originally born in Kentucky, and Harris’s Western liaison in the northern Wyoming territory with the female Crow leader Pine Leaf, who is pictured in Beckwourth’s manuscript.[1] She was a distaff relative of the Kentucky-born Mary Todd Lincoln, though the paradoxical unclarity of Gersemi’s own birth-date makes it unclear whether their relation was one of descendent, cousin, or even niece; certainly, she shared with her more famous relative Irish and Scots ancestry on both sides of the family line.

Other “Nelson” antecedents were descendants of the 15th century Scots gallowglass Manas Mac Mhoiresdean of Iona, a mercenary soldier who was said to be equally adept with broad-sword and hurling bat. Still others may have been Faroese sailors who, like the ancestors of the berserker Nāṯānas Hús, met Bassandan traders and whalers above the Arctic Circle in the 18th century; this is the source of the Nieltytär surname.[2]

The cornerstone of her own annual calendar was Sankthansaften, a Faroese midsummer fire festival she imported to Bassanda and insisted upon celebrating with the Band, wherever and whenever they found themselves, as well insisting that they should take part in the associated games and dances— Cait Mardanīš was wont to grumble “I hate that stupid snapdragon game,” but Gersi would just laugh and say, “that’s how you wake up the udlændinge!” She shared an affinity for meteorological phenomena with others who had preceded her in the Band: the cellist Elzbieta Purves, the singers Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie and Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, and the tubist/designer Yūhannā Casco Encabezado were all weather prophets, for example. The archetype of these, of course, was Colonel Thompson himself, who, it was said, could not only predict but could also in emergencies call down or dissipate ferocious storms (see “Col. Thompson's Golden Era Rio Grande Gorge Rides,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). Gersi’s own affinity for the fire festival in particular was reflected in certain magical attributes with which she was credited: on one shoulder she wore a tattooed salamander—in the Book of Paracelsus, symbolic of fire elementals, and an animal capable of living at the heart of a flame—and it was a matter of Band folklore that, at moments of great need, she could spontaneously invoke or even cast incendiaries: as her close friend Mardanīš put it, “she could put the fire wherever we needed it.”

Her appearance reflected her northern—Scots and Scandinavian—antecedents: she was tall, broad-shouldered, and fair-skinned, a triathlete who ran marathons in the Bassandan Alps, and was a leader of the post-Soviet movement to reinstate ancient Bassandan field sports, most notably peikhou, a thousand-year-old type of field hockey, likely imported from China via the Silk Road (Karsten Hegyváros would say “You don’t ever want to stand up against Gersi when she’s got a stick in her hand!”). She was a member of the Ballyizget Polar Bear Club, who annually at midwinter bathed in Pitā dī Bēṭī, the fjord in the Bassandan foothills fed by the river Ab Almyah (“The Father of Waters”). Bathing in this fjord was said to carry restorative and healing capacities (baraka), this in keeping with a multi-generational tradition of women healers among her Scots ancestors.

She was likewise understood to be something of a genetic prodigy: of Amazonian stature, it was said that she was so strong she could single-handedly lift a jeep. Her curly mane of auburn hair was perhaps an inheritance from her Afro-Caribbean ancestors, but also reflected a more mysterious affinity with others in the Band: in this latter, with the telepathic/kinetic singer/dancer Ani Hamim Gassion, to whose hair itself was likewise attributed paranormal powers (see the episode of Ani and Cait versus the Dark Ones, in the northern Rio Grande Valley, elsewhere in the Correspondence). The special paranormal attributes of Ani’s hair were associated with her singing but those of Gersi’s with her phenomenal strength.

On the other hand, even more esoteric explanations could perhaps be traced to her Scots ancestors’ particular affinity for another denizen of the animal kingdom: her ancestor, the gallowglass and mercenary captain Manas Mac Mhoiresdean, was sometimes known as Cervus Fiadh Ruadh, “the Red Stag,” for his stature, arm-span, auburn hair and beard, high coloring and high temper. Cait suggested that Gersi’s own speed and strength were a product of the fact that she was, like Ана Ljubak de Quareton, Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, and Ailsa Àn Xīng Niphredil, a shapeshifter—in Gersi’s case, the genus Cervidae—which would certainly help explain her sense of smell and direction, her phenomenal stamina, and her endurance in alpine ultra-marathons.

Like so many in the ESO orbit, she was a passionate advocate for indigenous wildlife and animal rights, and a participant in the “Human-Primate Collaborative Systems Project,” initiated by the oboist and engineer Erzbieta / Ealisaid “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici, which sought to map, using non-invasive techniques, the general habitat and range of the cryptozoological Parvatamā mānisaharū, the semi-legendary shaggy-haired primate of the Northern Alps. Thought to be the descendants of Homo erectus georgicus, fossilized remains of which have been found in Bassanda, and possibly themselves the victims of accidental time-and/or-space travel via previously-unexplored Rifts scattered throughout the Three Brothers mountain range, the Parva mani were a protected class. In the post-Soviet era, the H-PCSP, taking a leaf from pre-modern H. sapiens communities which had welcomed Georgicus as foragers on their outskirts, identified and designated avenues and zones of reserved wild space as ongoing habitats and migration routes for the Mani. Gersi herself was a patron of the Libertas Domum no-kill shelter founded by Madame Nijinska; in later life, she was likewise an advocate on behalf of arts and athletics for underprivileged youth; of all these philanthropic and activist impulses, she said “I got that from my mother—she’s the real badass!”

Gersi herself was certainly seen as a figure of both physical and psychological power: fearless and competitive, generous to animals and children, at home in the woods and hills, but never shying away from a battle. She was an expert horsewoman—so expert, in fact, that the hillfolk claimed she was actually a mythological being, Κένταυρίδες (Kentaurides), though when teased by band-mates about these mythological attributes, she would laugh and say, “I don’t think so—if you want to find it anywhere, find it in my grandcester, the Red Stag.”

Vignette, northern desert, on the arid eastern slopes of the Bassandan Alps, circa 1979:

In the pre-dawn shadows, a battered, gray-and-green dappled GAZ-67 4wd vehicle rolled up out of a dry creek-bed, far too quiet for an internal-combustion engine, in fact barely audible except for the rasp of gravel shifting under its heavy-lugged off-road tires. An observer from the west would have seen three figures, all in faded desert khaki, silhouetted against the roseate eastern sky: behind the wheel, a tall thin male wearing military-issue eyeglasses, a camouflage burnouse twisted around his neck and head to cover his blond hair; in the shotgun seat, a dark-haired female, olive-skinned, the green scarf which shielded her mouth and nose from the blowing dust accentuating her almond-shaped black eyes; behind and above them, perched on the jeep’s cargo bay, one arm clamped around the long-barreled weapon that had replaced the rear seats, an Amazon-statured female with a mane of curly auburn hair tied back under her forage cap. The blond cut off the whisper-quiet engine, and the three sat silent and almost motionless, peering back eastward over their route as the dust that had followed their tracks blew past them over the ridge’s crest.

The dawn grew. There came scattered birdsong: the cooing of doves, an occasional wren; as the larger silence grew, subtler sounds in turn became audible: the whisper of granulated sand rolling down the lee side of the ridge, the ticking-over of the jeep’s cooling electro-magnetic motor, the susurrus of the wind itself. Still the riders sat silent and nearly motionless, though Forage Cap slowly turned her head from side to side, chin down, mouth partly open and eyes defocused as she listened.

Suddenly the dark girl’s head came up; she twisted in her seat to make eye contact with Forage Cap, who nodded abruptly, as the dark girl whispered “Karsten--go.” The driver muttered “shit” under his breath, leaning forward quickly to twist the ignition switch: the motor caught with the barest click of a magneto, replaced by the gradual hum of accelerating rotors. Beneath that rising-pitch whine could be heard from the east a growing, nearly subsonic rumble, like the sound of very distant surf. The dark girl slapped Forage Cap on the knee and said “Ger’—limber up; they’re coming,” jumping up to stand on the jeep’s hood, scanning through field glasses back over the path from which they had traveled. Forage Cap yanked back the bolt on the long gun and unshipped its tie-down straps; she grinned and cracked “You found us the Cossacks, Cait—are you sorry it worked?!?” as she swung the weapon—an anti-tank rifle, though it was not armor that pursued them—to cover their rear. Cait ducked under the gun’s swinging barrel, and snapped “Don’t get excited: we’re scouting, not engaging.” She dropped into her seat: “No heroics, you two—no fun and games.” She smacked Karsten on the right shoulder. “Let’s go. The others are counting on us.”

The sun was almost above the horizon as the gray jeep hummed down the western slope of the ridge to find the friendly shadows at its base and slip away.

[Photo: Gersi’, northern Rio Grande Valley, date and photographer unknown]

[1] The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow nation of Indians, written from his own dictation by T.D. Bonner (1856).

[2] “Beautiful treasure”; daughter of Freyja and Odur

Karsten, contested border of Gobi desert, c1979; by Kaitlyn Van Vooren
Karsten Mitigwaki Hegyváros

English, Scots, Bassandan, Norse, Chickahominy

Saxophones

b1948

The surname is a Bassandan cognate for a Danish place-name cited in Domesday Book of 1086, associated with a “Bjerglandsby” family of border reavers—probably the descendants of Norse raiders or traders—from the region of the Saxon town Ulverston (Norse Úlfarr or Old English Wulfhere: “wolf warrior”) in Cumberland, North England, on the banks of the Irish Sea. Parallel Northern English family branches included that of the 11th century Ranulf de Querton, ancestor of the dancer/piper Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton, with whom he shared a stature and fair Scandinavian coloring, while other relatives on the distaff side are associated with an aristocratic family who inhabited Muncaster Castle in the village of Pennington. Later ancestors served as foot and horse with the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses, while a teenaged “William Penyngtun” (born c1617) is recorded to have sailed from London in 1635 as an indentured servant to Bermuda (that island being administered by the Somers Isles Company, which held a colonial charter from the Crown). Family stories allege that William escaped his indenture and stowed away to Jamestown in the new crown colony of Virginia at the age of 20. He served with distinction during the Third Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, commanding a corps of scouts and woodsmen, but refused to participate in the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Pamunkey and Powhatan villages, instead opting to enlist in the Royal Navy, eventually serving with distinction in the Low Countries in the Anglo-Dutch War of the 1650s. Invalided after the Peace of Scheveningen, Captain Penyngtun retired to Cumbria again with his Chickahominy wife, raising a large brood of children and becoming patriarch of an extended family. Subsequent Penyngtuns / Penningtons / Bjerglandsbys were sailors, navigators, and soldiers of fortune in various Continental campaigns; Karsten’s own great-great-grandfather met Robert Cruikshank, son of the electrical inventor, while both were in service of the Turks against Napoleon at the 1798 Battle of the Nile; they went East together, arriving in Bassanda around 1800. This Daniel Penyngtun married into the Hegyváros clan of sailors and smugglers, and through them became the scion of the Gora/Durang family who played such a major role in the anti-Tsarist / anti-fascist resistance of the early 20th century (Davoud Gora was this Penyngton’s great-nephew).

In addition to their navigational skills and experience, the Goras were noted exponents of the Afshak tradition of epic song and also instrumental dance music: Karsten inherited these traditions through his Durang mother, and its distinctive cantillation and intonation were a distinctive part of the BNRO saxophone tradition of which he was largely the founder. He was of exactly the age to become (if only temporarily) a Coltrane disciple, having heard 1965’s A Love Supreme, on a bootlegged reel-to-reel recording smuggled from the West on board the time-and-space-folding smugglers’ sloop Bruxa do Mar, by members of the 1965 “Newport Folk Festival Band” (the Bruxa herself figured prominently in the annals of the Gora family, having been won by Davoud in a waterfront bar-room card game around 1901). As a teenager he himself was part of the saxophone section of the “Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’” band, when in 1967 the legendary touring locomotive called “The Beast” was spontaneously activated as an electromagnetic “Rift” which cast them back in time, and possibly across space, to a parallel “where-when” following a great electromagnetic “burn” in the American Southwest.

That same version of the Band included Ishayo Abn Rodrigo Medina a/k/a El Mestizo (baritone) and Stòr Stoc, the Yorkshire-born alto player and dancer, another descendent of Norse raiders, while all were at one time or another members of the Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory studio of the Scots-French virtuoso François MacDhai. The saxophonists shared many adventures, both on and off the bandstand, and were not infrequently the catalyst for particularly Baroque turns of event and behavior: the most notorious, referenced variously in band reminiscences, appears to have involved the three in a backstage confrontation and near fistfight with members of the Soviet Army Band during a joint appearance at the Budapest Jazz Festival (1965), when Ishayo, a notoriously sardonic individual, is alleged to have told the entire reeds section of the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra that they “sound[ed] like fat-assed commissars.” Karsten later commented laconically, “Uh…yeah. That was ‘El Mestizo’ all over.”

Although Karsten is not mentioned in the episode of the Correspondence documenting the fall of Saigon in 1975, which describes the rescue of the family of the flutist Ít Vũ Công, it is known that he served with UN forces in Southeast Asia earlier in that period: there is for example a photograph of him as a teenaged saxophonist backing up Ann-Margret during a revue at Da Nang in 1968. Certainly his radio skills would have been essential in the 1975 Rescue described in the annals—though whether he continued to tour with the Band before/after/beside the parallel experience of the time-and-space shifting 1967/1881 “Sand Pirates” band, or became a member some time after their return from the parallel Qaerda-bo’lsa (parallel where/when) into which the notorious “trans-Rift accident” had cast them is unknown.

Paradoxically, he is also thought to appear in certain prose accounts and crude sketches contained in reminiscences by Western mountain men of the Green River (Wyoming) Rendezvous of the 1830s, as a Gaelic-speaking trapper from Kentucky called “Christopher Dean Penn.” What is not known is whether or how ‘Karsten’ or ‘Christopher’ might have crossed paths with the “Sand Pirates” Band in the 1880s American Southwest: he is absent from the collotype negatives found in the possessions of Cossack lancers who had apparently pursued the Sand Pirates in the wake of the Beast’s Rift Accident—or who possibly accompanied the Dark Ones with whom Colonel Thompson and his common-law wife Maritje Tiedtgen did battle in the same period (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). Did “Mitigwaki” encounter the Band post-Accident, in the mountains of New Mexico? Did he travel through to the northern Rio Grande valley via the same previously-unidentified Portal through which the Dark Ones had come? If so, how could he appear as a mountain man named “Penn” in the 1830s, as “Bjerglandsby” in the 1880s, and as “Pennington” in Vietnam in the late 1960s? The Correspondence to date has not answered these questions.

Whatever his origins, the annals of the Sand Pirates Band make it clear that, in addition to his musicianship skills, he was a natural and intuitive mechanic and artificer, familiar with a range of mechanical and electrical devices and able to improvise solutions to both mechanical and electrical problems, an especially useful skill in the isolated and disorienting circumstances of the Sand Pirates’ Southwestern adventure. With Aredhel Rían Ó Duinnshléibhe, he is credited with adapting aspects of French aéroplage (sand yacht) design for the “wind-carts” the Sand Pirates Band employed for desert travel: Ari the design of the complex rigging necessary to adapt sailing technology to the complex wind-stresses of the post-Burn simooms, and Karsten the hand-cranked cog-and-gear turbines which supplemented the wind and the hand-built batteries which (eventually) were developed to store that energy.

In addition to the members of his section, his particular friends in the Sand Pirates and “Rendezvous” bands included the hornist/dancer/commando Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš and the vocalist/dancer/sorceress Ani Hamim Gassion. He was closest of all to Gersemi Nieltytär, the Amazonian Danish/Blackfoot/Bassandan triathlete and horn player—some band members inferred that there was (or had been) a more romantic feeling than “mere” friendship, while others insisted that they were siblings, separated at birth, now reunited. Although both were open and sunny personalities, neither spoke of the shared relationship in detail; queried in the 1970s by the historians of the Eagles Heart Sisters Oral History Project, ‘Gersi’ said only, cryptically: “It’s deeper than words.” In later years, with Cait Mardanīš, they ran a trekking consortium (“Three Amigos Trekking and Adventures”) that led culture and wildlife tours across the Bassandan Alps; it was inferred, though never explicitly stated, that the company was clandestinely involved in the subsequent recovery of ancient Documents which had first departed the mountain monasteries of the Iliot shamans, subsequently being recovered in the ‘Oughts in Paris by the Brethren and Sistren in the “Great Train Ride for Bassanda” (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). The possibility that the Three Amigos company may have served as cover for clandestine anti-Chinese / anti-totalitarian Resistance is rendered likelier in light of the long-standing friendship and correspondence between Karsten and the traveler Jackson Lawrence-Smyth (see “Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda,” elsewhere in the Correspondence).

The specifics of the Band’s escape from the Great Southwestern 1881 Qaerda-bo’lsa, the so-called “Return from the Burn,” like the circumstances of their appearance in a Paris daguerreotype found in a Taos mission, are not known, whether that information may eventually be found, perhaps in the Locked-Room Holdings. But it is known that a significant number of the members of the 1885 “Victorian Steampunk” and 1881 “Sand Pirates” bands were back in Ballyziget, or elsewhere in Bassanda or the world, by mid-1968—some participating in the Prague Spring protests, others involved in the burgeoning Bassanda folk-rock scene while also working simultaneously with various samizdat organizations. Paradoxically, others disappeared into the underground in exactly this same period: it is curious but perhaps revealing that the pivotal year of 1968, after the confirmed but largely undocumented Return, saw interactions between individuals from multiple iterations of the Band—from versions as early as the ’62 Beatnik and ’65 “Newport Folk Festival” Bands—perhaps reflective of the worldwide upheaval of that period, or perhaps more complex or fourth-dimensional transformations as well? This is unknown.

From 1969 onward, he freelanced and taught as adjunct faculty at Habjar-Lawrence, though his primary activity was the development of new electronics and computer technologies for music applications; his early prototypes of digital samplers, for example, were prominently featured in the “Neo-Psychedelic” (more accurately, avant-garde fusion) LPs of the BNRO “big band” (see Suleiman’s Rock 1971; Youdou/Voodoo 1973). 1977’s double-LP live set Live from the Rift Valley is conventionally understood to have planted the seeds for both the “Gray Sleeve” Revival by younger fans who discovered Bassandan traditional musics through its wide range of sources (Nas1lsinez laughed and said “I think our liner notes could have given Harry Smith a run for his money!”), and more subtly, through an indirect and implicit but nevertheless powerfully-compelling symbolic linkage of folkloric revitalization with anti-authoritarian political action, which would climax with the 1985 dissolution of the Bassandan Central Soviet.

When not on the road with the Band or immersed in various back-country adventures, nearly always in company with Mardanīš and Cersei Nieltytär, he could be found in his top-floor loft in Ballyizget’s university district—in whose basement he maintained a rotating fleet of vintage autos under restoration—tinkering with digital technology, cataloging vintage instruments, and gazing northward, over the spires and rooftops of the old city, to the mountains beyond.

[photo: Karsten, contested border of Gobi desert, c1979; by Kaitlyn Van Vooren]

Arí at Ballyizget University, c1978
Aredhel Rían Ó Duinnshléibhe

Born circa 1946
dance, song

The daughter of an estate stewardess and a heavy-equipment mechanic, born in a tiny village of only a few hundred inhabitants in the northeastern grasslands, she inherited an aptitude for mathematics and mechanics through her artisan father’s family, but a sense of the wild from her mother’s. In the wake of her father’s lamented and unexpected death, she came to Ballyizget as an early-admissions student, matriculating on an engineering scholarship at the University. However, she appears to have spent some time living in a hermitage in the foothills first—it was not clear whether this had been with or without her family’s consent, or indeed whether it occurred before, or somehow during, her college days. In any event, her experience appears to have been relatively circumscribed until the time came for university—she would say “my life got bigger when I came to the capitol.”

As a teenaged university student, then, she was brought into the Band’s orbit by her childhood friend, the oboist Erzbieta “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici, whom she had met again in the ranks of the choir associated with the Bassanda Youth Orchestra. That matriarchal organization, founded in 1938 by Madame Szabo, served particularly as a means of providing a stable home life for children orphaned or displaced by the upheavals of the 1930s. Though not a Conservatory student, through effort and application she earned permission to participate in a wide variety of music-training programs was also completing her university degree in engineering. During this period, she was also mentored as a mechanical boffin by the Bassandan matriarch Anthea Habjar-Lawrence (1891-1961), scion of the Lawrence clan who were legendary allies of Bassanda, and in a long and exotic career had been a Grand Prix de Paris driver, engineer, anti-Soviet partisan, and political activist.

“Arí” or “Rí” was instinctively expert with steam, diesel, solar, and electromagnetic transport, but also with ingenious mechanical devices—her Christmas gifts, often small hand-built clockwork singing birds or music boxes, were treasured by band-mates. She was quiet and thoughtful, with a rich inner life; a meditator, though with a brusque outward demeanor, who painted quiet, peaceful watercolor landscapes of mountains and rivers; as she said, ““There are lots of reasons to be a loner. Only one of them is loneliness.” Like others in the ESO orbit, including John Rød Ericsson, Žaklin Paulu, Cifani Doma, Jēkvēlina Vovk, Móprah Uitmena, and indeed Nijinska herself, she bonded especially with canines, and was never without dogs as pets and companions. She was likewise a long-time patron and advocate on behalf of Madame Nijinska’s Libertas Domum no-kill shelter and animal rehabilitation farm.

As a result of childhood experience, she was acutely aware of the strain that unsupported elder-care imposed upon family members in caregiver roles. In response, and in memory of her beloved father, she became an outspoken advocate for universal health care; these focused around her fervent advocacy on behalf of the Pod Odnoy Kryshey (“Under One Roof”) campaign for out-patient and at-home health, which had been pioneered by Caitrìona Mardanīš and emphasized hospice and end-of-life assistance.[1]

As a relatively new recruit to the ESO in the winter of 1966-67, she was involved in the “Rift Accident” that cast the 1967 Band, on board the gigantic electromagnetic locomotive Sleipnir (known as “the Beast” in Bassandan parlance) for an ostensible spring tour, backward in time to 1885, and—in a seemingly parallel quantum dimension—the c1881 Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band, and to that parallel Qaerda-bo'lsa (“where-when”) in which a mysterious “Great Burn” had rendered both electrical motors and internal-combustion engines inoperable.[2] Like her section-mates and friends Sì Yuè Xì and Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, she was part of that group’s (or “groups’”) varied and seemingly coterminous adventures in the American Southwest, both within and beyond the conventional histories. Her engineering and problem-solving skills were especially significant in the aftermath of the Rift Accident, as the 1881 Band sought to cope with an American Southwest largely devoid of either social infrastructures or conventional touring mechanisms—she is for example credited with adapting aspects of French aéroplage (sand yacht) design for the “wind-carts” the Sand Pirates Band employed for desert travel.

We know some of these details because she is a significant presence in the tour diary of the violinist Marushka Dugarte Orjuela, themselves a treasure trove of information on the experience of the ’67 Band, including the occasional fragment of third-person narrative prose, in both Spanish and English. Among those fragments, Orjuela appears to have painstakingly transcribed into her notebooks long passages of Rí’s conversations with band-mates: it is therefore as a result of the singer/dancer’s knack for eliciting unique reminiscences, personal histories, philosophical and artistic convictionsthat we know as much as we do about the experience and perspectives of the Sand Pirates Band. Among other materials in the Correspondence, it is in the Ó Duinnshléibhe transcriptions that we find the story of Nāṯānas Hús, for example. However, other Rí items from the Orjuela notebooks are still embargoed in the Archived Material Objects Collection at Miskatonic. It is surmised that some of those materials may pertain to the collusion of certain conservative politicians with the Kremlin to subvert both Nas1lsinez’s use of the Band to support Bassanda’s liberalization of cultural censorship in the 1960s.

In the wake of that Rift Accident that had cast the Beast backward in time, and which yielded both the 1885 and 1881 Bands, and their eventual return—after many adventures—to the 20th century, she became a research and field assistant to Ambrosius de Colatta, an influential post-Hazzardian theorist of Rift phenomena. She was one of the team of practical researchers who, with Colatta, authored The “Unified Field Theory of Electromagnetic Chronological Transport,” a post-Hazzardi-Igniti’ite approach to electro-cognitive-magnetic-dimensional theory.

A rather romantic story, widely believed in ESO circles though not (yet) confirmed in the Correspondence, suggests that she was with Colatta when he embarked on additional, unauthorized, and largely-undocumented expeditions across space and time, which were variously explained as attempts to test the abstractions of Qaerda-bo'lsa theory, or attempts to find the long-disappeared Professor Hazzard-Igniti. The latter was said to have been disappeared into the Gulag by the KGB some time in 1942, but Colatta would mysteriously insist that “certain evidence suggested” the Professor still lived (see “From the Matthiaskloster Grimoire,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). If Colatta was correct, then it may be that his early 1970s disappearance from Ballyizget, in company with Aredhel Rían, was in fact part of these long-term attempts at trans-dimensional rescue. This epic romance of Rían and Colatta across space and time, if true, has yet to be told.

Though she was not formally trained as a dancer, she was one of the most reliable members of the dance corps, and saw participation in group dancing as a ritual of unit cohesion. She shared with her section-mate Kulamani Llandaff Callan a deep familial association with the Band, having experienced early discordance and abandonment, and spoke passionately about the communal structure that the Band provided. She was an adamant advocate for its larger mission in addition to performance: “It’s a family, right? A tribe. You don’t abandon your tribe.”[3]

A bibliophile, in the post-Soviet era she became a well-known habitué of bookshops across Europe and the former satellites, developing a particular expertise in period manuscripts and early prints, particularly those pertaining to mechanics: she is credited, for example, with the discovery of certain loose leaves from an early Leonardo notebook in a Milan archive. Throughout her life, she tended to inhabit the role of outsider: her friend Ḍrēgana commented, “there was a sorrow there.” But Rían was fiercely, even outspokenly, devoted to the band; she said, “Wherever you came from, whatever was your story, it didn’t matter. It was home. The Band was my home.”[4] And even decades later, when she held senior appointments for Bassandan infrastructure rebuilding after the fall of the Soviet Union, she would still arrange her holidays so that she could join the Band for the late-spring tour, dancin with abandon alongside her bandmates of four decades’ standing.

[caption: Arí, with friends, in her faculty office at Ballyizget University city campus, c1978]

[1] This campaign, inspired in part by the work of the pioneering Swiss physician and counselor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) and led by dancer/hornist Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš, emphasized providing out-patient and at-home health, counseling, and nutrition resources, thereby increasing the capacity of families to keep elders with them, up to and including the stages of dying. Many Kryshey-ites went on to become leaders in the State’s 1980s hospice and elder-care apparatus, in a program that was eventually copied in the West.

[2] It has also been suggested, though not substantiated, that this incident was in fact not a “Rift Accident,” but rather a clandestine escape, engineered by a group of Hazzard-Igniti’ite theorists led by Ambrosius de Colatta, intended to extricate the ’67 Band from Soviet tour obligations in order to make it possible for them to participate in the mid-April New York City MOBE demonstrations against the Vietnam War. However, if that was the intent—if de Colatta and his team had already theorized Qaerda-bolsa travel—they had not successfully harnessed a precise means of setting target times and places, and the experiment drastically misfired, sending them not across space to NYC but across space and time and quantum realities to the parallel wherewhen of the post-Burn Southwest. More research in the Archive may clarify the ambiguity of this account.

[3] Duinnshléibhe, oral interview ?5-6/V/1978, Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project.

[4] Ibid.

Tereza, in "The Burn." Collotype by Yiskah the Protector
Tereza Viscart Mullaine

flute

b1945

Scots, Swiss, Norman, Italian, Sindarin?

Mysteries surround her origins.

It is generally agreed that “Kit” (her pet-name within the BNRO) was born in Lanarkshire, in Scotland, in 1945, but her antecedents—and possibly the details of her birth—are rather clouded. The name “Mullaine,” in Irish Gaelic, translates as equivalent to “Green Meadows” or, in Scots, “Green Leas,” and a Robert Greynleis is registered a land deed at Cambuslang in Lanarkshire near Glasgow in 1555, during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots (fl1542-67). Much later, a Neil Greenlees arrived in Wellington, NZ aboard the ship Berwickshire in 1881, while Tereza’s great-aunt Elizabeth Oman Yates (1845-1918) was the mayor of Onehunga, the first female mayor to serve anywhere in the British Empire. Other Scots ancestors appear to have been descendants of Viking raiders who had settled in the Hebrides, Caithness, Sutherland, and—most immediately—the islands of the Firth of Clyde: family stories traced certain recurrent physical characteristics, including very pale skin, blue or green eyes, and blond, fine hair, to these Norse progenitors.

Another branch was descended more indirectly from Scandinavia via the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard (1015-85) a/k/a Robert Viscart; that French surname connoting “tall and broad-shouldered, of ruddy complexion.” His heraldic blazon included a fox, and borrowed the Irish appellation for cunning, sionnachuighim (meaning "I play the fox”), which moves into English as the origin of “shenanigan,” and a vulpine theme attaches to this Robert. The Occitan (southern French) song “Ai Vis Lo Rainard” is said to have been employed by him as a march during his campaigns as a mercenary captain in Italy, and later as an independent adventurer in Sicily and against the Byzantine Empire. Certainly a high temper and high “ruddy” or “choleric temper” were associated with his line—ironically, it was a matter of some family pride.

It would likewise appear that descendants of Robert Guiscard, settling in Apulia after his service, traveled and adventured still further north, settling first in Milan in the service of various princes, and then crossing the Alps into the Canton of Schwyz. And so it is through Guiscard/Viscart that she was also related in some degree to the scholar, alchemist, astrologer, and doctor Theophrastus von Hohenheim a/k/a Paracelsus, born Switzerland in 1493 and later acclaimed as a medical pioneer, particularly in the realm of mineral and vitamin therapies, clinical diagnosis, and respiratory health. The above, and the demonstrated connections between Paracelsus and Bassanda (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), are all part of the genealogical record.

On the other hand, a search of the official records between 1930-1950 reveals no birth certificate or other records, for either herself or her immediate parents, either at Lanarkshire or anywhere else. It is possible that the parent’s documents were destroyed during the Luftwaffe bombing of Clydebank in March 1941: the Glasgow Records office was not fully restored or reliably functional until well after VE Day in 1945.

As was the case with others in the BNRO orbit (notably the cellist, this absence of documentation led to considerable BNRO tour bus folklore focusing around her “alternate origins.” Perhaps this ambiguity is related to the fact that another ancestor is named in Robert Kirk's manuscript “The Secret Commonwealth” of 1691, a closely-argued theological treatise “on fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, and second sight,” in which Kirk recounts discoursing with a tall, pale young man calling himself “Robin Greenleas,” one moonlit night in the 1680s, on a hillside above Aberfoyle.[1] Though unpublished until the 19th century, Kirk’s manuscript was surprisingly influential: for example, the linguist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien had a copy of Walter Scott’s 1815 print edition of the manuscript in his library at Pembroke College, Oxford; it is thus just possible that Professor Tolkien based his Elvin character “Legolas Greenleaf” (Qenya: laica “green” and lassë “leaf”), in The Lord of the Rings, upon this 17th century “Robin.”[2]

Like her Sindarin doppelgangers, she had a very particular sensitivity to place: that is, to specific locations in the physical landscape. Tolkien’s Elves could sense the age and hear the voices of trees and places; similarly, on tour with the BNRO—and even in the disorienting environs of the post-“Great Burn” alternate wherewhen (see elsewhere in the Correspondence, on Qaerda-bo'lsa theory) of the 1881 Southwest—she would say, cryptically, “I’ve been here before.” Indeed, the 1881 Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band came to depend upon this locational sensitivity. This very particular kind of second sight, yielding inexplicable familiarity with geographic locations, caused the scholar-adepts of the post-Hazzard-Igniti’ite School to later speculate that she was, like Kulamani Llandaff Calla, Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, and Ailsa Àn Xīng Niphredil, another “electrical sensitive”: particularly and even acutely aware of the earth’s electromagnetic fields. Conversely, she tended to avoid urban cityscapes, saying “cities are like Myrcviþ—like a forest of dark trees. I become lost, and I struggle to breathe.” Eventually, however, she became an adept with electro-magnetic travel, possibly in fact as a direct result of the “Rift Accident” that cast the 1967 Band back in time to the “Great Burn,” and was a valuable contributor to post-Igniti’ite theories of portable and controllable Rift phenomena.

She was a mürekkep kişi (“ink person”), carrying permanent markings at various chakra points on her body: on her back, a tattoo of the 8-arrowed star which was the symbol of chaos and regeneration; on one forearm, the kanji for ma (間), the “in-between” place, proceeding from the "simultaneous awareness of form and non-form,” that links chaos and order; on the other, the veve (sacred symbol) of the Vodou loa “Papa Legba,” the trickster god of West African and Caribbean folklore and the crossroads. Indeed, she identified with all tricksters, of both hemispheres, including Kuyateh (American Southwest), Anansi the Spider (West Africa), Baron Samedi (Haiti), and even Weyland Smith, the lame supernatural blacksmith to the gods of Norse and Old English mythography. Though she bonded particularly strongly with the Norse god Loki, she subsequently came to appreciate Legba, who entered into southern USA African-American folklore, and was the source of the legends about Delta bluesmen selling their souls at the crossroads to “Mr Scratch” in return for musical excellence.

On the Bassandan side, she came from a long line of mountaineers and was legendary for her high-altitude capacities, during the warm summers climbing 12K and 14K peaks in the northern Alps without ancillary apparatus; she would laugh and say, “The mountains, and my uncle Paracelsus, taught me how to breathe strong!” She was an aficionado of folklore and animal lore, and especially of the medieval cycle of tales about “Reynard” (Ger: Reginhard “strong of counsel”), an anthropomorphic red fox often invoked in order to satirize nobility or clergy. Though Reynard is of French and German derivation originally, he also appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as the “Rossel” who fools an arrogant rooster in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The fox as trickster recurs as well in the Japanese folkloric creature called Kitsune.

Like a number of individuals in the BNRO orbit, from the Reverend Colonel to Yiskah MacFarlane Ni Molindar onward, she was an exponent of edged and staff weapons of all eras and provenances; Kit’s preference was for the Lævateinn, a wooden lance associated with the Norse god Loki, first mentioned in the Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius, c1270 CE, and for which she developed sophisticated solo and combat training forms. Her version, a flexible rattan shaft, painted with slogans in a runic language she had invented, and shod with iron, she wielded with nearly surgical skill, against all manner of threats both animal and quasi-human, in the “post-Burn” American Southwest. She may similarly have been peripherally involved in the encounter with the “Dark Ones” described as part of Col. Thompson’s Rio Grande Gorge rides, during the “Dark Times” c1883-1910, when the Great Electromagnetic Burn had opened Portals to the fourth-dimensional Outer Realm. Along with other members of the 1967/1881 “Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band,” she would in all likelihood have been involved with the foundational strategies which Colonel Thompson and allies began to employ to close these Portals.

Within the Band, she bonded especially with Ni Molindar, the Tonkawa/Comanche archer Mahá Red Elk, and her section leader Fionnuala Nic Aindriú. She also shared interests in Northern folklore and magic with Jēkvēlina Vovk (dit “Le Loup”), and she made significant contributions to the Bassandan State Digital Folklore Project, directed by Морган Ŭitmena, which mobilized the tools of modern archival technology to preserve and make “democratically available” an enormous body of materials from all eras of the nation.

An avid photographer, she was also a devotee of various historical film formats, from the collotypes employed by Eadweard Muybridge to capture the “Sand Pirates” Band in San Francisco in the 1880s, through 16mm, Kodachrome, and Super 8. On the road with the BNRO in the late 1960s, she insisted upon carrying along a small trunk of vintage silent films, with a particular focus upon the physical stunts of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and the fantastical effects of the Georges Méliès Studio (who may have documented the General—see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

She loved touring and was one of the most avid travelers amongst the BNRO membership, whether with the core band or in various spinoff projects. But, during those months when the band and its permutations were off the road, she made her home in a small cabin she called “Asgard,” full of felines, vintage cameras, and her vast and meticulously cataloged film collection, on the northern slopes of the Bassandan foothills.

Carved on the lintel above its door was a Hiroshige-inspired portrait of Kitsune, and the slogan Viresco (“I flourish”).

[1] Stewart Sanderson, "A Prospect of Fairyland,” Folklore 75/1 (1964): 1–18.

[2] It should be noted also that Rudyard Kipling, himself an aficionado of various forms of narrative folklore, may have likewise based “Puck”—“the Oldest of all Old Things”—in Puck of Pook’s Hill likewise on Robin Greenleas, otherwise “Robin Goodfellow.”

Daní, Summer 1957, solo from Bedfordshire. Photo: Cifani Dhoma
Danuta Ewelina Jankowski
of the Thirteen Wise Companions

b1939

Scots-Irish, German, Polish

In the maternal line, she was a direct descendent of—among others—Mayflower passenger Henry Samson, born (curiously enough, in light of his descendant’s 1957 experience) in Bedfordshire England, who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620 as a teenager in company with his cousins. He survived well into the 1680s, siring a sizable and prosperous clan; his descendants married beyond the Puritan faith and, by the 1790s, “Mosby’s” were among the Presbyterian Scots-Irish pioneers who pushed south and west from Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into the Ohio River Valley. Her Tennessee-born maternal grandfather Kenneth MacAlpin (b1890), who served with the US Marines as part of the American Expeditionary Force, was an airborne spotter on the Western Front in 1918, taking part in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Battle of Belleau Wood. After the Great War, he was recruited as a designer and test pilot by the Polish aviation corporation PZL (Państwowe Zakłady Lotnicze / “State Aviation Works”); he met her grandmother at Warsaw in 1919.

There are even more fanciful anecdotes further back in the family history, most notably amongst her Scots ancestors. The MacAlpins were cousins to the mac Suibhne clan of Donegal, the most famous scion of whom, Tarlach Mac Suibhne (c1831-1916), known as An Piobaire Mohr (“the Great Piper”), claimed to be descended from the ancient tribe called the Tuatha Dé Danann, “the People of the Goddess Danú.” Mac Suibhne himself claimed similarly to have learned his music from the Aes Sídhe (“the Good People”), and certainly a tendency to the Second Sight continued into later generations.

Her father Randolph (“Radzio”) MacAlpin Jankowski (b1920) flew as a teenaged fighter pilot in the vastly outnumbered but nevertheless fiercely effective resistance to the German invasion of September 1939; Danuta was born in a hospital literally shaken by the Luftwaffe bombing campaign. In the wake of the simultaneous Soviet invasion from the East (and which betrayal the Soviets repeated again in Bassanda only a few weeks later), and the collapse of the Polish Air Force, parents, newborn, and the maternal grandmother Ewelina were evacuated to Romania, and eventually found their way to Britain. Like many Polish pilots, Jankowski ojciec was ferociously dedicated to resisting the fascists, and promptly enlisted in the Royal Air Force; he was already flying RAF combat missions by the opening days of the Battle of Britain in August 1940 and was eventually credited with 16 kills, only one less than the legendary ace Josef František. It was this service during the Blitz that introduced the family to Bassanda: Vilyum and Davoud Srcetovredi, the Srcetovredi Brothers who later anchored the string section in the “Classic ’52 Band” version of the BNRO, served in the RAF alongside Radzio Jankowski. It was their tales of Bassanda, “in the glory days” before the Nazi Anschluss, that persuaded Daní’s parents, both of them highly musical and creative people, to permit her to matriculate at age 17 as a Habjar-Lawrence student when she was offered a recruiting scholarship to begin in Autumn 1956.

Despite a supportive family, there had nevertheless been considerable sorrow in her young life: the loss of loved ones, challenges in adapting to life as an expatriate and as an artist in post-World War II Europe. Certainly, it was her parents’ hope that Ballyizget and Habjar-Lawrence would be a constructive environment that led to their permission for her to attend university at the age of 17. And certainly she was not the only one among the Companions who experienced life with such challenges: as the later account in the Correspondence makes clear, among their Company was a “number of refugees, orphans, iconoclasts, lone wolves, and novices who came by chance and happenstance, by hook and by crook, and by every possible prior biographical and geographical path” to the experience at Bedford in the Summer of 1957—the initial Devising sessions that would eventually yield the Nas1lsinez/Nijinska masterwork To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes (1957-58).

A seeker of strong female role models, at Bedford she particularly bonded with Nijinska. Her fellow Companions were adamant that Daní was a brave and generous collaborator, but she refused to take any credit for herself, insisting that “Madame is the one who gave me strength. Anything I have accomplished, she helped me do.” Madame herself said, “I suppose there was a little of the Cinderella in her: left behind while others were advanced.[1] But Daní was strong. Perhaps she needed the Companions to help her believe in that strength—the ability to rescue others in order to save herself.”

As a dancer, she was particularly remarked for the athleticism and physicality of her performances; in the 1970s, her portrayal of Ariel/The Ash Girl in the visionary director Vilmos Kırmızı’s comic mash-up of La Cenerentola / The Tempest (La Cenerentola Tempestosa), inspired by the commedia dell’arte-style antics of the Mjekësia Trego (Eng: “medicine show”), was a touchstone for generations of Habjar-Lawrence choreographers. In teaching, she would laugh and say, “jumping is easy—you just have to leave the ground. But flying is a matter of choice—you have to learn how to wait around up there!”

Fragments from her journal from the period were preserved by the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project; decades later, she arranged that some would be released, in order, as she said, “that others’ suffering might be eased.” The following abbreviated selection provides some sense of the transformation she appears to have experienced at Bedford in the Summer of 1957:

5/V/55:
I’m so happy! Madame Nijinska met me at the train when I arrived in Ballyizget for my audition and she is everything I hoped she would be! She says I am to come to her in the Autumn and that I can be a student at the Scola![2]

20/VIII/55:
I am afraid now. I am here at the dormitories, but my first term has not begun yet and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if I should do this. I don’t know if I am safe with these people. I have had so much sorrow and I can’t bear any more. But I think I am safe with Nijinska…

15/XI/56:
My heart is broken. I came to the Scola because Nijinska was here—because I thought I could be safe with her. But now I am told she is leaving Bassanda, fleeing the commissars ‘because of Hungary,’ she says, and my heart is breaking…

24/XII/56:
They have all departed from School and I am alone. And Nijinska is gone. And I have to get away from the commissars—it’s not safe. She says that I should come to her in England, but I don’t know what to do; how will I find the expense? And I have no friends in the group she is gathering. I have no one here. What will I do?

24/XII/56 [midnight]:
Now it is later. I have been trying to decide what to do: do I stay here, with danger all around me, or do I go to England to be with Madame and the others as she insists I should? And I was leafing through this journal, and a fragment of paper fell out—I remember Madame giving it to me last year when I first met her. It’s a line in the Manifesto—I don’t know who wrote it, and it’s a smudgy mimeograph and I can’t make out all the words—but this passage leaped out at me:

‘Anyone can become a Friend of Bassanda: like all human experience of any value, it is a product of effort, imagination, and love. And the greatest of these is Love.’

And when I read that again just now, I started to cry, and I said to Madame, in my head, ‘I don’t care what I have to do, I don’t care how frightened I am, I don’t care that people hurt me before, I want to be there. I want this love, this life. I will do anything to be there.’

12/III/57:
Now I know my mind. Nothing will stop me. By any means I must, I will go to England to be with Madame and the Others. I don’t know what the future will bring, and I don’t know where I will find the costs, but I don’t care—that is where my heart finds its home.

The last entry preserved from her Summer 1957 journal—which, tellingly, is undated—reads simply:

I was right. I was right to do this. It was all true. I am Home. Here, where Madame and the Companions are—that is my home. They will always be my home. I am not alone any more. I am so very grateful.

In the French contemporary composer Olivier Messiaen’s Catalog d’oiseaux, a cycle of 13 short movements for piano, composed in 1958 under the inspiration of the Thirteen Wise Companions, Daní’s avatar was the Blue rock thrush (Merle bleu), whose origins on the storied island of Malta in the Mediterranean mirror the multi-cultural nature of her own experience. Eventually, after world travels and adventures, with the Companions and on her own, she became one of the patrons of Habjar-Lawrence. She was a passionate advocate on behalf of cultural exchange as a means of preserving indigenous folkways in the post-Soviet period—her “Daní’s Safaris”, co-sponsored by the ex-punk rock singer and parliamentary minister Polli Kilotona, brought teenagers from East and West to Bassanda, to participate in cultural events, seminars, and outdoor adventures, bonding together.

Decades later, Nijinska wrote,

“When she came to us, she was a broken beautiful bird: not knowing her own strength and courage. It was our job to help her find her wings and fly.”

She was twenty years old when she joined Nijinska, de Quareton, Nas1lsinez, and the Wise Companions at England, that summer of June 1957.

[1] See Aarne–Thompson folklore motif Type 510A: “the persecuted heroine.” See also Alan Dundes, Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook (NY: Garland, 1982).

[2] The Scola Naraščajoče Ptice (“Ascending Birds School”): the dance academy partnered with Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory.

Chakira, Summer 1957, solo from Bedfordshire. Photo: Cifani Dhoma
Chakira Iyatunde Rapiria
of the Thirteen Wise Companions

b1938

Taino, Yoruba, Galician, Gascon?, Bassandan

She was born in the foothills of the San Germán mountains in the southwest of Puerto Rico, and baptized at La Conventa de Porta Coéli (“the Portal to Heaven,” built by the Dominicans in 1609), in a town that had been founded in 1511.[1] Because of the extensive exchange between the western part of the island, and Santo Domingo—only sixty miles distant, across the Straits of Mayaguez—the town was vulnerable to French corsairs, being raided repeatedly throughout the 16th century. In fact, there was a family story that one ancestor had been a “Gascon” pirate who “found dry land”—more specifically, a merchant sailor, impressed elsewhere by French corsairs upon the capture of his ship, who seized the opportunity of the 1553 raid to dive overboard, swim ashore, and flee into the mountains of San Germán, where he married into the remote mixed-raced communities of jibaros. Subsequent investigations by the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project’s genealogical wing (the “DNA for Peace Initiative”) have suggested that this escaped corsair (“Jean-Pierre le Basque”) might have been not French at all—because the DNA evidence suggests that “le Basque” was in fact “le Bassande.” More recent scholarship has pointed toward new possibilities for geo-genealogical documentation, actually permitting the tracing of wanderings by “le Basque/le Bassande” from Bassanda, via Persia and Central Asia, and eventually west to the Atlantic.

She shared a polyglot New World identity with a number of contemporaries in the BNRO orbit: Taino, Galician and Castilian with the saxophonist Ishayo Abn Rodrigo Medina; Yoruba with the painter Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur and the oboist Erzbieta Ateşleyici; Gascon with the signer and dancer Ani Hamim Gassion. Her Spanish father’s people, like the family of the dancer Laurica Temino of the Eagle’s Heart Daughters, had been conquistadors in the 16th century, but (again like Medina) the family had quickly intermarried with the local population, developing a mestizo sensibility that combined mountain and city, Indio and European, Old and New World. On the father’s side, like her fellow Companion Sionainn “Boudicca” Biraz de St-Denis and the musician Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš, she came from a long lineage of wandering soldiers and sailors, mechanics and engineers, to which she attributed both her problem-solving capacities and her love for travel.

In the maternal line, her ancestors were denizens of the jibaro upcountry culture which, like “maroons,” “melungeons,” and “black Indians” elsewhere in the Caribbean, represented very early admixture of Indio and African ethnicities. Amongst the Borikén jibaro, ethnopharmacology and traditional medicine were particularly strong. In tandem, she inherited Lucumí healing practices through the maternal line: her mother and grandmother came from a long lineage of Santeria curanderas (traditional healers), who were highly respected as leaders in the mountain communities; their patron orisha was the herbalist Osaín, who in the Caribbean came to be associated as well with Saint Joseph.

Chakira’s own artistic identity clove toward the Yoruba orisha Yemayá, in a resonance which once again echoes the running-water motif associated with the Thirteen Wise Companions, is paralleled in the lives of her comrades Stála Violante O Gealbhain and Sionainn “Boudicca” Biraz de St-Denis, and finds its center in the River Great Ouse at Bedfordshire in the summer of 1957.

One finds additional layers of resonance to her both given and surnames: Rapiria, in Galician, is “of the River” (see likewise Castilian: “riverbank”), while Iyatunde, from Yoruba, means “the returned mother.” As a consequence, she was known among the Thirteen Wise Companions as “Mami Wata” (Efik: “Mama Waters,” a creole appellation associated with Afro-Indian presence in the Caribbean), a loving and respectful reference to her leadership, wisdom, and moral courage among them. Followers of Mami Wata, whose Catholic aspect is Our Lady of Regla, wear ceremonial clothing of red and white, employing the Igbo cowrie shell as a central symbol of wealth and good luck. In Trinidad, she is understood to a guardian of nature, punishing greedy or overzealous hunters or woodcutters, and Chakira herself was fiercely protective of children and animals, as well as of her Companions. The Gaelic/Mestiza/Mescalero dancer Azizlarim Jangchi, her forerunner in the Eagle’s Heart Sisters, called her “Yemayá,” after the mother of all orishas (the Yoruba pantheon of gods), patron of waters and healing, holder of deep secrets and ancient wisdom.

Like Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, Bronislava Nijinska herself, and (in the pre-WWI era), the adventurer Jefferson Washington Habjar-Lawrence (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), Chakira was particularly fascinated by the varieties of Pan-Caribbean Afro-Catholic syncretic religions. Kaur and Nijinska had become adherents of Haitian vodun as a result of paranormal experiences in the late 1940s (elsewhere in the Correspondence). Habjar-Lawrence was a scion of that Concord Massachusetts family whose fate had been intertwined with that of Bassanda ever since the 1880s: during his long-term residence in Trinidad and Tobago as expat musician and cultural activist, among other research he had studied the musical practice of the “Merikin” “Shouting Baptists” who had been settled by the British in T&T just after 1800 (see Winesap’s work on the “Cumberland Revival”, in his unpublished monograph Movement Revolutions).

Articulate, gentle, precise, and detailed-oriented, an inheritor of the improvisation training of the great movement pedagogue Danica Jovanović, root teacher of both Bronislava Nijinska and Ана Ljubak de Quareton, she was a remarkably intuitive dancer, especially considering that in so many other aspects of her life she was organized, linear, and logical. During the summer of 1957, the “River Great Ouse” summer which saw the white-hot creativity of the choreography To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes (a quote from Bedford son John Milton), she was a quiet focus of leadership, counting heads, solving problems, laying plans. She would say, “I have to keep my focus, almost everywhere and almost all the time. But when I am on the floor—that is when I am most free.”

Like a number of others who passed through the ranks of the BNRO, Eagle’s Heart Sisters and Daughters, and the Thirteen Wise Companions, she was a mürekkep kişi (“ink person”): one whose body carried permanent tattoos of personal significance. The implication of the mürekkep kişi, in Bassandan folklore, is almost always that presence of the body art can confer parapsychological capacities. In Chakira’s case, it was a small blue-green tattoo of a coquin, the small, loud-voiced frog who became a symbol of Taino cultural regeneration. On the day that she graduated from Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory summa cum laude in the winter of 1958, she wore a stole embroidered both with a Taino coquí of her heritage, and the pinwheeling-bird symbol of the Thirteen Wise Companions.

Creative instincts ran in her family and she cherished both the indigenous artworks she had inherited from her mother’s people, and the contemporary works that her brother created for her dacha. He was also the creator of the distinctive circling-bird motif which became the mandala of the Thirteen Wise Companions—an image that, like the tattoos of the mürekkep kişi, and certain photos of the BNRO, was itself understood to possess paranormal and psychoactive capacities (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

In the immediate aftermath of the “Fall of the Commissars,” in 1980—an event commemorated in the remarkable anecdotes regarding the spontaneous sung protests outside the Parliament—a vacuum in power would lead, briefly, to the rise of oligarchic competitors, as regional political and corporate figures sought to control, monopolize, and profiteer from the sale of state resources. At its worst, during the de facto reign of the hated oligarch Ntónalnt Kozyr c1982-86, Bassanda itself teetered on the edge of feudal partition. A succession of unexpectedly fortuitous events—electronic surveillance by Bassandan allies, the heroism of a small cadre of journalists and university, the steadfast insistence by justice officials upon due process and adherence to the rule of law, and the not-insignificant impact of the same “Forest Brethren” who had forced the BCCP’s disbanding—led to the downfall, indictment, conviction, and death sentence (commuted) of Kozyr. The oligarch, his grown offspring, and a number of his appointees were consigned to prison (the repurposed facility that had been known, in the Soviet era, as Temnaya krepost'), and Chakira became a noted leader in the worldwide resistance to economic oligarchy.

In the Catalog d’oiseaux composed by Olivier Messiaen in response to his contact with the Thirteen Wise Companions, Chakira is represented by the Eurasian golden oriole, a bird whose migratory patterns encompass much of Africa and the European Continent. Like her totem bird, she was a wanderer, forever drawn to the possibilities of adventure beyond the next horizon. Between tours, and on holidays from her duties as curriculum director at Scola Naraščajoče Ptice, the “Ascending Birds” dance academy partnered with Habjar-Lawrence, it was not uncommon for her to disappear from Ballyizget, her whereabouts to be belatedly confirmed to friends back home via letters postmarked from the far corners of the earth. As she said herself, “I have a light foot. If the chance is there, I’ll go.”

Her sisters in the Companions, however, always knew she would return—so long as, left behind on the mantel of her apartment, flanking the small blue-painted clay statue of Yemayá, could be found thirteen cowrie shells—and a small jade frog.

She was twenty-one when she joined Nijinska, de Quareton, Nas1lsinez, and the Wise Companions at England, that hot summer of June 1957.

[caption: Chakira, Summer 1957, solo from Bedfordshire. Photo: Cifani Dhoma.]

[1] It did not go unremarked amongst scholars of Rift theory that the church in which Chakira was baptized was itself believed to contain a Portal.

Marya La Gitana, c1972. Photo by Cifani Dhoma
Marushka Dugarte Orjuela
a/k/a Marya “la Gitana”

Fiddle, dance

Born northeast Venezuela 1936 of Timoto, Colombian, French, Italian, Bassandan ethnicity

Her maternal grandmother’s family line reached back to the great Andean kingdoms of the pre-Columbian era; other ancestors had come from the Auvergne of south-central France (Marushka later claiming this was the origin of her love for the bourree and chapelloise), while oral histories also linked the family with the islands of the southern Caribbean, and to Cartagena: one of her maternal ancestors was claimed to have shipped out with the Elizabethan sea-dog Francis Drake after his raid upon Valparaiso in 1579, and was with El Draco when he entered the bay of San Francisco. It is alleged that this ancestor (Manuel Cedillo, otherwise “Manuel de Las Manos,” a tribute to the size of his hands and the strength of his sailor’s grip), who later owned estates in Jamaica, re-enlisted with Drake in 1587, was appointed commander of his own vessel, and fought in the raids against Cadiz and Corunna. Family stories claimed that he served as well in the 1588 defeat of the Armada, and that his fluent Spanish was integral in the signaling that helped Drake confuse the much larger Spanish fleet as they were blown up-Channel. Later, with the shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery that the burgeoning Sugar Trade brought, the Cedillo family sold-off their estates in the Caribbean and returned to Caracas, turning to trade and livestock farming. Later DNA testing by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project—a long-running research exercise of which Marushka was an enthusiastic supporter—also found evidence of Southeast Asian ethnicity, possibly from prehistoric trans-Pacific voyagers from Micronesia, and/or fishers and traders from the Ryukyu Islands (contemporary Okinawa). On this Pacific side of the bloodlines, the family claimed descent from Minamoto no Tametomo (1139–70), a legendary archer and samurai exiled to the southern archipelago after the failure of the Hogen Rebellion, and to his son Shunten-Ō (舜天王), first “king” of the Islands.

The Bassanda ancestors in her mother’s family had arrived on Italy’s Adriatic Coast during the First World War via the smugglers’ routes that in times to come would also provide escape paths for political refugees. By the 1930s, after emigrating to the New World, her Italian father had become a long-haul trucker in the disputed frontier regions of the northern Andes, as Venezuela’s indigenous oil industry mushroomed in the approach to World War II. In the post-War era—after the Fascists had been defeated in Europe—he would be part of the international network who sought to identify and bring to justice those Nazis who eluded capture in 1945 and fled to South America. Their activities were instrumental in uncovering the complicity of president Juan Peron in the escape by ex-Nazis to Argentina and other South American locales.

In the run up to the War, her family were active participants in the underground groups which actively resisted the propaganda of the pro-Hitler Grupo Regional de Venezuela del Partido Nazi. Her grandfather had opposed President Eleazar López Contreras’s normalization of political relations with Franco; her uncles served in the Spanish Civil War: between 1936-38, they met Saadiqhah 'Ahmar (the mother of "Red John" / John Rød Ericsson of the BNRO), who later returned to Bassanda, and thus served as a conduit between Maryah’s family and the Pădure Fraților (“Forest Brethren”) resistance during the post-War re-Sovietization. BNRO founder Yezget Nas1lsinez himself was arrested in 1936 in New York City, for what appears to have been knowing violations of the USA’s then-official status of neutrality: correspondence exists between Yezget-Bey and Eric Blair/George Orwell which suggests that gun-running for Republican forces in Spanish Civil War was alleged, and that Marushka’s family may have been involved. Those charges were dropped, apparently at the confidential behest of the Roosevelt administration, but the arrest temporarily impeded Yezget-Bey’s ability to assist both those fleeing Vichy France and those fighting the Falangists in Spain. This potentially catastrophic interruption was averted by Marushka’s uncle Karl Tsezar Ugarte, who, drawing upon the family’s generations of smuggling expertise, was able to keep the arms supply running for a few more crucial months; Orwell himself said that the continuation of those shipments made possible the escape of many members of the International Brigade in October 1938, some via Gibraltar to Tangier and points beyond. A few years later, after the USA had entered the war, more than one member of the 1942 film classic Casablanca’s cast, which was full of refugees from the Nazis, spoke fondly of the uncredited “smuggling consultant” Ugarte, who they credited with the verisimilitude of that iconic film’s portraits of the clandestine resistance; indeed, there is a family story that Peter Lorre’s unctuous “Signor Ugarte” in the film was screenwriter Howard E Koch’s teasing joke upon his Bassandan friend’s identity. A few weeks before the March 1939 surrender by the Nationalists to Franco, Karl Ugarte arranged for his sister’s children to be sent abroad to distant relatives high in the Bassandan Alps—one of the few places in Eurasia where neither the Nazis nor the Soviets dared to penetrate—for the long duration of the War.

Marushka thus grew up in the High Hills surrounded by near and distant relatives, part of an extended kinship clan that spanned multiple mountain villages, but very far indeed from the Andes of her Táchira Province childhood; in the late 1970s, she spoke poignantly of those memories as Venezuelan prosperity and political order disintegrated, and she was a life-long advocate on behalf of refugees worldwide. In exile, her mother remained passionately dedicated to children’s education, and Marushka and her brothers throughout their childhood assisted with the family’s non-profit Hirsʹka Biblioteka or “mountain library trucks,” a bibliophile’s variant on the Jamaican sound-system trucks or mobile record stores; the much-loved UHB’s were a vital source of childhood education materials in the Stalinist era, not infrequently carrying samizdat prohibited material. Paradoxically, patronage of these trucks became safer the higher that users traveled in the Hills: on the flats, representatives of the Agentstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (State Secret Police) monitored the biblio-trucks closely, but were exceptionally reluctant to venture into the higher altitudes—as they would not infrequently, in the high passes, lose their way, if not their heads.

A few years older than some of her colleagues, in the more lenient late ‘50s era of Kruschev’s Bassandan Soviet Socialist Republic, she traveled widely across the nation as a youthful auditor for the Gosudarstvennaya Otsenka Proizvoditel'nosti Truda (“GOPT” – State Productivity Office)—though, in the tradition of her activist father, she found ways to use her exceptional accountancy skills to protect the most financially vulnerable of local and regional social-service programs. The “post-Hazzardian” speculative mathematician Ambrosius de Colatta once said of her, “I ‘solved for’ the solution to the ’67 Rift Accident—and I think I found it—but Marushka ‘solved for’ an end to hunger every day of her career: which of us better served humanity?” Much later, after the “Return” of the ’67 Band from their parallel-universe Qaerda-bo'lsa (Bassandan: “wherewhen”) exile in the post-Apocalyptic Great Southwestern Desert of North America, she was the patron of the Sadzhantsi or ”Seedlings” micro-economy stimulus programs in the post-Soviet democracy, through which (especially) women and ethnic minorities were encouraged to invest in building businesses and cultural enterprises.

An early exponent of music-as-social-action training (which would culminate in her later contributions as a patroness of El Sistema youth music education), she was taken on in the mid-‘60s as a “mature” student at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory by the legendary Dutch-English-Irish violin pedagogue Anya Bloemkelk O'Baoighill, a cousin by marriage, and a contemporary, of the ex-monk and animal-rights activist Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill. Under Magistra Bloemkelk’s tutelage, Marya was able to repair some eccentricities in her self-taught technique; ever afterward, she spoke with reverence of Bloemkelk and said, “my life began again when Madame found me.”

She was close to her section-mates in the 1967/1881 Band, particularly the Welsh/German ‘cellist Cedrych le Loup (obviously a pseudonym; his desire to remain anonymous is unspecific but confirmed—in fact, his nickname in the Sand Pirates Band was Gde Sedrikh? e.g., “Where is Cedrych?”); the Scots-English fiddle player Stefaniya “Steffie” dún Shábháilte; and the violist Hana Bin Bersifal, a linguist, mathematician, and healer. Marushka was likewise close to Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton, the Scots/English/Abenaki dance scholar and teacher, with whom, as she said, “I rediscovered my Gitana heart.”

As a native Spanish-speaker and accomplished linguist, and an experienced traveler, she was invaluable in the wake of the Rift Accident that cast the ’67 Band back in time, to a post-Apocalyptic Desert Southwest. Her mathematical aptitude and extraordinary memory for figures were likewise important, as the “Sand Pirates” Band began the laborious process of rebuilding the electromagnetic circuits of The Beast which had been knocked out during the Rift Accident and which continued to malfunction in the parallel wherewhen of “post-Burn” North America. A cryptographer and code-breaker, she helped establish communications networks in that rebuilding, and was instrumental in protecting the new colony at San Francisco Bay, after approximately 1885, from outside threats. When the Band eventually returned to Ballyizget—and the 20th Century—she brought with her, through the reconstructed and redirected northern Rio Grande Rift Portal, a large clan of friends, orphans, and rescued animals.

Later in life, as a dedicated Sinophile, she became a practitioner of Tea Ceremony, and in fact wrote scholarly papers tracing East-to-West influence, via the Silk Road, of Japanese techniques upon Bassandan Tea Culture. Though the connection is unconfirmed, it likewise may be that in Japan she came to know the violinist Federica Rozhkov (born Puerta Vallarta 1930), who significantly predated her in the BNRO, having departed the “Classic ’52 Band” in 1958 after being reunited with her lover Ashitaka Emishi, in one of the great romances of the Bassanda canon. Marushka and Fedi themselves were said to have undertaken music collecting trips together amongst the indigenous peoples of both the Ryukyu and Ainu Islands chains.

Otherwise, Marushka herself cherished the life she and her devoted husband built in the capitol city, after the wake of the 1985 fall of the BSSP and the reinstatement of democratic institutions. She was instrumental in the recovery of pre-Christian/-Buddhist music and visual teachings, and developed a particular sensitivity to the indigenous mandala tradition; her curated collection in the state museum at Ballyizget is still widely regarded as one of the great sources of visual documentation on those pre-literate spiritual practices. She continued her study with Magistra Bloemkelk and likewise became a beloved patron of the Bassanda Youth Orchestra, a no-audition ensemble which trained young recruits for the Elegant Savages and its satellite projects.

Upon retiring from the road, she and her husband took a dacha in the northern Alps, just below the treeline of Annolungma, not far from Matthias’s Mountain Rest, the legendary summer lodge of the Nas1lsinez circle. There she taught languages and music, walked the hills, and nurtured generations of feral and rescued felines.

Carved and painted upon the front door was the relief of a May flower, and over the lintel the dacha’s name:

It was called “Tariba.”

[caption: Marya La Gitana, c1972. Photo by Cifani Dhoma]

Ishayo, c1882?, collotype by Giyanlakshmi Julahe Kaur
Ishayo Abn Rodrigo Medina a/k/a El Mestizo

Spanish, Taino, Cherokee, Mescalero Apache

b1947 Aguadillo Province, Puerto Rico (Taino: Boriken)

saxophones

His European ancestors were of Spanish conquistador descent: it was a matter of received family history that they were distant relations to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid “al-Sayyid” (1043-99) of Zaragoza. DNA testing via the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project more concretely confirmed the indigenous Taino elements in his bloodlines; despite attempts by the Spanish colonial government to declare the Taino extinct (via European-imported disease and wars of extermination) as early as the 16th century, his mestizo ancestors continued as cultural activists in the vernacular resistance movement which sought to declare Taino identity a recognized ethnic minority. This activism was formalized in the 1960s as the “Taino Nation,” particularly through the medium of indigenous dance music and song.

His Caribbean ancestors otherwise included mixed-race sailors and freebooters recruited from Tortuga (Taino: Kahimi) by Sir Henry Morgan in the 1670s for strikes against Spain elsewhere in the Caribbean. Though the family carried the patronymic “Rodrigo,” they clearly and explicitly identified themselves as Indio and thus considered the Spanish colonizers to be hereditary enemies. Some of those buccaneer ancestors fled England’s 1690s suppression of the pirate colonies by settling deeper into the Caribbean, making landfall and establishing branches of the extended family as far west as Galveston and even the Caribbean coast of Mexico from the 1710s onward. Others traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio as flatboatmen and married into Scots Presbyterian settler families on the western slope of the Appalachians; they are thus one source of the mixed-race “Melungeons” who already inhabited “Kenhtàke” and “Tanasi” by the time Daniel Boone first pioneered the Cumberland Gap in the 1790s. Still others intermarried among the Cherokee and “Black Seminoles,” and were later removed to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

Like Caitrìona Aibnat Mardanīš and Mahá Red Elk, Ishayo was particularly deadly with indigenous weapons, most notably the distinctive recurved Taino bow, fired from a prone position, braced with the feet and drawn by both arms, shoulders, and back. During the abortive 1898 rebellion, Porto Riqueno / Taino resistance fighters had more than once halted US Forces’ armored trains by firing steel bolts through the boilers of the locomotives that drew them; the resultant steam explosions were powerful enough to knock an entire train off its tracks, and were called (in Taino/creole dialect) nos hurakã (e.g., “our hurricanes”).

Armed service was a family tradition, very often (and eventually explicitly) identified as anti-imperialist/-fascist, particularly in the wake of US President Rutherford McKinley’s 1898 blockade of Puerto Rico, in order to enforce his rejection of elected government and demand for maintenance of the US protectorate. Ishayo’s Porto Riqueno ancestors are believed to have fought in the Spanish-American War—though there is not-insignificant unclarity about which side they supported—but their participation with Allied Forces on the Western Front in World War One is documented more firmly. His great-uncles had been educated at the progressive Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s and there had developed the political consciousness they took back to both Dominica and New Spain. Others in his paternal line were tinkerers, mechanics, and inventors (including modifications of musical instruments), while his mother’s Spanish bloodlines brought the world of late 19th century European piano music into the household.

His maternal uncle Carlos Elizalde Rodrigo (b1917) fought against the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War, while his father Juan (b1924) enlisted in the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron as part the extended clan called the “Fighting Medinas” and, after training at Casablanca, participated in both the Corsica campaign (1943) and the D-Day landings (1944). Juan Medina particularly distinguished himself as a rifleman at St-Malo in August 1944.

He himself was a tracker, wild animal expert, and marksman, but seldom hunted except for subsistence; as he said, “My ancestors taught me to kill my animal brothers only at need, and with respect.” Nevertheless, in addition to the recurve bow, he was expert with any kind of firearm, especially long guns, though his personal preference was for the traditional Apache slingshot. His childhood experience in the desert mountains of the American Southwest, particularly as a tracker and navigator, proved invaluable to the 1967 band, especially in the wake of the “Great Burn” which knocked out electrical and internal combustion capacities in New Spain.

There is nothing in the Correspondence, including the sequestered Hazzard-Igniti “Closed Archives,” to explain the catalyst, the concatenation of unknown factors, that led to the Burn, but its impact, in the parallel wherewhen (Bassandan: qaerda-bo'lsa) into which the ’67 Band was cast when the Beast’s navigational systems suddenly “went West,” opening up an unexpected Rift Portal, is undeniable: for 200 miles on either side of the longitude 105deg W corridor that ran nearly north-south up the Rio Grande Valley, neither electrical motors nor petroleum-based systems would function. The result was that the rapidly-expanding cities of the region, including those which had originated in the very old missions at Santa Fe and Taos along the Rio Grande Valley, and into the northern Pecos and Canada River basins to the east, were rendered suddenly and essentially uninhabitable: the burgeoning operations of the New Mexico and Texas land barons, for example, were destroyed when it became impossible to pump-up groundwater to support cattle and sheep, and the vast majority of Anglo settlers fled west toward California, or east toward the Mississippi and Missouri basins. Those who remained tended to be indigenous peoples of the region, or descendants of Old Mexico, whose multi-generational experience of a pre-industrial Southwest prepared them for a post-Burn version of the same.

There is some thought that his maternal grandfather (born c1870) was present at the Paris Exposition of 1889, as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s troupe. Though most of the native American performers in Cody’s Wild West Show were Brulé, Oglala, or Lakota, and although the Apache had only been “subdued” with the 1886 defeat of Goyaałé/Geronimo, Diego Itza-chu (Ishayo’s grandfather) presented himself as a mixed-race “ex-scout against the Mescaleros,” though in fact he may have been more of a scout fighting for rather than against Geronimo’s band. At the Exposition, this Diego is said to have met the Filipino nationalist, freedom fighter, and martyr José Rizal (1861-1896), whose Irish-born wife Josephine Bracken, in the wake of Rizal execution by the Spanish colonial government, continued his revolutionary activities.

Even more confusingly—but with a particularly Bassandan sort of ambiguity encountered frequently in accounts of the BNRO, and especially of the (apparently) time-traveling 1967/1881 Band—there is some unclarity about whether it might actually have been Ishayo himself who participated in Cody’s 1889 European tour, some time after the “Sand Pirates” Band’s c1881-86 exile: the confusing orthography of Itza-chu / Issaku / Isaac recurs even within the Troupe’s own salary records for Diego, and suggests an obvious parallelism with the saxophonist in the ’67 Band. While this hypothesis seems rather far-fetched—except by Bassandan standards—and while Ishayo’s 1947 birth in Aguadillo is confirmed without doubt, it is now generally accepted amongst Hazzard-Igniti’ites that the so-called “Sand Pirates” Band actually did experience a Rift Accident and Rift-Drift; accounts of other contemporaneous members (notably Ani Hamim Gassion and Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš) confirm their adult experiences in the 1880s Southwest, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Ishayo, like Ani and Cait, somehow found himself separated from the Band post-Accident, and might well have connected with his Jicarillo and Mescalero “ancestors” (in this telling, then, these would actually have been both Ishayo’s “ancestors” and also his “contemporaries”), thereafter finding himself recruited into Cody’s Troupe.

If so, Ishayo may have been one conduit, or possibly the courier, for the ambrotype of the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” which, though apparently taken as an image in London or Paris, surfaced in the monastic archives of a northern New Mexico mission at Talpa, near Taos. Certainly some member of his family—if not he himself—appears as “Diego Itsaaks” in Cody’s 1889 tour rosters for performances which included the Paris Exposition Universelle. This tour is arguably the source of the claim that Isachu had visited the aging and nearly penniless Adolphe Sax in Paris to pay his respects—the Belgian had invented the saxophone, but his patent had expired in the ‘60s, leaving others to reap the financial benefits of Sax’s invention. In the Archive there is a brief handwritten description of the encounter, in Diego/Ishayo’s heavily creolized Spanish, which tells of “giving the Master a good meal at his favorite café—the least I could do.”

It is also telling that this Diego’s journal/notes likewise mention having met, at the Exposition Universelle, El Profe Nikolai Tesla (1856-1943), the noted developer of alternating current, whose later-life theories of wireless power transmission and communications—and even wilder ideas regarding “brain electricity” and the like—were widely disparaged, but eventually came to be seen as consistent with a good deal of Hazzard-Igniti theory (the latter professor himself having been quoted as saying “Poor Nikolai—he saw so clearly that eventually his larger vision blinded him to the day-to-day”). Ishayo remained in Europe after departing the Cody tour, and other scraps of handwritten description in the Archive, which appear to be the unbound leaves of an intermittent journal that he maintained throughout the 1881-85 “Rift Exile,” recount other adventures in both Paris and St Petersburg. There is additional empirical evidence to support this claim: in the 1960s Band, he was known for his fluency in both French and Russian, a useful skill-set in touring the Soviet satellites.

Like van Gogh, he knew the hill country of south-central France and the Rhône Valley, as well as the coasts of Brittany and Normandy, and showed a strong if amateur aptitude for bright and vibrant oil painting of landscapes and seascapes; it is probably in this period that he not only met Adolphe Sax, but also came to know the families of Cécile Lapin (who was then a small child), heroine of the 1906 “Great Train Ride for Bassanda,” and the Normandy-based Biraz Ouz clan, whose scion Binyamin (of the “Classic 1952 Band”) would be born c1920.

He was not afraid of physical confrontation and was, along with Cristofori Údolí Stromů, Natanas Hus, Ailsa Niphredil, Moprah Uitmena, Mahá Red Elk, and Yiskāh MacFarlane, among the Band’s cadre of street-fighters, this another useful skill in the rough-and-tumble venues of the post-Burn Southwest. Moreover, though the 1967 “Sand Pirates” Band was mysteriously absent from Bassanda or the Satellites for almost two years, only reappearing in Ballyizget months after the heartbreaking events of the 1968 Prague Spring, yet another “Jakub Muslimský” (e.g., “Jacob the Muslim”) is listed as the nom de guerre of one of the student leaders of that revolt; a blurred negative from the Tass files, never printed in the period but appearing in Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV (2010), certainly bears a striking resemblance to the young mestizo in both the collotype images of the “Sand Pirates” and the corresponding Polaroids of the ‘67 Band.

It was his habit, in both the 1967 and 1881 versions of the “Sand Pirates” Band, to assume the face-paint associated with his Indio ancestors; he called it a “gesture of respect” but, especially in the rough frontier bars, dancehalls, and crude unamplified amphitheaters of the post-Burn Great Southwestern Desert wherewhen, that Mescalero war-paint—like the ragged odds & ends of uniform and weird conglomeration of weapons affected by various members of the Band—was a useful deterrent as well.

As a baritone saxophone specialist, he was the low-end anchor of the legendary reeds section of the ‘67/1881 band, which also included Cristofori Údolí Stromů (b1948) and Karsten Vyrovnání (b1947). Like his mentor, the bassist Krzysztof Arczewski (b1932), in the late 1960s he became an avid field collector, recordist, and producer for the Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Co. label, particularly specializing in anthologies of New World, Caribbean, Southwestern, and Meso-American indigenous melodies. The “Gray Sleeve” records, pressed in very heavy vinyl with poorly-mimeographed but extensive typewritten liner notes, were an important resource for the preservation of “traditional” music, and became a foundation for the anti-nationalist repertoires of the Bassandan Folk Revival in the mid-1970s.

In later life, after the return of the “Sand Pirates” Band from the post-Burn qaerda-bo'lsa to the capital of Ballyizget, some time in the autumn of 1969, he took a post-graduate degree at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, while also attending courses in both bibliography and creative writing at H-LC’s academic partner, Ballyizget University. In the same period, he also continued to tour the Satellites with the BNRO; he was thus not the only member of the Band to complete a Master’s thesis (“Cultural Geography and Musical Memory in Selected Taino Indigenous Dance,” 1979) in the back of draughty tour buses and run-down long-distance posting hostels. He eventually returned to H-LC as adjunct faculty, teaching both woodwind techniques and musicians’ health & wellness, and, after 1985, publishing a series of tour reminiscences and original essays on issues of arts and political culture. He held a long-term lease on a penthouse apartment that was found at the top of the university branch of the Ballyizget Public Library, for which institution he also served as an unpaid expert consultant on first and rare editions, especially of Bassandan scientific tomes (some reaching all the way back to Iliot shamanic treatises) and of Eastern Bloc 20th century avant-garde and samizdat novelists.

Otherwise entirely lined with walls of books, the apartment’s tall windows looked out over the rooftops of the Quarter, toward Habjar-Lawrence, and beyond them north, toward the Bassandan Alps.

Stála, 1957, solo from Bedfordshire; photo by Cifani Dhoma
Stála Violante O Gealbhain
of the Thirteen Wise Companions

DOB unknown

Irish, Italian, Basque, Bassandan

Born in Los Angeles County, though there is some confusion regarding her birth-date: while a cancelled passport, still in the possession of the Archives of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project at Miskatonic University, lists that date as 1936, other items in the same archive boxes—notably several short 1-reel films—imply a rather different and rather more confusing story:

Her grandmother Violante had been born on the crossing from Palermo in Sicily to Ellis Island in 1894, while her Irish grandfather, a County Clare-born mathematical savant, had worked on the fringes of Manhattan’s Irish-American underworld, most notably as a double-entry bookkeeper for the young Owney Madden’s Gopher Gang, which controlled Hell’s Kitchen in the decade just before and just after 1900. Upon marriage, James O Gealbhain alias “Jimmy Gale” sought to avoid the turf wars that broke out between rival Irish-American gangs in the late ‘Oughts by transitioning quickly into freelance accounting work for the nascent silent-film industry based in Fort Lee New Jersey. Evidently a canny and far-sighted individual, he opted to entirely remove his young family from the Northeast, relocating them first to the film colony in Jacksonville Florida c1910, and then to southern California in 1915, where he worked for Selig and Kalem film studios. His children and grandchildren thus grew up in middle-class comfort during the West Coast’s 1930s building boom; Stála’s father Patrick, a middle son, worked as a high school gymnastics and track coach and moonlighted as a stuntman, while various uncles, aunts, and cousins were firefighters, carpenters, makeup artists, and studio hands in the Hollywood boom of the 1930s. But certain cousins across the country and “back East” managed to retain their underworld ties—these would prove useful both during Prohibition (1920-33), and again with the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943.

Also on the mother’s side, her great-grandmother (and namesake: the Bassandan pet-name Stála translating as “little drop of water”) came, with her husband and young family, to northern California in the 1880s, working first as a trail-cook on Basque sheep ranches, and then as a chef in San Francisco’s North Beach when it was still a small Italian fishing neighborhood. She was a bearer of circum-Pacific healing, fishing, and midwifery traditions: in fact, “Mama Stála” was recruited by literally three generations of the O Gealbhain clan to aid in the births of their children, and was delivering babies well after the age of 100. During the First World War, several of her male forebears are said to have taken part in the bitter hand-to-hand combat throughout the mountainous terrain of the Trentino front, and indeed to have trained Italian Alpini in Bassandan combat techniques.

Her Italian and Bassandan great-uncles, both Stateside and in Italia, who were bootleggers, smugglers, and gunrunners, were capable of turning their hands, even into old age, to sabotage, infiltration, and asymmetrical combat, and they deployed against the Nazis in the run up to the Italian campaign in the spring of 1943. Given their long-standing familial connections with the Black Hand and the Corsican Mafia, these Violantes were particularly useful in the invasion of Sicily; her father, who spoke fluent Italian with the accent of Palermo, participated in the Operation Husky airborne landings by the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in July 1943, which established a foothold on the island and opened the way for the Italian campaign, in turn forcing Hitler to withdraw troops from the Eastern Front, and hastening the collapse of Operation Barbarossa. Violante is said to have been the origin of the anecdote illustrated in the great WWII cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s sketch, in which a US Army dogface confronts a German Gebirgsjäger (mountain trooper) unexpectedly, face-to-face, as each is climbing over a ridge between trenches; the GI (Mauldin’s iconic character “Willie”), pointing a standard .45 automatic at the German’s nose, casually inquires “Didn’t we meet at Cassino?”

The curious anomaly in Stála O Gealbhain’s own story has not to do with lineage, but with internal conflicts in her chronology: though her passport lists a date of 1936—which is consistent with her apparent age during the Thirteen Wise Companions’ transformative experience at Bedford in 1957—some Band stories, and some family tales, imply that she might have been born much earlier: perhaps even before the First World War: In 1923’s Flaming Youth, a feature for the silent film star Colleen Moore (1899-1988), the majority of which is lost, it has been suggested that it is in fact Stála who plays an exotic dancer in a racy pre-Hayes Code (pre-censorship) poolside scene, dancing through underlit fountains of water in the company of a Hawai’an band. While it is known that she was exposed, as a child in multi-cultural 1940s Los Angeles, to a wide variety of Pacific Rim music and dance styles, no explanation has been tendered for the claim that it is she, appearing to be in her late teens, in a 1923 unrated film that predates her supposed birth-date by more than a dozen years.

One explanation has been tendered, though outside the semi-mystical and time-jumping contexts of Bassandan quantum theory (Qaerda-bo'lsa) it has not gained much traction (on the other hand, as the Hazzard-Igniti’ite proverb says: “What good is traction? It just keeps you from leaving the ground”). It has been suggested that, in her friendship with the dancer Sionainn “Boudicca” Biraz de St-Denis, who was a Mürekkep Kişi (Bassandan: “ink-person”), the two might have adventured back in time, after the Bedford summer, via chanting the mandalas that St-Denis carried on her body. Perhaps they were seeking their friends, perhaps they sought to join-up with the Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band, or perhaps there is another possibly accidental explanation not yet uncovered in the Correspondence which places them in Los Angeles in 1923; Kapak, regardless, insists—though only via controversial and arguably “unproven” citation—that it was indeed Stála who appeared in Flaming Youth.[1]

She was cheerful, sardonic, adaptable, and a highly effective physical clown, comfortable in a diverse variety of socio-cultural situations, and avid for the widest range of new and global experiences and adventures. As a dancer, in the lineage of Nijinska and of Nijinska’s root teacher Danica Jovanović, she was fiery, intense, and fearless, brimming with ideas, and a skillful facilitator, with a body vocabulary informed by her gymnastics experiences. She was a consultant, along with Madame Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa, on Танцы на раздарожжы (Tancy na razdarožžy; Eng: “Dancing at the Crossroads”), the 1969 BNRO-inspired theatrical dance show narrating multi-ethnic dance encounters in colonial-era Bassanda. In the 1980s, she taught tumbling, conditioning, and popular styles at Scola Naraščajoče Ptice (“Ascending Birds School”), the dance academy partnered with Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in the capitol city. Her students, who became known, only half-jokingly, as Stálaites (“water drops”), were remarked for their self-confidence, individuality, and openness to new experience.[2]

Later in life, she served as curator emeritus of the Bassandan National Archives’ collection of rare and esoteric archival films, drawing upon her encyclopedic knowledge of over 100 years of electrical documentation, and her particular sensitivity to worldwide folkloric and theatrical movement traditions. Her gallery shows of found fragments, art objects, and loving tributes to long-past film and dance stars. She developed a line of Italian pastries, based in recipes inherited from her great-grandmother, which were staples in the Ballyizget food-truck scene as gastro-tourism expanded in the early 2000s. Thes proceeds she dedicated to the cause of preserving habitats and ending poaching of Asian elephants, an endangered species in Bassanda as they were in north India, Yunnan Province in China, and Bangladesh; the pastries were called “Elephants’ Ears,” and the “Stála Trucks” bore a charming logo of a smiling elephant, on its hind legs, tossing a pastry into its mouth. She continued to travel widely, with particular fondness for the great European cities, and advocated passionately for Ballyizget’s inclusion among them, and maintained a network of friendships and correspondence around the world.

Her totem bird among the Thirteen Wise Companions was the Black-eared wheatear (Traquet stapazin), a tough, cocky little migrant, of great stamina and ubiquity. In Catalog d’oiseaux, Messiaen’s piano impression of Le traquet stapazin begins with tolling open chords that recall the bells of Cambridge, nearly within earshot of Bedford.

She was twenty-one when she joined Nijinska, de Quareton, Nas1lsinez, and the Wise Companions at England, that hot summer of June 1957.

[photo caption: Stála, 1957, solo from Bedfordshire; photo by Cifani Dhoma]

[1] Suleiman Agon Kapak, “The Mürekkep Kişi: a Southeastern European Body-Mandala Tradition,” in The Journal of the International Society for Bassanda Studies 24 (Summer 1993), 26.

[2] This reference to “water drops” (a proverb associated the Stálaites was, “they’re scattered—but they shine in the sunlight!” was widely believed to reflect Stála’s own effervescent manner) is another reference to the importance of running/moving water in the realm of the Thirteen Wise Companions (see elsewhere in the Correspondence)>

Ailsa, c1988, Photo credit: Cifani Dhoma.
Ailsa Àn Xīng Niphredil

b1947

voice, dance

German, Ute, ethnic Hui, Noldor?

On one side, she was a descendant of Wurttemberg nobility and, possibly, a very distant relation to the German poet, playwright, and philosopher JCF Schiller (1759-1805); on another, she was related to the Hamburg-born mountain man John Henry Weber (1779-1859), who emigrated to the USA some time before 1822, joining a Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition which departed St Louis at the spring thaw of that year. This company included figures (Jim Bridger b1804, Jedediah Smith b1798, Thomas Fitzpatrick b1799, and the remarkable Hugh Glass b1783) who would later become legends of the North American West, and was the first party of Europeans to cross the Continental Divide; Weber later married a Native woman and retired to Iowa, where he died at the age of 80 in 1859.[1] Nearly 100 years later, the General would say to the teenaged Ailsa, “Yep, I met your grand-pappy in St Joe [Missouri] around ’40: hell of a fine figger of a man even then; good with a knife, too. Reckon you take after ‘im, both ways.”

Although she was of slight stature, in the “Sand Pirates” band’s dystopian exile during the Great Electromagnetic Burn that wiped out both electricity and internal combustion engines in the American Southwest, she was notoriously effective with a single-edged Chinese dao that was over half her height in length. The blade was painted entirely dull black, she said, “because there is no honor in killing. But to save others, a Bodhisattva might take on that bad karma.” As a fighter, she was graceful and balletic, nearly elfin; watching her spar—and having occasion it seems, c1881, to observe her in combat—Yezget-Bey, himself having trained in martial arts, said “She’s liking Ariel from The Tempest—with a blade.” As regards her choice of weapon, there have been suggestions that she was in fact partly ethnic-Chinese (Hui): certainly her Mandarin was sufficient to enable her to assist the translator and singer Sì Yuè Xì in negotiating the Band’s route past road-blocks during Inner Asian tours.

But such linguistic adventures would come later: earlier, during her second year’s tenure in the Band, she was one of the party who were “cast backward” from 1967 to c1881, somewhere in the American Southwest, in a “Rift Accident” after the locomotive called “The Beast” was unwittingly activated as a portable Portal. This would appear to account for the 1967 Band’s later (earlier?) incarnation as the “Victorian Steampunk Band”, in a daguerreotype dated c1885, but only some of the 1960s members appear in that image. No conclusive explanation has been tendered for the absence of specific members (Ailsa among) from the 1885 image, and their presence in the c1881, but the least-implausible suggestion is that, in the Rift Accident of 1881, members were separated from one another—this would account for the anecdotes describing separate adventures by unique combinations of members; see the tale of Ani and Cait, for example, elsewhere in the Correspondence. Another such is that of Ailsa and her lover Yehoshua de Waultier, who were separated yet again in the subsequent wake of the Rift Accident, in the forests of the far northern American continent, but reunited—in a tale possibly borrowed by Tolkien, along with the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, for his Lay of Beren and Luthién, in the Silmarillion.

Indeed, her other antecedents are more mysterious and less clearly-documented: atypically in the Tolkien canon—whose characters often reflected encounters and acquaintances of the Professor’s—she appears to have been employed as an Eastern (as opposed to Western or Northern) European-derived model for an Elvish heroine of the Noldor, with Tolkien perhaps drawing from Schiller’s romantic play Die Räuber (“The Bandits”), a tale of revolutionary adventure in the Bohemian Forest. On the other hand, certain elements of her personality and attributes known to the Eagles Heart Sisters Oral History Project resist prosaic explanation:

Though she was of tiny, elfin beauty—it was said that she walked so lightly that neither snowdrifts nor sand-dunes showed the imprint of her footsteps—she was capable of quiet yet intense energy, that energy a necessary compliment to the larger-than-life personality and affect of the tenor/berserker Natanas Hus, with whom she shared leadership duties, as co-leader of the so-called “Celtic Choir” (the ‘Sand Pirates’ band was, paradoxically, home to a particularly powerful vocal section whose aptitude for North European and Celtic-language song was legendary; Ailsa said this was because “even in this desert exile, we remember our Home in the Gray Havens”). She was definitely an electrical sensitive; it was said that in certain conditions intent observers could see an aura of electromagnetic blue, purple and gold around her head and shoulders. This “Raising of Aspect”—one Band-mate likened it to “the shimmering of a sharp blade by starlight”—intimated circumstances of great joy or great danger.

Her pet-name in the Band was, likewise, “Snowdrop” or “Pearl.” She was a competent banjo player—this aptitude, incongruous in one so ethereal in appearance, perhaps an inheritance via her Rocky Mountain ancestors, possibly from Jim Bridger, who had been born in Richmond Virginia on the slopes of the Appalachians—and her signature tune was in fact the lovely “Snowdrop,” an instrumental credited to Sam & Kirk McGee, though that brilliant sibling duo themselves claimed to have got it from the repertoire of the Bassandan multi-instrumentalist and Bassandayana scholar and Zen priest Pappy Lilt (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

The descendent of healers and soldiers, she bonded especially with the ex-combat photographer and veteran Cifani Dhoma, and was also close to the multi-instrumentalist and choral specialist Avdyusha Hughes Ivanovich, with whom she shared geographical connections. During the exile of the “Sand Pirates” Band, her presence is said to have contributed to the invocation and eventual concretization of the northern Rio Grande Valley Rift portal, though which the Dark Ones invaded (see “Riding the Rift”). She was not a Rift theorist, but rather (like the dancers Kulamani Llandaff Callan and Feye Keijukainen Arndt, and the artist Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur) a “Rift Sensitive,” whose innate body chemistry and electrical mapping made her hyper-aware of shifts in magnetic fields, which often presaged the entrance into the known wherewhen (Bassandan: Qaerda-bo'lsa) of these malevolent Outside forces. She may have been a model for an unnamed female character in the American Western writer Edward Abbey’s Good News, a dystopian model which promulgates a dark vision which is anything but “good.”

She was an expert swimmer and diver; in fact, the exploit of the young mountain man Jim Bridger, in which he volunteered to help the 1822 party trace the course of the Bighorn River by floating down it himself, has also been attributed to that earlier member of her family line, the German-born John Weber. It was even alleged that, like Yakub Sanjo and Ана Ljubak de Quareton in the Band, and particularly the selkie Nollag Käsityöläinen, she was a shape-shifter: certainly she wore a Bassandan-cast gold signet ring bearing a pearl carved in the shape of a dolphin—possibly also a recollection of the Aegean and Minoan influence in Bassandan visual arts. Likewise she was close to others who bonded—or perhaps shared experience—with felines, including especially Azizlarim Jangchi (widely associated with the Yucatan panther) and Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne, a legendary feline rescuer and “cat whisperer.”

Somewhat later, after the still-undocumented return of the ‘Sand Pirates’ Band to a more contemporary wherewhen, she was a leader in the Bassandan version of the “Charter 77” movement, which is widely recognized as an important watershed in the gradual shift from the Brezhnev era toward eventual perestroika and then glasnost in the early 1980s. She was on the tramp steamer that carried the Band and its entourage in their defection into freedom from Talinn to Helsinki in 1985, and it is even argued that, with the selkie Nollag Käsityöläinen, she led—or lit—the Band into freedom. The Scots trombonist Yiskāh MacFarlane Ni Molindar said cryptically, “Nollaig and the Leumadair—they saved us: you could see her leaping free of the black waves, and she glowed in the darkness like a pearl.”

At Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in later years, she held an endowed Chair in voice, keyboard, and singers’ diction: a fearsome appointment, given the staggering diversity of languages commonly employed both for normal parlance and recital repertoires in Bassanda. She summered at a small cottage she called Imladris (“deep valley of the cleft”), with wide verandas and low eaves, above the fjord called Pitā dī Bēṭī which was fed by the river Ab Almyah (“The Father of Waters”), which flowed down from the Three Brothers (Annolungma) mountain range, dampening Bassanda’s misty foothills as it ran toward the sea.[2] She would say “If the Portal to the Outer Dark was to reopen in Del Norte, I would go there again, to fight alongside my comrades. But now I am glad to have returned from that Great Dryness, to this green place that is my home.”

In the fjord below her cottage, there were dolphins.

[photo caption: Ailsa, c1988, two decades after the return of the Band to the known wherewhen (Bassandan: Qaerda-bo'lsa) of Ballyizget. She appears to have aged not at all. Photo credit: Cifani Dhoma.

[1] Glass, the year after in 1823, would be mauled by a grizzly and left for dead by (other) companions, before crawling 200 miles to Fort Kiowa and survival.

[2] Pitā dī Bēṭī: Bassandan: literally “the Father’s Daughter.”

Yiskāh by Suleiman Agon Kapak, c1882 (?), Great Southwestern Desert
Mahá le Loutre Red Elk
hornist, Zen archer

b1947

Bohemian, Tonkawa/Comanche, Breton French, Bassandan

Her Bohemian great-great-grandfather had fought on the barricades in the 1848 uprising against the Austrian emperor and, upon that revolution’s defeat, subsequently fled, via tramp steamer out of Hamburg, to Cuba and then Galveston. In the next generation, the family fanned out north and west, settling by 1870 among the large Czech ex-pat community in the Texas Hill Country. Her great-grandmother, of mixed Tonkawa / Comanche ethnicity, was a cousin of the Quahada leader Quanah Parker; her marriage into the Veselka clan spared her repatriation with Parker to Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1871, and she remained with the family in central Texas.

Maha was connected to others in the Band via those same Texas Gulf Coast antecedents: the Haitian/Cajun violinist Extaberri Le Gwo, and the pianist/vocalist Rahmani Boenavida, both of whom predated her in the BNRO but whose legacy she continued. There were possibly also connections to the Irish San Patricios who had fought in the Mexican-American War and a few of whom had remained behind in Nuevo Léon, just over the border. And her father Charles Red Elk had been present as a teenaged rub-board player at the Dallas 1937 sessions that ensued after Mississippi Stokes heard Huddie Ledbetter, the folksinger Lead Belly, busking in Deep Ellum. Charles Red Elk, whose Comanche heritage continued to be an important part of family tradition, served on the Second Front in WWII with conspicuous courage as a “code-talker,” and was named a Chevalier de le Ordre national du Mérite for his contributions in the link-up between the US 75th Rangers battalion and members of the Free French resistance (see “Colonel Thompson and the Breakout from Normandy,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). Red Elk married Madeleine Vitry le Loutre in 1945, just after VE Day, and settled with Madeleine’s family, long established as fishermen, traders, and smugglers, in Morlaix, on the north coast of Brittany which held family roots for so many in the BNRO orbit. Mahá (full version “Mahaut”—a Flemish word for “battle-strength”) was born in summer 1947 in the Bassandan Alps, while her mother was visiting distant cousins, and was raised in both Brittany and Bassanda, in a childhood she described as nearly idyllic, filled with family relations, music, dance, and visual art-making. Her aunts and great-aunts were healers and midwives, and she herself inherited a store of indigenous folkloric medical knowledge, which included movement, song, and visualizations as well as natural and pharmaceutical cures.

In addition to providing dance and French horn playing in the context of the BNRO, it is also claimed that she was an exponent of the Exploding Tuba, an instrument pioneered by her Band predecessor Yūhannā Casco Encabezado around 1954 for the iconic and notorious (but little performed) Nas1lsinez anti-Fascist composition Casting Out Snakes, for which Nijinska, his long-time collaborator, Devised a choreography which she set on the seminal women’s dance troupe the Eagle’s Heart Sisters. Though Mahá was not so dedicated an explorer of extended techniques as Encabezado, in her own quiet way, she maintained the band’s tradition of explosive mid- and low-brass playing, and it is claimed by persons in the Band’s orbit that she was in fact the inspiration for J.K. Rowling’s character(s) the Vibes Twins, notorious sisters and musicians.

Along with her playing, she was a remarkably free, unself-conscious, and intuitive dancer, and would on occasion happily set aside her horn to dance with whomever in the Band or crowd needed a partner; section-mate Sārāha Masúria said “Maha would always dance with them. I was glad—it meant that I didn’t have to!” An enthusiastic amateur singer, she also participated in the revival, instigated by Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš, of the Zanimayut Bassanda Dukhovoy Orkestr or “ZBDO,” the time-traveling “Occupy Bassanda Brass Orchestra,” which had been recorded c1900 on wax cylinder, but was then again revived, in the 1960s. There is considerable unclarity regarding the possibility, first bruited by Hazzard-Igniti’ites, that both the 1900 and late 1960s recordings featured the same, time-traveling personnel; this is ultimately unknowable, as the c1900 recording logs are lost, and the ZBDO is known only by the few extant wax cylinders, and what certainly sounds (on a very low-fidelity recording) like the speaking voice of Cait Mardanīš, introducing the pieces. Better documented is the 1960s “revival” of the ZBDO, which most certainly included Mahá, Cait, Sārāha, and the clairvoyant Scots trombonist Yiskāh MacFarlane Molindar.

An inveterate tour-bus sketcher and photographer, she left behind a series of quick pencil and chalk portraits of Band members which capture charming and poignant moments among that group of ravening individualists. Moreover, she appears to have possessed a near-photographic memory: not only was she able to reproduce with remarkable sensitivity portraits of individuals from her childhood and tour experiences, but she was also an astonishingly skillful navigator and tracker, able to visualize complex topographies and landscapes—possibly another inheritance from her Tonkawa/Comanche lineage; this ability would prove invaluable, indeed a literal life-saver, in the adventures of the “Sand Pirates” Band (detailed below). She likewise participated in the work of the David Sheldrick and World Wildlife Trusts to protect endangered species, particularly the Asian elephant, beyond Bassanda’s borders (the idea of sport hunting being considered deeply repugnant in Bassandan cosmology, many former combat veterans turned their tracking skills to anti-poaching efforts worldwide).[1]

She was of an introverted and studious bent, particularly fascinated by natural phenomena and the workings of the natural world, and was certainly a member of that group who self-identified as “Hazzard-Igniti’ites”—those who continued the investigations of the legendary Rift theorist and cognition specialist Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti, after he was disappeared into the Gulag (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). As a part of that part of the ’67 Band who were cast back in time, in the notorious Rift Vortex Accident, to 1885 (1881?), she was able to report first-hand upon the shocking moment when the electro-magnetic tour locomotive Sleipnir, called “the Beast” in Band parlance, was suddenly rendered Rift-active and became its own portable distance- and time-spanning vehicle. She does not appear in the daguerreotype of the “mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘steampunk’ Band,” but does appear in the images taken, several years previously c1881, in the “Sand Pirates” Band. So she, along with a number of the 1967/1885 veterans does appear to have shared the post-Apocalyptic adventures of the 1881 Band, whose displacement across parallel-worlds had been foretold by the Iliot Buddhist shamans who authored the Bassandayana Sutra, hypothesized by Hazzard-Igniti (see his “Unified Field Theory of Electromagnetic Chronological Transport”), but only directly (and arguably) experienced by those like Mahá who endured the Vortex Accident, and the (seemingly temporary) exile into a parallel-universe American Southwest in the wake of a “Great Electromagnetic Burn.” She played a not-insignificant role in the 1980s and ‘90s Hazzard-Igniti’ite scholarship which investigated and eventually mapped the dynamic processes of Rift Vortices.

In later life, after retiring from her position in childhood music education at Habjar-Lawrence (a post into which she was repeatedly rehired, eventually as emerita), she shared a mountain stream-side dacha with several generations of Bassandan Barn Cats, in a wood and stone space that was stacked with canvases, and enjoyed panoramic windows into which poured the Alpine sunlight, looking out onto a vista of river and mountains.

[caption: Kodachrome (? Sic) of Yiskāh by Suleiman Agon Kapak, c1882 (?), Great Southwestern Desert]

[1] In one particularly notorious incident, the hated twin sons of the oligarch Ntónalnt Kozyr, Uday and Qusay, were surprised poaching big game—elephants and tigers—on the frontier, having (probably intentionally) strayed into Bassandan territory during the pursuit, and were summarily tried, convicted, and sentenced to multi-year terms of hard labor, cleaning up elephant dung in the national parks (they in fact narrowly escaped the traditional punishment for animal-murder among the indigenous Maa hunter-gatherers, which was castration). When their dictator father demanded their release, he was invited to come to Bassanda to join them—this preceding the notorious international criminal trial in which Kozyr was convicted of racketeering and human trafficking, eventually joining his offspring in prison.

Kodachrome (? Sic) by Suleiman Agon Kapak, c1882 (?)
Yiskāh MacFarlane Ni Molindar
a/k/a/ “Yiskāh the Protector”

b1956

trombonist, archer, swordswoman

German, Irish, Scots (Outer Hebrides)

One ancestor was a respected 19th century painter (Eamonn Heimeric Taiganear), born on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides islands, whose own great-grandfather MacFarlane had himself served in the Jacobite cause in the 1745 Rebellion, fought at Prestonpans. That Jacobite ancestor was in fact the amateur artist who caricatured the flight of the British general, Sir John Cope, on horseback from the field of battle, an anecdote that inspired the titanic piping tune “Hey Johnny Cope, Are You a-Waulkin’ [Waking] Yet?” Eamonn Heimeric (b1858), a contemporary of the Scottish genre painter David Wilkie, was especially well-known for his landscapes and images of wildlife and domestic animals, and Yiskāh herself, like several other members of the Band, was an avid amateur artist. She was mentored in this avocation by the Friend of Bassanda Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur; they appear together in the daguerreotypes and very early collotype “films” of the “Sand Pirates” Band taken by the notorious and eccentric genius Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who appears to have met the band in San Francisco c1883 through the efforts of Leland Stanford, Jr. (1824-93), robber baron, politician, and founder of the University that bears his son’s name.

Eamonn Taiganear the painter was also a cousin and contemporary of Lucretia Campbell MacPherson (1863-95), of Mull, the young bride of James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence, mother of Jefferson Washington, Miram, Dianthe, and Anthea, and who died of an undiagnosed heart condition at a tragically young age (see elsewhere in the Correspondence); hence, Yiskāh and the Habjar-Lawrence offspring—leaders in animal rights, steam- and alternative-powered locomotion, and revolutionary movements worldwide—were distant cousins (see The Lawrence Clan and the Ivy League, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

There was also a more obscure family relationship to the cellist Elzbieta Purves, whose Jacobite Mac Fhionghuinn ancestors hailed from Mull, also in the West of Scotland, and were gifted with the second sight; the precise nature of Elzbieta’s family connection to Yiskāh is unknown, as the cellist’s birth-date (and unnaturally long and unaging lifespan) were hotly debated. A closer and more immediate relation was to Yiskāh’s older cousin Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie (born Glasgow 1942 of Hebridean stock), whose ancestor George MacKenzie also served at Presonpans; after Culloden he fled to France and joined service of Maximilian III of Bavaria during the War of the Austrian Succession. Eventually his family intermarried with South German Catholics, the source of Yiskāh’s Robertsohn Bavarian antecedents.

She was one of the members of the 1967 Band who, having boarded the electromagnetic locomotive Sleipnir a/k/a “The Beast,” preparatory to departing on that year’s spring tour, was cast backward in time due to the Beast’s previously-unidentified activation as a time- and space-jumping “portable Rift.” This selfsame Rift Accident was the “Mysterious 1885 [really 1967] Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” documented elsewhere in the Correspondence, but also appears to have yielded a quantum-physics shift in space/times, as the Iliot shamans had foretold.[1] This would appear to account for the various images of the so-called “Sand Pirates” Band, from a parallel where-when circa 1881, in which the Great Electromagnetic Burn had rendered the North American Southwest and West largely inimical to electrical phenomena, thereby blanking-out both electrical communications and the internal combustion engine (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). These same results of the “Great Burn” would likewise account for the presence/absence of some Band members in the 1885 images versus those from ‘81—and for the various anecdotes of solo adventures for various members.

Her Scots Highlander background was also widely credited as the source of her fondness for edged weapons: in the c1881 “Sand Pirates Band,” at moments of necessity she wielded a hand-and-a-half sword (Scots Gaelic: claidheamh-mòr) which most in the Band found too heavy to lift. This fearsome weapon, which she called affectionately “Igor” (after her favorite composer—or, as she insisted, “favorite except Baba [Nas1lsinez]!”), was alleged to be constructed of an unusual high-tin bronze, not steel, and according to “Sand Pirates” folklore, could in her hands chop through the trunk of a palm or the block of a steam-car. “Igor” itself is lost—or, possibly, is still in her possession, in some parallel where/when—but scale replicas in the Archived Material Objects Collection at Miskatonic suggest that its blade was over 38 inches in length and weighed over 18 pounds. Tests with these replicas suggest that, provided the bronze were of sufficient quality, and were the wielder strong enough to employ, “Igor” could indeed have sliced through steel.

In the mythography of the BNRO, the low-brass section was comparatively unsung, but not underappreciated. Over the decades, it was the home of a succession of great players, whose powerhouse playing invariably lifted the band’s performances, especially live. But—as Yiskāh herself once said—“Eh, we’re low-brass dorks. We like good beer and comfortable shoes,” and it is true that the low-brass, with the notable and flamboyant exception of the tubist/designer Yūhannā Casco Encabezado, were generally content to provide the foundation and leave the fireworks to others. Yezget-Bey, however, was invariably appreciative and explicit in acknowledging their essential contribution: he is quoted as saying “They’re my heavy metal. The commissars fear us when the low brass play,” and it is certainly true that the world-shaking score for 1954’s Casting Out Snakes was inescapably dependent upon the low-brass playing that could, as the Founder said, “drive the snakes out of Ireland” (the piece was widely presumed to intend a metaphorical assault upon the “snakes” of the BSCC). More uniquely, Yiskāh was also a member of the Zanimayut Bassanda Dukhovoy Orkestr originally recorded on wax cylinder around 1910 by Bela Bartok (and also by James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence, following the adventure of the Great Train Ride for Bassanda) but which was then reconstituted under the leadership of the ex-partisan Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš in the 1960s, as part of the revolutionary movement that would work for the long-deferred day of liberation and democratic elections.

Yiskāh was in addition, a fine chef, capable of both locating foodstuffs, and conjuring edible meals from them, in the most arduous conditions on the road; she had excellent knife skills. Her “Anything Burritos” (e.g., “anything edible fits inside them!”) appear in the Bassandan Peoples’ Liberation Samizdat Cookbook, were eventually the cornerstone of a successful franchise of Ballyizget food-trucks a portion of whose profits was donated to homelessness- and hunger-abatement programs, and appear to reflect her own Scots/Bavarian/Bassandan take on the “little burro” that was a staple in Old Mexico.

Like many others in the BNRO including Maçdalija Gundisalvus and Xtaberri Le Gwo, Kalir Ourse Le Bois de Bouleau (among the Companions), Cifani Dhoma, and Nas1lsinez himself, she was a mürekkep kişi (Bassandan: “ink person”), and like Ani Hamim Gassion and Jēkvēlina Vovk, the ink designs on her body were capable of psycho-active and mandala-like capacities. Yiskāh for example carried on her back a large abstract pattern which friends claimed represented the magnetic ley lines of Uist in the Western Islands, and thus provided a “Rift mandala,” tracing of which could reveal to initiates the location of the Hebridean Rift portal (see Sian MacKenzie’s biograpy). Asked by the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History project why she would have a mandala on her back, Yiskāh replied cryptically “I can already ‘see’ what’s behind me…can’t you?”

Like others of the Habjar-Lawrence extended clan, and some in the Band including especially Nollag Käsityöläinen, she had a high facility for languages and took pleasure in acquiring local dialects and vocabularies (very often including highly impolite terminologies). Later in life, she owned a dacha in Bassanda’s Lakes district north of Ballyizget, a semi-arid region of canyons, small rivers, cottonwoods, and box elder, which echoed at night with the calls of foxes and owls. Its open floor plan was dotted with indigenous rugs, her significant collection of historical brass instruments, Asian art, rare orchestral scores, and esoteric edged weapons, with walls upon walls of books, and was home to both herself, and a series of enormous, ferociously loyal, and eccentric felines, the product of multiple generations of liaisons between the Scottish Fold cats she brought from the Hebrides and the indigenous Bassandan Barn Cats. There she resided, when off the road: cooking, reading, drawing, and serving as adored elder to generations of cousins, nieces, and nephews. On the stone-flagged floor of the dacha’s wide entry portico was reproduced the “Uist Mandala” she carried tattooed on her back.

Asked about its significance, she would reply: “Whenever I walk that pattern, I can see my way Home.”

[caption: Kodachrome (? Sic) of Yiskāh by Suleiman Agon Kapak, c1882 (?), Great Southwestern Desert]

[1] Bassandan: Qaerda-bo'lsa (literally: “where-whens”).

Jēkvēlina le Loup, c1970; photographer unknown
Jēkvēlina Vovk
dit “Jacqueline le Loup” (un nom de guerre)

Voice, dance, magic, kolesnoye skripku

b1945, Wrocław in Upper Silesia

Polish and German, Norse, Irish, Thule

Her earliest New World ancestors were survivors and descendants of various attempts by European explorers at a Northwest Passage, most centrally Viking explorers from the Greenland settlement, making their way north as they sought the route west. Those sea-rovers’ landfall is described in the Íslendingabók, authored by the 12th century priest Ari Þorgilsson (a/k/a “Ari the Wise”; Ari hinn fróði), as “Skraeling Island,” for it was there that Ari says Norse explorers met indigenous inhabitants (probably Thule tribespeople). The westernmost settlements of Scandinavians in North America (on the west coast of Newfoundland) appear to have become defunct by the middle of the 15th century CE, but North American indigenous peoples’ culture would continue to be a part of her family identity. She was therefore possibly related both to Emmiana Garrett Danesi's ancestor John Joe Garret (1863-1928), who married an Inuit woman and traversed the Bering Strait around 1900, and to Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton’s Abenaki relatives; a family story has it that the mimetic “Wolf Dance” of Vovk clan gatherings in northern Bassanda was actually an Inuit inheritance.

Others of her Norwegian and Icelandic ancestors adventured south and east along the great European rivers, eventually serving in the Varangian Guards at Constantinople. She was thus related by lineage and experience to the berserker/singer Nāṯānas Hús a/k/a “Heimdallr Av Stemmen” (“Heimdall of the Voices”), and like him had Scandinavian ancestors who settled in the Bassandan Uplands. Others emigrated west in the early 19th century, settling in the Upper Midwest of the USA; one of her great-uncles played on the House of David religious community’s exhibition baseball team with “Pat the Yank” O’Leary, father Séamus (“Jamey”) Mac Padraig O Laoghaire in the BNRO.

Among her eastward-bound Norse ancestors, who traveled by the continent’s great rivers (especially the Dnjepr and Weichsel), were mercenary soldiers turned merchants, who settled at Krakow, Liviv, and Odessa, and formed a highly effective trans-national clan of craftspeople and literary artisans. In the wake of the German Anschluss of 1939, her parents met in Breslau as teenaged recruits to the Olimp (“Olympus”) resistance organization, founded in 1941, which organized clandestine escape routes, gathered tactical information, and communicated with the Polish government in exile in London. They escaped the group’s betrayal to the Gestapo, but were forced to flee over the southwestern frontier into Czechoslovakia, where they continued their partisan resistance activities, carried map coordinates which helped them to direct Churchill’s ad hoc air drops of supplies during the Warsaw Uprising; her father personally calculated and transmitted the radio coordinates for the US Army Air Force’s airdrop during Operation Frantic. Jēkva was conceived in a safe house in Prague, and born at Breslau a few days before 8 May 1945, VE Day. Her parents once more escaping over yet another contested frontier, they eventually arrived in Bassanda, having traveled by donkey cart, truck, and on foot, over 300 miles from Prague, and took refuge with cousins in the northern foothills; there is an unsubstantiated story that the little family arrived, ragged and nearly barefoot, in the upland village of Rānīkō (from Rānī kō hilsa, “Queen of the Hills”), as the first snow of late 1945 was falling—the town being nearly deserted by those who had fled the Soviet reconquest of Bassanda in late 1942 (though “the Cossacks” tended to avoid the small mountain towns, which were rife with partisans and anti-fascist guerilla fighters).

There was considerable ambiguity and, more significantly, misinformation in the canon regarding her own upbringing, probably resulting from Soviet-period prejudices against indigenous educational and parenting models. She and her two brothers were alleged, for example, to have been wild children abandoned and somehow surviving in the deep pine forests of the uplands; it was even said that they had been raised by wolves. Yet the Vovk siblings were in no way “feral”— simply watchful, quiet, and rather “inward”; sensitive to the natural world and (especially) the cycle of the seasons; attracted to hilly forests and watersheds; knowledgeable in the folkways of plants and animals. More obscure though possibly more plausible rumors connected the children to the Parvatamā mānisaharū, the huge shaggy bipeds who roamed above the treeline of Fi Talat Ixwan, the “Three Brothers” mountain chain of which Annolungma, the tallest, was the source of Ab Almyah, “the Father of Waters”: the sacred river that fertilized Bassanda’s central highlands. Their Scandinavian bloodlines recurred in their engagement with other totem animals as well: she carried a pair of ravens, evoking Odin’s advisers Huginn and Muninn (Old Norse “thought” and “memory”), tattooed one on each shoulder.

Raised in Stalinist Bassanda, she was nevertheless exposed to trends in the post-WWII liberation trends in arts and culture, especially the Western literary revolution of the Beats and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Her parents ensured that she was aware of new revolutionary undercurrents within the national borders, as well, providing her opportunities to study music, dance, and folkloric handicrafts (especially pottery) in the youth programs at Habjar-Lawrence’s woodland summer enrichment camps, and via correspondence courses sponsored by Ballyizget City University. She also studied in more traditional methods, spending time with Iliot healers, shamans, and plant-doctors. She shared with several other members of the Band, in various eras, not-insignificant paranormal and clairvoyant capacities (see the singer/dancers Морган (“Морган”) and Kaciaryna Ўітмэна, the cellists Maçdalija Gundisalvus and Elzbieta Purves, and most notably the Outer Hebrides-born composer Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Her family likewise maintained their Central European connections, traveling clandestinely to and from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and even points further west, before returning to the northern Bassandan hills. She was present for example during the fabled visit by Allen Ginsberg to Prague in May 1965, when the Beat superstar was crowned Kral Majales or “King of the May” before being ejected by the secret police. In her early twenties, as a firebrand student leader of the ’68 Prague Spring uprisings, she would be part of the doomed resistance to the dismantlement of Dubcek’s reforms. There is an iconic Literarni Listy photograph of her, long hair flying, as she hurls a Molotov cocktail at the approaching Soviet T-28 tanks—Electric Trees frontwoman, and later post-communist Parliamentary leader Polli Kilotona (b1952) said of this image “J,ekva was who I wanted to be.”

In the early 1970s, however, after the shattering of the 1960s cultural revolutions, she “went to ground” in the capitol city, reconnecting with her eastern cousins and avoiding contact with the feared Agentstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the State Security police. In Ballyizget, her cover was as dancer and visual artist, but she was also a member of the Kolʹorova Skrypka pid Zemleyu, the underground society of players of the hurdy-gurdy called the kolesnoye skripku, an instrument which carried such strong associations with Bassandan ethnic identity that its practices had been banned under Stalin, like the better-known Ukrainian kobza or zither players,. As in post-1745 Scotland or pre-1980 Rhodesia, and various other totalitarian regimes worldwide, “ethnic” (that is to say, indigenous) instruments and music styles were themselves repressed, feared as both symbols and—occasionally—catalysts of revolutionary consciousness. In the case of the folklore revival in Bassanda, there was a strong, though necessarily only implicit, connection between playing the instrument of indigenous identity, and the willingness to engage in revolutionary activity on behalf of that identity; as the KSpZ slogan had it, Hraty koli - tse zvilʹnyty lyudsʹkyy dukh (“To play the kole is to liberate the human spirit”).[1]

Despite the risk, she nevertheless maintained a tendency to speak out, on issues of ethnic and indigenous identity and culture; even when criticized or condemned by officialdom as a snaruzhi, an “outside meddler,” she understood the symbolic power of folkloric expressions. As a folklorist (possibly an émigré) himself interested in vernacular culture. Yezget-Bey commented, “That she is an outsider is her strength—she has no cohort, and therefore the commissars cannot entrap her.”

She was later (around 1978, through the medium of the kole underground) connected to the French-born electric bassist Džonatan Výrobca (though that name and nationality are uncertain—other accounts connect him to the tragic Finnish virtuoso Jakob Biskopsstav, who died in 1976): romantic stories of their first meetings were the subject of tour-bus folklore.[2] She and Výrobca were integral to the late-1980s revival of one Bassandan tradition with the legendary poly-stylistic Tanz-volk drone band Naktis Žiūrėti, which included the piper Rogov Szczur Lądowy, the 5-string fiddle player Jakov Redžinald (years after he had ceased touring with the BNRO), Madame Main-Smith (on those occasions when she reappeared via Rift Portal in the appropriate space-time context), and the mysterious гармо́нь (button accordion) player Yeffersūnus Vynosula. She sang under the legendary Faroese conductor & teacher Jens Dahout na Uilyam of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, and she was present on the Ballyizget night in 1980 when an ad hoc choir from H-LC “sang the commissars out of the castle,” ending the negotiations which dissolved the central Soviet and set Bassanda on the path toward free democratic elections (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

In the 1990s, in the quieter days of the post-perestroika democracy, she lived in a small converted coach-house in Ballyizget’s university quarter, not far from Výrobca’s loft, which sat behind Habjar-Lawrence’s 17th century buildings. Its open floor plan was home to cats, dogs, ceramics, and books, and its rear doors opened onto an enclosed courtyard were sat her potting wheels and kilns.

Its medieval oak double front doors, tall and wide enough to admit a coach-and-four, were carved in relief with a pair of ravens.

[photo captioni: Jēkvēlina, c1970; photographer unknown]

[1] Грати колі - це звільнити людський дух.

[2] The chronicles mention a Tale of Vovk and Výrobca, which is alleged to “explain” the story of Biskopsstav’s death, and of Výrobca’s “rebirth,” via her magical intercession, but that tale has not yet been located in the Archives. Additional—and possibly paranormal—investigations may be required.

Sionainn, 1957, solo from Bedfordshire; photo by Cifani Dhoma
Sionainn “Boudicca” Biraz de St-Denis
of the Thirteen Wise Companions

b1937

French, Breton, Bassandan, Sarmatian, Irish?

She was born in Normandy at Saint-Denis-le-Gast, in proximity to the windswept waters of the English Channel and the island cathedral of Mont St-Michel. This meant in turn that she would have been exposed, even as a young child, to the Anglo-French culture of the Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) and the lawlessness of the fishing and smuggling port of St-Malo, which in the 19th century was literally known as le cité corsair, the “pirate town.”

Her St.-Denis relations in turn connected her to the family of Binyamin Biraz Ouiz (see elsewhere in the Correspondence) in the smuggling trade between Brittany, the Channel Islands, and Devon, all the way back to Drake’s victory over the Armada. Irish pirates from Wexford and Waterford, raiding into the English Channel, likewise shaped this polyglot Atlantic culture. She was thus also related at some remove to Cécile Lapin, heroine and narrator of the Great Train Ride for Bassanda, and to Lapin’s medieval family of scholars and copyists at Mont Saint-Michel.

It is interesting to note that her place-based surname itself once again evokes the running-water motif that recurs throughout the Thirteen Wise Companions’ saga; the English constituents of “Saint-Denis” are sīd (extensive, wide) and ieg (island in a river, riverside meadow); “St.-Denis” was thus a place name, “Sydney” a topographical specific. The nickname “Boudicca,” employed within the context of the Companions (and a usage jealously forbidden to outsiders), was a reference to the 1st century CE Queen of the Britons who resisted the Roman incursion, to her mother’s warrior heritage, and to the blue- and black-ink tattoos that extensively decorated her own body.

Her mother came from a family of Sarmatian background, an ethnic minority found mostly in the northern reaches of the Bassandan Alps and related to archaic minorities known in Asia Minor and the South Urals; it is likely that her martial background was an inheritance of this, as Sarmatian women were semi-legendary as warriors and matriarchal rulers. Her maternal uncles, both Bassandan and Breton, had participated in the early infiltration that preceded the Allies invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and in the wake of that successful campaign fought again in the brutal house-to-house combat at St-Malo. Highly respected woodsmen, watermen, and mountaineers, as well as sharpshooters and smugglers, her uncles subsequently were likewise involved in the breakout from Normandy in July 1944, assisting in the linkup of Free French forces between the paratroop battalion of the US 75th Rangers, Colonel Thompson, and Ismail Durang. Though her mother was a noted combat soldier herself—and would so serve later on, with the Forest Brethren partisans—with a 7-year-old child, she opted instead to flee the chaos of Operation Overlord and proceed eastward, from whence rumors of the Soviet “liberation” of Bassanda from Nazi occupation had trickled westward.

As regards the patriarchal line, Sionainn tended to avoid answering questions (even those posed by the simpatico interlocutors of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project), and chose to employ the surname of her mother’s kind. In fact, she would sometimes claim either that she did not know her father’s identity, or that he had been killed before she was even born; regardless, it does seem possible that whatever encounter had led to her conception was a brief and not particularly happy one. She was instead raised within a women-empowered and matriarchal environment in Bassanda, though there are recurrent echoes of Irish/Celtic cultural inheritance in her story which are not accounted for in the mother’s line.

For that matter, she was not the only person within the orbit of the BNRO, or even of the Thirteen themselves, to have suffered abuse at the hands of those who should have been protectors: both Kristina Olenev and Kulamani Llandaff Callan, among others, coped with similar painful past histories. But, as she said herself, “I hate that it happened. But it made me fierce. And now I won’t let it happen to others.”

She took from her mother the example of the matriarchal clans of Bassandan military women and freedom fighters; the mother in fact even became a member of the legendary Cell #1 in early 1944, at a time when that woman-centered underground group of Resistance fighters had largely converted from sabotage of the retreating Nazis, and was turning to meet the new threat posed by the Soviet “liberators.” Eventually, however, her mother was exposed to the AGB (the dreaded Agentstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Bassandan Stalinist secret police) and had to flee the capitol of Ballyizget, first into the surrounding forests, and subsequently over the frontiers to the West.

Thus, a de facto orphan, in 1943 she was recruited at the age of six into the junior choir of the Bassanda Youth Orchestra, which had been formed by Madame Szabo c1938, to serve not only as a performance organization but indeed a children’s group home, and which continued its anti-fascist activities in the period after the Soviet re-conquest in late ’42. She likewise continued her mother’s work with the women of Cell #1 (“My aunties and my sisters,” she called them), for whom BYO children served as clandestine observers and couriers. She thus largely “grew up” within the context of the extended tribal family of the BYO.

By the age of thirteen (1950) she had encountered the Орла Сердце сестры or “Eagles’ Heart Sisters,” the all-woman troupe of dancers upon whom Nijinska had set her Xlbt Op. 16, the so-called “Bassanda Rite of Spring,” later recognized as a watershed work, and had been accepted as an apprentice member. She brought to the junior troupe a fierce, wounded openness; a willingness to engage difficult or painful subject matter very directly; and, even as a teen, a not-inconsiderable taste for lambec, the potent Breton liquor made from apples, which recipe she had from the Biraz Ouiz clan and taught to local Bassandan distillers, and to the members of the BNRO.

Like Maçdalija Gundisalvus and Xtaberri Le Gwo, Kalir Ourse Le Bois de Bouleau (among the Companions), Cifani Dhoma, and Nas1lsinez himself, she was one of many in the BNRO orbit who self-identified as a mürekkep kişi; that is, in Bassandan, literally an “ink person”: someone who carried bodily decoration in the form of tattoos which hold ”autobiographical, cosmological, and/or psychoactive significance” [see Suleiman Agon Kapak, “The Mürekkep Kişi: a Southeastern European Body-Mandala Tradition,” in The Journal of the International Society for Bassanda Studies 24 (Summer 1993), 19.] Like others among this group of “mürekkeps,” it was alleged that chanting based upon the inked patterns on her body, or—in some cases—simply tracing the designs with a forefinger, could activate paranormal experiences.

As an adult, in the wake of the Thirteen Wise Companions’ transformative summer at Bedford in 1957, she would become a strong and vocal advocate for dance and theater education, particularly for differently-abled children (this broad-based commitment to expanding arts-educational opportunities for diverse students in Bassanda very significantly predated similar sensitivity in the West). Like the exotic dancer Feye Keijukainen Arndt, who (born 1903 on New York’s Lower East Side) long before preceded her in the Band, she was a specialist in sign language and an advocate for awareness of special education needs, and also like Feye (“Shayshay” on the BNRO bus), was a teacher of BSL (Bassandan Sign language), which was both indebted to the sign-language of Native Americans and indigenous pre-Christian Iliot nomadic culture, and also reputed to carry psychoactive and paranormal communicative capacities. Within the realm of dance, she was an advocate for the full and equal inclusion of diverse body types, ethnicities, gender identities, and aptitudes. She was likewise dedicated to animals, and a supporter of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory’s inclusion of Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics as part of artistic training. She was likewise dedicated to a succession of Bassandan Barn Cats, most of whom she named after her Breton aunts and uncles, while felines figure repeatedly in her mature choreography and photography.

Her own totem animal among the Thirteen Wise Companions, however, as they were immortalized in Messiaen’s masterwork Catalog d’oiseaux, was the tawny owl known as Chouette hulotte, or, in Gwerz, “Chats-Huant,” a code word for the “silent ones” (partisans) who opposed Napoleon’s troop levees in the western provinces, and who reappeared during the Nazi occupation. La Chouette has dark brown or umber eyes, prefers woodlands, and mates for life, fiercely defending her territory and her brood.

She was just twenty when she joined Nijinska, de Quareton, Nas1lsinez, and the Wise Companions at Bedford, in the summer of 1957.

Dāwūd Ala Alnuhra (second from left) with colleagues of the Habjar-Lawrence Faculty Quartet, c1970
Dāwūd Ala Alnuhra

Conductor, composer, violist

Born c1900 Näsara, Ingushetia

Scots, Ashkenazic, Ingush, Bassandan ethnicity

A descendent of the Scottish explorer Quentin Durward of Glen-houlakin, whose accounts of mid-19th century adventures in the Caucasus were collected in his reminiscence “Caged in China.”[1] A child prodigy, Dāwūd was trained in string-playing and composition at Moscow Conservatory in the last days of the Tsarist regime. It was exceptionally unusual for an “ethnic”—or even more, a “mongrel ethnic”—to enroll at the Conservatory, but such was his talent that the legendary X insisted he should e admitted, and indeed receive a bursary that made possible the financial burden. It was there that he encountered his nearly exact contemporary Nas1lsinez, a scholarship student from Ballyizget. Like Nas1lsinez, he was profoundly ambivalent about the Tsarist regime’s behavior toward both ethnic minorities and adjacent free territories—he was related by blood to Imam Shamil of Daghestan, who had led the abortive Nazran Insurrection—but also like Nas1lsinez, he was a subtle thinker who understood the complex avenues of advancement in an imperial bureaucracy. And, as his concertmistress Estafinia X once said, in another context, “The Maestro always played a long game.”

As a teenager, on holidays from Moscow, Alnuhra played viola in the salons of pre-Soviet Ballyizget, in that (briefly) halcyon period between the fading influence of the decaying Tsarist regime and the advent of World War I. Madame Main-Smith reminisced:

Ballyizget in those years was the fairy-tale capitol that those overfed burghers always claimed Vienna to be, and wasn’t—I don’t care what Schorske said, Vienna was always imperial first, and artistic second. In Vienna, the intelligent artists were the ones who figured out how to be just sufficiently outrageous that the burghers were titillated instead of intimidated. But in Bassanda, the real leaders of society were the artists, dancers, and musicians—the bankers and journalists and big farmers hung on their words and happily sponsored their performances. And Dāwūd was one of the great cultural figures of those days: a fantastic violist, a passionate teacher, and on top of that he looked like a Ruritanian hero: this majestic figure with long hair and huge hands. Most of the orchestral women and not a few of the men were in love with him. Especially when he came back from Moscow, with the Imperial cachet upon him.

Even in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, he retained his orchestral and directorial positions—he was too valuable a musician and organizer to be left idle. As a result, he was positioned to serve as a significant influence upon the conceptions of Yezget Nas1lsinez, whom he encountered again in the early 1930s, in Ballyizget, for the foundation of the BNRO. A very noted architect of Bassanda’s late orchestral renaissance in the progressive Leninist years of the 1920s, he subsequently served as an example for Yezget-Bey’s foundation of the ad hoc People’s Liberation Orchestra in the early ‘40s.

He was a master of late 19th century Viennese music, but was also profoundly influenced by Bartok’s pre-WWI explorations of folklore as a foundation for the composition of nationalist musics. He participated with Bartok in the 1919 Revolution and collected with him in the Carpathian Basin, and so there was a close parity in their perspectives upon the possible and creative dynamic relationships between “peasant” music and “new music.” He was aware of the experiments of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but maintained a primary performance and research focus upon folklore, and (discreetly) upon the cause of Bassandan cultural independence—in later years being revered for his inclusive and holistic perspective upon a wide diversity of “folk” and “classical” musics.

As a chamber musician and conductor, he had a range of specializations, including especially experimental composers of the younger generation, and an affinity for what might be called, for lack of a better description, “difficult” situations. He had first been appointed to head Habjar-Lawrence by Vilyum Balandjeor, in the depths of the Stalinist repression of the mid-1930s, after a period described in H-LC folklore as “the dark time” when a directorial commissar installed by the Kremlin had attempted to bring “rectitude” to its anarchic and wildly creative curriculum and founding faculty. The Conservatory had been nationalized in 1917, the old Tsarist title of Русское музыкальное общество (Russian Musical Society) and its imperialistic curriculum both being replaced by a experimental curriculum in the model of Zoltán Kodály’s experiments in Hungary—although sadly, this progressive curriculum would be eradicated under the wave of Socialist Realism in the 1930s. In the wake of that more conservative turn, Ala Alnuhra chose to accept more and more engagements in Central and Western Europe—he even made one tour of the United States, as guest conductor and string coach, with the assistance and advocacy of the Russian-born conductor Sergei Koussevitsky (1874-1951), in 1947. He displayed a subtle capacity for espousing Soviet ideals in Los Angeles and western democratic ones behind the Curtain, thus obscuring—for the sake of the cultural commissars who closely monitored Bassandan artistic leaders’ public pronouncements—his own political positions, rather as Shostakovich is said to have done.

It is also said that he had a peripheral role in the 1951 incident at the Romanian 4th Territorial Army Corps barracks at Cluj-Napoca, when Madame Szabo and her family, drinking plum brandy and smoking cigars in the basement with the Romany janitorial staff, are alleged to have “accidentally” burned the building to the ground. Though the Maestro was not directly involved, it was later remarked that he had in fact been leading a “special, by-invitation-only” chamber concert for 4th Corps command staff at a salon across town, and that those command staff were significantly delayed in responding to the fire.

During the gradual relaxation of Stalin-era restrictions in the mid-1950s, after Kruschev, who favored more extensive cultural exchange with the West, his durable stature as a conductor positioned him to work as an advocate for other, younger, and more experimental artists, both within and beyond Habjar-Lawrence’s walls. He was especially noted for his contribution as a mentor to youth ensembles, and his graduates went on to lead orchestras all around the world. He was a bearish giant of a man, who children (and adults) trusted implicitly.

He was especially beloved by the BNRO and ESO string players who had worked under his baton: Elzbieta Purves, Etxaberri le Gwo, Federica Rozhkov, Jérome Courvalle, Krzysztof Arcczewski, Maçdalija Gundisalvus, and Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī. There is a touching anecdote from his respected senior conducting student Aedan Timor Yvika in the official Correspondence, about the Maestro’s final performance at Habjar-Lawrence before his retirement, referencing his last concertmistress:

I looked out from the stage-left wings, and I could see all the way across the stage to the first violins. And Estefania X, the Romany prodigy who had her first lessons from Gruenberg, and had played for Alnuhra for years, was ripping into the final theme. But she wasn’t even looking at the score anymore, her eyes were just locked on him…and there were tears streaming down her face.

He was a lifelong friend of the choral conductor and composer Jens Dahout na Uilyam, himself a hero of Bassanda’s 1985 “Soft Revolution,” which had been led by the ex-punk rock singer and political activist Polli Kilotona. Maestro Ala Alnuhra was also one of the few who could talk na Uilyam down from one of his higher-dudgeon rages against “the Commissars.” And even after his—repeatedly postponed—retirement, he was regarded by generations of Habjar-Lawrence musicians as an artistic father figure and inspiration.

Concertmistress Eren Ni Fíodóir, who played for him the longest, put it most simply.

She said, “I would have died for him.”

[photo: Dāwūd Ala Alnuhra (second from left) with colleagues of the Habjar-Lawrence Faculty Quartet, c1970. There is no conventional explanation for his appearance as a young, vital man, given that he was just over 70 years of age when the image was taken. However, Rift transformative experience may have been involved.]

[1] Stanley Lane-Poole, "Caged in China," The English Illustrated Magazine 12 (reissued New York: MacMillan, 1895), 11.

Kali of the Companions, Bedford ENG, Summer 1957
Kalir Ourse Le Bois de Bouleau

Norman French, Moroccan French, Scots, Saint-Dominguese?

b c1936

A shape-shifter like Yakub Sanjo d’Aunai, Nollag Käsityöläinen, and Ана Ljubak de Quareton (of whom she may have been a distant cousin, via her Lowland Scots ancestry), but especially similar in certain paranormal details, and in her ursine alter ego, to Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, the Sámi dancer, vintner, and vernacular ecologist.

Her family line included ancestors from across North Europe, but the central England / Netherlandish strains were particularly central and appear to have most significantly shaped her cultural inheritance. Her Norman “de Berchalai” ancestors appear in the Domesday Book as early as 1086, just a couple of decades after the Anglo-Saxon defeat at Hastings. The surname is thought to derive from the Old English “be(o)rc” leah (literally “birch wood”), and the tree itself carried associations in pre-Christian Celtic nature-teachings with growth, renewal, stability, initiation, and adaptability; its parallel association with the potable birch beer perhaps likewise connotative of “adaptability”!

Through the late medieval and Renaissance periods, there was considerable trade and intellectual exchange between the Low Countries and the English counties of Norfolk, Sussex, and Essex, driven particularly by the market for wool. In fact, one of Kali’s Lowland Scots ancestors, William Barclay (circa 1570 - 1630), obtained an M.A. and a medical degree at Louvain outside of Brussels, and eventually became a professor of humanities at the Université de Paris, ending his days practicing medicine in Scotland. His best-known publication remains Nephenthes, or, The Vertues of Tobacco (published Edinburgh, 1614), an ode to moderation in the worship of the Goddess Nicotina, in which he advises that his readers should “not, as the English abusers do, to make a smoke box of their skulls, more fit to be carried under his arm…than to carry the brain of him that cannot walk, cannot ride except the tobacco pipe be in his mouth.”[1]

William Barclay died in 1630 at Nantes in Bretagne, and thus provides a direct geographic connection to the Biraz Ouiz clan of smugglers, musicians, and teachers at Pontivy in Brittany (see Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, elsewhere in the Correspondence). Though most of her (very diverse) family lines were of western or eastern European extraction, there is some thinking that she might also have had more recent connections with the Big Bend region of the Republic of Texas some ancestors having migrated there from Moravia during the Mittel-Europe revolutions of the 1840s. Her maternal grandfather, a native Texan, had served on the Western Front with the American Expeditionary Force in 1917-’18, later staying behind to marry a French girl and resettle in Normandy; Kalir was born and raised at Varades on the upper reaches of the Loire.

Europeans were apparently not her only ancestors from the American Southwest: she carried on one shoulder blade a black-ink tattoo of an extinct bear, reproduced from a prehistoric Native American pictograph in what is now the Hot Springs Historic District. Both Southwest and Southeast Tejas regional culture appear to have shaped her family’s background: in addition to the Native American parts of her lineage, it has been alleged that she, like the violinist Xtaberri le Gwo, was kin to the Lafitte pirate family who had been based at New Orleans and Galveston Island in the late 18th century.

She and her parents were on board the S.S. St Louis when that Hamburg-registered liner attempted in 1939 to carry over 900 Jewish refugees to safety in Cuba, but was denied entrance at Havana and Miami, and eventually returned to Antwerp, where a significant majority of the passengers were interned by the Nazis. Kali and her parents were shipped east, but in a random accident, the railroad car within which they were confined was shunted aside by Jewish sympathizers, diverted from the northern route which ran to the death camps in Poland, instead traveling southeast through Germany, Austria, and Hungary, before they were disembarked in the Židovska Četrtina (Jewish ghetto) of Ballyizget.

As a result, she appeared at the age of six in the Ballyizget production of the notorious children’s opera Dzhmelʹ, which was composed by Kaciaryna de Vêtir in the occupied capital of Bassanda under the German overlords’ diktat in 1941. It was intended that the opera should serve as the vehicle for films for Nazi propaganda films to be released to the international Red Cross, hence “proving,” like the notorious children’s opera Brundibár, the “benignity” of the German occupation. In fact, Kali, like several others of the cast was serving as a hostage for the surrender of her parents, who were on the run from the secret police. However, in contrast to the Czech Brundibár, which was composed by Hans Krása for a children’s orphanage in Prague, and later performed at Theresienstadt before most of the cast were murdered at Auschwitz, the after-story of the Bassandan production of Dzhmel’ (literally, “The Badger”—a Bassanda icon of cunning, endurance, and longevity) was quite different: though the Nazis’ intent was again genocidal, the tale ended differently: the train upon which the Dzhmel’ cast and creative team were confined was ambushed and liberated outside Ballyizget by a party of Pădure Fraților (“Forest Brethren”) commanded by the teenaged Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

The Brethren reported a strange tale: the train was found deserted, its crew disappeared. Yet the locomotive’s engine room and the interiors of the guards’ cars were spattered with blood—and, running down the snowy bed of the railroad ties, were the marks of what looked like tiny ursine paws. Cait’s guerrillas found the child Kali naked but unperturbed, cross-legged in the snow next to the locked boxcars, singing the traditional Japanese children’s song “Sho Sho Shojoji” (“The Badger”) to herself. And she looked on quite placidly as the Brethren, fearing the worst, rolled back the doors of the boxcars, only to find the prisoners, both children and adults, quite unscathed. Only after they had bundled the rescued prisoners onto horses, to make their escape up in the hills, and the little girl was riding on Cait’s saddlebow, did the partisan leader dare ask what had happened. Kali replied calmly, “My mama always told me I was a little bear, and I shouldn’t misbehave just because I could. Except, she said, when I needed to protect someone—then it was all right to do what I had to. So that’s what I did.”[2] Upon reflection, Cait chose not to inquire further about the disappeared Nazis, but simply hummed the child to sleep, lulling her with the horse’s easy gait.

Growing up nearly parentless in post-war Ballyizget (her parents remained underground for the duration of the Soviet occupation, all the way into the early 1980s), she developed a quiet, watchful demeanor, one that took in the behaviors and conduct of those around her but remained reticent and introspective. She was an open and generous-hearted collaborator, but tended to avoid heart-on-sleeve emotional revelations. She was comfortable and at peace alone, especially in the deep forests, a trait common among many of the BNRO personnel, and even among the Zen hunters of the Bassanda lineage exhibited a remarkable affinity for both animals and the natural world.

She was deeply involved in the progressive and little theaters of Ballyizget as a teen in the early 1950s, and was in fact one of the sources for new ideas from the experiments of Juliusz Osterwa in Poland and Anna Sokolow in New York City (via her Barclay relatives in the New World. She was an avid dancer and traveler, self-reliant and inner-directed, but generous and kind to collaborators. In early adulthood—as in the case of the hair-raising stories of her wartime childhood—she would not abide injustice.

She was just turned 21 when she joined Nijinska, de Quareton, Nas1lsinez, and the Wise Companions at Bedford, in the summer of 1957.

[photo caption: Kalir of the Companions, Bedford ENG, Summer 1957]

[1] See Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization, 100.

[2] This tale is an eerie parallel to those of the British regulars who were obliterated by howling clansmen and—allegedly—a gigantic silver wolf, in the forests of upstate New York in 1814 (see Ана Ljubak de Quareton, elsewhere in the Correspondence) and of the more recent Talvisota (Winter War) of Finland in 1939-40, when members of the invading Russian 7th Army were terrified by the night assaults of “the red-eyed commandos” (Krasnyye glaza komma); see Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, likewise.

"Max Shrek" as "Nosferatu" in the film of the same name (1922). Výrobca notoriously resistant to portraits (see biographical sketch).
Džonatan Výrobca (alias?)
Bassist, historian, iconographer, oenologist, Rift theorist

born c1920; location and nationality uncertain, though his 1940s familiarity with the bohemian neighborhoods of various European capitals, including the Left Bank and Montmartre in Paris, the old city of Pest, Praga in Warsaw, and Žižkov in Prague, suggests a peripatetic early experience. The likeliest origin story has him born as “Jean de Maréchal-Ferrant” in the Loire Valley of France, the son of a winemaker’s daughter from Roanne and a soldier who had served with the American Expeditionary Force, and raised among the vineyards and tributaries of that lush canton, with frequent travel to Paris as part of his maternal relatives’ wine-export business. Years later, Madame Algeria—herself a quite remarkable polymath—commented: “we always surmised he might have come from the aristocracy, originally, but he never spoke of any noble antecedents. It was more just a manner of how he carried himself, and the things—wine, food, languages, medieval history—that he just seemed to know, almost like an inheritance.”

On the other hand, another account suggests him to have been born “Džonatan Výrobca,” in Bassanda around 1920, though any records which might confirm or contradict this alternate account were destroyed during the aerial bombings that preceded the Nazi Anschluss in the winter of 1939-40. There is however a dog-eared, much used library card in the Archives at Miskatonic, dated 1932 and made out to “D. Výrobca,” issued by the Biblioteka Nationale in Ballyizget (a remarkable collection which had been modernized, under a commission from Tsar Alexander III, by the Belgian Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet in the 1870s).

At any rate, as “Džonatan Výrobca,” he more reliably appears in the Bassandan orbit in November of 1936 as a teenaged bicycle messenger, liaising with the International Brigades during the Nationalist defense of Madrid. Proponents of the Loire Valley story of his birth suggest that, running away from home “to fight the Fascists,” he crossed the border at Couflens in the French Pyrenees in the preceding August, just after the coup that fractured the Republican army command. Inside the city, the incognito General was expediting the clandestine importation of specialized arms based in Bassandan Rift theory and was directly in contact with Nas1lsinez, based in New York and working through clandestine Republican sympathizers in the first Roosevelt administration; it is said that Výrobca smuggled both Documents and essential circuitry, under the guise of delivering baguettes and coffee across the lines to the besieging Franco forces.

The ground-breaking Rift theorist Professor Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti, headquartered in Bassanda in the late 1930s, was ostensibly conducting electromagnetic experiments investigating the propulsion methods of the locomotive known in Bassandan folklore as The Beast, but it would appear that the Doctor was also working with the ancient Documents of Peace which had been smuggled to Ballyizget by Cécile Lapin and Ismail Durang in the Oughts, but which were seemingly lost again, until they reappeared at Dolpu in the Hindu Kush in the early 1970s. It is openly questioned whether the Documents were even traced between the Great Train Ride for Bassanda in ’06 and the 1970s, or whether they were entirely lost, or indeed subsequently forged. But at least one of these circuits, the PET—Prokhorov Electromagnetic Tractor—appears to have traveled successfully from Bassanda to Paris, and then into Madrid, by the General via Džonatan, and to have been successfully field-tested: on the night of 23rd November, during the worst of the aerial bombardments by the Fascist Condor Legion, six wings of Junkers Ju-86 bombers crashed in succession during their approach-runs. An anonymous eyewitness, a member of the French-speaking Louise Michel Battalion of volunteers—or perhaps Džonatan himself—left a reminiscence:

They came in waves from the West, over Villanueva, and they came up out of the red sunset like storm crows. And we knew that sound, of the sirens on their wings. I was picket at the western lines, and I saw them coming, and then, just as the first wave appeared, silhouetted against the sun, it was like they just twisted aside—like a wind came and flipped them over end upon end, and blew them into the ground, one wave after another.

Regardless of his role, or absence thereof, during the siege, Výrobca drops out of sight after the fall of Madrid to the Fascists in early 1939, and only resurfaces in Ballyizget, during the Nazi occupation, in the winter of 1941-42: lean and pale, dressed in ragged castoffs and surplus. To the casual eye, he resembled the other Displaced Persons who passed through the capitol at this period, some evicted from farmsteads, others fleeing the former frontiers and current combat zones, as the Soviet counter-offensive inched forward. Such persons kept an exceptionally low profile, flitting from one bombed-out block to the next, scavenging for food or metals, avoiding the daytime Nazi patrols (though the Germans learned that to send out a foot or truck patrol in the unlit nighttime back streets of Ballyizget was to markedly decrease the odds of the patrol’s return), appearing like nocturnal creatures only after the red sun had set, lighting up the grey rain and black smoke clouds to the east. To a more discerning eye—say, that of Nas1lsinez, who he seems to have met in this period—Výrobca stood out among the other refugees in his air of calm competence, in the sophistication of his language skills, and in the facility with which he deflected direct inquiries about his past.

For there was more to him than the typical DP. Documents from his wartime record in the Correspondence, still embargoed since the fall of the Bassandan Communist Party, are alleged to link him to the legendary Cell #1, the urban resistance group founded c1939 by Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton, Kristina Olenev, and Terésa-Marie Szabo, and operating clandestinely in Ballyizget, as liaison to the partisan guerrillas of the Forest Brethren. He appears to have been brought into contact with the women of the Cell through Jēkvēlina Vovk, a dancer and later kolo player and visual artist, and to have lent his expertise to the nascent Bassandan Bicycle Corps as they developed anti-imperialist motorcycle-sabotage techniques.

Though he kept a low profile throughout the Occupation, it was not uncommon to see him bicycling to various café jobs in the nightclubs frequented by Nazi officers, his double bass balanced across his back. While he drew a degree of scrutiny from Wehrmacht patrols, he was typically allowed to pass unmolested, carrying as he did an Ausweis granting him passage to and from gigs—the fact that the occupiers found him a reliable source of smuggled brandy and French champagne possibly facilitating this official leniency. Ever afterward, Vovk was exceptionally elliptical in describing just exactly what his clandestine service to Cell #1 had entailed—though that same service, decades later in the 1980s, earned him a commendation from the democratic government of Polli Kilotona. The commendation, couched in the very careful language which Kilotona, a former activist and the first leader of the Republic after the fall of the Soviet regime, typically employed to describe radical actions and “wet work,” reads as follows:

A commendation for meritorious and courageous service, in the spirit of Daiitoku, in the assumption of karma, and on behalf of the freedom of all peoples, in Bassanda and beyond.[1]

Queried by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History project, in the 1980s, Vovk said only “he did what needed to be done—at a time when few would or could do it.”

In the immediate aftermath of the War, he served more openly with the special Allied Forces Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives commission set up to locate, identify, and return the hundreds of thousands of art works and other valuables looted by the Nazis between 1933-45. Recognizing his oenological expertise, the regimental commander of the 7th Infantry Regiment of the US 3rd Infantry Division detailed Výrobca to inventory the enormous cache of wines held in the cellars of Hitler’s mountaintop retreat called the Berghof, at Berchtesgaden. He was responsible for the elaborate plan which rappelled hundreds of cases of Moet champagne and other fine wines down the mountainside, for eventual repatriation to France. In recognition of this service to French heritage and artistry, which had the desired effect of re-activating the nation’s wine industry after the war years, he was awarded the Ordre de la Libération by President Georges Bidault in 1946. It was an award he subsequently returned in disgust to the de Gaulle government in the wake of the abortive Algerian putsch in 1958, when right-wing officers and service-members sought to reinstate French colonial rule; Výrobca’s comment at that time was “I didn’t fight a liberation war against the Cossacks only to endorse a colonial war on their behalf” (the term “Cossack” was Bassandan parlance for any paramilitary personnel supporting oppressive governments, whether Tsarist, Soviet, Fascist, Nazi, or Republican).[2]

Though he did not play it, he was a connoisseur of the Bassandan hurdy-gurdy called the kolesnoye skripku, players of which, as symbols of indigenous cultural identity, were persecuted under both the Tsars and the Soviets, as had been the Ukrainian kobzar players targeted and murdered by Stalin. It is thought that the ruthless purge of Bassandan kolozim in 1937, a bloody echo of the notorious 1932 massacre of kobzar players by Stalin at Kharkiv, is what radicalized Výrobca and “convinced him that sometimes you have to take up the sword” (unpublished biographical sketch in the Correspondence). Indeed, there are quite romantic stories of his first meetings with Vovk, in the Bassandan hurdy-gurdy underworld during this same post-War period of Stalinist persecution, when she was a folklorist (possibly am émigré) interested in vernacular culture.

He is said to have been a mentor to the Polish virtuoso bassist Krzysztof Arczewski, and the inspiration behind Arczewski’s series of long-playing records, issued in the 1960s on the semi-samizdat Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Co. label, known as the “Grey Sleeve” series. Výrobca is likewise alleged to have fought in the 1943 Warsaw Uprising, though there are contradictory sightings of him playing nightclub gigs in occupied Ballyizget in the same period, and it is suggested that they met when Výrobca assisted in Arczewski’s escape via the sewers with the aid of Jewish Resistance leaders. The Warsaw experience held a lasting effect: in the late 1940s, after the defeat of the Nazis and the re-occupation of Bassanda by the Soviets, he appears as squad leader with the Pădure Fraților (“Forest Brethren”), the wartime cells of Bassandan partisans who continued their resistance after War’s end.

Much later, in the 1970s, he was likewise either a mentor, or possibly a protégé (the chronology is very unclear), of the legendarily brilliant and self-destructive Finnish bass guitarist Jakob Biskopsstav (1952-76). Though Biskopsstav was two generations younger, the time-shifting or -jumping peculiarities of Rift Portal travel mean that, at times, the Correspondence seems to show two different versions, one older and one younger, of the same Bassandan notable. It has even been argued that “Výrobca” and “Biskopsstav” may have been the same person, appearing simultaneously and time-paradoxically in the 1970s at different Rift-induced ages. The young Finnish virtuoso, whose intensely innovative, virtuosic fretless bass guitar playing fueled the harder-edged 1970s version of the Electric Trees, is thought to have died of a drug overdose in 1976, but the only testimony to that effect came from activist Polli Kilotona, who—in the depths of the 1970s authoritarian crackdown—may have conspired to fake the death. For the body of “Biskopsstav” was never recovered: it may be that, rather than dying, he intentionally disappeared.

Výrobca, on the other hand, resurfaced in Ballyizget in 1978; it may be no coincidence that, in precisely this same period, Kilotona renounced her membership in the activist Electric Trees, and began a strategically-skillful campaign for political office, which eventually led to her election to the democratic “shadow Parliament” (so-called because the BSSC refused to seat them) in 1980.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s he was a ubiquitous presence on the Ballyizget underground-jazz scene, which flourished in cellars, “pop-up” art galleries, lofts, warehouses, and other alternative venues, and he trained generations of H-LC students, not only in bass technique, but also in acoustics, electronics, and the particularly sophisticated vernacular form of Bassandan electro-magnetics—his technical and intuitive expertise in turn providing quite sophisticated insights into Rift theory.

He was an influential organizer, visionary, and producer in the late-1980s revival of the Bassanda Tanz-volk tradition which, while rooted in folkloric rural dance musics, found new audiences among the generation of young people who came of age in the first days of Bassandan glasnost after the 1985 fall of the Soviet state. These young people, many of whom had fought on the barricades in street demonstrations and protests, and been imprisoned for their efforts, were fiercely dedicated to the idea of indigenous art forms which could speak to the experience of post-Soviet Bassanda, while avoiding the pitfalls of nationalist ethno-chauvinism which had so contaminated earlier folkloric “revivals” in both West and East.

He was both bassist and instigator of the legendary poly-stylistic Tanz-volk drone band Naktis Žiūrėti, with Rogov Szczur Lądowy, Jakov Redžinald, Madame Main-Smith (on those occasions when she reappeared via Rift Portal in the appropriate space-time context), and the mysterious гармо́нь (button accordion) player Yeffersūnus Vynosula. As Lądowy put it—in rather cryptic fashion—when recalling the 1980s period of folkloric revival which paralleled, and in some ways precipitated, the final fall of the Soviet commissars (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), “without Džonatan, the revival wouldn’t have happened. Or at least, not with Naktis, and not in Bassanda, and not then. He was the spark to the fire—the rest of us needed him to pull us together.” On the surface, this seems relatively self-evident: Lądowy himself had largely retired from playing—at least under that name—and Redžinald was immersed in studies for his third university degree, while Vynosula was barely capable of communication, more comfortable with books and archives than with humans: it was Výrobca who convened the partnership. At a deeper level, it is likely also true that he was a necessary emollient for the spikier personalities found elsewhere in the Band.

Yet, despite the not-inconsiderable impediments to success which faced Naktis Žiūrėti, including the near-complete abandonment of folkloric material by younger Bassandans in the belated 1980s “flower decade,” the earlier erosion of the folkloric tradition in the countryside under Stalin, and the banality of the Western cultural influences which the glasnost-era governments preceding Kilotona had permitted, the band resonated in surprising ways with Bassandans of various generations, and with tuned-in Westerners. They made few recordings, and overseas tours were almost nonexistent, but aficionados treasured the free radio air-checks and multi-generation cassettes (analog media held on much longer in Bassanda than in the West) that were passed from hand-to-hand well into the 21st century.

Výrobca himself kept busy in Ballyizget, occasionally recording with the BNRO or offshoot projects, though he did not travel with the Band. He stayed close to his Naktis Žiūrėti colleagues, and with certain more senior members of the BNRO orbit, and with Yezget-Bey himself. By the 1990s, he was mostly content to remain at home, in the apartment he maintained in the university quarter not far from Habjar-Lawrence conservatory. From there he ventured forth to an occasional master-class or recording session, sometimes to work in the Habjar-Lawrence archives (he maintained a lively interest in ancient Bassandan music throughout his entire career), and only very infrequently visiting the Ballyizget nightclubs to listen or play, particularly when one of his senior colleagues was likewise appearing.

Mostly, however, he preferred to stay home in his loft, whose tall windows looked out over the medieval rooftops of the Quarter, and whose wall-space was, otherwise, entirely covered, floor-to-ceiling, with thousands upon thousands of books.

[A note upon the photograph: though Výrobca remained active in Ballyizget after the 1985 revolution led by Polli Kilotona, as a highly-respected elder statesman of Bassandan independence and independent music, he retained, curiously enough, a degree of reticence regarding photographic portraits. Vovk said simply, “he’s just shy,” but it is equally likely that, even forty and fifty years after his clandestine service in the Second War, he preferred to maintain a certain ambiguity of identity.]

[1] The reference is to the Bassandan version of the Bodhisattva Yamāntaka, who wields the sword that cuts through ignorance.

[2] Orig: “Je n'ai pas combattu une guerre de libération contre les cosaques seulement pour combattre un autre en leur nom.”

Mani backstage; date unknown. Photo credited to Mississippi Stokes.
Kulamani Llandaff Callan

b1946?
violin, voice, dance, electrical sensitive

Her parentage is not confirmed, but certain aspects of her genetic code, as mapped by the DNAPI (DNA for Peace Initiative), suggest that she came from a particularly direct line of Illiot shamanic stock: an extended clan, family name Eymir (Persian: ايمير), based in the nearly-impenetrable easternmost range of the Northern Alps. This clan included the semi-legendary Anakan Imir (born c1830), who had met Pappy Lilt and Algeria Main-Smith in Chicago at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 and was a significant influence on 20th century Bassandan liberation theology. There occasionally appeared among the Iliot shamans savants whose electrical sensitivity was so high that their prescience and other paranormal capacities were nearly uncontrollable; certainly her whole-body prophetic experiences were, in outward details, reminiscent of those associated with the oracles of Gelugpa Buddhist tradition. It is also possible that her ethnicity included ethnic Bassandan refugees from the Chinese invasion of Tibet, in 1956.

By 1957, in the wake of the crackdowns by local authorities that followed the Tibetan invasion and the failed Hungarian Uprising, the capitol city of Ballyizget was, on the surface, a stark and repressive place. As was the case in working-class neighborhoods of London and Glasgow, even as late as the 1950s, very little restoration of the devastation of World War II had been undertaken. The harbor front had been rebuilt, in an effort to jump-start the economy which had stagnated for nearly two decades, and the Parliament Square and buildings of the Soviet Central Committee had likewise been restored in honor of Moscow’s 20th Party Congress in February of ’56. But the balance of the capitol, in the ‘50s, was much like the bombed zones of central Europe and working-class England—neighborhoods still in rubble, the general population still under strict rationing.

Nevertheless, there were subtle signs of regeneration, though they most often appeared below the radar of the Central Soviet and the KBGB.[1] There were small coffeehouses on the waterfront, sometimes popping up in abandoned warehouses or cellars, and the beginnings of an avant-garde poetry and jazz movement inspired by parallel events in San Francisco and Paris (Soviet attempts to control the flow of information from the West were particularly ineffective in Bassanda—the old smuggling routes continued to flourish even into the Cold War). Elsewhere, elderly babushkas brought in from the starving countryside to live cheek-by-jowl in tiny apartments with children and grandchildren planted truck gardens and raised chickens and pigs. And every second block, it seemed, contained a used-book shop or newspaper stand.

She entered the BNRO orbit as a friend and protégé of the Haitian/Barbadian violinist Etxaberri le Gwo, a Band member since 1950. One night in the brutally cold winter of 1957, le Gwo arrived late to a rehearsal at Habjar-Lawrence, where the BNRO had just begun rehearsals for the spring and summer tour. Though tardiness was not unknown from le Gwo among other long-standing personnel, for whom more relaxed past procedures and expectations were sometimes presumed to carry over into more current and rigorous situations, this circumstance was different: he was accompanied by a thin teenaged girl in ragged dark clothes, who clutched a blanket roll and a fiddle case, and stepped hesitantly over the threshold after Etsy, huddling near the door as if to assure her ability to escape. As the Band—who were not unaccustomed to the arrival of unannounced or unknown strangers, and who, in light of Yezget-Bey’s clandestine activities, knew better than to remark or ask questions—continued their warm-up regime, which in this group of ravening individualists could vary from assiduously running scales in four octaves (the pianist Avdyusha Hughes Ivanovich) to smoking cigars and gossiping just outside the rehearsal room doors (the cellist Poltava, the pianist Boenavida, among others), le Gwo spoke in an undertone to the Founder. After a moment, he beckoned the girl closer. She came forward, still however shielding herself mostly behind le Gwo.

Yezget-Bey studied her. She had pale skin and dark, tangled hair; he noted the battered fiddle case, held together with twine, and her worn and thin-soled shoes, obviously soaked with snow-melt. What struck Nas1lsinez however, as he commented later, was the feral intensity of her gaze. It was not the dead-eyed fatalistic look of a refugee or orphan—a look he had come to know well in the sad years of the War and Stalin—but a brown-eyed glare that seemed to instantly size-up the other, assessing and tallying the interlocutor as an ally or a potential foe. Nas1lsinez would come to understand much better the origin of that feral intensity, but on that first winter night in 1957, as he described it, he merely “registered that there was more to this girl than met the eye.”

Nas1lsinez asked, gently, “How did you get here, girl?” She would not make eye contact, but tugged on le Gwo’s sleeve and then whispered in his ear. The violinist nodded, looked matter-of-factly at the Founder, and said, “She rode.”

Nas1lsinez paused, before repeating, “she…rode?” Etsy nodded, and then nodded to the girl. She finally looked at Nas1lsinez, and gestured to him to follow her to the street door.

Outside, it was sleeting. But under the awning that shaded the street door, a white horse, not much more than a yearling, was tethered, a ragged blanket over its shoulders. The girl stepped down to the cobbles, and stepped close to the horse, cuddling its face against her cheek as she turned to face Nas1lsinez, her eyes defiant.

le Gwo spoke from the doorway, and Yezget-Bey turned to listen. “That’s her friend Janub. She rode him from the mountains when she left the Mjekësia Trego. If we take her in, we have to find a home for Janub as well. She won’t leave him.”

Nas1lsinez turned back to look at the two of them: the thin ragged girl and the thin white horse. By now, Морган Ŭitmena had stepped out from the hall into the alley as well, and heard the end of le Gwo’s explanation. She looked at Yezget-Bey, and—a descendent of horse-copers and smugglers—said “It’s all right, Baba. We’ll find a place for the both of them.”

That first night, Mani sat with le Gwo in the fiddle section, though she didn’t play. Over the next few weeks, Yezget-Bey managed to piece-out her story.

Discovered huddled in a bus shelter near the Ballyizget train station by le Gwo, as he came in from his countryside cabin for rehearsal, she claimed to have escaped (as had her mentor Kristina Olenev), on horseback, from an abusive situation in a Mjekësia Trego traveling carnival, where she had been exhibited as “The Electrical Girl” and her psychic sensitivity—and resultant physical reactions—cruelly exploited. She was to all appearances a refugee and Displaced Person, though without any kind of official papers, and apparently orphaned in the wake of Stalin’s purges of the early Fifties. She never spoke about her life before the carnival, but it would appear that was not the first difficult situation from which she had escaped.

Her situation was rather curious: though she was, in the early days, a rudimentary musician, le Gwo insisted and Yezget-Bey agreed that she should participate in BNRO activities, as singer and dancer as well as string player. In addition to le Gwo, she was also mentored as a musician by the fiddle-player Jakov Redžinald, string section-leader when “Mani” (the pet-name by which the Band knew her0 first joined the BNRO in ’66 after having served an apprenticeship with the BYO. At Yezget-Bey put it “you don’t have to play in the Band to be a Member of the Band. Though it helps.”

She struggled with the personnel turnover that accelerated in the Band as the sea changes of the late Sixties brought contrasting opportunities and priorities—she was particularly averse to such changes—but this perspective is perhaps understandable: she was part of a particularly strong choral section in the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band, numbering among its members Ani Hamim Gassion, Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš, Eliška Šķielēt, Feye Keijukainen Arndt, Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, Морган and Kaciaryna Ŭitmena, Žaklin Paulu, Aine Ó Duinnshléibhe, and Nāṯānas Hús. The tenor Hús, who had trained at Habjar-Lawrence under the legendary conductor and pedagogue Jens Dahout na Uilyam, and who served as section-leader in the ’67 Band, came in for a certain amount of tour-bus teasing, as the only male singer in a 10-member choir; the bluesman Mississippi Stokes, notorious for his ironical sense of humor, referred to the lopsided choir as “Nate an’ them Sy-reens a’ his’n.”

She was informally adopted into the family of Madame Szabo and Részeg Vagyok, himself the holder of Displaced Persons papers, but who was widely believed in fact to be an American ex-serviceman (though his claims to have participated in recordings by Buddy Bolden around 1907 and in Trinidad in 1912 complicate this chronology). Though of slight stature and apparently delicate health, she was surprisingly self-reliant, with a gamine appearance which only partly masked a ferocious intensity. Kaciaryna Uitmena, a subtle and simpatico judge of character, said of her, “There was a fierceness about her: there was a sense that, somewhere back behind her eyes, she knew exactly where she was going and how long it would take, and that she would do whatever she had to in order to get there.”

It is true that, like Giyanlakshmi Julahe Kaur, she was an electrical sensitive, but unlike Gigi, her refugee status had formerly prevented her receiving either care or counseling for coping with this gift. Maya Deren, the avant-garde Russian artist who made one of the first great ethnographic films about Haitian vodun (Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti), understood what was happening to the adolescent Kaur when, traveling by sea with Deren and her mother in 1949, she had been struck by lightning but was impervious to electrocution. Mani was similarly impervious—she could handle live 220-volt cables and was fearless in her job as “Rift Apprentice” to Erzbieta Ateşleyici, the oboist and electrical engineer who led the team that rewired the quiescent “Beast” (the iconic locomotive of the Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Transport Company) after the Rift Accident that unexpectedly transported the 1967 Band, which consisted largely of raw recruits, backward in time to c1885. But the nature of her childhood experience, of the years of mistreatment as an orphan child of the carnival, and of her physical affliction, tended to make her wary of outsiders and their response to her.

On the other hand, her closest friends in the Band handled her occasional seizures with aplomb, becoming good practical nurses and physical therapists: by the 1960s, with the advent of Reiki training from Algeria Main-Smith (a body-energy healing method Madame had learned in the hills of eastern Bassanda from wandering Japanese monks), she had brought the physical symptoms under control, and begun to develop the latent psychological and spiritual acuity that were a hallmark of the Iliot healers, and hers by birthright. It was left to Madame Szabo, Fionnuala Nic Aindriú (and her lover Andrés Bistré), and Kaciaryna and Moprah Ŭitmena to create Mani’s intentional family, and they defended her with merciless ferocity. In fact, there is a story, told only in hushed tones and barely hinted at to outsiders, that Madame Szabo had once “cleared the way for K” to receive the care she needed, by personally “handling” the disappearance of a particularly obtuse and callous medical commissar.

She toured regularly with the BNRO through the ‘60s and early ‘70s, though Yezget-Bey and Madame Szabo insisted that she should continue her university studies, tutored by various Band members (she joked that “some of [her] best tutors had been the worst students”), completing assignments from her corner seat in the back of the tour bus, mailing them back to Ballyizget from a succession of frontier stations, across-the-tracks hotel lobbies, military barracks, and country crossroads. Eventually, she took advanced degrees in both medicine and in law, and became a healer and advocate, especially for orphaned children and other dispossessed. Later, she reconnected with the Iliot tradition of her apparent heritage, and “took the Fez” from the shaman and scholar Muhammad Badr, who first met her aboard the Beast in the 1990s—though, as always, strict chronology and the Beast’s time-jumping capacities resist coexistence. Badr Hakim was also a specialist in the use of healing herbs, and trained her in this art as well.

She spoke little about her childhood; indeed, she said “my life began after Etsy found me at that bus shelter,” but she did have a strong feeling for children and animals, particularly those neglected or mistreated by society. A rider—apparently—since childhood, she had a special bond with her fellow refugee, the horse Janub, and with all equines, and was a leader in developing therapeutic methods for children which centered upon care of and engagement with horses. Both her legal and medical skills were eventually put to use when, upon retiring from the road, she founded a companion retreat to Nijinska’s Libertas Domum no-kill animal shelter: “K’s Farm” was situated in the rolling grassland hills northwest of Ballyizget, and served as a refuge for younger members of her large extended family, and a permanent retirement home for farm animals.

Especially horses.

[1] Committee for Bassandan State Security (Komitet po Bassanda Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti)

Emmiana in the theatrical dance show, Танцы на раздарожжы (c1969); art-print by Cifani Dhoma
Emmiana Garrett Danesi

dance, concertina, tin whistle, visual art

b1924, of Sicilian, Genoese, Inuit, Lowland and Highland Scots, Bassandan ancestry

She came, via several different bloodlines, from mountaineers, sailors, smugglers, labor organizers, and artisans.

Her Italian grandfather, born at Monte Caucaso in the Ligurian Apennines, had served with Garibaldi in the Spedizione dei Mille (the “Expedition of a Thousand,” 1859-60), which sought to liberate Sicily. Decorated after the battle of Voltunro, this “Emiliano Danesi” returned to his mountain birthplace and in later life was a cobbler and—like many self-employed master craftsmen, and many veterans of the Risorgimento—an outspoken political progressive. He married the daughter of a Neapolitan stone-carver he had met just after the Expedition’s final victory, and they returned to Liguria to raise their family.

Richard Allan Ballentine, born Strawhaven 1760, whose Lowland Scots Catholic father had served with the Jacobite Stuarts during the 1745 but fled north to Inverness after Culloden, received a land grant of 2,000 acres on Cape Louis, NS in 1783; his children became farmers, fishermen, traders, and leaders in the new Colony established in the next year. This branch of the family continued as trappers and explorers in British and French Canada well into the 19th century: a James Ballentine Garret, Able Seaman, appears on the ship’s rolls of Sir Robert John M’Clure’s 1854 Arctic Expedition traversing the Northwest Passage, while a John Joe Garret (1863-1928) took part in the Great Stampede to Nome in 1898. That later Garret appears to have been as much interested in exploration as in gold—he married an Inuit woman and, with her family members, traversed the Bering Strait into Siberia around 1900. It may be through this circum-Arctic connection that Emmiana’s Iliot shamanic sensitivities arise.

Family connections to Bassanda probably also came via her Genoese trading ancestors, who knew the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caspian Sea well. This probably also accounts for the claim that she was related to the Goras, the hereditary family of smugglers who were Ismail Durang’s people (see “The Great Train Ride for Bassanda,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). The family was hereditarily reputed to be particular skillful (both licitly and illicitly) at cards, and it is said that her distant cousin, Captain Davoud Gora (b c1856), had actually won his legendary Bassandan smugglers’ sloop, Bruxa do Mar, during a card-game in a Ballyizget waterfront bar around 1901 (see “The Great Train Ride for Bassanda,” elsewhere in the Correspondence).

There may be a second-cousin connection as well: also on the mother’s side came her descent from an Alsatian dance master at the court of Louis XVI who fled the Jacobin Rebellion in 1792 and went to Dublin; born Giovanni Tessitore, under the English pseudonym of “John Durang” he was friendly with members of the United Ireland movement, but counselled against the ’98 Rebellion, predicting (accurately) that both reprisals and repression would be even more brutal after the rebels were crushed and the Act of Union was passed in 1801. “Durang” escaped the reprisals and married a Limerick girl around 1803, emigrating to the USA at the end of the War of 1812, when Britain had finally been defeated at the Battle of New Orleans. His last ten years were spent teaching at Philadelphia—he was known as George Washington’s favorite performer—where he popularized set-dances, cotillions, and his signature hornpipe.[1]

Emmiana herself was born at Devon in 1924, to a “Richard Garrett” who had served during World War I in the Royal Scottish Borderers and who, upon receiving his pension, had married Silviana Danesi and taken a small croft on the moors. She grew up until the age of 10 in the wild and stark landscape of Dartmoor; as she said herself “my childhood companions were mostly the curlews and the ponies and the rocks and the sky.” A snapshot taken around 1935 shows, among what appear to be siblings, parents, and cousins, a short-statured, slender child with tangled black hair and luminous dark eyes.

There is a lacuna in her biography between c1936-40: a portion of the parish records at Exeter were destroyed in a bombing raid early in World War II, and it is possible that the various children were scattered for safety from the Blitz amongst relatives, as was quite common in the days leading up to the first Luftwaffe attacks in September 1940.

What is not clear is how she herself first appeared in Ballyizget. It has been speculated that Dartmoor, perhaps in the vicinity of the Beardown Man on Devil’s Tor, contains another Rift Portal, akin to those found near the peak of Bassanda’s Annolungma “Three Brothers” alpine chain, and those alleged in the northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, Nantucket Island, the north Mississippi Hill Country, northern Morocco, and the hills of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas Mexico. The likeliest location, however, is the same Outer Hebrides Portal which figures prominently in stories of Isobel Sian Seaforth MacKenzie, and several other Bassandans of Scots provenance—including Richard Ballentine. It is possible that, during one of the Luftwaffe raids, the magnetic ley lines that govern the presence and disappearance of Portals might have been disturbed; Emmiana later said, very cryptically, “When I was a child on the moors, the bombers came, and a portal opened, but Papa and The Beast saved me.” This appears to be a reference to Sleipnir, the gigantic electro-magnetic locomotive which was the pride of the Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation, which figures heavily in a number of folkloric tales (and was affectionately known as “The Beast” by those who traveled aboard her). If so, she appears to have lost her way: she was discovered by Nas1lsinez, in the rubble left by the November 1940 Bassandan Anschluss, in the back streets of the capitol city.

By late 1940, the advancing Nazi armies had largely perfected the strategic combination of aerial bombing—honed in Spain at places like Guernica—and Blitzkrieg (lightning-fast motorized advance, supported by diver bombers) which had driven the catastrophic British evacuation at Dunkirk, earlier in the year. Bassanda, in fact, was intended to serve as a test-ground (as Spain had been in the west) for assessing the efficacy of similar tactics in Eastern Europe. Despite the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ratifying mutual non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union—a cynical betrayal by Stalin, which evoked shock and despair from both Western and Bassandan progressives and communists—Hitler was already secretly planning for Operation Barbarossa, the summer 1941 invasion of Russia. Ballyizget, like Madrid and Guernica and Łódź and Kraków, was a cynical—and monstrous—war game, which could only result in the defeat of the defending forces. The Condor Legion had substantially refined the precision of their techniques, and so parts of the Bassandan capitol were left untouched, while others (the railyards, docks, radio stations, and the BSSP headquarters in the Parliament Square) were heavily damaged.

Although she herself was reluctant to talk about her own past, in one interview conducted by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project, Yezget-Bey described—with permission from Danesi—how they had met. In November 1940, Nas1lsinez was deep in the dangerous process of organizing escape routes for various “undesirables” (Jews, Romany, “homosexuals” [sic], musicians, Displaced Persons, and others) targeted for persecution by the BSSP, as the Soviet Union mobilized for what even Molotov and Stalin knew was the coming conflict with Hitler. He had just left a clandestine meeting at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, thinly-disguised as a “strategic planning session for the new People’s Orchestra” (which at this time barely existed except on paper).

Yezget describes stepping down from a side-entrance of Habjar-Lawrence—the entrance commonly employed by both students and staff who sought a discreet cigarette—and heading toward the streetcar which would take him to his small wartime apartment (later renovated, to be occupied by Madame Szabo for almost two decades after the Leader’s death). But his survival instincts, inherited from his Afshak mother and honed during his epic Siberian trek in 1920-21 and subsequent gunrunning adventures in Republican Spain, and the acuity of his musician’s hearing, made him prick up his ears, and turn toward the end of the alley.

She was crouched in a corner in the darkness. Through tangled hair, she glared out at the tall gaunt figure slowly approaching. The knife in her hand caught reflections from the wan street light at the mouth of the alley. She did not speak, but, in the near-silence, against the drip of water from the eves of the old tenements on either side and the distant rumble of artillery, the irregular rasp of her agitated breathing was surprisingly loud. For a few seconds neither moved. Then Nas1lsinez stepped back a pace, and held out his open hand toward her, palm-up. Neither moved.

And then her hand opened and the knife clattered on the slick cobbles. For a moment after that, there was no sound. Then Yezget-Bey spoke quietly.

“It’s all right, girl. You can come Home now.”

She was the first dancer-member of the PLO, joined shortly thereafter by Jacqueline Demirci, the mixed-race hard-shoe dancer who became her closest friend, and who helped design Bassanda’s highly innovative post-perestroika early childhood music & movement public education system. Both joined the proto-Band (which only formally became the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra in 1947) at a time when Yezget Bey’s sense of the mission was still amorphous: moving away from the stiff folklorisms of 1930s Popular Front “concert folk” settings, but not yet arrived at the organic, sprawling, multi-mediated performance idiom of the 1950s and ‘60s Band.

The arrival of the two dancers was enormously impactful upon the Band’s evolution toward this more integrative direction, but not without challenges, at a period in the Stalinist 1940s when anything that smacked of popular music or American jazz was, unpredictably, either derogated as “decadent bourgeois imperialist ephemera” or celebrated as “heroic proletariat resistance to western imperialist colonialism.” As non-native Bassandans participating in indigenous art forms, both Jacqueline and Emmiana were sometimes the target of critiques by BSSP commissars charged with “maintaining indigenous art forms’ ethnic purity.” However, the Band defended them ferociously: for example, Rahmani Boenavida once drew a knife on a commissar who attempted to prevent their joining the Band onstage. She and Demirci were later recognized, in the 1990s dance scholarship of the post-Soviet era, to have bridged the gap between concert and vernacular styles at a crucial historical moment, and to have been among the first to put Bassandan starý štýl (“old style”) improvisational folkloric dance on the concert stage. She herself was equally adamant in defending the “old style,” and described her fieldwork with elderly rural dance practitioners as “the happiest days of my life.”

She bonded closely with other early PLO members as well, including the Filipino dancer/violinist Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī, Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, Etxaberri Le Gwo, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, and Madame Terésa-Marie Szabo. Other particular friends in the Bassanda orbit included the matriarch Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa (who had mentored her in the worlds of concert dance), the Creole ballerina and Nijinsky collaborator Celeste Roullet, and the pianist/chef Boenavida, with whom she had shared early days in the People’s Liberation Orchestra. With several of these she again collaborated in the late 1960s BNRO-inspired stage piece Танцы на раздарожжы (“Tancy na razdarožžy”; Eng: Dancing at the Crossroads), a precursor of the more glitzy stage-dance extravaganzas of the 1980s. Emmiana also served as an advisor on “refugee culture” and dance identity in the cabinet of Bassanda’s first democratically-elected Premiere, Polli Kilotona (herself a member of the Bassanda orbit and an ally of Yezget-Bey’s).

She was a fierce advocate for the refugees displaced by both Nazi and Soviet aggression, and even at the age of 16 had been a trusted member of Cell #1; looking like a street urchin, she could pass unnoticed through Army and secret police lines where a more mature Bassandan might have excited suspicion. In April 1945 she led a squad of Bassandan saboteurs who slipped into the city to disable trucks and trams earmarked for use by Nazi troops fleeing the advancing partisans.

She continued to be especially close to Yezget-Bey, her first mentor in the Band and as an artist, and she may have been one of the first to refer to him as Baba, a term of endearment; his death in 1985 was reported to have been devastating for her. The Leader, who had no children of his own, described the relationships between and among members of the BNRO orbit as “karmic agreements”: not so much “new” relationships, but rather recognition of pre-existing connections and obligations (to compassion, support, acceptance, love). However, the bond between Baba and Emmiana was—perhaps because especially long—particularly deep and immediate.

She may have provided Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who she met backstage at an Amnesty International benefit the Band played in London in 1991, with the archetype for the dancer “Katie Miller” (HP and the Chamber of Secrets). Her artisanal heritage was evident in visual as well as choreographic art, which provided an interesting arena for the intersection of her creative and psycho-kinetic capacities. In the same nexus, she is credited with authoring one of the first quasi-accurate maps of the ley lines within Bassanda that, at certain key locations, produced the electromagnetic time-and-space-folding channels called “Rift Portals”—a version of one of these hand-drawn maps graces the original, double-LP gatefold cover of the BNRO’s Live from the Rift Valley concert set, from 1975. Though she herself was not of Iliot ancestry, she was particularly close to the Uitmena Sisters, especially Moprah, the elder, with whom she had shared many adventures. It was through the Sisters’ intercession that Emmiana was inducted into the lineage of shamanic dance, and it was this sensibility that led her to evoke, in her visual pieces, the Iliot mandalas and sand-paintings associated with the steppe nomads.

She and Demirci, though no longer regularly touring with the BNRO, were present on the fabled night in 1985 when the Band, and a number of family members and colleagues (many clandestinely notified by Madame Szabo) defected after a Konzertshus performance in Tallinn, escaping via fishing trawler to Helsinki. Both likewise danced in the subsequent gala Musiikkitalo concert which celebrated the Band’s “liberation”, and which also functioned as a de facto retrospective upon Yezget-Bey’s artistic life—for he collapsed backstage immediately after the finale. She, with others from the Band’s four-and-a-half-decade history, was present at his bedside when he “left for his final tour” (the language from the subsequent press release) on 1 April. She insisted, as expected in Bassandan Buddhist tradition, upon accompanying his body to the crematorium, and she sat zazen throughout the cremation. It was she herself who scattered a portion of his ashes in the Baltic, from the stern of the tramp steamer that had carried them to freedom.

A poignant portrait of Danesi’s response to this loss was drawn by Jacqueline Demirci, speaking to the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project. She describes coming on deck in the very early morning of the day following the cremation, as the steamer chugged westward, taking the Band toward England and a fundamental reimagination of the life they had known. Demirci looked around for Danesi and saw her in the very stern of the steamer, staring aft, eastward toward St Petersburg, and Bassanda, and the life left behind. As the night air paled around them, she moved toward her friend.

Emmiana stood silhouetted against the red-gold glare of the dawn, facing east, as the sun came up over the horizon like a pillar of fire. “Emmi? Are you all right?”

Danesi half-turned. She was holding the empty urn tightly against her chest.

A few last flecks of ash swirled in the air between them and the engines rumbled beneath their feet, the flickers of foam in their wake catching the reddish tint of the rising sun. Demirci saw that there were tears on Danesi’s cheeks.

She said again, “Em? What’s the matter, dear?”

There was a silence, except for the rumble of the engines and the call of the first sunrise gulls.

Then Emmiana spoke. Her voice was soft but steady, despite the tears.

She said, simply, “I wasn’t ready to let him go.”

…

CODA:

In later years, she participated in a wide range of ESO activities, occasionally presenting master-classes at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory; her “Dance of Life” workshop, based in ancient Bassandan bodywork and meditation practices, is regarded as a breakthrough in the re-integration of body, mind, and spirit, particularly for victims of Alzheimer’s and PTSD.

She never lost her feeling for Bassanda and the past. Late in life, she ran a vineyard and artist’s colony not far from Libertas Domum, Madame Nijinska’s no-kill animal shelter. While her visual artwork ran a wide gamut of topics, both commissioned and otherwise, in her dancing and her depictions of dance, Bassandan themes, BNRO friends, and—especially—the figure of Yezget-Bey were frequent topics.

Visited by alumni of the Band and of her art studio, she would look up from her workbench, offer a carafe of her rough red wine with a laugh, and say,

“I think I’ve kind of turned into my grandfather. Or maybe my Baba.”

[1] There is some confusion over the specific identity of this “John Durang”; the more conventional biographies have this man born in Lancaster PA, not Alsace. On the other hand, it is possible that Tessitore/”Durang” may have assumed the name of the more famous dancer. Although the chronology is internally contradictory, Emmiana also claimed to have met her distant cousin Ismail Durang when he served as “native informant” in Olive Arnold Dame lectures at Harvard (1902-03). And a curious citation in Mystics, Musicians, Warriors and Dancers of High Bassanda (1874) by Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez appears to reference an “Amélie” who “danced the sun up.” Yezget-Bey once said of her, with characteristic inscrutability, “She has Ismail’s spirit. And maybe more than that.”

Ani, about 1970, in the Gassion family compound on Bassanda’s south coast, with “Alaksha”
Ani Hamim Gassion
b1947

Voice, dance

Mexican, Irish, Tlingit, Berber (?), Norman/Moroccan French

One great-aunt was Cécile Lapin (b1882), linguist, codebreaker, explorer, translator, and heroine of the epic 1906 “Great Train Ride for Bassanda”; Ani was thus related by marriage to the family of GTRfB hero Ismail Durang and the Gora clan of Bassandan smugglers, and in turn a distant cousin to the dancer/vocalist/brass specialist Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš, later a close friend.

Her great-great-grandfather was born on Inis Mean in the Aran Islands c1820 and emigrated to the United States at around age 20, joining the New York militia. Family histories insisted that he later rode with Stephen Kearny in the 1848 conquest of the New Mexico territory from the government of Joaquiin de Herrera. It has also been suggested that, like Rahmani Boenavida, Maçdalija Gundisalvus, and possibly Cait Mardanīš, Ani was a scion of the survivors of Los San Patricios, those Irish emigrants who abandoned the US to fight for their fellow Catholics during Kearney’s expedition. There is some unclarity here, however—the possibility is that David Gourley, her direct ancestor, in fact fought for but eventually abandoned both sides, and laid down arms entirely.

Her great-aunt Lapin’s younger sister Ghislaine (b1892), a pied-noir expatriate in Morocco, in the early 1920s became a patron of the Café Hafa in Tangier, where she met Jehan Gassion, a descendent of the Gascon Comte de Gassion (d1718) who commanded troops under Louis XIV. The younger Gassion (b1890) had come to fight on the side of the Berbers who followed Abd el-Krim in establishing the short-lived Republic of the Rif (from 1921), but after that Republic’s fall in 1926, Gassion and Lapin fled together to North America. Their son, born in the next year, grew up in the polyglot neighborhoods of the South Bronx among Irish, Italians, and many eastern European Jews. Gassion pere later took his young family to California to work with the eccentric bohemian folklorist and collector Jaime de Angul (1887–1950), a few years his senior, as a field-recording assistant and transcriber—this connection, and her family’s wide contacts throughout the San Francisco Bay area and communities, the source of Ani’s remarkable childhood and continuing facility at language acquisition, including English, Spanish, Arabic, German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Bassandan (years later, a notable “foodie” on the road with the Band, she would joke “I just keep up my languages so I can keep ordering my favorites!”—the great melodeon player Andy Cutting’s tune “I Only Want a Snack” was inspired by these anecdotes).

After World War II, Gassion took his family via tramp steamer on the long sea voyage that brought them from California, around Cape Horn, back to the Atlantic. and a return to their ancestral roots in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. Though the records are unclear—possibly intentionally so—it appears likely that Gassion pere reactivated his contacts with the Berber resistance to French recolonization, and it seems certain that the family likewise reconnected with the grande dame Cécile Lapin, who was similarly active. Ani was born at the mountain town of Arbiaa Taourirt in January 1947; she would therefore have been twenty years old in the year of the “Portal Accident” which cast the entire ’67 Band back in time, via teleportation of the locomotive called “The Beast,” to 1885.

It was also in the late 1940s that Matthias’s Lodge, in Bassanda’s Northern Alps, was reopened (after occupation by Nazi troops who subsequently died in an avalanche) and ritually cleansed “by a group of Berber musicians who had stumbled through a Rift Portal in northern Morocco” (see “Matthias’s Mountain Rest”, elsewhere in the Correspondence); the cataloging of the Ani materials now suggests that her family may have been among the group who thus traveled, perhaps with Madame Main-Smith (also in Morocco in the late Forties) as Rift Guide. If so, it would be a second corroboration of the Bassandan connection, and an indication of just how early her trans-Rift experiences began; indeed, in toddlerhood. At any rate, her family remained in the North from that time, and so Ani and her siblings grew up in the high hills: she was a noted Alpinist and swimmer and, with Žaklin Paulu, a member of the Ballyizget Polar Bear Club.

By the age of 16 she was a scholarship student at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget, studying music education and choral song, living with members of the extended Gassion clan (especially her cousins who were transplants from the south coast). She was part of an H-LC cadre permanently inspired by and associated with the legendary composer/conductor Jens Dahout na Uilyam: some of the last to study and collaborate with him in the years just before his retirement. There is a lovely photograph of her c1965 in costume at H-JC as the Welsh goddess Olwen, patron of flowers and springtime, in a folklore-inspired ballet/cantata by na Uilyam based upon legends of the Mabinogion.

Like a number of others in the BNRO orbit of her generation (John Rød Ericsson, Etxaberri Le Gwo, Maçdalija Gundisalvus, Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, Ана Ljubak de Quareton), she was a mürekkep kişi (“ink person”) and carried on her body a number of tattoos of varied autobiographical, cosmological, and psychoactive significance. The most notable of these was a small Celtic triskelion (triple spiral; see illustration) at the nape of her neck; on occasions of particular risk or requiring particular fortitude, she was known to gently finger this design in Kabbalistic patterns: this fingerwork being hidden by her long hair: she would say “that’s where I keep the power.” Like the dancer Azizlarim Jangchi, she was especially enamored of the great cats, and carried the paw-print of a jaguar on one hip—representative of her totem animal, the Mayan jaguar goddess Ixchel of Cozumel (Yucatan).

Like Ana de Quareton, she possessed some Northwest North American First Peoples ethnicity; in Ani’s case, through a distant Irish immigrant great-uncle who had been a participant—as guide and navigator, not miner—in the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, where he met the Tlingit woman he eventually married, and with whom he settled again in the Bay Area. This great-uncle may reinforce the Bassanda connection, as Colonel Thompson was also in the Klondike around 1896. However, there is also a family story from her South Texas relatives about her great-grandfather meeting Los Hermanos and “Senora Algeria” somewhere “far to the East” in the 1880s: the Bassandan connections are thus self-evidently complex.

Eventually she became known as a choral specialist, having received training, through her mother’s people, in the women’s genres of polyphonic singing from the eastern foothills. She was likewise a specialist in related extended techniques, possessor of the very wide vocal range which was a hallmark of the members of the Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir. She was an impromptu soloist on the original polytonal choral arrangement of the Electric Trees anthem Plima Istorije(“The Tide of History”) which was sung on the barricades by Conservatory students and staff in November 1985 during the final divestiture of the Bassanda Parliament buildings by the Soviet Central Committee, and hers was the remarkable, evocative description of the event (see “Jens Dahout na Uilyam”), elsewhere in the Correspondence. These events occurring while she was adjunct faculty at Habjar-Lawrence, a post she held for generations.

At certain frequencies, her vocal techniques were reputed to activate other aspects of her physiognomy: most notably, her hair, which, when she sang at the low pitches of F3, E3, or Eb3, would actually rise from her head, almost as if animate: there is a 1991 BPTV videotape, From the Rif to the Rift, which includes remarkable, if low-resolution, footage of Ani in mid-flight, in which her long mane appears to levitate and swirl around her head as she sings. In the early 1980s, Yezget-Bey actually composed a vocal solo for her on the traditional bagpipe tune (based in Bassandan plainchant) Pedicabo ego vos et divitiis Cornelius, which drew upon her extended-techniques expertise to sing a polyphonic part with a fundamental of D3 and a melody more than 3 octaves above. This solo was only infrequently programmed, as certain audiences—especially of bureaucrats—tended to be made profoundly uncomfortable by her profoundly low notes. In the same documentary film, made in samizdat style during the catastrophic period 1991-92 when a “backlash” of ex-apparatchiks and pro-Soviet chauvinists attempted to overthrow the democratic government of Polli Kilotona, Super-8mm footage of the coup leader, the notorious flaxen-haired ethnic nationalist by Ḍōnālḍa Müllkippe, shows the would-be demagogue standing on a tank in Ballyizget’s Parliament Square. A crowd of students and political progressives led by Ani sing Pedicabo, and Müllkippe appears to lose control of his bodily functions—this probably explaining why the footage never made it into the From the Rif documentary (though Müllkippe’s coup was defeated, and he was exiled in disgrace, within a few weeks after the concert). Similarly, she inherited the cause of women’s rights from the family of her relative Ismail Durang, who had been a research assistant at NYU and had participated in seminars at Harvard under Professor James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence around 1906.

The Conservatory was a remarkable place in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, as she completed her degree work and transitioned to adjunct faculty status. A hot-bed of progressive resistance to the Soviet Central Committee, the student body—especially after the tragedy of the Prague Spring in ’68—included a remarkable group of young female activists, mobilized in resistance to the cross-Satellite crackdowns that followed, and closely allied with the anti-patriarchal back-to-the-land ethos of the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ (“Wood-Elves’ Commune”) which was in its first foundation stages. These young women, several of them daughters of original members of the WWII-era “Cell #1” of female resistance workers and fighters, continued as vocal and fearless leaders in the opposition to the totalitarian regime; as their “spiritual godmother” Kristina Olenev said, “we’re still fighting the same Nazis. Women always have been.”

Sometimes associated with her Northwest America First Peoples ancestors, and attached to Ani herself, is the Haida legend of “Property Woman”: a female spirit with curly hair who brings prosperity to anybody who catches sight of her. Her band-mates believed implicitly that she, and more specifically, her long curly mane, brought good luck: as early as her teens, at Habjar-Lawrence, classmates would insist upon stroking her hair in advance of a recital or graduate examination (there is an entry in the magisterial Stith-Thompson Index of Folklore Motifs for “#1175: demon who is defeated because, when challenged, he is unable to straighten a woman’s curly hair”). But more exotic tales were later told about these same characteristics—from the unpublished memoir of Cait Mardanīš, written around 1990, comes an anecdote seemingly related to the time-shifting adventures of the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band.” Cait’s anecdote, which begins in media res, appears to date from a period sometime shortly after the Band’s daguerreotype portrait, found in a Taos mission and dated summer or autumn 1885; it would appear from internal details that she and Ani had become separated from the Band, perhaps immediately after or even during the trans-Rift event, somewhere in the Northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.

Cait’s fragment begins:

…We were in a cave, high up on the east side of the Canyon wall. I could track, and I knew my way in the dry places, but we didn’t know where the Band was, and we didn’t have much in the way of supplies. So we figured we’d wait until daybreak, and then climb the wall to get to the mesa: we’d be able to move more freely, and we’d be easier to locate when Yezget-Bey sent out search parties. The challenge would be to find water, but there had been rain, so we thought we might find some standing pools on the mesa. We made a low fire of downed pinon sticks, because in September it got cold up there overnight, and we huddled-up against the cave’s back wall, with the fire between us and the cave’s mouth. There wasn’t much wind, and the smoke of the fire rose slowly, backlit by the flames, before swirling away and trickling upward and outward into the darkness.

We weren’t too worried: Ani was more mountains than deserts—she was a good technical climber—but I knew how to survive the dry places from back home, and we had some water and some yak jerky in our packs. And I knew how to use a weapon, from my Forest Brothers days. So we figured that we’d just huddle down, keep warm, wait for daybreak. We thought we’d be able to sleep.

But it didn’t work out that way. A couple of hours after dark, as the temperature dropped, the cold woke me up. Ani was still asleep, and it had gotten so still that I could hear her breathing: the night sounds of birds, insects, leaves of the trees—they were all gone. I was suddenly anxious—didn’t like the stillness. I got to my feet and walked softly toward the door of the cave, to try to see what was out there.

It was eerie: there wasn’t much wind noise, but the air suddenly shifted, and grew colder, until it was almost like there was a cold breath blowing from behind us—from further back in the darkness at the back of the cave. And even though I didn’t hear the wind, there came the sound of the dry pinon branches outside and below rattling as they tossed together. I looked across the fire at Ani as she sat up, and saw that the pupils of her eyes had gotten bigger, and blacker—almost like the eyes of a cat: like she was seeing in the dark.

There came a rumbling from down the slope, deeper into the canyon—so low-pitched that you almost didn’t know whether you’d actually heard it. But it felt like the red dirt of the cave’s floor shifted under my feet, just a little. I turned and took a few steps further into the cave, and tried to peer into the darkness at its back, where the cold air was coming from. But it was so complete that my vision blurred—I might as well have kept my eyes tight shut.

I turned back, and saw Ani. She was standing at the cave mouth staring out into the dark. The firelight behind us caught the outline of her cheek and long eyelashes, and struck glints off her night-black curly hair. Without turning her head or shifting her gaze, she reached her hand up under the hair at the nape of her neck, where I knew she had her triskelion ink. She said quietly,

                ‘He’s out there.’

I didn’t ask who—I knew. I knew from reading the Colonel’s account that the Dark Ones had come through a Rio Grande Portal at other times, and I was afraid that this might be another instance.

Suddenly the wind came up with a rush, and whipped across the top of the hill, and whistled in the limbs of the trees below us. And borne on that wind, up out of the canyon, I heard the rumbling that others had spoken of…

And then she began to sing. I’d known her for three years by then—we came into H-LC at the same time—and I knew what she could do with her voice. But I had never heard her sing like that, though there’d be a few times in the years to come when she did it again. It sounded like trumpets, calling the troops across the field of battle; like dark oboes, as if the trees were singing. You could hear birds in her voice: ravens at a winter midnight, eagles high over the Alps, the wild geese calling us home. There were bears in the mountains and tigers in the mountain jungles; coyotes howling over the moonlit grasslands, dolphins slashing through the breaking waves, whales singing to their calves.

Her voice rose, and rose up, and the rumbling from the canyon below grew and grew, but her voice was even greater. It filled the cave until the walls shook and the flames of our little fire whirled around our legs, while her long dark hair swirled and floated around her head. She sang, and sang, and dust sifted down from the cave’s ceiling, and the sticks of the fire collapsed into coals and scattered across the cave’s floor, throwing our shadows like crazy dancers on the cave’s walls. And she sang, and she sang, for I don’t know how long—I lost track of time as her voice thundered in my head.

And then suddenly there was silence. The rumbling outside the cave was gone, and her voice was silent, though I would hear it ringing in my mind’s ear for weeks thereafter. The fire was nearly out, but there was a golden glow just beginning to rise at the cave’s entrance. Then, outside, I heard the first dawn song of a canyon wren. A little swirl of dust came in at the cave’s mouth on a breath of warm air.

Ani was still standing in the entrance. She turned her head, and I saw her eyes—enormous, almost all pupil, black as night, unfocused, almost unseeing. Then she shivered, and sneezed. But when she straightened, and tossed her head to throw back her hair, she was smiling.

“Come on, mija. I’ll show you how to climb that canyon wall. Sunup’s coming—let’s go find the Band.”

[photo caption: Ani, about 1970, in the Gassion family compound on Bassanda’s south coast, with “Alaksha”

Erzbieta, in her dacha workshop, c1970
Erzbieta / Ealisaid “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici

oboe, graïle (Occitan shawm), bagpipe

Manx, Irish, Bassanda, French, Yoruba (?) ancestry

b1947 at Peel, on the Isle of Man. Her earliest documented paternal ancestors were woodcutters and wood-carvers in the Western forests of Bassanda; later carpenters and boat-builders. She was, more immediately, a niece of the guitarist Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai (b1919), and a cousin to the dancer Uzun Yaron, a member of the notorious St. Grydzina Correctional Institute Afternoon Drill Team whose fabled escape in 1954 from that feared prison entered Band folklore, and the destruction of whose electrical records was laid at Yaron’s door. Also related by blood (second cousins) to Nollag Käsityöläinen, and thus another inheritor of the blacksmithing tradition which over time yielded some of the great designers who kick-started both Bassandan bicycle culture and electro-magnetic musical instrument pickup design.

She appears to have picked up her first mechanical skills, as a toddler, from the Bassandan partisans who were interned from 1939 near her Manx island home; a small cottage industry in hand-crafting mechanical toys grew up in these camps. It has been alleged that her father was in fact one of these internees, who—after repatriation in 1946—returned to the Isle of Man to rejoin Erzy/Elsie’s pregnant mother, determined to make a home for them in post-War Bassanda; the mother’s family name of Joughin has been traced back, on Man, as early as the 14th century, and their DNA more recently traced as far back as the Mesolithic.

Their daughter was actually born in Bassanda, in the midst of a band of “Forest Brethren” partisans who had been joined by her repatriated parents, and who together sought, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to prevent the rapid reconquest of the nation by the Soviets in the wake of the Nazi collapse. This forest childhood may help to explain her lifelong affinity for wild, forested, and (especially) mountainous regions. By the same token, it is a matter of scientific fact that Bassanda’s pattern of magnetic ley lines were particularly powerful and identifiable in high-altitude (mountainous) and low-flora (arid) areas. The DAPNI has not yet reached conclusions regarding whether Rift Sensitivity resulted from closer exposure in such regions to these stronger magnetic patterns.

Professor Hazzard-Üretici for example, another scholar of the Hazzard-Igniti School and a specialist in Bassanda’s “flexible” human life-spans and life-expectancies, alluded to this aspect of her experience only in very elliptical terms. But even the Professor’s elliptical comments carry implications which are nevertheless remarkably profound:

“…though, in her case, the idea of chronological lifespan is almost meaningless. A time traveler and specialist in Rift theory, she eventually traversed the Portals so frequently—and managed to so consistently recreate the “Portal Effect” in controlled laboratory tests—that time travel became second nature to her. Indeed, at any given moment, it could be difficult to know which Lizzie—the contemporary and any one of a number historical versions—one was addressing.”

Though ultimately aircraft played little role in the 20th century Bassandan resistance, primarily because their occupiers, from Tsarists to Soviets to Nazis to Soviets again, tended to enjoy very marked air superiority, she was an advocate for certain types of aerial warfare during the commando years, most notably the use of indigenous hang-glider technology and, occasionally, directional hot-air balloons (there is an unsubstantiated allegation that a Montgolfier Freres’ apprentice had ventured east and introduced this airship technology to Bassanda in the 1830s—even that these post-Montgolfier Bassandan airships had been powered by Cruikshank magnetic batteries, found in Bassanda by the ‘Teens). In the 1970s, she was a lead engineer for the Bassanda Ballooning Corporation, a state-owned non-profit which developed these craft for ethnographic expeditions and, eventually, cultural tourism (after the breakup of the Soviet Union).

Also in the 1970s she was part of the research team who sought to develop workable designs from the abstract schematics of the “Documents” carried on the Great Train Ride to Bassanda; prototypes of these Devices were later successfully field-tested, by Jackson Lawrence-Smyth around 1980 (see “Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda”). Her particular contribution was the “Inflammatron”, a simple but logically paradoxical circuit which could be directed at electrical motors, at considerable distance, and cause their armatures to spin so swiftly that they would burst into flame.

It was widely believed that she could invoke or create fire “at a distance, with her mind.” She herself tended to scoff at—though not contradict—these electrical/physiological explanations, and when asked tended simply to say “Nah, nah—that’s just Lord Gú’s warm blood inside me” (seemingly, a reference to the Yoruba orisha Ogun, god of Iron and patron deity of blacksmiths).

She was in general an authority on electro-magnetic propulsion and one of her generation’s greatest experts on the Sukhina Circuit whose uniquely intuitive design permitted the Beast to travel via magnet ley lines. She was likewise one of the senior Hazzard-Igniti students who posited an explanation for the complex electro-magnetic chain reactions which around 1967 had led to The Beast becoming its own unanticipated and unpredictable Rift Portal. She had a tremendous emotional attachment to the locomotive, the scion of the Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation, and often spoke of it as a sentient being. She called it “my dragon friend” and claimed to converse with it in dreams.

In fact she had a warm feeling for all manner of mechanical and electrical devices: a fan of treadle sewing machines and single-speed bicycles, of watch mechanisms and astrolabes, music boxes and clockwork toys. She helped lead the revival and adaptation of the “Ant” vehicles (after Anthea Habjar-Lawrence, who had pioneered the adaptation of captured Soviet staff cars into 4wd open vehicles, with 4-way independent suspension, very high engine torque, and overhead venting that permitted them to be driven water as deep as 5 feet); in the 1980s, with the bio-engineers of the Wood-Elves’ Commune, she developed versions of the Ant which ran on bio-diesel and were employed by game wardens, field biologists, and border-riders.

She was likewise exceptionally active in Bassandan cryptozoology—which, however, reflected a rather different inter-species perspective than similar paranormal study elsewhere. She participated in the “Human-Primate Collaborative Systems” project in the Northern Alps which sought to map, using non-invasive techniques, the general habitat and range of the Parvatamā mānisaharū, the semi-legendary shaggy-haired primate associated with the region of Matthias’s Mountain Rest. She actually posited an explanation for the presence of these “men of the mountains,” suggesting that perhaps they were the descendants of Homo erectus georgicus, fossilized remains of which have been found in the Caucasus, hence in relatively close proximity to Bassanda. Erzbieta further suggested, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, paleontologists, and Iliot shamans, that this collection of H. erectus georgicus might themselves have fallen through one of the known or unknown Rift exits scattered throughout the Bassandan Alps, including the most famous documented Portal, near the peak of Annolungma in the Three Brothers mountain range—and that this in turn might “explain” the appearance of prehistoric hominids in the era of H. sapiens. More significantly, her “H-P Systems” project developed an effective long-term strategy for preserving Georgicus habitats in the uplands and foothills, limiting development and the construction of electrical systems that might impede the magnetic ley lines by which H. georgicus navigated, and planning routes that connected habitats in safety. In the early Pastoral Era, communities in the North developed in which contemporary H. sapiens built villages which also welcomed Georgicus as foragers on their outskirts; the archaeologists hypothesized that precisely this sort of symbiosis had obtained in the North literally for millennia.

The Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project’s “DNK dlya Mirnoy Initsiativy,” otherwise “DNKMI” (“DNA for Peace Initiative” or DAPNI) confirmed that, as was especially common amongst BNRO members and allies, there were peculiarities in her DNA, including both (a) strands that appeared to be of archaic, even pre-Neanderthal origin, and (b) “genetic short-circuits,” more recent research upon which has suggested that her cerebral cortex might have been able, in conditions of heightened concentration or emotion, to generate unusually powerful endogenous electric fields. That research had not yet been undertaken in the late 1960s when she joined the BNRO—much less in that earlier period when she, like others in “the Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” was cast back in time—but this clinical explanation may account for both the peculiar behavior of compasses and other magnetic devices when in close proximity to Erzy (as was the case with Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur and several other Members, especially of the “Steampunk” edition) and, possibly, her unusual high ability to identify, invoke, traverse, and even (as described above/below) to seal Rift Portals—a phenomenon previously thought to be impossible until the late 1960s (see the earlier, ultimately unsuccessful attempts described in “Riding the Rio Grande Rift Portal,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). She was a particularly skillful and intuitive Rift Portal engineer, and helped design the circuits that—as late as the early 1970s—finally made it possible to reliably seal the Portals through which the Dark Ones had attacked Bassanda and the Northern Rio Grande valley. Of notably modest disposition, however, she typically insisted “I’m not really a scientist—more of a Rift Monkey, really.”

Her best friend in the Band was probably the singer and dancer Aine Ó Duinnshléibhe, with whom she shared a love of myth and a slightly macabre sense of humor. She loved libraries and archives, and was particularly fond of medieval sciences and mathematics. She was a passionate advocate on behalf of “ancient learning” and of the interplay between science, cosmology, and philosophy, able to link such seemingly-distant topics as medieval Bassandan mathematics and the 20th century’s electro-mechanical “Arndt Engines” (computing devices). Out of these interests, she developed as a cipher expert and code-breaker, adept with both intuitive and mechanical methods, having developed several codes, based upon the ancient Ogham symbols, which could be employed in both visual and sounding media.

Eventually, in the 1990s, she settled in the northern provinces, not far from the hermitage of Cifani Dhoma, below Matthias’s Mountain Rest. It was a small stone cabin hung with tapestries, walled with books (including her treasured collection of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien first editions, and carefully-preserved facsimiles of medieval manuscripts), and filled with small cheerful mechanisms that clicked, and whirred, and chimed.

Outside, over the heavy timbered door, hung a banner depicting a green and golden dragon.

Caitrìona at her dacha, c1970
Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš

Low brass, dance, voice

b1946 of Mexican, Irish, Greek, Sephardic, Apache, and Bassandan ancestry

Descended from conversos who left Iberia around the time of the Reconquista. At least one of these ancestors was actually among those hundreds of persons—soldiers, servants, guides, camp-followers, and so on—who traveled with Coronado’s expedition (1540-42) north from Mexico. This is the likely origin of the Spanish and Apache elements in her bloodlines, as tracked by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project’s “DNA for Peace Initiative” (“DNAPI”), whose primary mission, as shaped by the Ministry of Culture during the post-Soviet regime of Polli Kilotona, was to more completely track the sheer genetic diversity of the Bassanda population, with the goal of emphasizing diversity as a source of strength and beauty in the national character.

Her maternal great-grandmother was born in the province of Campeche on the southeast coast of Mexico, a semi-tropical Caribbean colonial settlement, built upon the pre-Columbian city of Ah Kim Pech. The walled city was much later (partly through Cait’s own efforts) ranked as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but prior to that time had been, ever since the 17th century, a port especially friendly to smugglers and pirates from England, Holland, and points further afield. Its polyglot population in turn enjoyed a close and immediate mercantile and cultural exchange with western Cuba and Jean Lafitte’s pirate haven at Galveston, in the early 19th century trading rum, silk, spices, and looted gold. This branch probably accounts for her family connections with the dancer Lisle Goncharov (born Campeche, 1932), the pianist/vocalist/trumpeter Rahmani Boenavida (born Monterrey, 1926), and the Haitian Creole fiddler Extaberri le Gwo (born Galveston Island, 1931).

On the paternal side, her Bassandan ancestors came principally from the expatriate communities of the Aegean: having been the victims of the post-Ottoman Diaspora—which displaced hundreds of ethnic minority communities—her father’s extended clan of smugglers, pirates, shipbuilders, and traders had settled widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean. This probably accounts for the interaction of Sephardic ancestors exiled from Spain and heading east, and Greek and Bassandan ancestors, heading west, in the 16th century coasting trade; though on the other hand, there were Bassandan traders, and Irish-Mexican veterans of the San Patricios, at Jalisco on the west coast of Mexico. In either case, it was certainly from the paternal, Aegean side of the family tree that she encountered the traditional “artless art” of Bassandan archery, which taught the use of the bow not as combat or exercise, but as a deep philosophical practice. From the Archives comes a short reminiscence attributed to the poet and storyteller Meyodija Zöld Mezők, who shared northern Greek experience with her, and who also mentored her as a writer:

Cait….Cait was tough, and brave. She’d served with the Pădure Fraților (“Forest Brethren”) against the Cossacks when she was just a teenager, and she wasn’t afraid of combat.[1] In the mountain war in the North, when the Chinese Cossacks were trying to do to us what they were doing in Tibet—“liberating” us from “the shackles of post-colonial superstition”—they feared her. She had a set of Nacht-Jager goggles that her cousins had liberated for her from some fleeing Nazi tankers in the Battle for Ballyizget in the spring of ’45 [NB: these goggles appear in the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band” daguerreotype, cited below], and that’d been hot-rodded for her with electro-magnetics by Astrid Hjärta, another one of those genius teenagers Yezget-Bey tended to gather around him. Even without them, but even more with them, she could move in the dark like a cat: absolutely silent and absolutely deadly. Those Cossack levies feared her, because they couldn’t hear her, and they couldn’t hear her arrows: some officer would step out on the porch of his barracks, especially in the remote outposts, and there’d be just this whisper out of the night, and a thunk, and he’d be dead on the boards with an arrow through him.

Years later, when she’d “put away violence for good,” and was mostly playing in the Band and running her POK [nb: see below], she told me some of her war stories. She’s laugh and say, “I’m only telling you this because I know nobody will believe it!” and then tell me some other hair-raising tale about that time.

[Smiles] What she didn’t know was that, even if nobody would ever believe those stories of her—peaceful Cait, who loved children and old people—they were totally prepared to believe those stories when I gave them to the heroine of my OAKEN books!

Her Bassandan smuggler grandfather was born in the Aegean, in one of the Greek-speaking expat communities of the islands; that is surely where he learned his small-boat skills, whether as smuggler, fisherman, or legitimate trader (or, at various intervals, all three). She was thus related by blood to the Gora clan famed in the WWI Bassanda Resistance and to the legendary Ismail Durang, hero of the 1906 “Great Train Ride for Bassanda.” She was likewise related, as a third cousin via their shared Cretan great-grandmother, to Leon Avventoros Anderson, the OSS/CIA analyst whose reporting on Bassanda was the backbone of the CIA’s and USIA’s area studies in the 1950s.

After the Second War, as a returning student on the Bassandan version of the GI Bill, she matriculated at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory. She was a specialist in some of the more esoteric low-brass instruments (ophicleide, saxhorn, helicon, and alto bugle), and played a key role in the revival of historical band music associated with Bassandan political resistance; particularly that music recorded on cylinder c1910-13 with the Zanimayut Bassanda Dukhovoy Orkestr (“Occupy Bassanda Brass Orchestra” or ZBDO), which recordings were in turn a strong influence on the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1917) which is commonly understood as the “first jazz band on record.”[2] Her revived ZBDO frequently appeared at patriotic events in the 1960s (Feb 23 Red Army Day, May Day, celebrations of the October Revolution), playing slyly re-orchestrated versions of anti-Tsarist anthems which insiders recognized to be likewise critical of the Central Soviet itself. “Kit-Kat” was a ringleader in this subversive musicianship, and kept the ZBDO going in the post-Soviet period.

But she also appears in the paradoxical, timeline-confounding daguerreotypes of the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” found in a Taos mission archive, and so it would seem that she shared with those other personnel the still-unexplained experience of having been ‘cast back’ in time, from c1967 to c1885, through the previously-unrecognized Rift-active capacities of the locomotive called “The Beast.” She never spoke specifically of these events, but there is a possibility that this time-travel actually positioned her to interact directly with the members of the ZBDO in the early ‘Teens, or perhaps even to have appeared on the recordings themselves. The chronology is quite confusing: did she transmit the recordings to the revivalists of the 1960s, or did she appear on the original cylinders—or did she perhaps, somehow, do both?

One indirect piece of evidence complicates this chronology in interesting ways. Her band nickname was La Gata, ostensibly conferred at least because of her natural bodily fluidity and dark coloring. She was widely associated with felines, and band folklore had it that her familiar spirit was a black cat. The literary historians of the Bassandan Archives at Miskatonic University have suggested that—if the story of the 1885 Band’s inadvertent time-travel is true— she might have served as a model for one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So stories, having (possibly) been introduced to the British author in Vermont during the same visit that also provided him with Ана Ljubak de Quareton as a model for the mother wolf “Raksha, the Protector,” in The Jungle Book. Kipling’s “The Cat that Walked by [Him]Self,” a “new fable” for children, tells the story of how humans “domesticated all the wild animals except the cat, which insisted on greater independence.” And that was a phrase the Band used—admiringly—about Cait: “she walked by herself.”

She was close to the singer and dancer Ani Hamim Gassion, with whom she shared both a clownish sense of humor—often mime or physical comedy—a love of dance, and a fierce commitment to personal independence. They were renowned for their ability to (paraphrasing Ani’s words) “hang with the Boys in the Band,” and regularly closed-down Ballyizget barrooms after their bandmates had long since succumbed to the potency of Syntia’s Peach Brandy—there is a beautiful Kodachrome image of the two, dated approximately 1968, dancing what appears to be a French mazurka in the Band’s favored Ballyizget waterfront tavern, the Golden Rhino.

Nearly at the other end of the BNRO space/time continuum, both were icons of what appears to have been an Edwardian-era version of the “fan club”: The Young Men’s Oriental Society of Talpa (c1892) elected Ani and Cait as their “cadets protégés,” which suggests that Messrs. League, Owsley-Smith, and Salamone, along with Lieutenant League, Colonel Thompson, and The General himself, respected them and admired not only their beauty but also their intellect (of Cait and Ani, the Colonel—who was in a position to know—once commented “them two’re the toughest, smartest, purtiest little gals I ever did meet in that Era—don’ blame ‘em for bein’ s’lective ‘bout menfolk: take a helluva man t’ keep with either one of ‘em”). Yezget-Bey called them “Sisters under the Skin,” another Kipling reference.

Her father was a master craftsman and she herself possessed competent carpentry skills; years later, she built her own small summer dacha on the southern face of the Alps, below Matthias’s Mountain Rest lodge. She was also an excellent “shade-tree” mechanic, and was capable of repairing the wood-burning Çons Moʙilī 4wd commando vehicles employed by the Forest Brethren, the two-wheelers of the Bassandan Bicycle Corps, and Yezget-Bey’s venerable Jordan House Car.

Though she had the self-discipline and physical fitness of a military-trained wind-band musician, there was a sensitive side as well: she wrote poetry, cherished small children, and was an infallible mentor to younger colleagues. Her series of rhymed, music-themed children’s books, La Gata’s Grāmatas, were beloved bedtime reading for generations of Bassandan families, and she herself was a doting, devoted female role-model to generations of BNRO offspring.

She was likewise close to her large extended family, across the globe, and was a leader in the movement to reintegrate the elderly— during the previous Stalinist period, largely consigned to grim State-run care centers—back into multi-generational home life. This Pod Odnoy Kryshey (“Under One Roof”) campaign, inspired in part by the work of the pioneering Swiss physician and counselor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), emphasized providing out-patient and at-home health, counseling, and nutrition resources, thereby increasing the capacity of families to keep elders with them, up to and including the stages of dying. Cait was also the public face of the POK’s outreach campaign, which facilitated college students serving as “family aides” in such situations, as an alternative to other forms of government or military service, and she spoke movingly of the sense of self-ness and centeredness which living with aging relatives had provided her. Many of her Kryshey-ites went on to become leaders in the State’s 1980s hospice and elder-care apparatus, in a program that was eventually copied in the West.

In contrast to the situation of a number of others in the Band, it has not been confirmed that Cait was a shapeshifter. But she did seem to manifest certain kinds of paranormal capacities, particularly in her capacity to bond and communicate with mammalian quadrupeds, especially felines. Of course, the BNRO and its circle, especially in certain eras, were especially feline-centric: Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne, Rāḥīl Marrone, Madame Main-Smith, and Madame Szabo were all noted “cat whisperers,” and highly evocative feline tales were told about Azilarim Jangchi and Deseo Koža as well. This feline theme was continued in the ancient origins attributed to the Bassandan Barn Cats (Freya felinis), a large-sized long-haired breed of great climactic fortitude descended from animals brought from the North by wandering Vikings headed for Constantinople, and sometimes called “the Bassandan Miniature Cougar” (a mis-classification). “BB cats” were renowned for preferring to sleep outside the home, no matter how warm their relationship with humans or how cold the overnight temperatures. The feline theme continued even beyond the borders of Bassanda: Professor St-John’s ancient half-Siamese / half-BBC mix, named “Anubis,” was jokingly described as “the Professor’s Familiar,” and was renowned for his alleged telekinetic ability to identify mendacious or sorcerous actions on the part of humans.

Though raised on the water, she was equally comfortable in the high, dry grasslands of the northern steppes, to the west of the Bassanda Alps, and appreciated the starkness of the northwestern landscape. She was an athlete, an outdoorswoman, camper, and hiker, and pioneered some trails in the foothills of the Bassandan Alps that still challenge the amateur; her friend the trumpeter Theofania de Someries, herself an expert horsewoman, said “Cait loved to be outdoors. Especially at night, under the moon. In the wild places.”

In seasons when the Band was home off the road, she could be found at her summer dacha in the Bassandan Hills, often reading in the sun, seated on a stone bench outside the cabin’s front door, which faced south over the alpine meadows toward Ballyizget and her friends at Habjar-Lawrence.

She was usually accompanied by cats.

[1] NB: in Bassandan Resistance circles, the forces of Russian authoritarianism—whether Tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet—were most often described under the historically-anachronistic blanket term “Cossacks,” which was a descriptor not of ethnicity but of conduct; it was even employed to reference Red Army troops during the Chinese incursion, along Bassanda’s northeastern borders, in the mid-1970s. See likewise miško broliai (“Forest Brothers”), elsewhere in the Correspondence.

[2] “Занимают Bassanda Духовой Оркестр”. The ZBDO was also cited as a strong influence upon the Kelemen Misha Forsàidh-era Electric Trees, in their brief appearance, a la Ashley Hutchings’s Etchingham Steam Band, as an atonal “free-jazz” marching band.

"ShayShay," Ballyizget, c1944
Feye (a/k/a “Sé” a/k/a “ShayShay”)
Keijukainen Arndt

b1903, New York City, Lower East Side

One side of her family (Ashkenazim/Romany/Bassandan) had come to America in the 1890s, part of the wave of eastern European Jews who fled pogroms in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Other European ancestors included Ulster Scots (the so-called “Wild Geese”) and French Calvinist Huguenots who had settled in Bavaria and Switzerland in the 1680s. Her maternal grandfather Ibrahim Arendt, a Torah scholar and the family patriarch, correctly divined that, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, conflicts in the Balkans would probably escalate, and in response led Feye’s mother, grandmother, and aunts to the New World, though it took the looming outbreak of war itself, in summer 1914, to bring the Arendt sons who had maintained the family’s tailor shop in Konstanz, in Bavaria. The immediate precipitating agent in this second flight by the Arendt brothers was the assassination of the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand; in the event, the Kaiser issued a blanket approval of Austro-Hungarian aggression against Serbia (and its ally Russia), the so-called and notorious “Blank Cheque,” shortly thereafter. The Arendt extended family was united again in New York (the Brothers traveling on a ship named, ironically, the Kaiser Wilhelm) by July 12 1914, just a few weeks before the declaration of war on the 28th. Having assumed the surname “Arndt,” following a clerical error at Ellis Island in which officials misspelled the surname, the reunited multi-generational clan settled on Henry St on the Lower East Side, in the bustling neighborhood of German and Russian Jews; Irish, Poles, Italians, and Finns were also present on the block.

Her father James Weaver, an itinerant actor, dancer, and Irish tenor, had met her mother Miriam in New York around 1899, when he brought a pair of trousers to be darned into the family tailor shop at 12th St and Houston. They had eventually begun courting, which courtship was opposed by Miriam’s father but supported by grandfather Ibrahim, who insisted “That she should love the American boy is her choice”; their first child, a daughter, was born in 1903.

Some of Feye’s first performance experiences were as a child actor, comedienne, and dancer with her elder brothers, in the neighborhood around the corner of Second Avenue and 12th Street, in the second “Golden Age” of Yiddish theater, and it is certain that she worked for a period as a teenager in a Kosher candy shop. The Lower East Side in this period was—and had been, ever since the American Revolution—a neighborhood of enormous cultural diversity and, as a result, of fertile expressive arts. Performers as varied as the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, and Boris Thomashefsky were all building careers rooted in the neighborhood and in the music, comedy, and song of the theaters at the time that she was growing up. Touring on the same Yiddish vaudeville circuits as the young Marx Brothers (then a singing group) with her siblings as “Di Arndt Brider mit Eyner” (“The Arndt Brothers plus One”), she developed her stage skills (this is also the reason she retained her mother’s family surname).

However, it was also a place which experienced considerable anti-Semitism, marginalization, and—in the period of summer-fall 1917 leading up to US entrance into World War I—anti-German hysteria. Especially in the Midwest and West, hard-working immigrants with the misfortune of obviously Germanic surnames could find themselves scapegoated, boycotted, or worse. She was 14 when the War ended, an accomplished singer, dancer, instrumentalist, mime, and comedienne, but there appears to have been an abrupt hiatus—one might almost say a catastrophic interruption—some time in early 1919. Nativist sentiment had continued into the post-War era, now leveled more widely at not only Germans but also real or presumed “Bolsheviks” and “anarchists” who were presumed to represent a threat to national security. The notorious Palmer Raids (after the US Attorney General who promulgated this shameful persecution) sowed seeds of fear and resulting persecution of Jews, Italians, Irish, and Eastern Europeans, political activists, and union members, and the Arndt family were not immune: the Brothers-Plus-One act’s Summer-Fall 1919 tour of the Upper Midwest was cancelled in mid-stream, and the siblings had to struggle to get home to New York. At some point on this return journey, full of interruptions, cancelled trains, rough interrogations by suspicious small-town police officers, and garbled communications to the family in Manhattan, the following series of telegrams was exchanged (only a portion of the telegraphic conversation is preserved):

24.VI.16 Milwaukee (WISC)4PM
FOTER: DEYN KANSALD STOP FILE BEYZ AMERIKANER STOP STARTING FAR HEYM ENDIT
(“Father: Tour cancelled. Many angry Americans. Starting for home.”)

25.VI.16 Elkhart (IND) 2AM
BAN RISKEJULD STOP AVEYTING KSHR INDYANA STOP KUMENDIKE STANTSYE TALEDA
(“Train rescheduled. Awaiting connection Indiana. Next station Toledo”)

[a gap follows, completed with a cable marked “Urgent” from the Union Square post office in Manhattan]

27.VI.16 UNION SQUARE (NYC)
VI KEN FEYE HOBN VERN LOST QUERY VEN HAT IR NISHT ZEN IR QUERY VU IZ DEYN SHVESTER QUERY
(“How could Feye have become lost? When did you not see her? Where is your sister?”)

So it seems that somehow, somewhere between Elkhart Indiana and Manhattan, and sometime between 24 and 27 June 1919 in that summer of the Palmer Raids, en route home from a cancelled tour with her brothers, she simply “went missing”. She disappears from the New York Yiddish- and English-language theatrical newspapers, family letters occasionally refer to “our poor lost Feye,” but there is a hiatus in the chronology. And when she does reappear in the historical record, that record’s chronology is internally contradictory, to wit:

Though she was not a “flapper” per se, being too sophisticated and self-willed a person, F Scott Fitzgerald insisted that she served as the model for the young aristocrat Ardita Farnam, heroine of the early (1920) story “The Offshore Pirate”; where she and Fitzgerald met—if indeed they did meet in person—is not known;

She is present in a snapshot of Algeria Main-Smith and Yezget-Bey conversing with the young Ezra Pound outside Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in Paris in 1926, but there is no explanation or indication of how she got there—if indeed it is she (though the apparent age of the blurred figure is relatively consistent with a 1903 birthdate).

In addition, from a much later era come recollections of her, in in the World War II-era reminiscences, letters, and other ephemera of Jakov Redžinald, Madame Szabo, Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, and Морган Ŭitmena, all original members of the pre-BNRO ad hoc “People’s Liberation Orchestra,” and of the subsequent 1952 “Classic Band,” who speak of “Sé”’s comedic and mathematical skills—she was a legendary haggler in village markets, adept at both the banter and the quick arithmetic which this mandated. Though it is alleged that she toured with the ’52 Band, no photos of the period include her. It has been suggested that this lacuna may perhaps be due to the fact that the reminiscences of these “classic-Era” personnel might actually predate the ’52 Band, and deserve more accurate attribution to the pre-Band PLO. However, the situation is much more chronologically complicated:

She appears in the Lilt Papers, held at Miskatonic, as another participant in 1892 conversations between Algeria Main-Smith, Jacob Riis, Big Bill Haywood, and an unnamed Iliot shaman “wise woman” (who may have been the mother of Yezget Nas1lsinez) at the World Columbian Exposition. She is reported as appearing as a dancer on the Midway Plaisance of the Exposition in that year, approximately the same time that Lilt appeared in Chicago, and a small souvenir postcard in the Correspondence appears to suggest that she may have been one of the dancers later notoriously popularized as “Little Egypt.” There is no known explanation for her alleged appearance at an Exposition 11 years before she was born, but what is confirmed, throughout the known biography, is her familiarity with various genres of folkloric dance from Asia Minor, North Africa, and the Near East.

Finally, and most challengingly, she is one of the many BNRO personnel who are visible—with equivalent contradiction—in the daguerreotype found in a Taos mission and generally understood to depict “The Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band.” However, most of the other personnel in this image are not those who were (apparently) her contemporaries in the 1940s-50s Band, but much younger recruits from the late 1960s, who the Hazzard-Igniti school of thought has suggested were “cast back in time” at a moment when the electromagnetic locomotive known as “the Beast” had itself, as a result of multiple trans-Rift journeys, become an unpredictable, not yet identified Portal of its own. Ambrosius de Colatta, Professor Hazzard-Igniti’s senior student and an influential post-Hazzardian theorist of Rift phenomena, has suggested that, sometime after the successful 1906 return of ancient Documents back to the motherland from Paris by Cecile Lapin, Ismail Durang, and Professor James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence (see “the Great Train Ride for Bassanda”), 1960s Bassandan activists tinkering with the locomotive’s electro-magnetic circuitry may have inadvertently activated this Riftian capacity. In this scenario, the 1967 Band, traveling via Beast to a jumping-off point for a tour, found themselves sucked into the Beast’s own undiagnosed Riftian vortex and cast backwards to the 1880s. This may also explain how, by the 1990s visit of the General and the Colonel to Winesap at Miskatonic, the Beast could carry amongst its passengers dozens of notables from all eras of Bassandan and related history—that, in fact, these time-traveling notables were simply passing-by one another on board the locomotive, en route to and from different where/when destinations.

Sé popped up in Ballyizget during the Nazi Occupation of 1940-45 as a café dancer under the stage name “ShayShay,” while also serving, like Kristina Olenev, as a member of the women-led resistance group “Cell No. 1” which liaised with both Allied intelligence and the partisan group called “the Forest Brothers.” This is the source of one theory which has been posited for her absence from the iconic photos of the 1952, 1962, and 1965 Bands, despite the substantiated evidence of her earliest appearances in the ‘40s with the pre-BNRO People’s Liberation Orchestra, and her presence in the “mysterious” 1885 portrait: the simple inference that, after engaging in both anti-German and anti-Soviet activities during the War years, she was reluctant to be listed or even photographed as a participant in public activities, or even that the Archives had been scrubbed of such images, for her own safety.

In a somewhat more challenging interpretation, it has been suggested that she was in fact, like several other Bassandan notables (including the Colonel, the General, Madame Main-Smith, and a number of members of the 1967/1885 Band, among others), an individual time-traveler. Further scholarship and deduction confirms that she might better be described as a “time refugee” or “time drifter”: an individual so susceptible to the time-traveling and life-extending aspects of Rift experience that shifts of era and location might occur without warning or her control. A number of Bassandan notables shared a degree of electro-magnetic sensitivity—the capacity to sense, channel, alter, or accumulate electrical power derived from the Earth’s magnetic ley lines—including Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, Aislinn mac Aluinn, KG, and others. Though these “Lost Years” in her biography have proven resistant to rationalization even by the expert researchers of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project (EHS-OHP), who were unable to fill all gaps in the record, the “Colattian Time Drift” phenomenon may explain her absence at certain documented historical moments (most notably, the formal band portraits cited above), despite the number of anecdotes from original PLO / BNRO personnel who adamantly insist upon her having been present.

If this deduction is accurate, then a further inference follows: that what most frequently precipitated this sudden, unexpected, and seemingly uncontrollable Rift travel were her encounters with dance. All accounts from all periods attest to her interest in and almost trance-like response to new dance styles, and numerous small-yet-vivid anecdotes confirm the intensity of this mind-body engagement:

She was versed in various Irish and UK folk dance styles spanning four centuries and a wealth of social-cultural-class experiences: Cecil Sharpe cites her, confusingly, as a source for his collecting of both English country dances in 1922 Lancashire and contra-dancing in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1916—Sharpe, a notoriously biased fieldworker who “saw what he wished to see” in collecting, mistakenly identifying her Appalachian flat-footing as “the Kentucky running step.” It is just within the bounds of possibility that she could have danced for Sharp in Kentucky at age 13—though how, as a New York child vaudevillian, she could have learned Appalachian clogging, is not explained—and her citation in Lancashire in 1922 may possibly accord with the accounts of her presence in Paris later that same year.

Some have similarly claimed that she appears as a B-girl, dancing with Afrika Bambaataa’s Bronx-based Zulu Nation, in early promotional shots from 1971-72, a time when very few Anglo’s were part of the hip-hop community. There is no explanation for the apparent chronological anomaly of a young woman, appearing to be in late teens in these photos, at a time when Sé was nearly 70 years of age.

Tall, blonde, and serious in demeanor, she was a wonderfully expressive, stately dancer, who was also an adept clown in comic moments, and a fine teacher. She is alleged to have kept company with—or perhaps just to have hauled equipment for—the guitarist Yishay Sønn Ramiro and the dancer/teacher Jaakko Eipäkauppa, who both moved through the PLO orbit prior to the official founding of the BNRO, and she was especially close to a number of the female personnel including Szabo, Jangali, the Ŭitmena Sisters, and Meyodija Zöld Mezők, among others.

A mathematical savant—though she disparaged the “bean-counters” of the Bassandan Soviet Socialist Republic bureaucracy—she was an admirer of the great English computing theorist Ada Lovelace (1815-52), and in the late 1930s contributed to Bassandan partisans’ development of an adapted “Difference Engine” (mechanical computer) which was driven by magnetic batteries and could be packed on the back of a mule; these “Arndt Engines” were crucial tools in computing wind and weather patterns to coordinate air-drops and commando raids by Allied forces against the Nazi occupiers. Much later, she was a patroness of the “Calculus Commandos” mathematics club for young women at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, who were mentored by the female veterans of Cell #1.

She was also a linguist: having inherited Yiddish, Bassandan, and German from her mother’s family, and Irish from her father’s, she later added Finnish, Latin, and Japanese. She was a founder of the Society for Bassandan Sign Language (BSL) and was a pioneer in the use of sign language to communicate with neurologically-diverse clients and with members of the animal kingdom: it was largely through her agency that BSL was added to veterinary- and animal rescue-training programs.

Witness reports in the Eagle’s Heart Sister Oral History Projects transcripts insist that she was also capable of what BNRO veterans (and the occasional post-Hazzardian Rift theorist) described as a “raising of Aspect,” a construction either borrowed from, or possibly bestowed by the BNRO upon, the speculative-fiction author Roger Zelazny, and employed by him in his Lord of Light. This novel posits a group of interstellar spaceship crew members who, landing on a human-inhabitable world, over centuries learn to control certain psycho-active, electro-magnetic, and technological tools in such a fashion that they are able both to transfer consciousness to new cloned bodies, and to appear as Gods of the Hindu pantheon to the humans who are their multiple-generations-removed descendants. Sé was widely held, within BNRO circles, to possess the same capacities.

One final explanation for her psycho-active and “time-drift” attributes has been promulgated, primarily by those who knew her longest: reaching back to the PLO days, and even before, around 1921, when she first appeared, still an apparent teenager, in Ballyizget. Called “Feye” by her Lower East Side family and “ShayShay” in her Ballyziget café days, her later pet-name in the Band was “Pele,” a reference to the Hawai’ian goddess of dance. But as early as her teenaged years in the 1920s, in both Paris and Bassanda she was referenced, by Fitzgerald, Madame Main-Smith, and even the wandering banjo player Lilt, with a variety of other highly-evocative names: “Yemaya,” “Bali” (scrawled in pencil on the back of a photo of Lilt and Sé from Sharp’s 1916 Appalachian collecting are the identifiers “Lilt & Balley, fer Mr Sharp”), and “Devi” among others.

Though the EHS-OHP accounts attribute these nicknames to bandmates’ recognition of her dance mania, certain other documents in the Archive, not yet cataloged or digitized, allege that likenesses of her portrait or of certain live details recur across a very wide range of epochs of Bassanda history: on papyrus and parchment, in carvings and cuneiforms, over nearly a millennium. Though the EHS-OHP accounts allude to these uncatalogued documents, the accounts resist the obvious inference arising from them: that those reporters in various media and eras, like her oldest friends in the PLO/BNRO, believed literally that she was a multi-semiotic manifestation of the many goddesses of dance: the Yoruba orisha Yemaya (goddess of water and healing as well), the Hindu Shiva (goddess of dance and destruction), Bali, Malyadevi, Bastet (Egypt) goddess of cats, joy, dance, music, family, love.

As Madame Szabo, herself a larger-than-life figure who was also one of Sé’s oldest friends, said, questioned about this most fanciful story by the EHS-OHP documentarians, replied, with a question of her own:

“How do you know that she wasn’t a supernatural being?!?”

Magda, Golden Gate Park, c1967
Maçdalija Gundisalvus
cello
b c1936?

Her ethnic origins are slightly mysterious: family stories suggest that antecedents include Mexican Hidalga, Irish expatriate, Ulster Scots, Comanche?, Chickasaw, Bassandan/Romany. A part of her family’s Southwest history revolves around the contested territories on the border between south Texas and Nuevo Léon; on the other hand, a great-great-uncle, a veteran of the Batallón San Patricio, was said to have later run a swordsmanship school in Guadalajara, on the western coast, and to have sired a large brood of mixed-race Irish/Mexican children (see Carpenter, 1851); some of their descendants served as crewmen and pilots for the 1940 scientific collecting expedition which was later co-authored by John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, The Sea of Cortez. It is also confirmed that, like the Manila galleons, Bassandan smugglers and gold merchants did occasionally make harbor at Ensenada, Acapulco, and San Francisco; hence it is likely that some others of this Irish-Mexican ancestor’s children, perhaps answering the call of the blood, shipped out for points “West” (which, from a Euro-centric perspective, really meant “East”) toward the South Seas. Another relative, one of the first English-speaking homesteaders to enter into the eastern Ozarks from Tennessee, was the mysterious “mystic hunter” and backwoodsman Ruiseart Cuinneagham (born c1782), who married a Chickasaw woman, and whose tri-lingual longhand journals from 1805-11 contain, between descriptions of terrain and watersheds, prayers to and conversations with the spirits of the animals he hunted and the streams he forded.

In the paternal line she was also definitely a scion of Iliot shamanic stock; it is thought in fact that her Bassandan grandfather had been an advanced adept in the mystical Order of the Twenty-Six Fezzes. Though she herself was not an initiate, it may be that her unusually high paranormal sensitivity nevertheless resulted from this genetic inheritance: it is well-known that the Iliot shamans, whose lineage was both inherited and educated, tended to display such sensitivity.

Even as a child she was also an unusually striking presence: large-eyed and pale-skinned, quiet and observant. The American playwright Arthur Miller, who met her family in London in 1951, might possibly have had the adolescent Magda in mind when, in 1953, he drafted his dramatic characterization of Abigail Williams, who in his allegorical masterpiece The Crucible is a principle protagonist. In later life, she was not particularly pleased at this link to a quasi-historical figure widely blamed for precipitating the Salem Witch Trials, though she was not above quieting invasive Bassanda Communist Party officials, during their routine interrogations of the Band, by blurting out embarrassing details of the commissars’ private lives which she had “seen.” By the same token, there is some internal evidence in the materials collected in Tolkien’s Silmarillion that one model for the Elvish clan of the Ñoldor (Quenya: “those with knowledge”) was the pale-skinned and dark-haired Gundisalvus siblings, who he met, also in the UK, in the same period.

Admittedly Magda was not untouched by angels and demons; an avid devotee of the supernatural, she maintained an impressive collection, for example, of first editions, manuscripts, and primary sources from the collection of the journalist and essayist Lafcadio Hearn/Koizumi Kaumo (1850-1904), who had specialized in retellings of Greek, Irish, Creole, and Japanese ghost stories. She was multi-lingual from a young age, and it was she who, during a visit to Japan’s Waseda University on tour with a BNRO chamber group around 1957, correctly identified a previously uncatalogued hand-written fragment, which relates Hearn’s wild tale of a supernatural confrontation in the canal city of Matsue between Colonel Thompson and a murderous Obake (vengeful ghost). And her Highland Scots, Bassandan, and Chickasaw heritage likewise ensured that she was well-endowed with both “tales” and “sight.”

Given this paranormal sensitivity, it is no surprise that she bonded with the shapeshifters in the Band, particularly with the selkie pianist Nollag Käsityöläinen and, a little later, the malsum dancer Ана Ljubak de Quareton and the Sámi ursine dancer Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, though she herself did not bear this attribute. Like Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne, who with her siblings had possibly served as a model for the Pevensey children in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, she was exceptionally sensitive to and communicative with animals: because Ballyizget University’s Department of Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics was housed at the “City” campus only a few blocks from Habjar-Lawrence, and because Doktor Марцус Walhaz, chair of the Department, was a patron of the BNRO, it was not uncommon for Magda to while away the hours between lessons and rehearsals by assisting in the therapeutic-animals training facility at BU. Later, citing older role models and animal-rights activists like de Quareton, Lisle Goncharov, and Madame Nijinska herself, she headed an innovative chamber-music program at Madame’s Libertas Domum "No-kill" sanctuary and shelter, hosting open-air concerts attended by recovering humans and recovering animals alike, and indeed often bringing them together to contribute to their own healing.

She was in a sense a child of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, having begun studio lessons there as a young girl around 1946, and in a similar sense she grew up there: comfortable with the environment and the people, intimately familiar with the rabbit-warren of practice rooms, engineering spaces, aging plumbing and heating systems, acoustically-friendly corners and stairwells, and so forth: an emblematic mascot of the wild individuality of both staff, faculty, and students there, in the paradoxically “golden years” of the grey Stalinist 1950s. She claimed to have been present as an onlooker in the rehearsal room at Habjar-Lawrence in 1952, when the former combat photographer Cifani Dhoma snapped the iconic “Classic 1952 Band” photo, depicting the BNRO in concert blacks and fezzes, which photograph Winesap (not normally given to even the remotest sorts of paranormal credibility) has persuasively argued possesses psychoactive and possibly Rift Portal powers. While the ‘50s was a restrictive period, when the BCP’s cultural affairs commissars were especially invasive and repressive—an atmosphere strongly reflected in the scowls of the ’52 photo—there was also a sense of under-the-surface repressed excitement, as the Classic Band’s personnel gelled and they came into the first flowering of their unique ensemble powers.

She studied technique informally with Terésa-Marie Szabo during her years at Habjar-Lawrence (temporarily retitled 1943-56, at the height of the Stalinist era, the "Glorious Marxist Revolution’s People’s Bassandan Nationalist Conservatorium"), in whose orchestras she also met the Scots-Cuban bassist Sagairi Gaisgeach, the Sikh violist Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī, the singer and berserker Nāṯānas Hús, and her particular friend, the Icelander composer Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, with whom she shared a love of puns and wordplay. She inherited the BNRO cello chair, which had been originated by her ageless mentor Elzbieta Purvis and also previously been held by her friend Jérome Courvalle, from Marusia Churai Poltava, who is conventionally understood as having preceded her in the Band but was, paradoxically, a number of years younger (born 1941 Chiapas). This paradox may be explained by the fact that Poltava’s political activism in Mexico not infrequently took her away from Bassanda, and so some fluidity in the ‘cello chair is perhaps understandable. Magda was deeply touched by the parallel BNRO dance tradition embodied in the Legend of the Five, the Five Sisters of the villages under Annolungma whose transformation into Golden Eagles formed the original basis of the myth upon which Xlbt. Op. 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring,” was based. This work had been conceived and set by Bronislava Nijinska in 1912 but never performed, before the idea was purloined by Diaghilev and Stravinsky, and Magda often lamented that, as a trained ballerina herself, she had not been able to participate in the eventual premiere.

What is not understood—any more than in the case of the other thirty-six players in the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’” daguerreotype, which was discovered in a Taos mission and restored and colorized by Cifani Dhoma nearly 100 years later—is how Magda, born in 1936, could have appeared in a photographic image taken over fifty years before. BCCP kommissars of the 1960s insisted that the portrait daguerreotype (not an ambrotype, as has sometimes erroneously been reported) was a “mere imperialist falsification,” a clumsily-retouched bit of archival propaganda intended to extend the Band’s terminus ante quem more than 80 years backwards in time and thus legitimize their inclusion of some “Tsarist” or “decadent Western imperialist” repertoires. Leaving aside the fact that post-Soviet spectrographic analysis has revealed no evidence of such tampering—and likewise that Soviet-era kommissars were exceptionally unwilling to challenge Dhoma’s intuitive photographic veracity in person—the evidence of the Julāhē Kaur fragment, and certain other 1880s evidence alleged to still lie in the Miskatonic Archives’ “Locked-Room Holdings,” suggest that no simple explanation for this time-folding paradox can be tendered. Perhaps the simplest explanation is the one that lies nearest the surface: perhaps, somehow, beyond the world of Newtonian physics and closer to the world of Bassandan electro-magnetic-chronological-paranormal phenomena, the Band could both exist and recruit in 1967, and c1885.

One other piece of evidence, elsewhere in the published Correspondence, likewise confirms both X’s involvement in the mid-‘60s Band and—apparently—the ability, which she shared with so many members of that band, to step across chronological eras. She first visited the USA as a stage-hand accompanying the Band during the trip that led to their semi-legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when a party on board the tour’s schooner Bruxa do mar, moored in Newport Harbor, inspired Bob Dylan to pick up the electric guitar. She was present in the crowd with her aunt and uncle, Robin Dobar Momak and Dafni Elias Momak, founders of the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ ("The Wood-Elves' Commune") which three years later birthed the revolutionary rock band The Electric Trees, when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s afternoon workshop performance of frenetic, heavily-amplified Southside Chicago-style blues drove a divide through the Newport audience nearly as sharp as the axe which Pete Seeger apocryphally threatened to use upon the power cables. It may even be that the implacable defiance with which Momak, Yezget-Bey and the Band met the BCCP commissars’ critique of their “bourgeois modernism” at the Inquisition in Ballyizget on the next day, July 25, may have been emboldened by the electric revolution they had somehow witnessed in person, the night before, half a world away. Certainly Newport ’65 provided a vision for communal arts-centered progressive action which played out in the Commune’s move, in early spring 1967, from a warehouse squat on the Ballyizget waterfront to 250 acres of steep, rocky, alpine pasture in the northern foothills, about 60 miles north. By then Magda was almost 21, and with her parents’ blessing provided the vision for an arts education program based upon Kodaly, John Dewey, and traditional models of apprenticeship.

Another factor may have influenced this move from the urban to the bucolic, and a turn toward traditional folkways and knowledge systems: Magda is definitely recorded as present, with Etxaberri Le Gwo, Aislinn mac Aluinn, and Yezget-Bey at the Human Be-In in January 1967 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Though she is not mentioned in the primary source material that confirms Etsy and Yezget-Bey’s presence (see “Beautiful See-In at the Human Be-In,” San Francisco Oracle, Jan 16 1967; now held in The Digger Archives), the provenance of several photographs from the same event has been confirmed; see “Aislinn mac Aluinn,” elsewhere in the Personnel files, and the image of Magda dancing, below. That hippie sensibility continued; she appears, peripherally, in the later account of the smuggler and Bassandan freedom activist Jackson Lawrence-Smyth’s encounter with the CIA Head of Station in Dolphu, Nepal in January 1979 and of accompanying him, in company with Khampa riders, as he smuggled ancient and essential Documents out of Bassanda (see “Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda”).

Like Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, she was a couturier and an empath and something of a visionary, addicted to clothing and gardening: conversing with plants and a tree-rights activist, she was a powerful inspiration for green activism in New Zealand, for example. Also like Julāhē Kaur—who carried the scars of a lightning strike down one hip, in addition to intentional ink, and also like de Quareton, John Rød Ericsson, Etxaberri Le Gwo, the shamanic dancer Moprah Uitmena, and Yezget-Bey himself—she was extensively tattooed, which in Bassanda carries strong connotations of body-centering, mandala-/acupressure-like psycho-activation, and ritual worship.

Like Dhoma, Ericsson, de Quareton, Žaklin Paulu, Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, Madame Gora, and Nijinska herself, her totem animal was Canis familiaris.

Madame Gora as Zerlina, Ballyizget production of Don Giovanni, c1958
Madame Múdry Urodzený Gora
singer, teacher, bodywork specialist, animal rights activist

b1908 Quimper (France) of Breton, Irish, Scots, and possibly Bassandan extraction. Though it has not been conclusively confirmed, the timing is correct for her to have been the natural-born daughter of the Bassandan freedom fighters Ismail Durang and Cécile Lapin, conceived in 1907, just after the climax of the epic adventure recounted in the “Great Train Ride for Bassanda” (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

What is known is that her Breton and Norman antecedents were soldiers of fortune, led by Patrick Sarsfield, who left Ireland after the 1691 Battle of the Boyne that broke the power of the Gaelic aristocracy—a diaspora who came to be known in Irish history as “the Wild Geese”. These Irish soldiers served in French, Swiss, and other Continental armies, and so she came from a long line of travelers and military adventurers. Most directly, her great-grandfather Francois Connolly, born at Finistère (the westernmost tip of Brittany) in 1809, served in the Russo-Turkish War in the late ‘20s, and again, commanding Italian troops, at the Battle of the Chernaya in the Crimean War (1850s), in which Leo Tolstoy was also a combatant; in his retirement, he became an activist for Ukrainian independence (Khlopomanstvo) after settling in Transcarpathia. His daughter, Madame’s grandmother Elzbieta Gora (born at Prezemyst in Galicia in 1855), was a singer and natural healer related to the great yogini Siddharajni, whose prana was said to be so strong that she could practice sitting meditation in the snowfields above the Matthiaskloster in the Bassandan Alps. Madame herself was a noted athlete and outdoorswoman, comfortable in all weathers; at one time in the 1950s, she was the patron of Uulsyg Ajilluulakh Khümüüs (Eng: “those who run mountains”), the Bassandan equivalent of the Kaihōgyō (回峰行?) (circling the mountain) sect of marathon-running Tendai monks of Japan’s Mount Hiei.

She herself, because born in Bassanda in a period of very significant political unrest—and in light of the political risk to her activist parents in the wake of 1917’s Red October when the Bolsheviks seized power—was sent to stay with distant Connolly relatives at Thirsk in the Yorkshire Dales, arriving in November 1918 just after the Armistice had been signed. Unfortunately, post-War North England was itself a rather stark environment, with many returned and invalided servicemen finding themselves out of work, and wartime shortages, rationing, and political censorship still very much in evidence. As supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, the Connollys were in the minority (though Northerners tended to share the Irish suspicion of Parliament and “London”) and it was impressed upon the young Múdry that she must be very careful about expressing political opinion amongst populations whose perspectives might differ from her own. This was brought home to her as she listened to the political conversations in the snug of the Wheatsheaf tavern where she worked as a teenaged server in the 1920s; this may have been where she first encountered, amongst the surprisingly well-read Yorkshire farm workers (many of them actually Irish nationals working abroad to send money home), more progressive political stances.

As a child, she found solace—like so many in the Bassanda orbit—in books and animals: the Wheatsheaf, which had been a posting inn ever since the 18th century, had a surprisingly complete literary collection of wide variety, including everything from worn copies of Dickens and Thackery subscriptions left behind over decades, to the latest numbers of the Times, the York Herald and The Dalesman. As she became known as a “bookish little thing,” area farmers, ministers, and schoolteachers made a point of leaving-in all manner of reading materials for her. She was likewise known, even in her adolescence, as an animal-lover, and not infrequently, the crusty farmers of the Yorkshire fells would visit the Wheatsheaf with an ailing sheep dog, barn cat, or other family pet, and listen respectfully to the teen’s assessments; decades later she quoted one consultant with relish, and an impeccable Yorkshire accent: “Aye, yon wee ‘un knew oor wee beasts better nor we.”

She had some thought of qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, but that profession was still, in 1925, very much a masculine preserve; it would require the demands and the new medical sciences of World War II—particularly the development of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals—to liberalize the field’s holdover Victorianisms. She might nevertheless have still attempted to break the gender barrier in this particular field, but in the spring of her 18th year, she was heard to sing the comic Yorkshire dialect song "On Ilkla Mooar baht 'at" (“On Ilkley Moor without a hat”) at a village fete by the 57-year-old Ralph Vaughan Williams, a combat veteran of the First World War and already in 1925 one of the best-known composers in Britain (his Hugh the Drover, an opera set in the Cotswolds, had been premiered at RCM in the previous year). Williams, a collector of folksong ever since meeting Cecil Sharp in 1900, and a Friend of Bassanda since visiting Ballyizget c1906 with the young Bela Bartok, was immediately struck by not only the purity of Gora’s tone and the subtlety of her expression, but also by what he (rightly, but with considerable prescience) recognized to be remarkable vocal potential. Striking up conversation with her and the Connollys after the fete, Williams discovered Gora’s Bassandan antecedents, and said—“But surely, with the War past, and Friends in the West becoming aware of the artistic riches of Bassanda, you might consider using such talent in your nation’s cause?”

It was thus through Vaughan Williams’s good offices that she gained the opportunity to study voice from 1926 onward at Paris’s École Normale with the legendary American-Italian mezzo Claire Croiza (1882-1946). During her time there, she moved in the circles of brilliant and very politically aware bohemians and expatriates; among other important contacts, she is likely to have met Algeria Main-Smith while Madame was consulting as a specialist in “Oriental and Esoteric values” for Shakespeare and Company. Gora herself haunted that book-shop and could often been found curled in a dusty back corner of the stacks, absorbed in reading; by Spring of 1927, Sylvia Beach, the bookshop’s legendary owner (and publisher of Joyce and Hemingway) had, in her own words, “thrown up my hands, and given the child a job—she was always there anyway!”

It was probably Madame Main-Smith who eventually brokered the introduction between Gora and Yezget-Bey, though exactly when they met is not known: it may have been at Paris in the Twenties, where he was a student in the Boulangerie, or as late as 1937-38, when his movements are not entirely known: locations as diverse as Tibet and Mississippi have been posited. It is confirmed that she was back and forth between Paris, London, and the North of England in the early 1930s. She seems to have travelled farther afield as well, in keeping with the folklore interests propounded by her mentor Vaughan Williams—in her papers in the Archives at Miskatonic College, there are handwritten music manuscripts and interview notes which suggest collecting activities both in the Western Islands of Scotland and the West of Ireland, most notably in north County Clare.

But there are intimations that she may have traveled even further and via even more mysterious paths: by 1927, she could converse with considerable critical acuity regarding the work of the artists’ colony at Taos in the northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, and indeed counted both Georgia O’Keefe and Colonel Thompson and his common-law wife Maritjie Tiedtgien as correspondents and close friends (and later as god-parents to her daughter). By the same token, she sang Gaelic-language songs from Lewis and Mull in the Outer Hebrides with an intimacy and fluency that suggested analogous deep familiarity with the West of Scotland as well—and possibly also a degree of paranormal sensitivity (such sensitivity is found in unusually high concentrations in the Outer Hebrides, probably as a result of very close bloodlines and a relatively isolated gene pool). It seems likely that her Gora/Durang genetic inheritance—if indeed she was of that line—may have conferred upon her the ability to readily navigate the space-and-time-folding Rift Portals, as was the case with the dancer Azizlarim Jangchi, the Hebridean singer Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie, the painter/bluesman and Friend of Bassanda Eric von Schmidt (RIP), and the Sufi artist Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur. If Múdry Urodzený was in fact the daughter of Durang and Lapin—a matter of faith amongst those students at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory with a modicum of awareness of Bassandan revolutionary history—it is even possible that she was conceived on board the gigantic locomotive called The Beast, which might go far to explain her particular sensitivity to and acuity regarding electromagnetic phenomena (there were very few recordings made of Madame in her youth, because until the advent of digital technology, electrical microphones and recording devices tended to misbehave in her presence in very unpredictable ways).

It has been suggested by some that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, an acknowledged devotee of Bassandan music, intended her wizard-diva character “Madame Celestina Warbeck” as a kind of homage to Madame Gora. Certainly the latter was a noted interpreter of Bassandan art-song from the Czarist era, which—rather like the lieder of Schubert—showed a strong and subtle sensitivity to the formal structures and metaphorical language of Bassandan folk song. There was opportunity for Rowling to meet Madame in Portugal during post-perestroika tours in 1990-91 by the newly-rechristened ESO, when the Band, now touring freely in the West following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the lamented “departure” of founder Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez, took part in performances supporting the ancient Roman city of Porto’s nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (a status awarded in 1996).

Múdry was definitely back in Oxfordshire by the mid-Thirties, having developed a passion for Cotswold Morris dancing—a natural extension of her athletic and artistic sensibilities—where she became acquainted with the members of the Inklings, the informal university literary group whose leading lights were JRR Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; it has been alleged that there are elements of her in Lewis’s Narnian character “Aravis” from The Horse and his Boy (first sketched in the late ‘30s). Spectacular dance was in fact her avenue back into Bassandan folkloric culture; though Bassanda was largely closed to outsiders between the 1939 Nazi Anschluss and the 1942-45 reconquest of the capitol by Soviet forces, she was known and claimed in the post-WWII period as a “scion of the motherland,” and her concert tours behind the Iron Curtain were welcomed by the Central Committee. She used these tours of Bassanda to reconnect with Yezget-Bey, who in the late ‘40s was overtly engaged in coalescing the loose collective of the People’s Liberation Orchestra into the official Bassanda National Radio Orchestra—a goal necessitating considerable bureaucratic acuity and subtlety—and with Anthea Habjar-Lawrence, a clandestine Yezget-Bey liaison to the Bassandan Underground and a friend from Madame’s Paris days. Gora received official State permission for travel in the High Hills, including the closely-monitored “Ethnic Minority Containment Spheres” (de facto townships used by the Soviets to isolate indigenous communities), due to her stated intention of documenting the folk plays of the traditional Mjekësia Trego (Eng: “medicine show”), an improvised musical/theatrical form which later informed the BNRO’s collaboration with Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory on a 1961 Ballyizget production of The Tempest, set in the Gulag, in which many Band luminaries appeared. 1949 was also the year that Madame Gora co-founded, with Yezget-Bey, the Bassanda State Female Vocal Choir (an influence on the later, much better-known Bulgarian Women’s Choir), with her old mentor Ralph Vaughan Williams as their patron and affiliated composer.

Her particular friend in the Band was the designer, Tarot specialist, and low-brass virtuoso Yuhanna Casco Encabezado, but she connected likewise with the dancer Ana de Quareton through their shared Yorkshire roots, and with her distant cousin, through Breton relations, the vocalist, saxophonist, and dance-master Binyamin Biraz Ouiz. She bonded with the dancer and ex-medicine show performer Kristina Olenev over their shared love of Bassandan Morris and the Mjekësia Trego. She was also close to the Band’s canine-lovers, including Cifani Dhoma, Ít Vũ Công, John Rød Ericsson, Žaklin Paulu, and the dancers Goncharov and Jangchi, and she was, as she herself described it, “the human companion” of the Bassandan greyhound she called Finn mac Cumhaill after the Irish mythic hero, who was a kind of totem animal for her. One student said of their legendary relationship:

“He was her familiar; he traveled with her everywhere. And he was totally intuitive—she’d be teaching, or holding forth to a master-class, and there’d be a pause, and then just faintly you’d hear him snort, curled up under her desk, or pacing at her side along the hallways of Habjar-Lawrence. She had some kind of dispensation from the administrators—even in the height of the 1950s repression, when every bureaucrat tried to look like a commissar and every commissar tried to look like Stalin, she was allowed to keep Finn with her. Some of we students wondered if there must be some kind of history between the two of them, maybe even something the bureaucrats sensed even if they didn’t know or believe it.”

Her student roster at HL-C eventually included, from the Band, Nāṯānas Hús, Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, John Rød Ericsson, the composer Jens Dahout na Uilyam, the punk-rock avatar Polli Kilotona of the Electric Trees, the shamanic dancer Морган Ŭitmena, the former street child Deseo Koža, and a host of others—generations of Habjar-Lawrence students felt the impact of her pedagogy. Ŭitmena commented: “She had a marvelous touch with students, the skilled ones and the ones with problems, the mature ones and the ones who were already divas: she had just the right ways to deal with each complicated set of issues that came in the door. And she was endlessly gentle and sensitive.”

In later life, after she had largely retired from a full teaching schedule at Habjar-Lawrence—a retirement which was repeatedly deferred by repeated appeals from distinguished alumni who insisted upon sending their own protégés “only to Madame”—she owned a dacha in the foothills of the northern Alps, just below the Matthiaskloster, full of scores, dogs, books, and grandchildren. Though she described herself, in those years, as “a homebody,” she could occasionally be prevailed upon to attend one of the Friday evening music sessions at the Mountain Rest Lodge, and even sometimes to sing: songs from her childhood, from Brittany, the Gaelic Hebrides, and the Cotswolds hills, and, on one memorable night, a ribald macaronic Bassandan folk song poking gentle fun at her former H-LC supervisor, Vilyum Balandjeor.

She is commemorated in the “Gora Scholarship for Vocal Health,” established by friends and admirers at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory as a permanent scholarship for underfunded voice students, and even into her 80s, always attended the auditions for that Scholarship. It was not uncommon that candidates who were unsuccessful in the competitive auditions would receive mysterious and discreet financial support and personal encouragement via other channels. Balandjeor, in fact, became accustomed to her advocacy on behalf of students, and once remarked, to the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project, “I might have minded that she’d keep coming back to me on behalf of one more candidate. But I couldn’t—because she was always right.” When she was asked to vet this line in the OHP’s transcripts prior to the Project’s publication, Madame is reported to have burst out laughing: “Oh, that’s no problem—go ahead and include it. When it came to students, I was always right!”

The door to her former voice studio at Habjar-Lawrence contains a small brass plate, reading simply “Madame G: H-LC faculty 1942-96.” Below the inscription, under the engraved outline of a canine’s collar, is the added legend “And Finn.”

Ana Lubjak de Quareton Backstage c1972 Photo by Nijinska
Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton
born c 1920? [Inuit: Kangiqsualuk ilua; Eng: Hudson’s Bay]
Scots, English, Norman, Abenaki, Bassandan ancestry

The paternal line’s deep roots in the North of England (Lancashire, Warwickshire, Cumbria) and Scotland made them adherents to the Jacobite cause—though one Wharton said of the Young Pretender, after the defeat at Culloden during the 1745 Rebellion and Charles Edward Stewart’s flight overseas, “Tha am beagan ghobhar mar a rinn mòran math do dh'Alba mar tomhas den bhuinneach-mhòr” (“The little bastard did as much good for Scotland as a dose of cholera”). This line descended from Earls who had served under William the Conqueror in the 11th century; a Ranulf de Querton was granted lands in Northumberland around 1080 (an alternate etymology for the surname comes from the Old English waefree + tun (Eng: “farmstead by a swaying tree”).

Regardless of etymology, the “swaying tree” image is apt in describing the de Quertons: the women of the line were unusually tall, often standing near six foot, or even more, in the 17th century, when the average height was less than 5’6”, and Philip de Quarton (dit “le Chêne”; Eng: “The Oak”; died c1407) was reputed to be seven feet tall. Family stories attributed this impressive stature to ancestors who had “come over the sea from the North”—that is, from Scandinavia—though the line has not been traced there. Despite their height, both males and females in the de Querton/Quarton line were acclaimed as not only fighters but also dancers, and the family crest includes the motto Gratiam et fidem (Scots Gaelic: dìlseachd agus gràs; Eng: “loyalty and grace”). Other recurrent genetic features included fair hair, pale skin, and bright blue eyes—all of which would tend, anecdotally, to favor the Scandinavian attribution.

On the other hand, more fanciful explanations of her origins have also been ventured, and the wildest tales told, by some in the BNRO orbit. It is confirmed that one branch of her family left Scotland after the Clearances, settling first in the Presbyterian Plantation of Ulster, and then traveling on to the New World, where they homesteaded on the Old Frontier around the eastern Great Lakes. A “Peter Wharton” served in September 1814 with the American militia, consisting in large measure of Scots Gaelic immigrants, who defended Plattsburgh NY on Lake Champlain from simultaneous assault by a British squadron of gunboats and a force of about 11,000 British infantry. During the battle, the British were defeated both by sea and by land, and the retreating infantry, fleeing north toward Canada, told tales of being hunted through the midniht woods by howling clansmen and “a gigantic silver wolf.”

Of course, the image of the wolf as familiar and totem animal had been known in North America since the Pleistocene, and Peter Wharton’s son Philip (born c1820) is said to have married an Abenaki girl, so it is possible that the story of the Great Wolf comes into the family via Native American tales—in fact, the wolf cult is found all around the Arctic Circle, in northernmost America, Europe, and Asia. Among the First Peoples, the Wolf is a sacred animal widely depicted in indigenous art—Ana, in tribute to this aspect of her ethnic ancestry, sported a small green Haida wolf’s-head tattoo on one shoulder.

Ana met Nijinska some time after 1950, when Madame arrived in Ballyizget following her life-changing sojourn in Trinidad (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), but herself appears on the Bassanda horizon well before then, in the early 1940s. During the cultural onslaught of the Nazi and Soviet wartime occupations of Bassanda, not only urban and bohemian but also rural and indigenous cultures experienced tremendous damage: minorities were uprooted, subjected to ethnic cleansing or pogrom, forbidden the traditional languages and festivals, and by-and-large forced underground. The Iliot shamans, whose practices were not only spiritual but also cultural and psychological in nature, were particular targets; many fled Bassanda entirely, others took refuge with partisans or resistance bands, still others “converted” under duress to socialist materialism. The Polish and Czech levies of the 3rd Panzer Division, who occupied Ballyizget under SS command between 1939-45, wore the Wolfsangel badge associated with Nazi collaborators elsewhere, but the symbol was regarded as particularly blasphemous by Bassandan patriots, precisely because of the wolf’s sacred stature in Iliot mythology. In the savage war of occupation fought between the occupiers and the various resistance groups collectively called Pădure Fraților (“Forest Brethren”), it was not entirely uncommon to find the Bassanda character for “wolf-spirit” cut into the foreheads of fallen Nazi troopers. And in 1941, during the brief occupation of Matthias’s Mountain Rest by Nazi Chetnik troops, in the immediate aftermath of the blizzard and lightning storm that wiped out that garrison, partisans found huge wolf prints, which followed the few escapees’ ski-tracks before disappearing into the fresh snow of the avalanche that had buried the last survivors. Tales told around the fire at the Mountain Rest suggested that the would-be escapees had fled precisely because they heard a “gigantic wolf” howling just outside the barred timber doors.

In fact, though birth records in the de Quareton archives at Morpeth in Northumberland are ambiguous, it appears that Ana may have been born on the shores of Hudson’s Bay in northern Canada around 1910—though none of those archival documents serve to explain her youthful appearance in photos of the Eagle’s Heart Daughters c1962. When the EHS Oral History Project’s investigators interviewed her sister-dancers in the early 1980s, they too were evasive about Ana’s origins and age; in response to these questions, Ambrosía de Cantù replied, elliptically, “Oh, well…Ana was always the same. And if she was worn-out, she would ‘go away’ for a while, and then come back stronger than ever.” Though pressed, Cantù declined to elaborate—a reticence that was ubiquitous amongst the Sisters and Daughters.

The story becomes even more complicated when examining certain historical photographs held in the Archives at Miskatonic U. In the section of sketches, ambrotypes, and daguerreotypes (sadly, not available online, as the Archive has as yet been unsuccessful in raising the very substantial funds necessary to catalog and digitize the extensive collection), there is a charcoal sketch attributed to Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur. This sketch matches an anonymous ambrotype, found in a Taos mission, of the mysterious “1885 Band”—mysterious precisely because, though a very imperfect and ambiguous image, it appears to have been taken in London or possibly Paris, and to include, c1885, portraits of individuals who were likewise members of the Bands of the 1950s and ‘60s. Though denounced by 1960s BSSP functionaries as “mere imperialist falsifications”—an allusion to the poorly-retouched file photographs which notoriously “erased” discredited Party functionaries from May Day and Lenin’s Tomb commemorations, or added newly-favored ones—no persuasive debunking of the sketch, or of the ambrotype upon which it is based, has been tendered. And, equally unlikely, in addition to those paradoxically youthful-looking “later” members of the BNRO, both Madame Nijinska (not yet born in 1885) and Ana herself appear—and it is definitely the latter: her sleeveless costume reveals the Tlingit wolf on her left shoulder.

Literary historians have suggested that this “earlier” 1880s Ana—if indeed the two are distinctively different individuals—may have served as the model for “Raksha, the Protector,” the female wolf who raises Mowgli as part of the Seonee Pack in Kipling’s The Jungle Book; other records in the Correspondence (not directly referencing the Taos daguerreotypes) suggest that an “Analisa Wharton” may have been a visitor at Kipling’s Vermont house “Naulakha” around 1892. It is possible that this “Analisa’s” First Nations stories of sacred wolves, transposed to Kipling’s familiar locale of India, may have been Raksha’s inspiration.

More plausible is the suggestion that Ana may have met both the General and Saadiqhah 'Ahmar, mother of “Red John” Ericsson, as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain in 1935 or ’36, during the Spanish Civil War; both are documented as present in Iberia at that period. George Orwell provides a sketch of her as an unnamed “militia woman” who helped him learn how to roll his kitbag at Barcelona in 1936; in fact, these meetings, possibly during the defense of Gijon, may have led Ana to the escape routes that eventually took Orwell back to England, and ‘Ahmar to Bassanda.

She is documented in Ballyizget by the late Spring of 1939, only a few weeks after the Nazi Anschluss had invested the capitol: a blurred snapshot, taken in a café in the artists’ Quarter, shows a group including Ana, the mechanical “boffins” Anthea Habjar-Lawrence and her sister Miriam Smythe, the organist and folklorist Alexei Andreevitch Boyer, Terésa-Marie Szabo, and Yezget-Bey himself. This would have been one of the earliest meetings of “Cell #1,” the mostly-female underground liaison group which coordinated anti-Occupation activities between university folklorists, urban saboteurs and forest partisans, and which paid the price—several of those depicted did not survive the War (the parents of the Srcetovredi Brothers, for example, were “disappeared” only a few weeks after the photograph was taken).

In the wake of World War II, Ana’s advocacy is widely credited with helping re-establish the indigenous northeastern yogic practice called йога, which had come into Bassanda from Central Asia in the 12th century but which, like many indigenous cultural/spiritual traditions, suffered severe repression during the Czarist and Soviet occupations. Related to this was her interest in cakara pēṭiga (Punjabi: ਚੱਕਰ ਪੇਟਿੰਗ; “chakra painting”), a bodywork / meditative /mandala practice associated with Iliot shamanism (there are period daguerreotypes of women shamans painting and displaying the henna, sage, and indigo body designs whose colors symbolize “earth, grass, and sky” in Bassandan iconography). Ana was a leader in re-establishing this practice during the “Gray Fifties”, when the twilight of Stalinism still sought to repress indigenous culture.

It is a rather mysterious fact that the BNRO orbit included a large number of individuals who showed an unusually immediate affinity with other species. Not only the animal rights activists—the ex-combat photographer Cifani Dhoma; the dancer Lisle Goncharov and artist Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur; the animal lovers Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne, Rāḥīl Marrone, and Yannoula Periplanó̱menos; and Herr Doktor Марцус Walhaz, whose professional identity as Chair of Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics at Ballyizget University directly implicated him in animal rights; likewise, Madame Nijinska herself was a very active member and financial patron of the Bassandan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA). But even the Zen hunters in the Bassanda lineage—Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill; Aislinn mac Aluinn; and especially the mysterious 19th century Scots Presbyterian backwoodsman Ruiseart Cuinneagham—bonded with animals, including their quarry, with great intensity; Cuinneagham’s mystical journal (composed in longhand, in a mixture of English, Gaelic, and Chickasaw, between 1805-11) even contains prayers to and conversations with the spirits of the deer and elk he hunted. And, although Soviet scientists contested the claim, calling it “primitive pantheist delusion,” the BNRO orbit included among its adherents some whose affinity with animals was even more immediate: namely the shape-shifters Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, Azizlarim Jangchi, Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, and Nollag Käsityöläinen. Ana was likewise close to the shamanic dancers Nāṯānas Hús, and Морган and Kaciaryna Ўітмэна, the Ŭitmena Sisters, and formed a perhaps-more-improbable bond with the bluesman Mississippi Stokes who, though in his late forties by the time they met, often partnered with her in dance duets as part of the Bassanda Project. Stokes said, simply, “Mos’ kind ‘n’ gen’rus gal I ever met. I’da done anythin’ atall for Ana. Even dancin’.”

Although she began as a corps dancer, over time in the 1960s and ‘70s Ana’s role gradually shifted, and she became a major collaborator and artistic touchstone for Nijinska: recalling the period from the vantage point of the 1980s, EHD dancer Cifani Walter commented, “She was like Madame’s right arm—like the other half of her brain. Madame could tell you something in the studio, and you wouldn’t understand it, and hours later, without prompting, Ana would finish the thought for you. Or you could ask Ana a question, and days later Madame would pick up the answer. I don’t know how they did it.” Sasha Gruschevsky said, “They were sisters under the skin—Ana needed a big sister, and Madame needed a daughter.”

In addition to her role as lead dancer and choreographic collaborator with both the Eagle’s Heart Daughters and the Bassanda Project (the latter being Madame’s umbrella collaboration with musicians, poets, and visual artists), she was also formally recognized by the post-Soviet government as a “Protector” of the no-kill animal shelter Libertas Domum (“Freedom Farm”); the State Proclamation, signed by former Electric Trees frontwoman Polli Kiltona, first Counselor of the post-perestroika democratic government seated in February 1985, recognizes her “courage, compassion, and dedication to the cause of freedom for all beings.” For decades, and even after administration of the Nijinska-founded shelter was taken up by Madame’s former students Lisle Goncharov and Azizlarim Jangchi, there were tales of a huge silver wolf in the hills above the “Liberty Farm.” Azi, herself unusually sensitive to the natural world—and of whom some quite extravagant tales were likewise told, most notably by her closest friend Goncharov—is quoted as saying of Libertas Domum, “No one can hurt us here. Our Friends watch over us, and we them.” Likewise the mountaineers Doma, Käsityöläinen, and Joost Bauherr all alluded indirectly to the “animal brethren” and the primate Parvatamā mānisaharū (“Shaggy men of the hills”) who they claimed collectively guarded the Farm.

But the most evocative tale was one told by Olenev about Nijinska herself. An intensely dedicated person, who had suffered loss and exile in her life, Madame eventually came to feel at home in Bassanda, particularly in the Hill Country below the Matthiaskloster where the Farm was located. By the late 1960s, she was largely retired from touring, and her contacts with the Sisters and Daughters, now traveling and art-making around the world, were more intermittent, though she cherished their visits, while the centrality of Libertas Domum to BNRO/EHS/EHD consciousness certainly continued. Nevertheless, she still experienced loneliness and what she called “white nights”—bouts of insomnia when she would roam the grounds and fences of the Farm, obsessively checking the well-being of the animals and humans under her care. Though she seldom spoke of it, her oldest friends, Kristina Olenev and Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa, knew that she suffered from nightmares, and the recurrent fear that she might, like her tragic brother Vaclav, eventually lose her reason; these were among the causes of her insomnia. “Kariss” said—“Which was absurd. She was the strongest and bravest person I ever met.” Yet the “white nights” continued.

At the same time, the 1960s decade was inarguably a period in which more pragmatic and prosaic dangers threatened. The heartbreak of the Prague Spring, in ’68, had crushed any hope of long-term liberalization under the Soviet government and, with the BNRO and her ally Nas1lsinez more and more touring in the West, she felt isolated in the northern foothills. The Wood Elves’ Commune, from which the avant-rock band the Electric Trees was founded, was a node of positive and progressive energy, but State repression of their liberal message as it eddied outward to yield more and more pressure upon their friends like Nijinska as well. Moreover, the economic instability of the period was bringing refugees from over the eastern border, to which the State responded with ever-more aggressive crackdowns on artists and other “social undesirables.” In turn, this led to an upswing in domestic crime, police brutality, and—as law enforcement was increasingly concentrated upon the urban centers and the capitol—an upswing in rural crimes: cattle theft, housebreaking, and smuggling. Payment to the Soviet levies of the military government was often in arrears: more than once, the resident staff at Libertas Domum actually had to take up arms to fend-off attacks by roving bands of renegade soldiers. Madame herself insisted upon helping all refugees and orphans, but even she had to acknowledge that sometimes a more stern response to invaders was required. There were fierce warriors within the Bassanda orbit, including Uzunboylu Mischa and Cifani Doma, both combat veterans—and Azi, Lisle, Kariss, and other permanent residents were themselves very capable fighters—but Madame nevertheless tended to fret, toss, and turn, in her nighttime worries over the safety of all.

One night in the fall of 1968, as the weather in the foothills was already giving way to overnight frosts, though the grazing for the Matthiaskloster’s goats and the Farm’s ungulants was still lush, Madame once again lay abed, long after midnight, while most around her slept. Finally, she rose and went to the window, which was thrown open for the sake of fresh air. There was a clear three-quarters moon, bright enough that the powder of stars of the northern Milky Way was partially dimmed, and one could pick out isolated individual trees in the high tundra that sloped upward from the Farm toward the site of the Kloster, which was itself invisible in the moon-shadow of Annolungma, tallest of the Three Brothers mountain range and original site of the Legend of the Five Sisters. Her gaze followed the slope back down toward the fence that protected the northern corral from the open range, along the line of the fence toward the dark bulk of the hay barn (which also housed the injured raptors rescued by O'Baoighill), and continued on down-slope toward the low line of kennels where the elderly and rescued canines were housed.

And then her glance stopped. Something was crouched against the kennels, nearly out of the moonlight, but still visible as a blot of slightly darker black against the backlit wall of the building itself. Even as she looked, the blot moved.

Without thinking, barely breathing, she threw on a parka over her night clothes and snatched up a rifle that leaned against the wall just inside her bedroom door. Moving quickly, she slipped through the door and ran silently down the hallway that led toward the paddock and the kennels. The worn stone of the corridor’s floor, quarried from the tumbledown buildings of the monastery that had originally occupied the site, was cold but familiar against her bare feet, and the night air was chill against her cheeks and bare arms. Arriving at the heavy timber door, which was barred at night, she softly slid aside the hatch over its peephole and looked out again. Though the angle of the narrow aperture made it difficult to see the kennels’ walls, she thought she could make about the darker blot again. She heard the clink of weapons, and voices muttering in Russian—a group of the Cossack levies, bent on robbery or worse.

In her mind’s ear, she heard the voices that she had hoped and prayed would be stilled in the years of safety, community, and rejuvenation since she had come to Bassanda from Trinidad. She heard the voices that Brother Vaclav always said spoke to him, offering him artistic inspiration but also moral condemnation—and the uncertainty that lay between. For a moment, she closed her eyes and, clutching the rifle in both hands, rested her forehead against the rough timbers of the door. Then she took a deep breath, pushed back the bar, and slipped out into the paddock. Moving quickly, hugging the black shadows under the main building’s walls, she hurried to her left, toward the point where a narrow band of bright moonlight illuminated the carriageway between the main building and the hay barn, where she thought she had seen the unidentified intruders. There was no sound within the main building, but she could hear the snorting of the horses in the paddock, and this gave her courage. She moved cautiously and—she thought—silently across the carriageway, heading again for the friendly shadow of the barn, the rifle held defensively across her body. She had fired it before, but hated weapons, knowing intimately how much suffering they had caused for her friends in the animal kingdom. She gained the shadow under the barn’s wall, beside the wooden ramp leading up into its dark interior, built for wagons bringing in the threshed hay, and edged along its base…

And suddenly, out of the darkness at the top of the ramp, they leapt down upon her: three huge Cossacks, black-bearded and in ragged Soviet uniform, wild-eyed with hunger and vodka. They had slung Kalashnikovs but brandished clubs and knives, evidently seeking to do their work without raising the entire farmstead. In terror Nijinska threw her rifle to her shoulder, but they were upon her before she could take aim. A swung club knocked her rifle away and there was the crack as her shot went wide. A second blow knocked her off her feet, and the impact with the hard-packed earth of the corral jarred the breath out of her. For a split second she lay stunned, but instinctively rolled away, sensing more than seeing the club poised to swing down again, this time on her unprotected face.

And as she rolled, she heard behind her the snarling of a gigantic canine, mixed with a babble of roaring Cossack voices. She gathered her feet beneath her and tried to rise, but fell sideways, still dizzy and disoriented. A few seconds of confused noise, the sounds of bodies striking bodies as the Cossacks fled back up the ramp toward the barn, the shrieks of injured humans, and suddenly there was silence except for her own rasping breath.

A shadow fell across her face, and Kariss was there, her fighting knife in hand. Olenev crouched to put her other hand behind Madame’s shoulders and gently raised her to a sitting position, her back to the barn’s wall; she said urgently “Brona, my dear—are you all right?” but Nijinsky realized Kariss was looking away, across the corral, across the barn’s ramp, upon which lay the motionless bodies of two of the invaders, at the fleeing figure of the third Cossack. As he cleared the fence and ran, boots pounding the earth, back up the slope from which they had come, Olenev thought saw a long, low, black, feline shadow loping along, and gaining, on the Cossack’s trail.

Olenev looked back at Madame, and smiled into her eyes.

“You are all right, Brona; all is well. Our Friends Azi and Ana have protected us.”

Olenev nodded in the other direction, toward the hay barn’s ramp, just above and to their left. Nijinska turned her head and looked upward.

Looming over them, straddling the two motionless fallen Cossacks, head lowered and blue eyes blazing, was a gigantic silver wolf.

John Rufus with “Hobo,” c1970
John Rud Ericsson a/k/a John Rufus a/k/a “Red John”

North English, Norwegian, Manx, Comanche, Bassandan

b1940

His father’s Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian heritage provided both the complexion and the political consciousness that led to his longstanding nickname “Red John.” Born into a family of loggers and sailors near Roseburg, Oregon in the USA in 1916, Eric Einarsson had volunteered with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain 1937-38, where he met and fell in love with the teenaged resistance fighter Saadiqhah 'Ahmar (b1918 in Al-Anbar, a small Arabic-speaking village at the head of Najir Fjord, on the south coast of Bassanda), who had come to Spain “to fight the fascists and the Cossacks.” Hoping to escape via Einarsson’s US passport, they married in haste in Republican-held Madrid in February 1939, as the Nationalist artillery pounded the outskirts of the besieged city. However, rather than accepting internment in France or repatriation to the States, and in the face of the German Anschluss, Saadiqhah insisted upon their return to Bassanda, anticipating (quite rightly, as it turned out) that the annexation of Austria marked the beginning, not the end, of Hitler’s eastward expansion. She did not yet know she was pregnant—the baby was apparently conceived on board the passenger train that took them over the Pyrenees—and she was adamant that they must assist in the Bassandan evacuation. Having seen the reprisals of Franco’s fascist forces against those who had fought in Spain for the Republic, she feared similar retaliation against Bassandans who might resist the Nazi incursion she knew was coming. In the event, she was proved right, and it was due to the courage and clandestine activities of the Einarrsons and others like them that so many Bassandan artists, political leaders, and ethnic minorities were able to escape to safety, across the frontiers, or failing that into the foothills of the Alps and the depths of the western forests—some of these refuge communities in fact continued as safe havens well into the period of the 1960s, after the Soviet reconquest.

He was also related via his mother to the 15th century mercenary Jehannus Stejar-Braț (“Johannes the Oak-Armed”), who after service in European wars retired to Bassanda. Stejar-Braț was the scion of a long family tradition of resistance to Tsarist incursion: his great-grandson Blata “Kurashchimiz” (“The Wrestler”), born in 1540, was so strong that he could grapple and throw a Cossack horse and rider. John Rufus’s own maternal great-great-grandfather, a partisan leader who pioneered the use of the trough-battery “one string” (described as emitting an “unearthly howl of banshees”) against invading Tsarist forces in the 1820s, was captured and executed without trial by Cossacks in 1828. Within a few days after this event seven different ranking Cossacks officers had died under mysterious circumstances; the only surviving ranker of the garrison, who immediately after the events requested transfer, is quoted as saying "Там не было знака на них - но их позвоночники были сломаны” ("There wasn't a mark on them--but their spines were crushed”). His father’s antecedents also included Comanche scouts and cowboys, and he was a second cousin of Charles Chippity, who served with the 75th Ranger Battalion during Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy; see elsewhere in the Correspondence.

He was exposed as a child to the sword-dancing traditions of mountainous Qrystyn’a (in the north) and personally witnessed the arrest of the Qrystyn’a Four by Uli Kunkel’s secret police in 1953. This event certainly crystallized both his commitment to the preservation of folk-art forms and his inheritance of anti-authoritarian resistance: it was only about a year later that he began wandering, both in the back-country of the Alps and also over the frontiers; as he later said “I wanted to see where my father’s people came from.” In the ten years between his teenaged departure from the North, arrival at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget, and recruitment into the band, he worked as a logger, blacksmith, short-order cook, and forest fire lookout in the USA, a fisherman and street busker in Ireland (where he was befriended by Micho Russell of Doolin, County Clare), and as a lorry driver, dishwasher, and busboy in Europe. He arrived back into Ballyizget, penniless and without official papers, in the winter of 1962, and was reticent about the means he employed to cross borders from the western democratic nations into the Eastern bloc satellites without any official documentation.

When asked, he just said “I walked. Mostly at night.”

However, some elements of his past history could be gleaned from the tattoos that covered much of his body: dogs and trees featured prominently, along with Native American, Scandinavian, and Celtic iconography, and a series of slogans in various languages. He was an expert tattooist in traditional Bassandan style, which incorporated mandalas and sacred seed syllables, such that the inked body itself became a palimpsest of mystical practices. He also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet-era prison culture; he had avidly pursued interviews and photography with veterans of the Gulag and amassed an extensive catalog which permitted him to cross-reference skin art’s meanings and associations.

Upon return to Bassanda, he apprenticed with the US-born WWI veteran James Jackson Forster, grandfather of Estefanía Ó Raghallaigh Kápak, in blacksmithing and horse-coping, in the foothills below the Matthiaskloster. He was intimately familiar with the southern slopes of the Bassandan Alps, but whether this knowledge of the back-country, and his skill as a tracker, proceeded from his childhood experience, or from other more mysterious attributes, is unknown. The mountaineer and avant-garde composer Joost Bauherr did once say, cryptically, “Hus, Matthias, Red John—they’re all Parvatamā mānisaharū,” a reference to the semi-legendary shaggy-haired primate of the northern hills (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). There is no direct or literal evidence to support this fanciful, cryptozoological allegation, but certainly forests were re-energizing places for him; he is quoted as saying, “Getting lost is the best part. Then I can ask the trees to help me find my way.” Other empirical/indirect evidence includes the fact that he was a practitioner (like Hus and Brother Matthias) of the Balochi Nur Sur style of overtone singing, associated with the “Shaggy man of the hills”, which had come south and west from the Hindu Kush. In addition to his vocal skills, he was also a useful multi-instrumentalist, doubling on both plectrum and brass instruments as needed; he eventually developed a minor specialization in the Irish dord, a reconstruction of Bronze Age horns used for battle and ritual.

He was particularly sensitive to forests and trees, both the pine woods of the USA Pacific Northwest and the hardwood deciduous forests of the Bassandan foothills, and described himself as “Zen logger”, in the mold of the northern California poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder. He was a good practical carpenter, and assisted, in the 1970s, with the restoration of the Matthiaskloster after its long neglect during the Stalinist period. He was also another in a long line of Bassandan brewers, having apprenticed with the ex-Matthiaskloster monk and master craftsman Rodbertus de Vêtir, and his “Red John’s Old Ale” was notoriously powerful and unpredictable in its effects. He took pride in his ability, along with that of Jakob Redzinald, Sanjo D’Aunai, Részeg Vagyok, and Antanas Kvainauškas, to “close down any bar that’ll keep pouring!”

He shared with Mississippi Stokes an interest in and sympathy toward Bassandan hobo culture, and eventually had an image of The Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation’s Alco Pacific Class ‘4-6-2' steam locomotive Sleipnir, a/k/a “The Beast” of Bassandan folklore, tattooed across his shoulder blades. He was likewise mechanically inclined and was fascinated with the Sajāyā Traka—the “decorated trucks” tradition exported from Pakistan to Bassanda—in which his former band-mate Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī was especially well versed. He shared this automotive aptitude with the BNRO guitarists Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai and Mississippi Stokes, and tremendous stamina as a driver with Žaklin Paulu. He was particularly a virtuoso with the succession of surplussed Soviet-built ZIS-120N tractor-trailers; his capacity to pilot these ungainly beasts on the slippery, often washed-out mountain roads during the rainy monsoon season was legendary.

Like Cifani Doma, Žaklin Paulu, Lisle Goncharov, Ít Vũ Công, and Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, he was dedicated to canines, and it was alleged that he could converse with them. Like “Doc” in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (based upon his friend, the pioneering California ecologist Ed Ricketts, a Friend of Bassanda), John Rufus would raise his trademark flat cap to dogs he met, and the dogs would look around and smile at him. He also built the large barn at Nijinska’s Libertas Domum which provided safe haven for flightless raptors rescued by Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill. His blacksmith experience gave him expertise with horses, but only the strongest Bassandan breed, descended from the Mongolian Адуу, imported by Genghis Khan, could carry him. On the other hand, he was so strong that, on a bet—especially if the stakes included beer—he could actually lift a Bassandan pony on his back, and more than once lifted Yezget-Bey’s house car singlehanded out of potholes or ditches.

Though of modest height and powerful build (his section-mate Kaciaryna Ŭitmena said of him “Red John looks like one of those live oaks he loves so much—short and thick!”), he was, secretly, a sensitive and poetical individual, keeping a personal journal that contained reflections on people, events, experiences, and philosophical challenges he encountered. In the 1980s, he became professor of medieval studies, folklore, and comparative philology at Ballyizget University, spending his summers in a “hermitage” he himself had rebuilt from its medieval foundations, on the south-facing slopes below the Matthiaskloster. He published nature- and lyric-poetry in samizdat mimeographed periodicals, his poetry showing the influence of the Americans Gary Snyder and Wendell Barry, the Irishman Seamus Heaney, and the Czech Czesław Miłosz; eventually (after 1986), this poetry was collected and reissued, bringing his work to a wider audience in the Satellites and eventually in the West.

Like that of his contemporaries cited above, his poetry reveals an acute awareness of the natural world, history, and folklore, and of the mind of the poet as another “landscape of discovery.”

Elschen, graduation from Habjar-Lawrence, Spring 1964]
Elschen Kaniiniyhdyskunta de la Varenne
b1943

Born Sussex of English, Irish, Norman, German, northern Bassandan ancestry

One branch of the family, whose surname appears in the 11th century Domesday Book, emigrated to Massachusetts in the 17th century; a David Warren (b1751) served as a private in the Continental Army in the frontier campaigns of western upstate New York during the American Revolution. She may also have been related to Dr Joseph Warren (1741-75), the martyred hero who rode with Revere in April 1775 and was killed in combat at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of the same year.

Her Norman father Joachim was born in 1910 at Dieppe, the French harbor town where the Seine empties into the English Channel. A descendent of les Comtes de Warren at Chateau Bellencombre, de la Varenne served in 1929-30 with the Allied forces, near the end of their post-WWI occupation of Aachen, where he picked up a fluent Nord-Deutsch which he later passed on to his children. This linguistic skill and his experience of the Hanseatic ports played a key role in his later recruitment by British Intelligence just after Dunkirk, when he and other Allied agents were infiltrated back into the Continent. M. de la Varenne served with great distinction as a liaison to the Belgian and French resistance until 1942, when, on the run from the Gestapo, he was rescued by Elschen’s mother Marie Duplain (b1917), a niece of the legendary Bassandan heroine Cecile Lapin, who came from a family of painters and gentleman farmers on the Island of Guernsey, and thus spoke both English and French as cradle languages. Mademoiselle Duplain was already serving, by 1936, as an agent of MI-5, under the guise of an artist studying painting in Berlin; William Shirer’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich mentions her an unnamed “female British agent” who had infiltrated the sycophantic circle of “artist friends” around Der Fuhrer as early as 1935. de la Varenne and Duplain, who were secretly married in Hamburg in 1942, helped smuggle out photographs and tactical maps which guided RAF bombers; betrayed to the Gestapo, they escaped the city’s harbor in a small trawler with Marie at the wheel, and were picked up off Cuxhaven by HMS Bee on the morning of April 8, 1942, just before the commencement of a series of massive RAF raids. It became a part of family folklore that Elschen had actually been conceived on board the Bee on the night of the escape.

The child was born at Surrey, in South London, in January 1943. Because the de la Varennes had been identified to the Gestapo, it was not thought safe for them to continue their underground work on the Continent. Instead, Madame, with her artistic eye and detailed knowledge of north Germany and the Baltic, became an interpreter of RAF aerial photography and an advisor on aerial camouflage; her “winter forest” design, reproduced on camouflage nets air-dropped to partisans, is widely credited with having saved lives by concealing resistance forces from Luftwaffe overflights. Varenne pere continued his military duties, coordinating targeted bombing and paratrooper air-drops in advance of Operation Overlord, the June 6 Allied invasion on the Normandy beaches; as part of a Ranger team scouting ahead of the breakout, he met Colonel Thompson and Ismail Durang in the late July breakout from Brest, detailed elsewhere in the Correspondence.

Elschen knew little of her parents’ dangerous service; quite to the contrary, she recalled a rather idyllic childhood not dissimilar to that of Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, who preceded her in the flute section of the BNRO, and who, though born in Okinawa of English/Greek/Bassandan heritage, like de la Varenne grew up in south England, where her family had moved to escape the Luftwaffe bombing raids over London. Her experience, and that of Yannoula and other children like them, may have informed C.S. Lewis’s conception of the Pevensey children who are the protagonists of his Chronicles of Narnia, first imagined in 1939, though the first manuscript (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) was not completed until 1949. The younger of the two Pevensey sisters, Lucy, is thought to have been modeled upon Elschen herself, who like her fictional counterpart was golden-haired and an expert archer.

As Periplanó̱menos said, in this South Downs childhood their friends were “foxes, stoats, weasels, otters, badgers and birds;” Elschen, like her band-mate, the fiddler Aislinn mac Aluinn (Meşe Kolları), was particularly attracted to and at home within forests. At eleven, she insisted upon the addition of a middle name, Kaniiniyhdyskunta (there is no explanation for her familiarity with a Finnish word for “warren”), and used it forever after.

She cherished a family of kittens her mother had rescued from the wreckage of Weymouth during the Luftwaffe’s doomed 1944 Operation Steinbock bombing campaign; she said of these felines “we grew up together.” The smallest, which she named Aislinn, was a long-haired orange tabby who actually accompanied her to Bassanda and lived to the remarkable age of 21 years; Elschen’s friend and section mate Ít Vũ Công insisted that this kitten had provided the inspiration for Lewis’s iconic lion-king Aslan of Narnia.

There are also mysteries about her: from young childhood she exhibited an astonishing facility with languages and dialect accents, not only her mother’s Channel Islands French and her father’s North German, but also the Sussex dialect, the “cant” of the Romani travelers who, in this period, still wandered the South Downs in gaily painted caravans, and—more fancifully perhaps—bird-song and the clicking communications of badgers and hedgehogs. By the age of eight, she could as well read, write, speak, and understand Latin, having discovered a collection of textbooks and concordances in Lewis’s Oxfordshire house, and once shocked her mother on a walk by reciting, in flawless Middle English, the springtime poem “Lenten Ys Come with Love to Toune”; it was never explained where the child had encountered the poem or how she had learned its sound.

Likewise, documents in the family papers, incomplete copies of which reside in the Archive, allude to a namesake “Elspeth Warren – the model for Georgiana Darcy in Pride and Prejudice”—while a sketch by Austen’s sister Cassandra, dated 1811 and labelled with the initials “EdlV”, bears a remarkable likeness to Elschen. No explanation has been tendered for this remarkable similarity of appearance to a young girl sketched 130 years before her birth, though aspects of Lewis’s description of the fabled wardrobe which “held all of Narnia” are consistent with the time- and space-folding capacities of the various Rift Portals which have been tentatively identified worldwide.

Precisely how she came to matriculate at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget in Fall 1962 is also not known, but there are at least three possible channels: either through her mother’s Lapin relatives (see the 1906 “Great Train Ride for Bassanda”), or through her father’s wartime meetings in France in 1944 with Thompson and Durang, or possibly through the presence of a previously-unidentified Rift Portal in the South Downs. This third possibility, though “implausible,” most completely accounts for her childhood linguistics, her familiarity with Bassanda, and the possibility of some sort of time-travel (a phenomenon not unknown elsewhere in the corpus of Bassandan biography).

She and her future husband Harun al-Najma (b1942) met as members of the Bassanda Youth Orchestra in the same Fall 1962 term. He was the son of ethnic Bassandans who had been expelled from Turkey after the 1923 Population Exchange: although the family was not Greek, the al-Najmas’ mixed-race antecedents meant that they were swept up in the dragnet even so. Harun thus grew up in a mountain village of the northern Alps of Bassanda, but showed such promise on the saxophone (at that time, in 1956, a new-fangled and “Western”-associated instrument) that he won a scholarship to Habjar-Lawrence, where he and she met in the Conservatory’s “Anti-Fascist Marching Collective”(a distinctively Bassandan twist on the marching-band concept). Though he did not continue with music, he was instrumental in the development of the first computerized musical instruments employed by the BNRO in the late 1970s: along with Periplanó̱menos, he helped design circuits for the legendary Makamat Multis Sonorum keyboard, an instrument inspired by the acoustical experiments of the American Harry Partch which could play quarter-tones or in any intonational system at the flick of a switch.

Her best friend in the Band was probably her section mate Ít Vũ Công (dit “le Danceur”), the Saigonese flutist who Elschen met in a student wind ensemble at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in the Fall of 1962. While the two, on the surface, seemed diametrically contrasted personalities—Công the ebullient, talkative flirt, and de la Varenne quiet, reserved, and rather introspective–they bonded over their love for flutes and animals, each claiming to see in the other qualities lacking in herself. She was also close to the shape-shifters Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, Azizlarim Jangchi, Nollag Käsityöläinen, and Yakub Sanjo D’Auna, as well as the dancers of the Eagle's Heart Sisters and Daughters. Her gentle, quiet manner was sometimes deceptive to those outside the BNRO orbit; as Công (who was extroverted enough for two) said of her, “those silly boys should have seen her dance!”

She was recognized for her commitment to animal rights (especially those of rescued domestic animals) in a circle of artists and musicians especially noted for such engagement, and with Cifani Doma, Марцус Walhaz, Rāḥīl Marrone, Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill, and Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, was a sponsor and partner in Madame Nijinska’s no-kill animal rehabilitation and long-term shelter, Libertas Domum. She and her husband Harun shared a house in Ballyizget’s university quarter which was well-known to the City’s feline population (like the Acropolis in Rome, Ballyizget was home to a population of feral cats which, being regarded as sources of auspicious good luck, were well-treated and cared-for by neighborhood populations; under Madame Nijinska’s patronage, Bassanda actually pioneered the humane “catch, spay, and release” policy). The house, which overflowed with books on history, languages, music, and world religions, was only a few blocks from the small Coptic Cathedral which was rebuilt in the early 1960s after having been shattered by World War II air raids (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). Elschen was a leader in the reconstruction, and particularly in the recovery and repair of the antique high altar and its sacred vessels—in fact, it was see who found the ancient Communion Cup buried in the wreckage.

In later life she actually enjoyed a second career, beyond her music professorship, as the author of elegantly-plotted country-house and locked-room mysteries, under the pseudonym “Alice Küçük” (“Little Alice,” a pun on the name of Alice Liddell, inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stories). She likewise continued as professor of flute and piccolo at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, though she eventually cut back on touring with the ESO, saying “I’m a home-body. I love my comrades in the Band, but I love my house and my husband and my studio and my cats even more.”

Avdyusha Hughes Ivanovich, Bassanda News Service, c1968
Avdyusha Hughes Ivanovich
Born Yuzovka, Ukraine, 1947, of Welsh, French, Breton, Bassandan extraction

His great-grandfather was the self-educated Welsh engineer John Hughes (d 1889), who contracted with the Tsarist government to jump-start Russia’s iron industry, and founded the city of “Yuzovka” on the Azov Sea in 1869 for this purpose. After Hughes’s death, his sons ran the family business until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, at which point most of the expatriate English and Welsh staff returned to Britain, although a few relatives and family members stayed behind. In 1918 Avdyusha’s grandmother (b1898), a schoolteacher of mixed Ukrainian/Bassandan ethnicity who was an aunt of Nollag Käsityöläinen, fled the advancing Reds and stowed away on a coastal steamer to Rostov, thence joining a caravan of refugees returning to Bassanda. Upon arriving in the capital of Ballyizget—which would soon fall to the Bolsheviks—she changed her telltale Ukrainian surname in order to avoid attention, finding work as a seamstress. Her boy children would assume the honorary patronymic “Ivanovich” to commemorate their Welsh forebear. Her only daughter likewise became a public school teacher, and taught generations of Ballyizget schoolchildren, even during the worst of the “Hungry Thirties” and the turmoil of the WWII Nazi and Soviet occupations. When the Bassanda Youth Orchestra was founded c1938 by Madame Szabo, with a particular mission to provide employable skills for young refugee and orphan children, Miss Ivanova became one of the organization’s first and most beloved academic tutors. During the War she married the Breton soldier of fortune Jean-Claude Kieffer, a friend of Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, who served as road manager and porter for the BYO, but in fact employed this as cover for his ongoing activities with the Bassandan anti-fascist resistance. Avdyusha also became close to Jakov Redžinald, who, a generation older, had served with Kieffer and like him had been active in the anti-Soviet resistance of the 1940s.

Avdyusha’s other particular friends in the Bassanda orbit included his Welsh compatriots Ceridwen Moira Ifans and Aislinn mac Aluinn (Meşe Kolları), and Biraz Ouiz, his senior and mentor. He was also close to the clarinetist Antanas Kvainauškas and, after the Berlin Wall came down in 1988, became a partner in Kvainauškas’s bohemian restaurant “Brother Antonius’s”—his “Avdya’s

He was a distant relation of the Welsh ex-commando and long-distance walker Colin Fletcher; hence a contributing member to the Bassandan chapter of Ddaear yn Gyntaf (Earth First). Like Fletcher, Avdyusha was a legendary walker—in fact, the original logo of Ddaear yn Gyntaf was an abstracted profile of him on the trail.

He had extensive experience from early teen years with Central European (especially Yiddish) musical theatre, and his comic and mimetic talents played a significant role in the BNRO's collaborations with underground playwrights in the depths of the Stalinist repression. His spot-on impersonation of a pompous and stupid Soviet commissar was a tour-bus favorite for decades, and was eventually captured (around 1974) on crude 8mm Super-8 film (see clip). In the 1990s he actually hosted his own television music-and-sketch-comedy show; of this program, Avdyusha Ivanovich’s's Parvozho Sirk, Michael Palin later commented "I thought we in Python were surrealist, but Ivanovich’s Sirk--that was just sheer loony Welsh madness!"

He was heavily involved with Ballyizget’s mid-‘60s avant-garde film-making community, taking cues from the experimental and ethnographic documentaries produced in the 1920s under the aegis of The Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Company label. This company, founded in 1908 to release the watershed folkloric disc The Janissary Stomp, by the Rev. Col. R.E.C. Thompson and the General, continued its activities even into the Stalinist and Nazi periods; there are also rumored to be, somewhere in the Archive, uncatalogued boxes containing period Edison Kinetoscope moving-picture documentation of the Reverend Colonel, Maritjie Tiedtgen, and other Bassandan notables. At times, the label nearly ceased production, and at other times its public list of recordings served as “cover” for a wealth of illicit, prohibited, or samizdat material (including folksong recordings of banned ethnic groups, experimental and avant-garde new music, recordings of anti-fascist contrafacta, and so forth). But by the ‘60s, with the loosening of strictures that accompanied Kruschev’s ascent to power, it was possible for film and recording artists to expand their range of permitted subjects, and the RFBAD&TE Co. was a leader in this expansion.

Avdyusha had been present as a child of seven during the filming (by Cifani Dhoma) of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters’ ethnographic documentary based on Nijinska’s original choreography Casting Out Snakes, and this early experience made a deep impression—for the rest of his career, movie-making was a very important part of his creative life. In fact, some of his first recordings after joining the BNRO in early spring 1965 were on the soundtrack of the General’s reinvented score for the 1922 silent horror classic Nosferatu: at the young age of 18, Avdyusha’s conducted improvisations on organ and piano were an essential part of that seminal film score. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, he partnered with Estefanía Ó Raghallaigh Kápak in planning, recording, editing, and releasing a series of ethnographic films of minority folkloric dance cultures and communities.

An engineering savant, in a separate area of endeavor he was also an authority on late-model steam engines, with a particular fondness for the Doble steam car (http://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/), upon which he was recognized to be one of the world's leading authorities. Though the model of an automobile driven by burning wood is seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as an exercise in anachronistic thinking, his customized adaptations of 1950s Soviet GAZ-67 jeeps to burn wood instead of diesel made them an essential and unstoppable part of the armory of the partisans of the North Bassandan Alps fighting to resist Chinese encroachment in the late 1960s. Because they ran on wood, his "Çons Moʙilī" ("Jones Mobiles") were entirely independent of China’s petrochemical blockade.

He later likewise led the way, as a patron of the Bassandan chapter of "Friends of the Earth," in the adoption of bio-diesel vehicles, after the dissolution of the Central Soviet in early 1986. Later versions of the Çons Moʙil were cherished by collectors, their steam-boilers have been retro-engineered to burn recycled vegetable oil; the very best fuel was said to be the paprika-and-garlic-scented discarded oil used in cooking Madame Szabo's Liptai Túró (spicy Hungarian Spread--see the Bassandan Peoples’ Liberation Samizdat Cookbook, elsewhere in the Correspondence)

He had piano lessons with Nollag Käsityöläinen, and took over keyboard duties in the BNRO in late 1964 from Thorvaldur Ragnarsson. In the BNRO, he and Rahmani Boenavida would trade off between organ and piano, creating uniquely inventive layered textures reminiscent of the two-keyboard sounds being pioneered by the Canadians Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson in roughly the same period. His Band-mates praised his extraordinarily sharp ear and generous collegiality, as player, choral singer, or dancer; he showed a maturity beyond his years, and not a few late '60s BNRO fans were more than a little smitten with his boyish good looks.

But there were interesting sub-texts to his sunny and open personality: he had a deep and abiding attraction to and sensitivity toward the poetry of the prototypical American gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe (Avdyusha's chamber setting of Poe's "Lost Lenore" is a chilling essay in ominous lost love). As a choral singer and composer, he inherited the endowed professorship in composition which had been established at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory by Jens Dahout na Uilyam, after that eccentric pedagogue retired to the Alps in 1987. As a scholar, he maintained his interest in a wide variety of cultivated and vernacular singing traditions, and showed particular sensitivity to the complex of singing, dancing, playing, slapstick comedy, and wordplay he found in the indigenous tradition of the Mjekësia Trego (traveling carnivals).

He was an aficionado also of the local puppetry tradition Birbirlerine Isabet Kuklalar (“puppets hitting each other”). This folkloric genre was widely disseminated by peddlers and traveling players, which in turn led to remarkable diversity and individuation of their classic tropes of mistaken identity, inappropriate love, double-entendre wordplay, and low slapstick comedy. His 1970 folk cantata Rake Iyileşmesi ("The Rake's Recovery"), based in that tradition, is a sly parody of the Stravinsky/Auden magnum opus The Rake's Progress (1945). That work combined the forces of the BNRO, a classic lineup of the avant-folk-rock band the Electric Trees, and Madame Nijinska’s Eagle’s Heart Sisters modern dance troupe.

Late in life he became a patron figure for the younger generation of composers and dramaturges who came of age in the post-Soviet independent nation of Bassanda. Dozens of composition students and hundreds of singers passed through his studio and ensembles, and were uniformly adamant that his inspiration had been key. As one graduate student commented, when interviewed by the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project,

“Prof Avdya never judged me—but he always pushed me. I looked at him, and he helped me believe I could have the life of an artist. And he was right.”

Estefanía, at her retreat center
in the northern foothills, c1977
Estefanía Ó Raghallaigh Kápak
percussion, dance
born June 1945, northern foothills of the Bassandan Alps, of Turkish, Bassandan, Scots-Irish ancestry

Her ancestors were hill farmers in the West Riding of Yorkshire; there is some thought that they enter into in North England as Irish allies (as “Ó Raghallaigh”) to Richard of York during the Wars of the Roses. She was also descended in the paternal line from the Scots-Irish immigration to the American colonies after the 1745 Rebellion and the subsequent Ulster Plantation; they settled on the western slopes of the Appalachians, and ancestors fought on both sides in the American Revolution; an “Alexander Riley” appears on the muster rolls of the Patriot militia, commanded by Benjamin Cleveland, that defeated Loyalist troops in the Battle of King’s Mountain in South Carolina in 1780. Later, this “Riley” appears to have homesteaded west and raised a family in what became Tennessee. His descendants served on both sides of the American Civil War; her great-grandfather on the maternal side was born within a few days after the Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The martial tradition continued: her Tennessee-born grandfather, who served with the Canadian Corps at the battle of Vimy Ridge in Spring 1917, later deployed his sharpshooter skills on the side of Azerbaijan in the unsuccessful resistance (1920) to Soviet invasion. Fleeing Baku in May 1920, he made his way north incognito and crossed the border into Bassanda in July of that year, eventually settling in the northern foothills below the Matthiaskloster as a horse-coper and farmer. Her mother’s family came of mountain stock and traced one line to Iliot shamanic stock: the Iliot traced ancestry through the female line, hence her usage of the surname “Kapak”. Their children, perhaps taking after their Scots-Irish ancestors, wandered widely; some were traders and smugglers, others mountain guides.

She herself was born in the foothills of the northern Alps, at the tail end of the Nazi occupation. Her wandering photographer father, Suleiman Agon Kapak (b Ankara Turkey 1924, of ethnic Bassandan parentage), had relocated, with the outbreak of war, from Turkey back to his home village. The effects of the Soviet re-occupation in late 1945 were felt much less in the hill country than in the cities, where both Nazis and Soviets tended to concentrate their efforts at control. The hill country people in fact barely distinguished between the two totalitarian groups; a northern saying alluding to this point was “U bir forma kiyib bo'lsa, u bir Kazak bo'ld.”[1]

Her home village was the site of the Great Werewolf Scare of 1947, referenced elsewhere in the Correspondence, which is largely uncorroborated by factual history—in fact, the most detailed accounts of this “Scare” actually originate in the field reports of the Soviet occupiers. It is thus possible that there were in fact no werewolves in the Alps: although Bassandan naturalists claimed to have identified the species Homo krasnaya (homo lupus or “man-wolf”), the Velikiy Strakh Pered Chelovekom Volki (literally “Great Fear of Man-Wolves”) may in fact have been an elaborate campaign of psychological guerrilla warfare undertaken by the country people against the Soviet occupiers, many of them unwilling levies from animist Central Asia. If a Russian soldier was found dead in the mountains, surrounded by gigantic paw prints, the occupiers tended not to question the nature of his wounds; in fact, such events sowed panic and exacerbated desertion among the levies. On the other hand, Thorvaldur Ragnarsson insisted that he had taken up the accordion in this period precisely because his silver trumpet had been impounded to be melted down as bullets for werewolf-hunters, though given the presence of Yakub Sanjo d’Aunai and other shape-shifters in the Band within a few years thereafter, it is not certain that BNRO would in fact have supported such a hunting campaign.

She did, later in life, trace her own interest in natural medicine and the healing arts to early experiences with rural illness—the Iliot shamans were both healers and also tended, perhaps as a result of the sheer intensity of the psycho-cognitive shamanic state, to experience health problems of their own. Having been a somewhat sickly child, she herself said she “learned how hard it could be for poor people to suffer—and how unnecessary,” and health and wellness was a touchstone throughout her life.

She was raised within the indigenous found-percussion tradition, which closely connected the ability to dance with that of rhythmic musicianship, and both to phenomena of pantheist healing. This percussion tradition, which used seed-pods, gourds, resonant stones, and other natural substances as sources for rhythmic sound, possessed strong psycho-active associations. There is a likelihood that she was connected through her mother’s line to Anakan Imir, hold of the Iliot shamanic lineage, which prioritized the use of frame drumming as a tool for evoking trance.

Accompanied by her father, she was present at the 1954 Ballyizget premiere of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters’ Casting Out Snakes, which began life as a choreographed dance but was transformed into an engine of psychoactive power when translated to art-film medium by Cifani Dhoma. It is said that, at that premiere, she told Kapak pere “Father, those are my people—that is where I want to go.” Already, at the age of nine, she appears to have known her path—in fact, her parents found it quite difficult to persuade her to return to the North, as she insisted that her place was “with the Sisters.”

Her home village, on the far southwestern border of the Alps, was likewise home to the sword-dancing tradition associated with Qrystynʼa, a syncretic Coptic Christian saint of the 3rd century. Both the Ŭitmena Sisters and St Qrystynʼa Four came from the region; the latter quartet were briefly imprisoned for “prohibited anti-proletarian criminal minority dance,” before being freed in a legendary BNRO shamanic performance. She was equally comfortable with edged weapons, and a strong athlete: she later co-captained the all-Bassanda Women’s camogie (Irish hurling) side, with Ceridwen Moira Ifans, which went to the all-Ireland in 1975—the year that the BNRO and the earliest prototype of the Bothy Band met in sessions in Dublin.

By the age of ten she was performing with the Bassanda Youth Orchestra under the direction of the Srcetovredi Brothers and was already making a name for herself as a marvelously instinctive and musical percussionist: conductor Dzjems Rasel Srcetovredi quickly learned that it was unwise to second-guess her (sometimes unpredictable) musical choices because “her ideas were always better than what was written.” She graduated to the BNRO early in 1964 at the age of 19, where she completed what has since been recognized by musicologists as a classic percussion section of Žaklin Paulu (who had entered the band in 1951) and Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire (who had been with Yezget-Bey ever since the early ‘40s). Though much their junior in both years and seniority, she brought unpretentious self-confidence to her role as a team-player within the section—and, likewise, unique skills and attributes.

She possessed an encyclopedic familiarity with a wide variety of roots musics, here benefiting from the advent, after 1947, of economical and high-powered shortwave radios built by Bassandan cottage industries, which opened the world of global musics to her post-War generation. Experience with the BYO, and her quick ear and strong retention, brought orchestral percussion capacities to the BNRO’s palette. She was also a triangle virtuosa; Mississippi Stokes, who later subbed in the Ballyizget Cajun Band with her, commented “People think that instrument is a toy. Wadn’t no toy when she got her hands on it. It ‘uz like the engine f’r the whole band.”

She was especially valued as a companion on the road: adept at conversation, quick-witted and funny, with a vivid imagination and a great passion for conversation and the sharing of ideas. At the same time, she possessed considerable organizational prowess, serving as de facto road manager and bus captain for the Band in the late Sixties, a period when this group of ravening individualists was particularly challenging to wrangle on the road.

A dancer since childhood, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s she participated in planning, recording, editing, and releasing a series of ethnographic films, particularly of minority folkloric dance cultures and communities. For a musician, she was quite comfortable with hard science, and participated in writing some of the first music-recording software, using 8-bit machines running a prototype of Unix, between 1969-73.

Consistent with her Iliot background, she consistently displayed the sensitivity to nature, landscape, and the spirit world captured in the translated fragment entitled “The Eagle’s Vision.” Her particular friends in the Band, in addition to Paulu, Ifans, and O Laoghaire, were the weather prophets Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen (fiddle, voice) and Yūhannā Casco Encabezado (tuba).

Later in life, she held a teaching post at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget, where she was instrumental in instituting what became a world-famous program in artists’ health and wellness. A proponent, along with Extaberri le Gwo, of the Jamaican raw-and-whole foods regimen called Ital, which included both spiritual as well as physiological considerations, she also developed a university curriculum for sacred drumming and instituted studies of rhythmic entrainment. It would seem that her Iliot heritage came further to the fore in later years: she was a natural and instinctive physician, and receptive to a wide range of healing traditions from around the world—after largely retiring from the road, she still traveled widely, especially in the Caribbean and Central America, researching and collecting natural cures.

She commented: “Life can be very complicated or very simple. But to find the simplicity, you have to find your place. Your place in space, and your place in time. That’s a life’s work.”

[1] “If it wears a uniform, it’s a Cossack.”

Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur c1970
at her dacha
Photo by Cifani Dhoma
Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur (ਜੁਲਾਹੇ; dit “Gi”)
b1936 of Scots, Belgian, Quebecois, Bassandan, Yoruba, Chippewa, Punjabi ancestry

Her ancestor Donald McDonald, hereditary piper to Clan MacDonald on the Isle of Skye, served with Wolfe at the 1759 First Battle of Quebec, as a member of the assault party that crossed the river and scaled the cliffs below the city in the darkness of early 13 September; in fact, it was Cadet McDonald who, when the boats were challenged by an enemy officer, drew upon his maternal antecedents to respond in flawless French, “Nous sommes les bateaux avec ravitaillement pour nos frères sur les remparts.”[1] Proceeding without further challenge, the party’s surprise bayonet charge pierced the line of pickets on the slopes and led eventually to Montcalm’s defeat and the city’s capture. Captain McDonald later served on the then-frontier of western Massachusetts and upstate New York during the American War of Independence as part of the 84th Regiment of Foot, the Royal Highland Emigrants. He was commended for conspicuous bravery in the southern campaigns of Georgia and South Carolina in 1776-77 but retired after the War “over the mountains” (the Appalachians); having lost his first wife in childbirth, he remarried later in life to a Métis girl who was the descendent of Quebecois voyageurs exploring down the Mississippi and thence up the Ohio.

Her paternal grandmother Roisin Canonach McLeod (b 1861-62 in Mull in Scotland’s Western Islands) was a nurse with the 92nd Highlanders at the Battle of Kandahar in 1880, and her father Lakhbir Julāhē Singh, an Anglo-Sikh Subedar born in Ludhiana approximately 1895, served with the Khalsa (Sikh cavalry regiment) on the Western Front in 1915. Taking part in one of the last cavalry charges in modern warfare, severely wounded at the Second Battle of the Somme, and invalided to Paris, he met her mother, resettled from Belgium, whose Maltese Templar ancestors were shared by the family of BNRO saxophonist Binyamin Biraz Ouiz. Giyanlakshmi was thus related by blood both to the smugglers and musicians of the Biraz Ouiz clan of Pontivy in Brittany, and the musicians, scholars, and doctors of the Ludhiana family of Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī, born at Amballa a year after herself.

Her Bassandan grandmother, who married into a family of expatriate French artists and cartographers based in New Orleans (some painted street life, and others served as informants for the Greek-Irish journalist Lafcadio Hearn’s waterfront tales), was also related by blood to the family of the Haitian/Barbadian/kriyo violinist Extaberri le Gwo. Her mother—born in the Faubourg Marigny of mixed Bassandan / Jamaican / New Orleans creole extraction, and who went by her maiden name Tisserand—was alleged to have been a gris-gris priestess, and was certainly an informant to the avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren, who spent time in New Orleans in the late 1940s.

The child exhibited a very early affinity for both the visual arts, especially figure-drawing, and for cartography; even before she could speak, she drew fanciful maps of what were assumed to be imaginary places: however, the BNRO flute-player and electrical savant Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, who became a disciple of Dr Hazzard-Igniti though the two never met before the Doctor was disappeared into the Gulag, decades later suggested that these were in fact intuitive maps of magnetic ley lines. Called “Gi” as a child, she sometimes suffered from nightmares, and would awaken crying and shaking, being calmed only when encouraged to draw pictures of what she had seen; those images, held in the “juvenilia” collection of the Ballyizget Museum of Vernacular Art, depict gigantic, occasionally horrific or faintly humanoid figures: the tubist, occultist, and designer Yūhannā Casco Encabezado, never averse to a paranormal explanation, has insisted that they represent not fantasies, but actual visions from “the Outer Realm,” reputed to be the source of invasions into Bassanda and northern New Mexico during the late 19th century by supernatural entities called “the Dark Ones” (see “Riding the Rift”, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Dr Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti, possibly the most renowned authority in a Bassandan context on the phenomena of magnetism, fourth-dimensional travel, and quantum drift, before he disappeared into the Soviet Gulag, is said to have met the child in wartime Port of Spain Trinidad, where he was researching possible Caribbean Rift portals, in 1941, when she was approximately five years of age. A fragment survives of his laboratory notes:

…The child is a remarkable savant when it comes to language and visual literacy. She is articulate beyond her years, discussing quite abstruse topics in design and artistic philosophy with aplomb…Even more remarkable, however, is her relationship with electrical phenomena. Presented with three undifferentiated blocks of ferrous metal, she is able instantly to identify which of the three has been most powerfully magnetized. Similarly, magnetic devices, when brought into close physical proximity with her, behave in most peculiar fashion: compasses are instantly robbed of directional capacity, magnetic recording wire is seemingly erased—yielding only static-filled noise when played back—and batteries themselves either instantly lose all charge, rapidly burning-out from inside, or else (more commonly) becoming completely recharged if depleted...Though I have no literal explanation for the child’s relationship to these electrical phenomena, I am left to conclude, in the face of empirical evidence, that she possesses some very unique and powerful magnetic attributes.

Certainly the child was exceptionally sensitive to paranormal and extrasensory activity (see below), though as an adult she alternately and rather casually ascribed that sensitivity to either “ma mère le Griotte” (her Creole mother) or to an extraordinary experience she had as a young teenager. This event may go to explain some of the electromagnetic powers later attributed to her:

When Maya Deren and Bronislava Nijinska made their leisurely voyage from New York down the Atlantic coast in 1948-49, it appears that Madame T, and her daughter, traveled by train to meet them in Miami, in order to join the Caribbean leg of their voyage. The specifics of the relationship between film-maker, choreographer, and gris-gris priestess are not entirely clear, but certainly all three shared an interest in paranormal psychology and a uniquely “female” way of experiencing the unseen world.

One night during this voyage, in January 1949, on course for Trinidad after visiting Guadeloupe, Dominica, and Martinique, the by-and-large pleasant and peaceful sailing weather of the journey was interrupted by a series of squalls which laid the small steamer nearly on its beams’-ends. The squalls—short, very intense rainstorms which blew laterally across the ship’s line of sail, causing her to heave and pitch, if only for a few moments—were gone almost before they had registered, or before the supercargo passengers had opportunity to be alarmed: a sudden howling wind; unexpected crashing, rolling, and corkscrewing through the waves; some shattered crockery; and then an aftermath of warm, pouring tropical rain. Deren, Nijinska, and Madame Tisserand, who had been sitting in Deren’s stateroom, were thrown to the deck. Immediately after the squall had passed, Madame got to her feet and rushed across the cabin to check on her daughter, asleep next door—only to find the bunk deserted, the porthole swinging open, and the 13-year-old nowhere to be seen. Madame naturally panicked, and ran for the nearest ladder to seek Giyanlakshmi on deck, calling out for the steward or the nearest sailor.

She emerged onto the streaming decks, with the squall now passed but the steamer rolling heavily in the swell, and looked wildly around in the eerie, silvery moonlight that reflected off the foam of the storm-tossed waves. For a moment, she saw nothing; she turned to call frantically down the hatch just as her friends Deren and Nijinska emerged from it. As she clutched at Nijinska’s arms for assistance, terrified that the child had somehow wandered on deck and been swept overboard, Deren—herself a person of significant paranormal sensitivity, who would later report upon and film her own experiences of vodou possession (see Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti)—raised her hand and pointed over Madame Tisserand’s shoulder. She turned to look forward and saw, lit by the occasional flashes of intermittent lightning, her adolescent daughter, clad in her nightgown, hair streaming with water, seated on a hatch cover swinging her bare feet, smiling with eyes closed. Even forty feet away, Madame could hear that she was singing.

Within a few quick steps, Madame reached out for her child, but cried out in alarm as a powerful electrical charge shot up through her hands, across her shoulders, and into her breast, nearly knocking her down. The girl—already, at 13. tall for her age—stood, looked her mother in the eye, and spoke, as a small cloud of sparks swirled about her and struck golden highlights from her hair, “Ne pas avoir peur, maman ... il est seulement l'éclair.”[2] She held out her hand to take her mother’s arm—prompting a second shower of smaller and milder electrical sparks—and Madame saw a thin, blue scar that looped like a tattoo around the girl’s left wrist, down the side of her nightgown, and down her bare left calf: there were scorch marks on the deck beneath her feet. She continued in French “It was the lightning, Mama. But I’m all right. I knew it would come—that is why I came outside and I sang to it. It found me, and now I can see clearly.”[3]

Next day, they arrived in Port of Spain, and began the sequence of festival events that transformed Nijinska’s life and led, indirectly and eventually, to the successful completion and staging of her choreography Xlbt Op. 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring,” decades later. Thereafter, the Tisserands mère et fille themselves opted to journey onward, in the wake of the Trinidad adventure, and to join Nijinska upon her relocation to Ballyizget in obedience, as she said, “to the Old Gods’ advice.” Giyanlakshmi became part of an informal group of teenaged progressive artists and anarchists loosely affiliated with the BNRO, mostly the offspring of post-WWII progressives, calling themselves Anty- Burzhuazni Apachi (“The anti-bourgeois Apaches”), whose samizdat manifestos and visual art in the early 1950s caused surprising headaches for a Soviet propaganda machine intent on conveying idealized Social Realist unanimity. By the age of fifteen, she was already legendary amongst revolutionary practitioners of anti-Stalinist buzadigan amallar rasmlar = “painting on walls” = graffiti) and her “tag”—graffito version of her name—was found on buildings, especially official CPB buildings, all over Ballyizget.

She throve in cold weather, and in the late ‘50s lived in an unheated walkup squat (non-regulated apartment) on the Ballyizget docks; more thin-blooded artist comrades spoke with awe of her breaking the ice in her bathtub to bathe each morning, and many gathered there on winter evenings, not only for the art, music, and conversation, but because, as one said, “Where Gi was, it was always warm.” There is no explanation for this thermal vitality.

Her paternal grandfather’s origin in the Western Islands of Scotland is thought to account for her alleged endowment with the Second Sight: that is, a paranormal ability to “predict” the future and—especially—to know of or “see” events far distant in space, which ability is particularly associated with the small and closely-intermarried population of the Island of Mull. Certainly there were watershed events in Band history which she, from her studio in the foothills of the Bassandan Alps, appears to have known about from a great distance. And it was sometimes claimed—though never by her—that she could perceive beings or intentions, when in close proximity, that were invisible to others or to the naked eye, as it was alleged she had “seen” the Dark Ones in her childhood. The most famous instance of this extrasensory perception in her adult years pertains to an event in 1959, when, from her studio in Ballyizget, she “saw” the detention of Madame Szabo and her family by the Czech secret police in Prague, over five hundred miles away, and warned Yezget-Bey, prompting his legendary 23-hour epic drive by Jeep, with Zaklin Paulu and Yakub Sanjo d’Aunai, to rescue them (detailed elsewhere in the Correspondence).

She claimed to have a special affinity with the Beast, the gigantic electro-magnetic locomotive of Bassandan revolutionary legend, and could, at various decades, be found aboard her; there are references to Gi in the epic 1906 account of “the Great Train Ride for Bassanda” (no explanation of her appearance in a tale dated 30 years before her birth has ever been tendered). Likewise, she more than once appeared in the northern Rio Grande Valley, possibly as a result of Rift travel. There exists for example a charcoal sketch of the “Victorian BNRO,” matching an Ambrotype found in a Taos mission archive and dated approximately 1885, bearing the inscription GKJ, though no explanation has yet been tendered for a sketch which predates the founding of the Band by over sixty years, and her own birth by more than fifty…

She was close friends with Nijinska, Kristina Olenev, the blues guitarist Mississippi Stokes (of whom she would laughingly say “chér, it’s a manteca thing we share”), and the NOLA-raised Anglo-Mexican trumpeter, pianist, and vocalist Rahmani Boenavida, another scion of Bassandan electro-magnetic innovation, engineer of the legendary “Rashtrid” hot-rodded audio recorders which were used to capture the field recordings of Live from the Rift Valley. She was a member of the circle of animal-rights activists that included the ex-combat photographer and documentarian Cifani Dhoma, the shape-shifter dancer and violinist Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, the ex-monk Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill (a faculty member in Ballyizget U’s Department of Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics), and Nijinska herself (founder of the no-kill animal sanctuary and shelter Libertas Domum, in the northern foothills).

She seldom traveled with the band, but in certain circumstances could be persuaded to enlist as illustrator and “visual collaborator”, sometimes sketching or painting to live music as the band played. One such image graces the large gatefold cover of the two-disc LP set Live from the Rift Valley, recorded at an open-air concert in the foothills of the Bassandan Alps by the BNRO in 1974; she later reworked this spontaneous sketch as Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”), borrowing the title of a musical anthem originating with the anti-Soviet underground rock band the Electric Trees. Vibrant with intense color and thick pigment, defiantly anti-realist, and celebrating with visceral force the bodies of those who had fought and died for Bassandan independence, it was hung in the rotunda of the Parliament building in 1985 after the “Fall of the Commissars” described elsewhere in the Correspondence—a ceremony which generations of Bassandan art historians perceive as a watershed in post-Soviet visual arts. She subsequently produced a whole series of paintings in analogous style, inspired by the music of the BNRO, the (post-perestroika) ESO, and the late-period Trees.

She was a remarkable dancer, particularly to the BNRO’s music, capable of channeling simultaneously the movement vocabularies of her Yoruba and Afro-Caribbean maternal ancestors and the Sufi ecstasy of her father’s heritage. A striking short film by Cifani Dhoma exists, recalling the story of her childhood lightning encounter aboard ship, of Giyanlakshmi dancing in a thunderstorm during a BNRO outdoor concert in the Bassandan hills below the Matthiaskloster.

Later in life, she held an endowed chair in visual art and mixed media at Ballyizget University, in the context of which she trained generations of revolutionary artists. But her heart, she said, was always at her dacha on the south Bassandan coast: a rambling bungalow with bamboo walls and verandas, perched out over the water in the midst of wetlands and wild birds, full of dogs, paintings, recordings, and mementos. She chose the site because it fell directly beneath the geosynchronous orbit of Asteroid 7112 Ghislaine, discovered in 1986 by planetary scientists Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, and named in her honor (several of her pieces hung in their home in Palomar California).

It was a matter of BNRO / ESO folklore that, on the night, once every three years, that 7112 Ghislaine passed directly overhead, in the inevitable thunderstorms, she would dance until dawn.

[1] “We are the boats with re-supply for our brothers on the ramparts.”
[2] “Don’t be frightened, Mama—it’s only the lightning.”
[3] “Il était l'éclair, Mama. Mais je suis tout à droite. Je savais que ça viendrait-qui est pourquoi je suis venu à l'extérieur et je chantais à elle. Il m'a trouvé, et maintenant je peux voir clairement.”

Ít Vũ Công dit “le Danceur”, Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory
graduation photo, 1966
Ít Vũ Công, dit
“le Danceur”[1]

Born Cholon 1944

Vietnamese, Irish, French, ethnic Annamese

Great-grandfather was an Irish soldier of fortune, recruited into the Connaught Rangers in 1905 and serving with distinction on the Western Front, but who resigned his commission rather than participate in the brutal “Black and Tan” reprisals after the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Decommissioned and stripped of his pension, he wandered East and found employment in 1920s Burma training regional police; it’s said that he met the young Eric Blair / George Orwell in this period and in fact narrated the original anecdote which became Orwell’s “Shooting the Elephant.” Other members of the Irish family, serving overseas in 18th and 19th century as “Wild Geese” (mercenary soldiers), intermarried with Normans whose original place-based name was Courtenay (from Latin: “Curtenus”—“the Short”). When, in the 1970s, she finally visited Doolin and the Aran Islands on the west coast of Clare, she commented “I feel like I’m finally coming home”.

Another great-grandfather was a distaff member of the Annamese Trinh dynasty which had been largely supplanted by the end of the 18th century; though in greatly reduced financial circumstances, this branch of her lineage retained an awareness of traditional culture, including Chinese music, court dance, painting, and Confucianism. She joked “yeah, I’ve got one great-grandpappy who was Irish nobility and another who was Annamese royalty, and they all taught me everything there was to know about my heritage, and that I was a princess, and neither of them left me a sou!”

She received an early education in languages, dance, and music from family members and then at a French-language school in Saigon in Cochinchina. First attracted to the fiddle, which had been played by her Irish forebear, she eventually abandoned the instrument, saying “I loved the violin—but it didn’t love me back”; evidently, the flute was a little more forgiving. The South, in the period 1944-54, the period of her childhood, was torn with imperial and colonial political and military strife: she later spoke quite movingly of the school as “a haven—a place where nothing could hurt me and I was surrounded by people who loved and believed in what I did.”

Her uncle, a Foreign Legionnaire from Alsace who joined the Legion under mysterious circumstances in 1941, fought during World War II alongside Free French forces (mostly colons and planters and their immediate families) against the Indochinese Vichy government and the Japanese occupiers, and in fact escaped in 1945 with the remnants of these guerilla forces into Nationalist China. In the wake of the Japanese coup that eventually overthrew the Vichy puppet government—and which murdered many who refused to accede to the new authorities—her father smuggled the family out of Cholon and hid them on a French cousin’s remote rubber plantation. There they waited out the war and the brief Empire of Vietnam that followed, before the French returned in 1946 to attempt to resume power and the family returned to Cholon.

At sixteen, under the urging of her Francophile parents, who understandably hoped to get her out of the Diệm regime’s South Vietnam altogether, she traveled alone to France to audition at the Aix en Provence Conservatory but was declined admission; the then flute professor is reported to have said, “Well, there is a certain passion there, but she plays like a peasant—like a pied-noir” (“black foot”—a nativist slur).[2] Crushed, she returned to Saigon; years later, she said “I thought—well, that’s it: there isn’t a future for me in music.” She experimented with ballet and with singing, but discovered a stronger passion for photography, both portraiture and more experimental artistic studies. There exists a series of beautiful and (with hindsight) elegiac photographs taken by Vũ at around age fifteen, shot with an old Leica left behind by a French newspaperman, which depict something of the life into which she had been born and which, by 1961, was already slipping away: her siblings, dressed in the uniforms of their French grammar school; her grandfather, clad in white and wearing a battered colonist’s straw hat, seated in a garden with a cigar and glass of wine; her mother in an ao-dai, posed formally, standing behind her seated father, one hand on his shoulder; the Belgian corgi dogs that the family raised. It was a way of life that rapidly disintegrated as French colonial rule collapsed.

Unexpectedly, and despite the earlier setback in Provence, word of her musicianship eventually reached the BNRO nevertheless, when, having abandoned the idea of overseas study, she participated by chance in a youth festival of music in the Philippines. The contact happened through the intermediacy of the locally-born violinist Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, who had played regularly with the BNRO as early as 1953. By 1961 “Princess” Jaṅgalī was actually on hiatus from the Band, and while visiting her family in Manila was asked to judge the music festival. Śamū’ēla, a warm and nurturing presence to younger musicians throughout her entire career (she later became a worldwide leader in the foundation of youth orchestras, especially in the developing nations), made a point of slipping backstage at the interval of the concert, whose first half had featured Vũ in a performance of the Milhaud Op. 47 sonata (flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano). While “Miss Sam” had kind words for all the players, it was Vũ who she drew aside and said “Where are you from, my dear? And how long have you been playing?”

That night, from a telephone booth outside the St. Cecilia Hall in Manila, over a very poor trans-oceanic line, Jaṅgalī rang Nas1lsinez, and, nearly shouting, exclaimed “Baba, you have to hear this child! Of course that conasse in Provence couldn’t hear what’s inside her. But the child has the Bassanda heart in her playing—and someone has to get her out of Cholon!” Nas1lsinez was not unused to receiving such communications from past or current band members, often from the four corners of the earth; those who had played for him for many years were often highly effective talent scouts—and sometimes, as well, advocates for youngsters who needed the band as much as the band needed them. As a result of Jaṅgalī’s adamant advocacy, and an exchange of telegrams between Ballyizget and Saigon, the seventeen-year-old left her family’s Cholon home in August 1962 to attend Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory on a full-ride flute scholarship. Within a few weeks, she had been sucked into the BNRO orbit.

She came into the Band at a unique time, in the midst of a fallow period precipitated by both the significant social changes occurring in the West, which the BNRO members had watched closely (the 1962 ensemble was in fact known as the “Beatnik Band” because they were so strongly influenced by modernist and experimental literature and music in this period), and by departures and transformations in the personnel between 1962-64. The earlier “Classic ’52 Band,” assembled in the teeth of official disapproval in the depths of the Stalinist era, had attained legendary status, with quite extraordinary capacities being attributed to its music and even its official portrait-photograph. The 1962 “Beatnik Band” had retained many of the same players, now much matured, but, as a draft manuscript for a never-published LIFE magazine essay makes clear, was experiencing a kind of centrifugal force as the Kruschev loosening of social strictures and the siren call of Western “liberalism” began to pull the classic lineup apart. The period from August ’62 (just after the Band returned from its annual summer tour) through spring 1965 greatly intensified the ferment and unrest in the ranks; while the players were still as fiercely loyal to one another and to Nas1lsinez as they had been previously, their frustration at the setbacks, retrenchment of official repression, and closing-down of opportunity that followed Kruschev’s ouster was substantially greater.

This sense of frustration was temporarily mitigated by the presence of both new young players and that of treasured veterans returning to the fold: in this period, for example, both Rahmani Boenavida (piano, trumpet, guitar, voice) and Krzysztof Arczewski (double bass) re-entered the ranks, and their wide experience outside the confines of the Band, and indeed the confines of the Satellites’ policies, provided a counter-balance to the centrifugal force exerted by the disparity of Stalinism versus the 1960s West.

By 1965, the year of the Band’s much-mythologized appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, “Little Dancer” was 21 years old, and had nearly three years’ experience in the BNRO. She specialized in extended techniques for the flute and worked avidly with the BNRO’s partnered arrangers and her section mates to further develop the arsenal of winds techniques, particularly drawing upon the traditional flutes of Southeast Asia, most particularly the sao truc (six-holed bamboo flute) and sae meo (fippled whistle from the indigenous Hmong people). Articulate beyond her years, she was, moreover, an adamant opponent of the escalating presence of combat troops in her home country, and more than once Nas1lsinez—himself a pacifist of long standing—had to warn her against being quoted by the Bassandan Central Soviet as a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiment (his specific words to her were “You can hate the war all you want, my dear—but don’t let the commissars use you to do the dirty work of their propaganda”). More lightly, her verbosity and quick wit made her a welcome traveling companion on the interminable tours in the BNRO’s succession of rickety buses and trucks.

She was at the same time a very important bridge between the conservatory-trained musicians who tended to fill the ranks of the BNRO and the folk musicians who were often the senior players or indeed the sources of their repertoire. Keeping up her classical music studies even as she toured, and very much a product of the colon’s “music of the great tradition” conservatory mindset, she was nevertheless open to a very wide range of music and expressive arts, and especially appreciated the juggling, tumbling, magic tricks, and slapstick comedy of the indigenous Bassandan Mjekësia Trego traveling carnivals—her comic renditions of folk puppetry’s ribald tales were a favorite of post-gig band parties. Bookending the photographic studies from her Cholon adolescence are the later albums of both informal snapshots and more formal portraits from her years on the road with the BNRO, in which she captures many of the Band’s members at their most “characteristic” moments (there exists, for example, a notorious series of shots of Antanas Kvainauškas which he always insisted must have employed a doppelganger). In addition to her abilities with strings and winds, and activity as visual artist, she was also a competent actress and sailor, swam like a fish, and was more than a bit of a clown.

Finally, despite her somewhat happy-go-lucky manner, her bandmates knew her as a fiercely loyal and courageous comrade. Though it is not widely known, the epic tale of the Band’s direct intervention in the April 1975 exodus of “boat people” from South Vietnam, and their rescue of her escaping parents from capture by Thai pirates, would challenge the imaginations of the most expansive Hollywood screenwriters, and this was not the only Bassandan adventure in which she played a critical role.

On the romantic side, the band repeatedly imputed a long-standing of incipient liaison between herself and Jakov Rezinald; though they were close friends and shared both a sense of humor and a commitment to the band, each insisted that the relationship was strictly platonic. They were relentlessly teased about it, nevertheless: the joke apparently never got old (Yezget-Bey reportedly insisting “Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know!”).

More seriously, Rezinald—who, with 57 years in the BNRO/ESO, brought an impressive mass of experience, commitment, and perspective to such considerations—said “Our Little Dancer was a warrior. I never, ever, ever doubted her commitment.”

The Band tended to agree.

[1] Ít Vũ Công literally translates as “Little Dancer”.
[2] “Eh bien, il ya une certaine passion, mais elle joue comme un paysan, comme un pied-noir.” (Pied-noir is a derogatory term associated with mixed-race North African and Southeast Asian colonial peoples.)

Nollag Käsityöläinen, age 15
Ballyizget Középiskolában a Művészet
(“High School for the Arts”)
Nollag Käsityöläinen (b1920)

Born Bassanda of ethnic Ukrainian and Scottish stock.

Her great-grandfather was a blacksmith, her grandfather a senior engineer for the Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation. The latter is credited with the “Sukhina Circuit” which made it possible for the locomotive engine called “The Beast” to travel through air via balanced electromagnetic repulsion from the earth’s ley lines. Through this maternal line she was also related to the family of Davoud and Jamshid Gora, father and son smugglers on the Black Sea, who had played a crucial role in the Great Train Ride to Bassanda (1906, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Her father was a Russian Orthodox cantor, an ethnic Finn, and a notable linguist: it is said that he was fluent in more than a dozen languages (including Finnish, Saami, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), and read and sang in over a half-dozen more. She herself possessed significant linguistic skills: when she fled to Switzerland in 1939 during the Nazi Anschluss of Bassanda, carrying two suitcases and 100 rubles, she made her first connections as piano accompanist not least through her ability to converse with soloists in all the polyglot languages of Bern. It has been alleged that it was likewise her linguistic skills—no less than her public persona as a globe-trotting piano accompanist—that led to her recruitment by OSS chief Allen Dulles. On the other hand, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, a notoriously prolix gossip, once told Leon Avventoros Anderson (during a wild pub-crawl in Ballyizget in the 1990s), that Käsityöläinen won the post in 1939, while playing piano in the bar of Bern’s Hotel Bellevue Palace, by besting Dulles in an arm-wrestling match!

During the War years, in addition to rapidly developing her career as accompanist and soloist, she appears to have continued her clandestine service on behalf of the Allies; during the German and then Soviet occupations (1939-c1949) of Ballyizget, she was often in-and-out of the capitol city. With multi-instrumentalist Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, she served as a “forward observer” and correspondent in the clandestine communications networks maintained by sympathizers with anti-Fascist partisans in the hills.

After the War, and particularly during the gradual liberalization under Kruschev (1955-64), she attained almost mythic status on staff at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, and an unmatched level of authority, by virtue of her colorful personal history, encyclopedic knowledge of repertoire, dizzying technique; and also by a subtler, less quantifiable metric. Of this, Yezget Bey said “She was always very calm, very focused. Very generous.” She collaborated with Krzysztof Arczewski as well as a number of other BNRO personnel for solo programs and recordings, and was the principal accompanist on his “Gray Sleeve” recordings.

She was a prodigiously talented accompanist, especially of folkloric or otherwise un-notated music: no matter how complex, crooked, or melodically intricate the tune, she was essentially capable of harmonizing perfectly upon first hearing. A favorite party trick amongst the less-mature members of the BNRO and H-LC staff was to give Käsityöläinen an extra drink and then, in her hearing, claim that the accompanists on the classic Michael Coleman Irish fiddle 78s made in New York in the 1930s “really knew what they were doing” (Jakov Redžinald was particularly prone to such teasing activity). Though normally a retiring and gentle person, the combination of Syntia’s peach brandy and the “Coleman sides” was like a red rag to a bull: she would explode with indignation and curse those nez·hrabnyy olova vukhamy idioty! (“ham-fisted tin-eared idiots!”) in four languages.

She was especially close to Joost Bauherr, with whom she shared an interest in new music, outdoor pursuits and the wild; at his urging, she became a patron of the Bassanda Bicycle Club. With Cifani Dhoma she learned to be an accomplished wilderness traveler and photographer. In later life she collaborated with Bauherr, Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, Rahmani Boenavida, Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta, and the General himself in design and testing of a prototype drone-synth tuned to the Bassandan makamat, the Yıllanmış-Tron. She also made extensive contributions to the Bassandan Peoples’ Liberation Samizdat Cookbook (see her “Nollag’s Pyrizhky”).

She and Dhoma were particularly close; Nolla spoke of a “karmic agreement” between them, and both were very active in disability and veterans’-support organizations: Bassanda was one of the first post-World War II satellites to institute retraining/reintegration strategies for veterans returning from the fronts, and the nation’s Mechi v Plugi (“Swords into Plowshares”) program was an unacknowledged model, blending subsidized communal living, counseling, job training, and arts therapy, for later veterans’ service organizations among the NATO allies. Nolla herself made a personal commitment to advocacy on behalf of the neuro-diverse, including autism and like conditions.

She was an adept seamstress and avid swimmer, figure skater, and skier—the walls of her senior accompanist’s studio at H-LC were lined with many hundreds of photos, taken with friends engaged in these activities all over the world, interspersed with post-concert photos from equal hundreds of performances. She was beloved of generations of students for her remarkable ability to alternately encourage and drive; a popular H-LC catchphrase was “you can’t hide from Nolla’. You shouldn’t even try.”

In addition to myriad other talents, she was also a marathon swimmer: a scion, with Žaklin Paulu, of the Ballyizget Polar Bear Club, founded by Gerlandagjeor Balandjeor. And there is some evidence that, like Yakub “Sanjo” D’Aunai, Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, and Azizlarim Jangchi, , she was in fact a shape-shifter: her great-grandmother, the daughter of a Jacobite clansman from the Inner Hebrides who had left Scotland after the 1745 defeat of the Highland clans at Culloden and come east as a professional soldier, allegedly inherited the supernatural aquatic capacities of the Hebridean selkies or “seal people” (see The Great Silkie of Skule Skerrie). Cifani Dhoma told a story of trekking in the high country with Nolla and Bauherr; she said that, on an evening’s stop when they had been delayed in crossing a high pass and were running out of food, Käsityöläinen stripped, dove into an Alpine stream, and caught their evening’s trout dinner with her hands.

Moreover, the EHS Oral History Project documented matter-of-fact testimony from a number of BNRO members who claimed to have witnessed such a transformation during the night in 1985 when the Band defected from Talinn to Helsinki by tramp steamer. Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi is recorded as follows:

“No…I’m telling you, I saw it! One minute Nolla was standing with us. It was night-time, after 2am, we’d just finished breaking down after the Talinn gig, and we’d gotten as far as the harbor: some standing on the pier, some still in the back of the equipment van and on the bus—all of us in the Band, and the crew, and some family. Nāṯān had smoothed out the KGB men who were guarding the theater—we went past one who was stuffed head-down in a dumpster, not moving, and two more who appeared to have conked their heads together full force—and Jér and Etsy had already taken out the policemen on the wharf, and Mississippi insisted he knew the engines, and Benjy had the eyesight to conn us out of Talinn harbor even in the blackout, but we didn’t have any chart of the mines we knew were strung below the surface.

And the water was black, black as ink, and we knew there was a huge boom guarding the mouth of the harbor, but we didn’t know if Benjy could see it, and we didn’t know if we could avoid the mines. And I saw Baba lean over to Nolla —he was super tall, and she wasn’t, particularly—and whisper something to her. She nodded, and then Yezget-Bey stepped up on a bollard and hissed to get our attention, pointing at the gangway we were to use to board.

I was near the back of the group—I had forgotten to bring my fiddle and had to run to the theater, past the KGB men, unconscious or dead, and then run back to the wharf—and as Baba pointed in the other direction, I heard a sploosh overside and I saw something go into the water. Benjy and Madame Szabo hurried us aboard and there wasn’t time to look around much, but, as I came up the gangplank at the end of the crowd, I saw Ceri Ifans tug on Baba’s sleeve on the wharf and say “what about Nolla? Aren’t we going to wait for her?!?” Baba replied, “Don’t worry, girl. Nolla is going to lead the way” as he hustled her aboard, himself bringing up the rear.

Mississippi and Etsy, the two sailors, dropped down to the engine room, Rashka went to the galley and started rattling pots and pans to feed the children, and Benjy went to the bridge, with Yanna next to him to run the radar. Ais and Sian cast off the bollards and flemished the lines, but most of the rest of the Band, the landlubbers, huddled on the after-deck. I saw Cif climb the ladder to the roof of the deck-house and go forward to the prow. She had a pair of small flashlights in her hands and Raakeli went with her. I was scared but I was also dead-curious to see what Baba proposed to do, so I followed.

I saw Raakeli put her two hands together on the rail of the prow and lean far forward over the water ahead and then I heard—maybe from her—a kind of growling bark. Cif flicked one flashlight, with a red lens on the bulb, toward the pilot house, and I saw Benjy flick the chart-lamp on-and-off in acknowledgement. Raakeli made the bark again, and looking ahead, I saw the black waters of the harbor roil for a minute, and then, reflected in the lights from the wharfside warehouses behind us, I saw the head of a seal break water: big, and sleek, with huge luminescent brown eyes.

Raakeli barked again, and Cif flicked the two flashlights back toward Benjy red-blue-red-blue, and I heard the diesel engines far below rumble into life. The seal slapped the water with its flippers and dove, and Cif clapped Raakeli on the shoulder with a grin, whirling the blue flashlight in a circle over her head. The diesels shifted into a higher, more urgent key, and that dirty old ferry slipped away from the wharf smooth as silk. Ahead, I saw the seal rocket up out of the water, to the starboard, and splash down again; Cif spun both flashlights in parallel clockwise circles, and above Benjy eased the wheel over to take us to starboard, down the harbor channel and out to sea, at the slowest and quietest possible speed.

Forty minutes later, as we cleared the western edge of the Paljassaare Promontory, a low sliver of a waning moon opened to us between the mainland and Naisaar Island. It hid for a moment, but in the darkness we could still just see, and hear, the seal breaching and then splashing down to dive, leading us northward toward the free Baltic beyond the three-mile line…

When we rounded the northern tip of Naisaar, Cif doused her lights, and clapped Raakeli, who was leaning against the rail as if exhausted, on the shoulder.

“Good work, Little Bear. That’s ten miles offshore. If the Cossacks haven’t caught us by now, they can’t catch us until we’re into Finnish waters.”

Raakeli straightened and smiled, saying something in a language I didn’t know:

“Olemmeko kaikki hyvin, emäntä Cif? Olemmeko turvassa?”

Cifani smiled and patted her shoulder. “Yes, Little Bear: we are safe. You and Nolla, between you—you were our spirit guides. Go down and get some supper; I’ll bring Nolla when she comes.”

Cif turned, and beckoned to me. “Go and tell Benjy he’s OK from here. And find Baba and tell him that Nolla guided us well.”

I did as I was told and, a few hours later, with the sun rising red over Leningrad a hundred miles over the horizon to the east, we came into the network of small islands that guard the free Finnish city of Helsinki. Most of the band had dozed quietly, well-used to the exigencies of sleeping on the road, but a few of the more talkative—Antan’ and Nuala, Jakov and Jamey—were still awake, as the sky paled in the east. Yezget-Bey came up the hatch from the hold, as Benjy, leaving Yanna at the wheel, dropped down from the pilot-house to the after deck. Baba looked at Benjy.

“Tout’s clair?”

Benjy nodded: “Oui, Papa. Nolla a fait pour nous. Nous sommes clairs.”

Baba slapped him hard on the shoulder: “Well done, mon gars. Today we make landfall in freedom. Where is she?”

Cifani had joined us. At this, she smiled, and pointed past Baba’s shoulder toward the stern. Behind us, with her back to the taffrail and the rising sun picking up highlights in her dark hair, glistening with wet, was Nolla, her clothes damp, her face pale but smiling. She had an arm around Raaakeli, who clung to her, and she tightened the embrace and smiled wider as she met Baba’s gaze.

He smiled back and said “Maith thú, Selkie. Tá muid i do fiach.”[1]

[1] “Many thanks, Selkie. We are in your debt.”

Aislinn, Golden Gate Park, January 1967
Photograph by Extaberri le Gwo
Aislinn mac Aluinn (Meşe Kolları)

clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, trumpet, bagpipe

b1942, of Breton, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Bassandan ancestry

Descended on the distaff side from the fifth century St Alan(us) of Quimper in Brittany, a very early convert to Christianity, her family comes into England as followers of William the Conqueror. Alan ar Rouz / “Alan Rufus” (c1040-1093), a Breton count who fought with the invading Normans at the Battle of Hastings (1066), later became one of the most powerful of the Anglo-Norman lords, holding lands at Ashwyken in Norfolk, Suffolk, and East Anglia; he built Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire. The family’s Breton and Welsh connections yield an ongoing interest in folklore and associations with Cambria and the stories of King Arthur. The given name “Aislinn”, common in the family history, derives both from the Irish word for “vision” (aisling) and from the Anglo-Saxon name “Æsclēah,” meaning “the place of the ash-trees” a reference to the hardwood trees that grew on the family estate in the Yorkshire Dales (and to the place of the ash in pre-Christian tree magic). A family story passed down in Alan Rufus’s line held that St Alanus’s blessing upon them was strengthened in the presence of hardwood groves, and certainly this appeared, anecdotally, in Aislinn’s own life-long affinity for hills, wild places, and running water; she once said “when I am among the trees, I am never alone.”

Another branch of the family went east, as pilgrims and mercenary soldiers, and was active in both war and trade in Byzantium, Greece, and the conquest of Cyprus. It is said that the origins of the “Black Bird” story fictionalized by Dashiell Hammett and filmed by John Huston in The Maltese Falcon were actually in a Cypriot anecdote passed down for generations in the mac Aluinn family and shared by Colette St Jacques with Hammett in San Francisco’s Japantown around 1922, just after he left the Pinkerton’s detective agency, but decades after St Jacques’ return from her Bassanda journey with Algeria Main-Smith and Master Li Bao.

Bassanda enters her lineage through this eastern-Mediterranean branch of traders and crusaders; her maternal great-grandmother traced her ancestry to the c1463 marriage of a Bassandan mercenary, Jehannus Stejar-Braț (“Johannes the Oak-Armed”), to a daughter of Marietta de Patras, mistress of the Anglo-Cypriot King John II, a descendent of Norman invaders. After Jehannus retired from the condottieri, he returned to the south Coast of Bassanda, bringing with him his new wife and infant daughter. Paradoxically, the Breton-Norman Meşe Kolları (“Oak-Armed”) family would later play a significant role in the Kazakları'nın Direnç movement that resisted Tsarist imperialism in the early 18th century; Jehanus’s great-grandson Blata “Kurashchimiz” (“The Wrestler”), born in 1540, was so strong that, in battle, he could grapple and throw a Cossack horse and rider.

An Anglo-Irish relative, William, 1st Viscount Beresford (1768-1856), fought with Wellington in the Peninsular War (1809-1814); very unusually, and despite the fact that he had lost an eye in a musket accident, he was also not only an expert tactician but also a deadly sharpshooter who accounted for numerous French officers at Badajoz and Salamanca. That warlike spirit and martial expertise was continued in the New World “Allen” branch of the family: a Zephaniah Allen mustered in January 1800 as a Marine on the United States sloop of war Herald and was later granted a pension by the US government; he settled in Athens Alabama in the 1830s and his family may have been partly responsible for the strain of deep-South pro-Union sentiment which Colonel Thompson and the General later described there at the height of the US Civil War.

Another branch of the Norman Rufus family followed the mercenary commander Richard Strongbow west from England into Ireland in 1171 on a contract with the King of Leinster, whom Strongbow later deposed. The chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) describes William FitzAldelm (born c1151) as “…tenues de corpore, a iustus fortis fraxinum” (“…of slender stature but strong as an ash tree”); FitzAldelm, even after settling in the Plains of Kildare west of the Dublin Pale, continued to hold lands on the Continent as Seneschal of Normandy.

The Breton/Welsh/Norman connection continued into the modern era: Aislinn’s own great-aunt, Cécile Lapin (born Normandy 1882) was a participant in, and chronicler of, the Great Train Ride to Bassanda, undertaken by herself, Professor Habjar-Lawrence, and Ismail Durang in 1906-07, to deliver ancient “Documents” located by General Landes in Paris to anti-Czarist freedom fighters in Bassanda. There is a Breton connection to the family of Binyamin Biraz Ouiz at Pontivy, of the House of Rohan; in the 1960s, when they were on the road with the BNRO, Biraz Ouiz would refer to Aislinn as “little cousin.” She returned annually for the bagpipes festival at Pontivy, Kan ar Bobl.

Aislinn was born in 1944 in the seacoast town of Makhachkala, to a family still involved in trade (and probably smuggling) throughout the Aral, Black, and Caspian Sea regions. Though she imbibed sailing and the sea with her mother’s milk, she also spent time in the scrub-forested mountains around Gimry, just a few miles inland though significantly higher in altitude. She thus learned to both sail and ride as a child, and throughout her life displayed an affinity for quadrupeds, especially the tough Bassandan mountain ponies called Avar (Russian Avarskaya) which had served as mounts for early Byzantine crusaders (her ancestors). Her family had maintained the condottieri’s practice of speaking both local languages and their inherited Breton/French/Gwerz amalgam, and she possessed remarkable language-acquisition skills, an aptitude particularly useful in the ‘60s when the BNRO’s touring circuit expanded eastward into East and South Asia.

She was close friends with her section-mate Extaberri le Gwo, an iconic figure in the band 11 years her senior. “Etsy” looked out for her, and there is a story that the two were reunited in San Francisco in 1967, briefly fronting a San Francisco incarnation of the Electric Trees (“The Cosmic Willows”) on dual electric fiddles. Jerry Goodman of “The Flock” (Chicago) is said to have been significantly inspired by their example, and Dave Swarbrick of Fairport Convention (England) was known to jokingly dedicate “The Brown Girl” to her upon occasion. Her self-evident musicianship, even-keeled personality, and wildly diverse additional aptitudes led Madame Szabo to recruit mac Ailuinn for the BNRO within a few days after her 18th birthday.

She is described as possessing a quiet, rather remote manner, in contrast to other more flamboyant characters within the Band’s orbit, but, as Le Gwo said, “quiet little thing, but the girl could surprise you.” In addition to her linguistic aptitude and encyclopedic capacity for memorization, she was also mathematically gifted at near-savant level, capable of performing complex algebraic and trigonometric problems in her head—a skill which made her additionally valuable on those occasions when, traveling late to a concert date, it was necessary for the BNRO busses and trucks to “fold space.” The combination of mac Aluinn’s mathematical skills and the electro-magnetic instincts of Yannoula Periplanó̱menos (an almost exact contemporary, whose Anglo-Saxon ancestors had likewise fought at Hastings; the two later joked about their “ancestral conflict”) sometimes made it possible to pioneer off-road routes not knwon by any cartographers.

A voracious reader, she specialized in non-Western history and organology, displaying a remarkable aptitude for non-traditional, archaic, and “found” instruments, in addition to concertizing on clarinet, shawm, bagpipe, fiddle, and trumpet. When Yezget-Bey, in collaboration with Thomas Binkley of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, first commissioned a series of reproductions of Bassandan Bronze-Age horns, it was not only low-brass specialist Yūhannā Casco Encabezado (a flamboyant, extroverted personality much given to musical experiment, who appears in a late Roger Zelazny fragment about “Lord Rein raising the spirits of the Canyon”) but also the quiet and introverted mac Aluinn who recovered the extended playing techniques which the historical models seem to have required.

In the 1970s, as the satellites (including Bassanda) began to enact market and political reforms, echoing the progressive innovations of the “Charter 77” movement in Germany, and the Band traveled more widely and freely, she added additional instruments and languages to her arsenal: Swahili and the Kenyan krar (harp-lute), Welsh and the pibgorm (folk oboe)—an instrument she shared with Ceridwen Moira Ifans—and, under the influence of NYC-based jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the mazello and stritch.

After the death of the Founder in 1985, she accepted an adjunct teaching post in winds and strings at Habjar-Lawrence University, walking to classes each morning through Ballyizget’s polyglot University quarter, exchanging greetings in a dozen languages, before returning home to her small townhouse behind the Cathedral, whose every room was filled with dozens if not hundreds of curious and antiquated instruments and lined floor-to-ceiling with thousands upon thousands of books.

As percussionist Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire put it, "Bhí sí ciúin, ach bhí sí ar ár mac Aluinn” (“She was quiet, but she was our little Rock”). And every March, when the BNRO and (later, after dissolution of the BSSR) ESO vehicles loaded at the front gates of Habjar-Lawrence for the Spring Tour, she would be on the sidewalk, waiting quietly amongst the more extroverted members’ jostling and greetings, a stack of instrument cases and an overweight valise of books by her side.

Once, when asked about her reasons for staying so long in a touring situation which took her far from her beloved South Bassandan countryside and family, she said,

“I like touring; it’s like running water. It’s never the same stream twice.”

Sian Mackenzie in rehearsal, c1970
Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie

voice, dance, violin (Scots, German, Bassandan, Welsh ethnicity)

b1942 Glasgow, from a Highland lineage, while her father was serving in the RAF in the defence of the North; previously, he had been part of the vastly-outnumbered planes providing air cover for the Dunkirk evacuation in May-June 1940, and then in the earliest stages of the Battle of Britain. In order to protect her from Luftwaffe bombings, like many other “war babies” she was sent out of the city to stay with relatives (Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, whose Greek/Bassandan father had brought his family back to Sussex just after Pearl Harbor, was raised in the bucolic South Downs in the same period for the same reasons).

In Sian’s case, she was housed with her grandmother Sarah Mac Coinnich on the Island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The family had been on Lewis, and scattered through the Western Islands, ever since the 13th century, and had played key roles in various military conflicts, both at home and abroad. Ancestor George MacKenzie had fought at the Battle of Prestonpans, the first great victory in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, when the British regulars under General Sir John Cope were caught unawares in a mist by a broadsword-and-buckler charge of the assembled Highlanders, and routed in something under five minutes. George MacKenzie again served as a field commander at the last of the Clans’ victories, the Battle of Falkirk Muir, fought in a howling rainstorm in January 1746, but after the defeat at Culloden in April, he like many other clansmen fled the reprisals that followed. He traveled incognito to take ship for France from the Firth of Forth, but, disillusioned with the cause of the Young Pretender, signed on as a hired commander in the military service of Maximilian III of Bavaria during the War of the Austrian Succession. It was probably in this period that a branch of the family intermarried with South German Catholics.[1]

Another branch of the family, descended from a brother who left Scotland after the 1513 defeat at Flodden, entered the service of the Kings of France. Through this line, Sian was related to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès a/k/a the Abbé Sieyès, a classic exemplar of the French philosophe, whose skepticism and scientific bent did not prevent him from both taking holy orders and authoring the 1789 polemical pamphlet Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état? (“What is the Third Estate?”), which served as one theoretical basis for the French Revolution (though he later repudiated Bonaparte’s Imperial pretensions). An engineer, philosopher, and musician, the Abbé may, during the period of “Chats-Huant” Breton resistance to Napoleon’s levies, have become acquainted with the ancestors of Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, ex-smuggler and BNRO saxophonist. Other ancestors emigrated after the ’45 to the Americas, especially to the southern Appalachians, becoming frontiersmen, guides, and surveyors—several fought on both sides of the Revolution.

Amongst those MacKenzies who remained in Scotland, the women of her family, as was not at all uncommon within the close-knit populations of the Western Isles, were widely credited with the Second Sight. When Charles Stuart MacKenzie died in hand-to-hand combat in World War I, it was claimed that, at that same moment, on Lewis, his grandmother exclaimed “they’ve killed my dear boy Charlie.”[2] Other Hebridean MacKenzies, male and female alike, were reputed to be able to control winds, tides, and rain, an ability similarly attributed, within the BNRO, to both Elzbieta Purves and Sian herself. The archetype of this paranormal sensitivity, of course, was Colonel Thompson: see the telepathic and weather abilities implicit in the “Riding the Rift” section of the papers.

There is, moreover, a direct link between the Hebrides and Bassanda: not only through the patriarch Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez (born at Foyers, 1845), but also Lucretia MacPherson (1863-95), the lamented early-deceased wife of James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence (of “Great Train Ride for Bassanda” fame) was a Campbell from the Islands, while 1950s BNRO ‘cellist Elzbieta Purves had a maternal grandmother from Mull. All of these brought to the Bassanda / BNRO orbit a sensitivity to wind, weather, and telekinetic communication. Dr Hazzard-Igniti suggests that this may have resulted from the possibility that an additional Portal to the Bassandan Rift Valley, paralleling the one somewhere in the northernmost Rio Grande Gorge, was located somewhere on the islands of Barra, Uist, or Throbshire—other “places of power” within the earth’s magnetic ley lines.

By the same token, there was always music in the family: the MacKenzies were noted patrons of pipers and harpers, all the way back to the 13th century, and Sian’s maternal great-uncle was George Frederick Findlater (1872-1942), the “Piper Findlater” of legend who, during the Battle of Dargai Heights (1897), was wounded in both feet, but continued to play “The Haughs of Cromdale,” inspiring his regiment to carry the position. This action was widely admired and reproduced in the Victorian Press: he subsequently received the Victoria Cross. Other martial relatives served in World War I, most notably the Ottawa-born flying ace Donald Roderick MacLaren (credited with 54 kills), and there were many MacKenzies and Seaforths who piped and commanded on the Western Front.

After 1945, she was sent to public (e.g., boarding) school in England but insisted that she was “an exile in a Sassenach country” and resisted conforming to norms of public school uniform or spoken accent. This standoffishness may partly have resulted from the mistreatment she claimed to have experienced at the all-girls school, but for whatever reason she became a powerful advocate for the underprivileged, and a ferocious competitor at field hockey. One of her school chums said “she wasn’t afraid of the occasional dust-up. None of the boys from St Custard’s ever wanted to bully her. At least, not more than once.”

At 16 she spent a summer in the foothills of the Alps at Innsbruck with her Stresemann relatives; though the province was still in the process of rebuilding after the devastation of the War, she remembered it as an idyllic period when she “came to love the mountains the way I loved the sea.” This was immediately followed by the winter term during which Yezget Nas1lsinez met Thomas Binkley while serving as visiting faculty at the University of Munich (where the Welsh wind player Ceri Ifans, later of the BNRO, also met Yezget-Bey for the first time). It is possible that Sian may have heard some of the Nas1lsinez lectures in company with older cousins who were students at Munich, before returning home to Lewis to complete her secondary schooling in the winter of 1958-59 through tutoring from a visiting Bavarian aunt.

It is not known how she first traveled to Bassanda, but it has at least been suggested that this was due, once again, to the presence of a Portal somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. With her island-trained maritime skills, and her MacKenzie family sensitivity and (implicit) ability to predict and control weather, she was permitted to explore quite freely along the Islands’ rough coasts in her own small sailing dory. On the evening of February 29, 1959, while she was slowly proceeding, close-hauled against a SSW wind, back down-coast from the sea-cliffs near Garenin, and endeavoring to claw around the headland of Carloway and into the harbor of Great Benera, the wind unexpectedly veered two points to the west and she was engulfed in a black squall. The boat was blown against the rocky shore and stove in, but when searchers found it in the first daylight, there was no sign of her body. Her German aunt lamented, insisting that “the poor child has been lost at sea,” but her MacKenzie relatives (especially her older brother, who had taught her sailing and small-craft skills) shrugged their shoulders and said “she’ll return when she’s ready.” And her grandmother Mac Coinnich, 93 years of age in her fireside chair, agreed, saying “Níl, tá a dúirt sí liom go bhfuil sí ceart go léir. Tá sí sábháilte, in áit i bhfad i bhfad i gcéin. Is féidir liom a fheiceáil.”[3] And weeks later, a crumpled envelope postmarked from Bassanda, covered with a wealth of postage stamps, franks, and rubber-stamps and addressed to “Sarah Mac Coinnich, Lewis, Alba”, appeared with the mail boat. It contained only a Sacred Heart prayer card and a blurry snapshot of Sian, smiling in a small group of young people which included the Ŭitmena Sisters. On the card was written, in the young woman’s distinctive cursive script, the single word “Sásta” (“happy”).

She met Jens Dahout na Uilyam on the first day of classes at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in the Autumn of 1960: they were both part of the first cohort of students participating in the post-Stalin expanded curriculum, on the Finnish model, which mandated that all degree curricula must include elements of traditional music, improvised music, and new music composition. She would later teach in this program.

She found a place within the BNRO as vocalist and dancer; many of her Welsh antecedents had been dancers and dance-masters, and, like the Ŭitmena Sisters, she had a capacity for psychokinetic states within the art form. However, where their Iliot shamanic roots enabled them to impose cognitive transformations upon others, Sian’s dancing seemingly evoked lost genetic memories, during which she might execute complex and archaic strathspey steps and speak or sing in the voices of her Scots Gaelic ancestors. This trance was most quickly invoked by the hornpipe tune “Johnny Cope i’ the Mornin’”, which commemorated her ancestors’ victory at Prestonpans.

She was particularly close to the Ŭitmena sisters, her comrades in the vocal section and dance corps. Kaciaryna later commented (see the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project documentation, from the mid-1980s):

“She was a little lost when she found us, I think—I think maybe wasn’t sure where her life was going to lead, or maybe how to get there. It wasn’t anything big that we did, we just—took her in. Some of us were like that: we hadn’t known where we fit in, didn’t know where there was a place for us. Sometimes it was family things, sometimes it was just a wandering foot—but in the end, what mattered most was that when we found the Band, we realized we were home.”

[1] Several centuries later, another scion of this Bavarian branch of the family was Gustav Stresemann, a late Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, a final spasm of German liberalism, which eventually collapsed under the unsustainable reparations demanded at Versailles and the street battles heralding the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.
[2] Tá siad a maraíodh mo buachaill daor Charlie.
[3] Gaelic: “No, she has told me she is all right. She is safe, in a far distant place. I can see her.”

Marusia Churai Poltava c1970
Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory
“Marusia Churai Poltava”*

[* A pseudonym—see below.]

Born “Maria de la Belmonte”, 1942, Chiapas Mexico

Cellist, composer, musicologist, political activist

As a child, trained in Mexico’s regional public-school music systems, where she learned an essentially 19th-century conservatory approach to performance practice and orchestral repertoires. Only later, as a teenaged cello student at Puebla and in the USA, did she discover new music; as she herself said, “it wasn’t the radical music that attracted me at first; it was the radicals that attracted me, and then the music that they loved.”

Her home of San Cristobal de Chiapas, a mountain town, became a center for progressive activity after the CIA-backed 1954 overthrow of the adjacent Guatemalan presidential government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and resultant refugee crisis; she thus experienced first-hand the impact of global geopolitics. While playing with a youth orchestra, she met Che Guevara c1955 in Mexico City, where he was studying medicine; she would later be powerfully influenced by his pragmatic Marxism, though she differed with him in considerations and criteria for “just violence.”

Also met the iconoclastic American experimental composer Conlon Nancarrow in Mexico City around 1956, when she was already an experienced orchestral cellist. Nancarrow had fought in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade but returned to the USA after Franco’s victory in 1939, before moving to Mexico City to escape US government harassment. By ‘55, he was immersed in the experiments with player pianos that would define his oeuvre, but as a child Poltava saw a manuscript copy of his earlier String Quartet #2 (from some time in the late 1940s) and became fascinated by his experiments with “sliding tempi”. The American was charmed by the child prodigy and by her interest in his music, and taught her the rudiments of the piano-roll punching technique he used for most of his compositions (decades later, she would transcribe some of the orchestral music which he punched in rolls, so that he could hear it played, and she would stage the first Ballyizget performances of Nancarrow’s ensemble music with the Piece #2 for Small Orchestra just after the Communist Party left power in November 1985).

Admitted to La Universidad de las Américas at Puebla at the age of 14, where she majored in music, literature, and political science. At that time, the discipline of “Women’s Studies” was not formally recognized in either USA or Mexico institutions, but at Puebla she was introduced to Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking 1949 text Le Deuxième Sexe, teaching herself French to read it. Also at Puebla she encountered the poets of the “Beat” movement and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. She met Jack Kerouac in one of his periodic visits to Mexico, traveling with Neal Cassady on one of the journeys immortalized in On the Road; this meeting was possibly also commemorated in the 96th “Chorus” of his Mexico City Blues (“Saw little white collar girl / with little black dress /and spots of rose on each cheek / in her glasses”). Her interest in the synthesis of jazz and poetry stems from this period.

She appears to have had the occasional master-class in folkloric musics with the Peruvian criolla violinist Federika Rozkhov in the late ‘50s, during the period between “Ferikarohasu”’s departure with her lover Ashitaka Emishi from the BNRO in Sofia, and her return on some (unknown) date prior to June 1962 when Fedi is again pictured in Cifani Dhoma’s photographs of the “Beatnik Band” backstage in Tallinn.

In the wake of the 1955 Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM) in Rio de Janeiro, her home province Chiapas became a crucible for the progressive humanitarian ideals later promulgated by the Roman Catholic bishop Samuel Ruiz (1924-2011), which proposed a radical reinterpretation of early Christian teachings to emphasize social justice and charity to the poor. Though the term only took hold in the early 1970s, as a reflection of worldwide social justice movements, the earliest roots of this “Liberation Theology” and the later EZLN, the so-called Zapatista Movement, were sown in Chiapas in the late 1950s, the period of the young Maria’s teenaged years.

Around 1958, in token of her growing political consciousness, she took the name of “Marusia Churai” from the Ukrainian composer/poet/singer (1625–1653), who had been wrongfully accused of murder and incarcerated, but later released “due to her reputation as a singer-songwriter.” In a tribute to the American songster Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (1888-1949), who analogously sang his way out of prison—twice—she later included a solo version of his “Tom Hughes’ Town” in her repertoire.

It was also in Mexico City, as a teenager in 1958, that she met the Bassandan jazz pianist Patrycja королівський (Korolivsʹkyy). Maria was playing occasional gigs of Argentine tango and French musette music in bohemian cafes in Portal de Mercaderes, when she was approached by Korolivsʹkyy while accompanying a drunken bandoneonist at the venerable Café del Cazador. As Marusia later described it, “Pati said to me ‘Why are you hanging around with this drunken peasant, who doesn’t even know his own chord changes? Have you ever heard of Horace Silver?’ and that was the end of that!”

Korolivsʹkyy, a mysterious figure in a BNRO pantheon full of such types, herself employed a pseudonym (also a not-uncommon element in BNRO “biographies”), but appears to have been born in the south Bassandan seaport town of Mariupol' around 1935. Not much is known of her background prior to the 1958 meeting with Poltava, but she claimed acquaintance with Rostov, Kerch, Istanbul, Smyrna, and other Aegean and eastern Mediterranean ports, as well as the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts. She enters the PLO orbit around 1950, through a ship-board meeting with saxophonist Zoya Căruțaș, a recent recruit who had met Nas1lsinez in Odessa in February of the previous year, and it was through Zoya that met Yezget-Bey. Korolivsʹkyy appears to have been radicalized by experiences and observations encountered while playing on Caribbean cruise ships; Poltava later claimed that “Pati” had fund-raised for Fidel’s “26th of July” movement.

At the same time, and in contrast to some of her radicalized contemporaries, “Marusia” retained a fierce dedication to the ideal of art as a vehicle of not only group/political liberation but also individual/psychological expression. She and Korolivsʹkyy collaborated with a wide range of artists across media and art forms, staging installations, “happenings,” and other prototypically-interdisciplinary events throughout the southern provinces, influenced by both Beat-era jazz and poetry combinations and the mid-‘50s Black Mountain College experiments of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley.

c1964 she received a visa to begin studies at Lambuth University (Jackson, TN) with the iconic female musicologist Frieda Walker-Kanoie (b1929), who had fled Hitler’s Germany with her parents, and, after her mathematician father received a post at Princeton, trained in both historical and what was then called “systematic” musicology (that is, ethnomusicology). Walker-Kanoie wrote a ground-breaking dissertation (1956) on the interplay between African-American Pentecostal preaching and jazz soloists’ improvisational practices, and later consulted with the US government for various (secretly CIA-backed) touring music organizations including Voice of America. Poltava swore by Walker-Kanoie’s influence, saying “As an intellect—Frau Doktor raised me.”

Upon graduation from Lambuth in the spring of 1967, she spent time in Buenos Aires, and worked with revolutionary film-makers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanos in founding their “Cinema Liberacion” in Buenos Aires. A huge devotee of American and European avant-garde films including The 400 Blows (1959), Yojimbo (1961), and especially the docu-drama The Battle of Algiers (1966), she with Korolivsʹkyy created pastiches and original music for Getino’s magnum opus La hora de los hornos (1968), a stark critique of the symbiotic relationship between violence and neocolonialism, later described as a “paradigm of revolutionary activist cinema.”

“Marusia” herself fled to Bassanda in November 1968 during the “Year of Revolutions.” She had been a leader in the Mexican Student Movement, taking part in the protests which exploited the visibility conferred by the presence in Mexico City of the ’68 Summer Olympics. She spoke movingly to the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project regarding the events of October ’68, when helicopters and riot police attacked a large crowd of working-class citizens and students at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco neighborhood. She had played music at an open-air concert for the strikers the night before the attacks and, after the concert, learned through clandestine channels that white-gloved assassins associated with the government’s Olympia Battalion were searching for her. She never returned to her apartment in Tlatelolco, but with Korolivsʹkyy caught a series of fourth-class busses to Veracruz, where sympathetic stevedores smuggled them aboard a freighter bound for Havana and eventually eastward.

Immediately upon arriving in Ballyziget, she was introduced by Korolivsʹkyy and Lisle Goncharov, a friend of her family’s, to Yezget-Bey, who recognized not only the musical maturity but also the political consciousness she could contribute. By the mid-1960s, many of the BNRO personnel had almost literally “grown up in the Band,” some, like Antanas Kvainauškas, Fionnuala Nic Aindriú, Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, and Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel, having entered as very young and relatively recent recruits; others, like Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī, Jakov Redžinald, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, and Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, long-time veterans (O Laoghaire, for example, had been playing with Yezget-Bey since 1940), but with comparatively little experience (by 1968) outside the very unique cocoon of the Orchestra. Redžinald famously said “I was just a schmuck from the steppes until I came on the Band.” Only a few members, several of them a year or two older—Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, Jérome Courvalle, Mississippi Stokes—could be said to have a particularly wide pre- or non-Band experience, and so the Founder particularly welcomed Poltava’s mature and sophisticated political consciousness. It subsequently became apparent—and was so remarked by Poltava, in her seminal article “Bir kadını І değil mi? Hegemonya Toplumsal Cinsiyet ve Sınıraşan Hiyerarşileri Sanat Politika”—that the peoples’ revolutions of ’68, whether successful or unsuccessful, were a pivotal moment in subaltern communities’ rising political consciousness, and a watershed in the history of women’s rights.[1]

Throughout the 1970s, she toured intermittently with the BNRO, but was equally active in arts and politics in the satellites, especially on behalf of historically discriminated-against racial and gender minorities. After the death of Yezget Nas1lsinez in Tallinn in 1985, and especially after the “Departure” of Madame Szabo on May Day 2004, Poltava remained a fierce advocate for the Founder’s vision and for the utopian, communitarian, and activist aspects of the ESO’s professional identity. She was an articulate and impassioned voice on behalf of displaced people everywhere, and a powerful resource for younger activist/musicians.

She returned to Mexico City in October 2008, at the invitation of the democratic government of Vicente Fox: a leonine, iconic figure in Latin American arts and social justice movements, to march at the head of a crowd of 40,000, commemorating the martyrs of Tlatelolco.

[1] Originally published as “Ain't І a Woman? Gender Hegemony and the Politics of Transnational Arts Hierarchies” / “¿No es І una mujer? Género Hegemonía y la Política de transnacionales Artes Jerarquías,” La Revista de Mujeres Artistas Internacionales, X/2 (1971), 22-67.

na Uilyam in retirement
Jens Dahout na Uilyam

voice, conductor, composer, pedagogue

b1907; Norwegian, Faroese, Scots, Dakota, Winnebago

His paternal grandfather had brought the family to the USA in the 1860s, from the Faroe Islands: it appears that one part of the line had come, perhaps as early as the ninth century, from other Norse settlements of the North Atlantic. They had likewise arrived in Shetland with the court of Haraldr Hárfagri, the first king of Norway: he thus inherited the tradition of singing Rímur (polytonal rhymed poetry) from these ancestors. Other relatives were among the first settlers of Iceland, while there may have been German connections through trading with the Hanseatic League into Germany and the Baltic. His mother’s people were also Faroese, but traced their lineage back to Scotland and Orkney—it is from this line that, in all likelihood, his paranormal/telepathic abilities originated: geneticists have suggested that, as in the Outer Hebrides, the relatively narrow gene pool and close connection to nature in those islands tended to enhance such capacities.

The clan settled in northern Minnesota, less than two years after statehood had been declared. The elder na Uilyam, who had adamantly opposed the assault upon native Dakota peoples propagated by paramilitaries (see “Knights of the Forest,” c1860s), eventually moved the family c1894 north into tribal lands around Lake Itasca near the headwaters of the Mississippi; his son Oskar na Uilyam married a Winnebago woman around 1900. Their eldest son, christened Jens Dahout, was born on the family homestead, in an encampment called Gichi-ziibiwininiwag, in 1907, and schooled both by his trilingual (Winnebago, English, Norwegian) mother and a succession of exceptionally well-read Lutheran pastors (inevitably necessitating German acquisition as well).

Other relatives on his grandmother’s side, related to the mixed-race trapper and explorer John Johnston (1762-1828), traced their Scots Presbyterian lineage to the Ulster Plantation, and had fought in the New World theater of the Seven Years’ War against French-Indian forces. There was also influence upon the na Uilyam clan from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), a pioneering ethnologist from a line of mixed-race Scots-Irish and Ojibwa traders and Indian agents; though he died in 1864 (and in last years of his life turned decidedly away from ethnography), the idea of sympathetic and scientific engagement with indigenous art forms was familiar and valued.

He matriculated as a choral scholar at the University of Wisconsin at the age of 17, having been reared on a diet of Bach and Brahms by his family and church choir experiences, and quickly distinguished himself as conductor and arranger. A chance encounter in Milwaukee in 1927, on a university concert tour, with relatives of the legendary Wisconsin-born Scots adventurer Alexander Campbell Gardner, made him aware of the riches of polyphonic choral song to be found in Bassanda, and there is a possibility that, on the same tour, he met BNRO founder Yezget Nas1lsinez himself in New York City.

Whatever the reason, the attested fact is that na Uilyam visited the capitol of Ballyizget in the following year, during the first flush of the new Republic’s socialist efflorescence. He was reportedly thunderstruck by the receptivity to progressive music-making in those halcyon years of experimental art under Lenin—which gave no intimation of the coming conservative authoritarianism of Stalin, which would commence in the early ‘30s—and especially in light of the comparative aesthetic conservatism of the North American choral establishment of the period. Conversely, the H-LC faculty and students were reportedly highly impressed with the swashbuckling young American. So, when he graduated with his Master’s degree in Choral Conducting from UW in the Spring of 1929, and was approached by a delegation of both BSSP functionaries and H-LC faculty at Madison’s Hotel Ruby Marie, they having traveled all the way from Ballyizget, he was persuaded to accept a preliminary two-year contract in the newly-created post of “Coordinator of People’s Proletarian Choral Activities” at the Conservatory. The dashing young conductor, only 23 at the time of appointment, was seen as an ally by both artistic and musical progressives in Bassanda, and, at the end of the 2-year appointment, was persuaded to stay on in the tenure track—though, in keeping with the aggressive egalitarianism of the period, the word “tenure” was supplanted by the clumsier circumlocution “deserved recognition of comradely contribution.”

Throughout the “Hungry Thirties,” in the very different environment of Stalinism, he fought fiercely to defend both music education and music performance at Habjar-Lawrence, at times undertaking guest-conducting and educational appearances in order to raise funds to, as he said “keep the doors open and the lights on.” In these circumstances, and through the War years, he continued the long slow process of building a world-class choral program, one imbued with the ideals of artistic excellence, ethical probity, and global awareness which he embodied even if they were granted only lip-service by the commissars. He continued his contact with Nas1lsinez, though the latter’s activities, particularly in the period between 1937-47 (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), which included both above-ground musical fieldwork and clandestine partisan actions, necessitated the surface appearance of relative distance between the two (further research in the Archives has suggested that in fact na Uilyam was closely involved in just such subversive activities).

At Habjar-Lawrence, he mentored a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom were adjunct faculty or “mature” (e.g. “returning”) graduate students, in the early ‘60s. He taught the first cohort of students participating in the Conservatory’s expanded curriculum, later a profound influence on the Finnish model of the Sibelius Academy, which mandated that all degree curricula must include elements of traditional music, improvised music, and new music composition. He trained generations of influential musicians: in the BNRO orbit, especially the tenor soloist Nāṯānas Hús a/k/a “Heimdallr Av Stemmen” (“Heimdall of the Voices”), and, especially, the seminal conductors Eoghan Raghnall Ó Súilleabháin, Baruška Mac Laomain, and Stefaniya Consigleri. These musicians carried his name and musical lineage very widely; it was said of them that “you could tell a Jens student by their intensity” (which his doctoral candidates wryly retitled “Jens-tensity”).

He was finally named Director of Choral Studies at Habjar-Lawrence in 1951, in the period leading up to the first apotheosis of the BNRO as the “Classic ’52 Band,” after its much more ad-hoc origins as the People’s Liberation Orchestra (c1943-47), and he continued to collaborate extensively and now more visibly with Yezget Nas1lsinez in field collecting, concert programming, and political activism. The Director’s post at H-LC was an exceptionally high-profile arts leadership role during the period (by comparison, Nas1lsinez’s leadership of the BNRO, though impactful, was widely regarded as far more problematic and peripheral), because the Academic State Choir of the BSSR, of all the state-sponsored ensembles, in the 1950s toured much more widely beyond the Curtain. Though this was the heyday of formalized and carefully standardized massed-choir settings of “traditional peasant songs,” Prof Jens was always a tactful advocate for the unadulterated folkloric expression, insofar as that was possible. Likewise, he spoke up for indigenous folk musics, and subtly resisted the Central Soviet’s pressure to marginalize idioms associated with ethnic minorities.

Over the course of his career, both before and after the fall of the Soviet commissars, he led community and campus choirs around the world, both within and beyond the Iron Curtain. He was repeatedly offered posts, for example, in USA and UK conservatories, as luring such a distinguished musician to the West would have been a considerable propaganda coup for CIA-backed initiatives from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As an advocate for pan-national and intra-ethnic inclusivity, he supported enhanced liberties for musicians, but was innately—and aptly—wary of the West’s geopolitical motives, particularly during the Cold War. By the same token, in the late Fifties, during Kruschev’s liberalization, he was also recruited—indeed, was subjected to considerable political pressure—to become Chair of Choral Activities at the Moscow Conservatory. Nevertheless, he resolutely declined to leave Bassanda and Habjar-Lawrence: his answers to overtures from other search committees, invariably polite, always carried the statement “I’m needed more here.” By the 1960s he was leading the series of programs which he called “Reflections / and” (“… and Rejections,” “…and Celebrations,” “…and Resistance”), which artfully walked the line between metaphorical critique and abstract allusion.

As a choral arranger and composer, he experimented extensively with microtonal and “just intonation” tunings for his settings of Shetland, Faroese, and Dakota folk poetry, while his polytonal choral arrangement of the Electric Trees anthem Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”) was sung on the barricades by Conservatory students in November 1985 during the final divestiture of the Bassanda Parliament buildings by the Soviet Central Committee. Adamant that there should be no triumphalism or persecution of ex-Soviet functionaries, while recognizing that the moment demanded solemnity, ex-Electric Trees frontwoman Polli Kilotona, who had been elected to lead the progressive “shadow Parliament” of 1980—so-called because the BSCC refused to seat them—had asked na Uilyam to lead a group of Conservatory students in singing outside the barricaded Parliament. A remarkable, evocative description of the event has been left by Ani Hamim Gassion, a prior member of the Bassanda Youth Orchestra, and later student and adjunct instructor at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, from whose alumni a number of BNRO members had come:

He’d handed out mimeographed music to us when we all met up in the lobby of the Conservatory. We hadn’t known whether we’d be able to get close, because there were barricades all over the Parliament Square. But it was walking distance, and there didn’t seem to be anything else we could do to help the nation move toward freedom, so we walked there. It took a long time.

I remember it was a cold night: the mercury wasn’t very low, but it was very damp and foggy outside the Parliament. We stood there for hours while Kilotona and the commissars haggled inside about the terms of the Central Committee’s departure. We were crushed right up against a barricade, just over the road from the steps of the building, and there were soldiers in camouflage uniforms, holding rifles, lined up shoulder to shoulder, facing us. My feet were killing me, because I didn’t have warm shoes, there was nowhere to sit down, and we’d been told that if we vacated the area the soldiers would close up the Square and we’d never get back to the Parliament.

Most of the Parliament we could see was dark—we knew that a lot of the middle-level staff, and the functionaries who’d been extorting money for years, had left the building and some had even left the country—but there was a line of windows on the top floor that were lit. Someone said that was where Polli and the commissars were meeting. I tried to imagine the scene, because she was a legend to generations of students, from all the way back in the Sixties, but I couldn’t reconcile the purple-haired, painted-faced wild-woman I’d seen in old videos with a Parliamentary counsellor who might be negotiating the end of the Cossack dictatorship. Of course, I couldn’t visualize my composition professor, who we called “Prof Jens,” as any kind of political activist either. Yet we were there—myself and a few other adjunct faculty, and about a dozen students from the Conservatory, some of us weren’t even singers—because he’d told us Bassanda needed us: that there was something we needed to do. We were holding little candles in paper holders, like for a vigil.

I could see Profesor Jens just on the other side of the barricade, a few dozen feet down the road, talking to the young Captain in charge of the detachment guarding the building. Prof had been back and forth through the crowd, now talking to the soldiers, now speaking on a walkie-talkie to other people from the Band and the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ, and I wondered if anything was even going to happen.[1] But then I saw him speak into his walkie-talkie, and then shut it off and collapse the antenna, and he said something final; the Captain shook his head in refusal. Then Prof Jens walked along the line of the barricade, clasping the hands that people thrust out to him, and hopped up on one of the traffic bollards that guarded against car attacks, and faced out towards us. I could see that huge black building, like a giant prison, behind him, the line of windows glowing orange on the top floor, and above that, just the cloudy, rainy sky, lit by the backwash of the Square’s halogen lights.

I reached inside my duffle coat and took out the crumpled sheet of photocopied music he’d handed out that afternoon—it was hard to read, because we’d used the Conservatory’s samizdat machine, plus his handwritten manuscript notation was notoriously bad. He raised his left hand, the candle in the paper holder flickering, so we could see his face, and then he lifted his right hand and we began to sing. I could see him there, the candlelight flickering off his glasses, his bald head shining and his beard wet with the drizzly rain. And we started to sing. And as we sang, he sang with us. And behind us, and around us, we could hear others take up the song. I imagine a lot of the crowd knew it from the original Electric Trees version, the rock version, from the ‘60s, but all around me I heard the crowd take up the parts of Prof Jens’s version, until it sounded like a gigantic polytonal organ playing.[2] It almost felt like our singing was shaking the foundations of the Parliament building itself, as more and more and more voices joined in.

I was struggling to follow Prof Jens’s conducting, because it was hard to see him and you had to guess at the tempo he was beating. But we knew the words, anyway, and we knew each other from singing together, and it almost seemed like everyone, everyone in the crowd, knew us too. It was like we were singing the history of Bassanda itself. I looked at the nearest soldier facing me, and saw that he’d dropped his rifle to his side, and I looked into his face, and he was singing too, with tears rolling down his cheeks.

We finished singing, and Prof dropped his hands, and jumped down off the bollard. Around us, the crowd was amazingly silent—so quiet that we heard the big doors of the Parliament bang open. A line of Party types in their black suits came hurrying down the steps, with their bodyguards and aides all around them. But they didn’t look at us—they avoided eye contact, almost as if, after all the years of fascist repression, they were afraid of us—and they hurried into their black Zil limousines and drove away. The crowd was still silent.

And then Polli came down the stairs, all by herself; she was dressed all in black, and her face was pale and tired. I’d never met her in person, but she’d lectured at the Conservatory for the popular-music module, and I think almost everyone in the crowd knew who she was. She crossed the lane and came down to Prof Jens, standing at the barricade that had held us back from the Parliament building. I was close enough to hear what she said to him:

“It’s done. When the commissars heard the crowd singing, they knew it was all over. It’s done. Thank you, Jens. Bassanda and Yezget-Bey thank you as well.”

In later years, he served as artist-in-residence for Shetland College and maintained a summer camp, basis for his North American activities, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the USA. But he retained his endowed chair in composition at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, and a villa, crammed with hundreds of scores, instruments, and mementos, in the hills above Ballyizget, to which every summer former students from his 50-year career made pilgrimages: their dedication to him was a by-word.

The window in his composition room looked out upon a panoramic view of mountains.

[caption: na Uilyam, as emeritus professor of composition at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, around 1980]

[1] “Wood Elves’ Commune”: the 1960s rural cooperative which gave birth to the Electric Trees; see elsewhere in the Correspondence.

[2] The song Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”) had emerged, originally as part of a collective (instrumental and vocal) improvisation, during the Electric Trees’ set on Live from the Rift Valley (1977). It had been played again at the funeral of Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez, in April 1985, a few months before the BSCC dissolved in the anecdote excerpted above.

[1] In the 1980s, for example, Nic Aindriú commented “I thought I was experienced when I came on the Band [in 1961]. I didn’t know anything.”
[2] “Wood Elves’ Commune”: the 1960s rural cooperative which gave birth to the Electric Trees; see elsewhere in the Correspondence.
[3] The song Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”) had emerged, originally as part of a collective (instrumental and vocal) improvisation, during the Electric Trees’ set on Live from the Rift Valley (1977). It had been played again at the funeral of Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez, in April 1985, a few months before the BSCC dissolved in the anecdote excerpted above.

Nāṯānas Hús invokes Iliot shamanic dance
with the Uitmena Sisters;
concert photo by Cifani Dhoma
Nāṯānas Hús
a/k/a “Heimdallr Av Stemmen” (“Heimdall of the Voices”)
voice, shamanic dance

b1943

His ancestors came from the Faroe Islands; his paternal ancestry thus likely included Norwegians, Icelanders, and Scots.

He joined the band at Midsummer 1965, after the events described in the Correspondence vignette The Battle of the Golden Rhinoceros (appended below). His 5-octave range, from contra-bass to male alto, later made him an essential contributor to the all-night modal drone sessions also practiced by devotees of the Habjar-Sonic Deathly Hallows bouzouki synthesizer. In addition, his capacity to develop sub-sonic bass pitches by overtone singing in the bass register meant that he could literally incapacitate—or heal—through sound alone.

In this he was a willing co-conspirator with his section-mates the Uitmena Sisters—on those occasions when the BNRO might find themselves delayed by officious bureaucrats at a border crossing, a particularly “uneasy” physical sensation might ensue, not traceable to any audible sonic source, when said bureaucrats would suddenly lose control of bodily functions, thereby expediting the crossing.

He was a contributor to the numerous live bootleg recordings of St Christina Fikrinizi Değiştirebilir (“May St Christina change your mind/head”), a celebrated drone-bass piece which had been sketched as the synched soundtrack for the Eagle’s Heart Sisters’ experimental 1954 film Casting Out Snakes. Though it never received a studio recording, it was a favorite among the aficionados and completists who called themselves “’Ro-Heads” and recorded hundreds of shows—they spoke of its “cosmic cognitive impact.”

To that same composition had been attributed shamanic transformative capacities which featured prominently in the “accidental” decapitation of the St Grydzina Correctional Institute’s notorious, psychopathic warden Uli Kunkel (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). Hús and Yūhannā Casco Encabezado developed an approach to bass-voice / low-C tuba duet drones which exploited subsonic overtones to effect significant transformations of consciousness; in fact, as a teenager, more than once Hús had been approached by Red Army generals and secret service commanders regarding the possibility of his enlisting for “special weapons” military testing, a service he steadfastly refused. Eventually, forced to undergo the battery of physical, mental, and psychological testing the Central Soviet imposed upon all draft recruits, he managed to fail so resoundingly badly that he was classified 4G – “To be carefully avoided as utterly unsuitable to proletarian service needs”; in fact, the examining board recommended he be paid a small regular state pension, to “ensure that subject Hús is never tempted to appear again before the Recruiting Board of any region.”

He took this opportunity to enroll as a special student at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, where he was mentored by Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, saxophonist, vocalist, and répétiteur of the BNRO’s choral forces, which included some ex-personnel from the Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir (whose members eventually rebelled against the rigidity and artificiality of the state-authorized “choral folklore” imposed upon them and went into exile in the West). There was also a close connection between the choral and composition departments of H-LC, within which institution, at various points, numerous BNRO personnel taught (Lyov Varushkin, Antanas Kvainauškas, Lisle Goncharov, and Yūhannā Casco Encabezado all held tenured posts, while Krzysztof Arczewski, Rezeg Vagyok, and Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire were long-time adjuncts and guest lecturers). He particularly bonded with “Prof Jens” Dahout Na Uilyam, head of composition and director of the experimental chamber choir, as well as with the singers Deseo Koža and Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie, among others. He was closest to the Neapolitan singer Adelais Iannontosis, who had preceded him at HL-C by several years and served as Dahout Na Uilyam’s “straw-boss” or ensemble-manager.

A paternal ancestor, Gubrand Ericsson, allegedly a berserker, had been a member of the Varangian Guard who fought at the Battle of Beroia in 1122. Although the Byzantine Imperial forces were victorious, Ericsson was taken prisoner and, eventually, sold by his Pecheneg captors into a Genoese Black Sea galley, where he was chained to an oar—normally, a death-sentence.

However, he escaped by a fluke: the galley was assaulted by Bassandan pirates off Pitsunda (in present-day Georgia). During the action, just as the pirates were about to run alongside and board, he got a hand on the slave-drivers’ ankle and dragged him down amongst the benches, where the oarsmen tore away his keys. Released, Gudbrand leapt up onto the gangway and then to the poop, where he seized the galley’s captain and threw him overboard, to be crushed by the ships’ grinding together, before tearing the sloop’s tiller off its pintles, thus rendering the galley helpless under the pirates’ assault.

Freed from their chains, many of the former galley slaves took ship to their homes around the Black Sea and Asia Minor, but Gudbrand stayed on, before eventually retiring from the sea and homesteading land in Bassanda’s northern foothills. Generations later, his descendent Nāṯānas found his way down out of the hills again.

It is not known exactly how Hús had come to serve, as a teenager, on board Bassanda freighters and smugglers, but the tale of his first encounter with the BNRO orbit became an article of band folklore…

[fragment from the Correspondence; undated]

THE BATTLE OF THE GOLDEN RHINO

…the “Golden Rhinoceros,” a Ballyizger sailor’s and workingmen’s bar on the wharves much favored by the more street-wise members of the BNRO. After midnight, some time in March 1965.

Jérome Courvalle, French-Canadian ex-logger and rum-runner, and current cellist with the BNRO, sat drinking beer at a corner table against the front wall, with a view of the front and back doors and through the rain-streaked, dirt-smeared front window.

The only other occupants of the room were a quartet of Cossack soldiers in Russian uniform, talking and laughing loudly at the best table: a flaxen-haired Sergeant, grizzled hulking Corporal, and two privates, one short and squat and the other thin as a beanstalk.

Beyond, at the end of the bar, barely visible in the shadows in the back of the room, a huge figure hunched over a beer glass. The dim light of the Çıkış (Exit) sign glinted on his reddish beard and long fair hair.

The waitress Deseo Koža, a former street child who had been given the job at the “Rhino” through the offices of Terese-Marie Szabo (among Madame’s many other skills was her remarkable ability to conjure employment for the seemingly least-employable from what appeared to be thin air), tried to squeeze between the bar and the table occupied by the Cossacks, but the Corporal, loudest and drunkest of the quartet, grabbed her upper arm and yanked her toward him, nuzzling her face with his beard.

She cried out. Courvalle, possessor of a hair-trigger temper and a degree of fistic inclination, jumped to his feet. The Sergeant of Cossacks rose to intervene, but Courvalle brushed him aside and slapped the Corporal back-handed hard on the shoulder.

He rapped out “Leave her alone, crétin,” and pushed the Cossack back in his chair. The Corporal snarled in anger, but before he could rise, a Tokarev pistol appeared in the Sergeant’s hand. All participants froze as the Sergeant gently, in almost leisurely fashion pressed its muzzle against Courvalle’s cheek below his left eye. There was a silence. Then the Sergeant spoke.

“I think we are nearly done here, Comrades.”

He raised his voice to carry to the bar:

“Proprietor! I think that we will regard our bill this evening as a gift of the house to redress the inhospitable response. If you wish a return by members of the People’s Soviet Army, you will need to be more selective as regards your clientele.”

He turned to look dismissively at Courvalle.

“As for you, moujik: I think you will accompany us outside, where my colleague and I will administer a sharp reminder of the respect that is due to the Red Army.”

He twisted the muzzle of the Tokarev to emphasize the point, and now there was blood on Courvalle’s cheek as he glared unblinkingly into the Sergeant’s eyes. Desi clutched at his arm, pleading “Please, Jér, please don’t fight with them. After, they will let you go.”

Without moving, Courvalle carefully spat on the sawdust-covered floor between the Sergeant’s polished boots.

The Sergeant said “Hein? You prefer to accept your penalty here? So be it then.” He nodded to the Corporal, who drew a woven leather truncheon from his belt to smack against his palm.

“Hold him” and the Two Privates pinioned Courvalle’s arms from behind. The Sergeant stepped back, still aiming the pistol at arm’s length directly at Jérome’s face, then nodded to the Corporal, who stepped forward and raised the sap.

And suddenly the golden-haired giant at the end of the bar, seemingly without moving, was looming behind the four Cossacks. The Sergeant, sensing his presence, pivoted on his booted heel and stared up at the giant, snapping out “Ne pomeshayet , gde vy ne khoteli , uvalen!”[1]

There was no immediate response—though Desi, pinned between the two, heard the giant’s breathing deepen and slow as he towered above her. The Sergeant stuck a stiff finger into his chest through his worn canvas shirt. “I won’t tell you again, peasant—avoid that which does not concern you.”

With his eyes on the Sergeant’s finger on the trigger of the Tokarev—a model with whose action and vulnerabilities he had extensive experience—Courvalle for a split second glanced up and to his left at the blond stranger, hearing his rasping breathing, seeing a flicker of red growing in the giant’s eyes, and a small fleck of spittle appearing at the corner of his bearded mouth.

“Very well,” said the Sergeant. He took a second step back and pivoted the pistol to point at the giant’s face. Courvalle jerked forward against the pinions arms and snarled “Fuck you, putain!” For a moment, though he did not flinch, the Sergeant’s eyed flickered left at Courvalle.

And the giant’s balled fist, as big as a 5-pound ham, rocketed upward like a triphammer against the Sergeant’s elbow. Everyone in the bar— Deseo Koža, Courvalle, the Cossacks, and even the bartender—heard the crunch as the bone collapsed under that hammer blow, and the Sergeant yelled with pain. The Corporal, losing his head for a moment, dropped his truncheon and fumbled to open the buttoned holster of his own pistol. Desi shrieked as Courvalle spun like a top, smashing his right elbow into the jaw of the Squat Private, who dropped like a stone, as the giant emitted an unearthly, earsplitting howl. Courvalle spun back, just in time to see the giant’s other fist smash downward on the Corporal’s gun, which exploded in flame to bury a slug in the wooden floor. The giant grabbed the Corporal’s free hand, seized him under the armpit, and whirled him like a discus off his feet and into the air, casting him loose to sail over the bar and smash into the rack of bottles behind it.

Courvalle was distracted by the Thin Private, who had likewise dropped Jérome’s arm and whose pistol had cleared its holster, pivoting to point toward Courvalle’s chest. He braced himself for the explosion, but a huge hand clamped down on the Thin Private’s neck from behind, while the other twisted the pistol away. Simultaneously, the giant stamped one enormous heel down on the prone Sergeant’s free hand, as he groped for his dropped pistol; the Sergeant howled again in pain. Without glancing down, the giant met Courvalle’s gaze as he hoisted the Thin Private with one hand into the air, paralyzing him like a kitten held by the scruff of the neck.

In an impossibly low bass voice, like the notes on an organ, the giant rumbled, in a thick accent, “You want him?”

Courvalle suddenly grinned wildly. “Hell, mon amis, I don’t want any of them! Get rid of them!”

The giant grunted “Okay,” and dropped the Thin Private next to the Squat Private, both unconscious on the floor. He stooped to grab the collars of the moaning Sergeant and the whimpering Corporal, and proceeded to drag both the length of the bar and out the door, Courvalle snatching up various discarded weapons and following behind. DC peered out the door into the dark, fishy smelling street, to see the giant throw first the Sergeant and then the Corporal of Cossacks, one hand after the other, into the tar-black harbor. The two splashes were followed by choking, snorting, and Slavic curses, as Courvalle, using his best Canadian League pitching style, threw the pistols spinning far out into the bay.

He turned back to see the giant regarding him calmly from his great height. “What’s your name, friend?”

The giant replied, “Nāṯānas. I come from up yonder,” and nodded his head in a generally northerly direction.

Courvalle took him by the elbow—it felt like a tree trunk—and led the way back toward the Golden Rhino. As they crossed the road, moved by he knew not what intuition, he asked at random, “You play any music, friend?”

To which the giant grunted “I sing. Loud.”

Behind them, in the shadows over the road, under the Rhino’s ragged awnings, a match scratched and flared into flame. Courvalle recognized Madame Szabo’s thin silhouette, the glint of moonlight on her henna’d hair, and her ever-present Cuban cigar. She made sure the cigar was drawing evenly, looking closely at its end, and then spoke quietly but with an unmistakable aura of command:

“Jér—get yourself, and your big friend, and that little waitress, out of here. Meet at the rehearsal hall. Baba can probably use them both, but not if our Cossack acquaintances find them first.”

…

In later years, he also bonded with Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, the Sámi dancer / violinist / singer who came into the band in 1968 after having helped found the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ (“The Wood-Elves’ Commune”) led by Robin Dobar Momak; and who was believed by some band members to be a shape-shifter (a claim somewhat substantiated by Eldarnen’s remarkable telepathic ability with large mammals). There was a certain resemblance of physique and aura between Hús and “Brother” Matthias, proprietor of the Mountain Rest Lodge and Guest House, and, in the BNRO folklore, both were reputed to bear some sort of relationship to the “large shaggy tawny-pelted bipeds” sometimes visible in the early spring snowfields above the Lodge. Certainly he was very sensitive to animals and they responded very favorably to him. It was also claimed that Deseo Koža occasionally manifested not in her small-framed human form, but as a little black cat, also nicknamed “Desi,” who regularly stowed-away upon the BNRO bus for summer tours.

When off the road, he anchored the tenor section of H-LC’s experimental chamber choir, and hewas present the night that the choir, under the direction of “Prof Jens,” “sang the commissars out of office” on behalf of Polli Kilotona (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Later, when various members of the chamber choir split off to tour with the BNRO under the direction of Biraz Ouiz, the répétiteur and saxophonist, Hús went with them. On the other hand, calling it “a welcome change of pace,” he moonlighted by providing gravel-voiced doom-laden vocals for Ragnarök DöÖMÖöeD, seminal avatars of the Bassandan heavy metal scene, who—in tribute to either Anthony Burgess or Bassandan morris dancing—dressed themselves in white breeches, shirts, and suspenders, and black bowler hats, and sang powerful bass-register anthems to freedom.

In all circumstances, he was a powerful, nearly monosyllabic presence, to whom his bandmates nevertheless looked for strength and quiet focus. As “Doc Benjy” said,

“Nāṯān’ was a rock. He was there for the right reasons, and he kept us on course. I depended upon him.”

[1] Don't interfere where you aren't wanted, lummox!

Rāḥīl, Libertas Domum, c1970
راحیل Rāḥīl‎ Marrone

Clarinet, bass clarinet, bass guitar

b1942 at Ancona on the Adriatic coast of Italy, of ethnic Greek, Jewish, Bassandan background.

Various maternal ancestors were associated with the Marianuskloster: the monastery founded in Bassanda’s northern Rift Valley by Marianus Scotus, a wandering Irish monk and missionary, in the 11th century. At least one relation (a great-great-great-grand-uncle) had been a monk in the last days of the cloister in the 16th century; others, after the monastery was destroyed by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the 1570s, may have become wandering mendicants, studying and teaching in secret.

Her great-grandfather was the Adriatic & Black Sea captain and smuggler Davoud Gora, plying between the Italian, Albanian, and Dalmatian coasts, who figured prominently in the Great Train Ride for Bassanda (1906-07). After the bombardment of Ancona in May 1914, Captain Gora and his crew, who had escaped by putting to sea in a thick fog the night before the attack, liaised with the British forces, and served out the Great War in action against the Austrian navy as coastal pilots, forward observers, and clandestine saboteurs. Jamshid Gora, the Captain’s son, Rāḥīl’s great-uncle, fought with distinguished bravery as a torpedo boat and U-Boat-killer captain and was decorated by the British government after the Armistice. Later, Captain Davoud retired from the sea, and Jamshid assumed command of the family’s small maritime shipping fleet (and probable continued smuggling operations). As a result, Rāḥīl (named for her maternal grandmother) was raised in the post-War period on and around boats—an instinctive expertise that was to prove extremely important, indeed life-or-death, on the night in March 1985 that the BNRO and families defected from Tallinn to Helsinki by tramp steamer.[1]

Her mother, Sofiya Yasmin, Davoud Gora’s grand-daughter, was a traditional singer from the Bassandan Alps and a holder of the Afshak شاعر ("Shama" / “bardic”) tradition, inheriting that tradition’s paranormal capacities. Her paternal Marrone (It: “the Brown Ones”) ancestry was in part Scandinavian: wandering Norsemen who, having traversed southern and eastern Europe on the great rivers, joined the Varangian Guards; one may have been the Árni who carved his name in runes on a parapet in the top floor of the Hagia Sophia basilica at Istanbul. Later members of the family settled widely across the Aegean and Adriatic coasts.

Her father Paolo, a cultural activist and writer from Le Marche in Italy, and an erstwhile postulant for the priesthood, fought with anti-Fascist partisans who linked up with the British Army during the 1944 Italian campaign, while she and her mother and siblings fled the city into the hills around Monti Sibillini. She was thus raised in an environment of instability, turmoil, and conflict, which childhood experience she later insisted had shaped her desire to serve in the helping professions.

In the post-War period, having shown very high childhood aptitude for music, she was sent to stay with her mother’s family, in Bassanda’s north, so that she could attend programs sponsored by the BYO directed by Viliyam and Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi. She was present as an onlooker at some of the recordings and summer outdoor concerts by the Band and which were captured in the iconic and psychoactive “Classic ’52 Band” photograph (see Winesap’s testimony, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

She began formal study as an orchestral clarinetist at age 14, at which time she also became a protégé and eventually a lifelong friend of Antanas Kvainauškas (b1930), who mentored her at the Középiskolában a Művészet (“High School for the Arts”) which partnered with Habjar-Lawrence. Like Raakeli Eldarnen, who was similarly mentored by Teresa-Marie Szabo, she was a naturally gifted player who found herself powerfully attracted to the BNRO’s anarcho-syndicalist ethos of collective mutuality.

She went to work as a teaching artist for the BYO in 1961, and began performing selectively with the BNRO just after the Spring-Summer tour of that year. It required some persuasion on the part of Kvainauškas to convince her that she could find the interpersonal dynamic of a touring band constructive and inclusive, and she was never an avid devotee of the road—unlike, say, “Sanjo” D’Aunai, Jérome Courvalle, Jakov Redžinald, and Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, who in contrast could barely be persuaded to leave it.

The period 1958-61, while a somewhat fallow moment in the history of the BNRO, as has been documented elsewhere, was nevertheless one of significant social and political change, both in the West and behind the Iron Curtain. Ballyizget itself was seeing an increasing influx of young “beatnik” artists, musicians, and writers from the West, some arriving as legal visitors, others—more frequently—hitchhiking or otherwise traveling “on the black” (the Irish mandolinist Andy Irvine is thought to have first entered in this fashion, hitching rides on long-distance articulated lorries). So the cultural revolution that was sweeping western Europe and the United States, heralding the Civil Rights and social justice movements of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (in the USA), the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (Britain), and the Nouvelle Gauche (France), also echoed, if however faintly, in Soviet-era Bassanda. In this same period, the Band toured more and more extensively, in the Satellites, the Far East, and the West, as the central Soviet attempted to keep pace with the greatly stepped-up “Cultural Cold War” engaged by the US Information agency and other CIA front operations.

Rāḥīl eventually left her teaching artist post at the Conservatory in 1963, to join Ballyizget’s nascent free-improvisation scene, saying “with Antan’ and my friends in the Band gone so often, there wasn’t the same atmosphere at H-LC. I didn’t want to be out on the road for months on end, but I did want to be out in the world, making music that spoke to my contemporaries.” Though invited to join the touring organization permanently and full-term (the BNRO, even in the Stalinist era, had under the leadership of Yezget Nas1lsinez practiced a kind of de facto collectivism and autonomous organization, subtly rejecting, modifying, or subverting central Soviet directives), she preferred to stay closer to Ballyizget and to the circles of political and social revolutionaries who clustered around the teacher and environmentalist Robin Dobar Momak.

A seminal influence in the nature-centered communal movement which Momak pioneered—and from which developed her very strong interest in a vegan lifestyle and its political ramifications—she remained in the capitol when he led the first wave of “back-to-the-land” communards in 1966 from Ballyizget to found the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ (Wood Elves’ Commune) on land in the foothills of the northern alps which had been donated by Samiel Yasgureyivitch. As chief organizer of the urban gardening program which the commune maintained to help feed the inner city poor and refugees neglected by the Central Soviet, she also immersed herself in the capitol’s underground music scene—an early ‘60s community that overlapped extensively with activist members of the International Committee for Sexual Equality. In fact, some of the earliest roots of European “punk rock” are in early ‘60s amateur and self-taught Ballyizget underground musical ensembles which espoused a radical rejection of both musical and gender hierarchies. The Electric Trees front-woman Polli Kilotona’s (b1952) radical politics and androgynous, avant-garde rock were born in the activities, politics, and artistic experimentation of these communities, and the Washington DC-based punk auteur and bandleader Ian MacKaye later cited the Ballyizget scene’s “gender equality, radical equality, and intensity,” and particularly Kilotona’s influence, as inspiring aspects of his work with Minor Threat, Fugazi, and the Riot Grrrl movement.

Heavily influenced herself by the free-jazz experiments of Eric Dolphy (1928-64), Marrone also took up the bass clarinet, which she introduced into the nascent punk-rock scene, and sometimes played through electronics gear reworked by Yannoula Periplanó̱menos. Rāḥīl’s extended bass clarinet improvisation on double-bassist Krzysztof Arczewski’s "Zamknij ryj, Donnie,” as recorded at “Matthias’s Mountain Festival” and reproduced on the BNRO’s1975’s Live from the Rift Valley, is a miraculous display of unaccompanied virtuosity, and was reputed to be responsible for the holographic manifestations onstage reported by eyewitnesses.

Her interest in extended techniques and sonic palettes for low-register instruments expanded when in 1969 she added the bass guitar to her arsenal, at the behest of Kilotona, and on which she had lessons from Jakob Biskopsstav, the teenaged Finnish virtuoso who played with the Trees 1968-73. Under his influence and that of the Arczewski’s “Grey Sleeve” solo recordings (on the Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Co. label), she eventually contributed to experimental and musique-concrete recordings by Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, overdubbing multiple clarinets and basses in service of his shifting, rumbling soundscapes.

There is a gap in 1968-69, when she drops off the Ballyizget music scene for almost 22 months. The archivists of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project have not been able to fill this gap, but it was an article of Band folklore that she had trekked east, perhaps as far as the mountains of Chinese Turkistan, to study nutrition and herbal healing with Uighur shamans. Upon her return, in the spring of 1970, she reconnected with the urban gardening circles in the capitol. Ragnursson later commented, “When she came back, she was different: quieter, but also more open. And she was more insistent about helping other people.” She was one of the architects of the Wood-Elves Commune’s urban-gardening workshops and a vocal supporter of their food-trucks’ emphasis upon vegan/vegetarian food, based in part in Brother Matthias’s “Mountain i-Tal Diet” (with the very welcome addition of closer-to-sea-level green leafy vegetables and citrus fruit).

Her activism was fueled by philosophical as well as nutritional considerations, and shows the strong influence of both the Zen sutra called the Bassandayana and of the “green-yellow-blue” Catholicism—heavily influenced by Buddhism and Central Asian pantheism—which had evolved at her ancestor’s Marianuskloster. As well, a powerful strain of animal-rights activism runs through the circle of the BNRO, from their patron Herr Doktor Марцус Walhaz, Chair of Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics at Ballyizget University; the legendary wildlife photographer and BNRO archivist Cifani Doma; to the shape-shifters Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen, Azizlarim Jangchi, and Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai; the activists Terésa-Marie Szabo, Bronislava Nijinska, and Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta; and the “animal-whisperers” Lisle Goncharov and Yannoula Periplanó̱menos. From her mother, Rāḥīl had inherited a strong influence of the indigenous Bassandan shamanic traditions, for which animals were sacred as “the spirits of the earth that talk to us,”and she was a militant protector of animal rights, and she was a strong friend to Madame Nijinska’s Libertas Domum no-kill shelter and, after Madame’s “departure,” its continuation under the leadership of “Azi” Jangchi, Lisle Goncharov, and others.

Late in life, after retiring from touring altogether in the post-glasnost period, she ran an urban farm-to-table gardening center, supplying both Ballyizget’s “foodie” restaurants (her close friend Kvainauškas by this time was partner in “Brother Antanas’s”) and public-service agencies feeding the poor and elderly. She shared a high-altitude hermitage in summer months equidistant between Matthias’s Mountain Rest and the capitol, which served as a home to dozens of rescued cats and other mammals, and housed a personal library of over 20,000 volumes, as well as her lifelong companion Qrystyn Rdeča, a poet, activist, and author of speculative and utopian fiction.

Antanas Kvainauškas, her oldest friend in the band—and who, in contrast to Rāḥīl’s reserve, was a sufficiently prolix reporter for two—said “She was this unique mix of the radical punk-rocker and the introspective littératrice. She didn’t open up very widely, but she loved very deeply.”

[1] Marrone, along with Extaberri le Gwo, Mississippi Stokes, and Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, identified the steamer on the Tallinn docks and broke into its engine room (after Jérome Courvalle had “subdued” the policeman standing anchor watch), after which Stokes fired up its diesels, and Biraz Ouiz conned the ship out of the blacked-out Tallinn harbor with the BNRO’s extended family aboard.

As Prospero in "The Tempest" rehearsal, c1961
Photo attributed to Lisle Goncharov
Azizlarim Jangchi[1]
(Called “Azi” within the Sisterhood)

Scots-Gaelic, Mestizo, Mescalero Apache ancestry

b1932? Organ Mountains (?) of southern New Mexico[2]

Her maternal ancestors were reputedly descendants of the Hudson’s Bay Company explorer and mountain man Robert Stuart (b 1785 Callandar Scotland), an employee of the British Northwest company, who had adventured southeast via the Columbia and Missouri Rivers through the Raton Pass toward Santa Fe. According to a c1825 reminiscence transcribed in the memoirs of the hapless Black Mountains explorer James Ohio Pattie, Stuart’s son settled a homestead in the Mesilla Valley just south of the Doña Ana Mountains. That region became part of the United States after Kearney’s war and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, but its unique combination of English, Spanish, and First Peoples’ cultural influences remained afterward.

Her immediate parentage is unconfirmed (see the account of her appearance as a child in Ballyizget, below), but the claim has been advanced that her paternal line was Mescalero Apache, and that she was a descendant of Goyathlay (Eng: Geronimo); the patronymic is unknown however.

Even more of a mystery is how, as a child, she traveled undocumented from southern New Mexico to Bassanda—a mystery that has never been adequately explained, and which she herself never discussed. Olenev claimed that Dr Hazzard-Igniti, the legendary magneto-geologist and Bassandan scholar, had proposed the existence of an additional Rift Portal somewhere in the south Rio Grande Valley, connecting New Mexico to Bassanda, and perhaps symmetrically paralleling the north Rio Grande portal cited in various episodes of Colonel Thompson’s career.

However, this is impossible to confirm, as a large body of Hazzard-Igniti’s speculative notes were destroyed or embargoed after he was consigned to the Gulag in 1941. Olenev speculated that perhaps, in a childish exploration of the lower Valley, the girl might have stumbled upon a Portal and unintentionally been swept through the Rift; this would account for her sudden presence in the capitol, though how she then made her way from Bassanda’s northern Rift Valley south into the capitol city of Ballyizget was never established.

She is first identified in the winter of 1943-44, barefoot, ragged, and dirty in the streets of the Nazi-held Ballyizget, by Kristina Olenev: one of a small army of young beggars and pickpockets controlled by a petty thief and compulsive gambler named Donaldas Erohmasfelt. “Kariss” sought the children’s release, but Erohmasfelt demurred and physically threatened her, citing the “hand over fist” profits the children were earning him. In the turmoil of that winter, when the Uzbek levies of the Red Army were closing in on the city, the Nazi occupiers were far too distracted to attend to petty crime, especially by underage criminals. Olenev, whose legendary maternal instincts were only eclipsed, in the BNRO / ESO / EHS orbit, by respect for her temper, considered simple assassination, but Madame Szabo, knowing Erohmasfelt’s gambling addiction and sociopathic hubris, proposed an alternative intended to engage both character flaws: that she and he would gamble for the child.

Knowing Madame’s Romany skills with playing cards, Olenev proposed that the two try wits at the old game of Lansquenet.[3] Erohmasfelt declined, and insisted upon dice, to which Szabo readily agreed, provided the dice were her own. The gambler proposed a single throw as the deciding turn, but Madame Szabo, with a cool and impersonal smile, insisted upon a best-of-three competition. In the event, Madame won the first and third of the throws, and the child was “hers”. For a moment it seemed as if Erohmasfelt —a notorious back-slider and card-cheat—might consider reneging on the terms of the game, but the presence of Olenev, who was known for both her protective instincts and her skill with a knife, persuaded him to abide by the deal: released from the clutches of their procurer, the children were placed with foster families, and Kariss brought the girl home.[4]

Kariss was, however, shocked to find that she spoke no known language, and began teaching her Bassandan immediately.[5] There were spurious allegations that the child might have been feral, abandoned in the wilderness and raised by wild animals, but at nearly the same moment, in the early months of 1944, the Nazi occupation collapsed under the weight of the Red Army siege.

Fortunately—and in decided contrast to the situation of other “liberated” cities—Ballyizget and her citizens suffered relatively little, as the besieging Red Army troops, most of whom were ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks from the satellites, considered Bassandans to be “cousins.” The Nazis had invaded and attempted to hold the country with Polish and Czech levies under a German officer corps, and very few of these levies had any stomach for either Bassandan guerrilla warfare or Soviet concentration camps. Most simply threw away their weapons and uniform insignia and began walking west, in a tacit agreement with the Free Bassanda fighters that, if they moved quickly and caused no incidents, they would be permitted to flee over the frontiers into neutral Switzerland: a partisan proverb of the period goes Nie go otfrli napaǵači; neka švaJcarski se griži za toa za promena (“We threw out the invaders; let the Swiss worry about it for a change”).

Olenev and Madame Szabo attempted to protect her from Soviet officialdom, but word of the “feral child” was leaked to the press, and “Azi,” as Olenev named her, became the topic of public controversy. The Ballyizget Газета записи (Russian: Gazeta Zapisi Eng: “Newspaper of Record”) suggested that she was the offspring of a German soldier and a Bassandan fraternizer, and claimed that she was congenitally incapable of speech due to “Fascist abuse.” The Central Soviet sought to further exploit the situation, claiming that Azi had been “liberated through the mercy of the benevolent Socialist state” and considering her use as a poster child for the war’s turning tide.[6]

Also as part of this publicity campaign the child was taken from Olenev and placed in a state-sponsored orphanage; though told that she would have “full visitation rights,” in fact Kristina’s access to Azi was by-and-large terminated (Olenev, a notoriously outspoken critic of authoritarian free-speech restrictions, maintained a very adversarial relationship with the Soviet authorities, even during wartime).

The orphanage situation was not successful: the child ran away multiple times, and was eventually categorized as “morally untrainable and subject to pernicious bourgeois tendencies.” This led to her removal to an “asylum for children,” a notorious institution in the hills south of Ballyizget, run by the same state agency that supervised the St Grydzina penitentiary—in both cases, these were for-profit prison labor ventures which netted corrupt bureaucrats tens of thousands of Bassandan rubles.

However, in March 1947, when she was approximately 15, her ninth escape attempt was actually successful. There is a romantic story of her having been rescued by a pack of animals and returned to the forests; a likelier explanation is that she plotted this escape during a prison performance by the Kráľa Family Band: Davit (violin/aged 12 in 1947); Anatoly (double bass & piano/15); Sofia (accordion/6), and the matriarch Madame Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa, who was pregnant at the time. This was a period when the KFB stood in relatively good odor with the Soviet authorities, not least because Madame’s ability to “tame” wild children was perceived to be consistent with neo-Marxist educational theory—both Davit and Anatoly, despite little physical resemblance to Madame or Sofia, were child virtuosi (it has been claimed that both boys were the offspring of Kristina Olenev, but because “Kariss” was barred by authorities from any further contact with Azi, her reunion with Davit was delayed until 1956; see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

The pressmen accompanying this much-publicized visit remarked upon the immediate bond between Madame Kráľa and Azi and upon the fact that the child seemed to be able communicate verbally with her: a crude transcription of their dialog, taken from Gazeta Zapisi reports, was later analyzed by Winesap, who claimed that the transcription revealed the two were actually speaking Mescalero Apache (although Winesap was never able to find documentary evidence in the Archives to confirm this fact, or to hypothesize the source of Madame’s expertise in this Southwest US indigenous language). In this scenario, it is alleged that, during this conversation, Madame Kráľa instructed the child to expect rescue by Bassandan partisans, which rescue attempt was successful; certainly, the Family Band’s discredit with the Central Soviet appears to reflect this accusation.

On the other hand, Lisle Goncharov, who first met Azi in San Antonio only a year later, told a different story: she claimed that the warder on duty that night in the orphanage, having heard “suspicious noises” in the dim-lit dormitory, entered and was confronted, in the moonlight, by a “gigantic jet-black panther, with eyes like fire.” Given that the only great cat known in the nation’s south—a high-altitude, semi-tropical climate—is the white-brown dappled Bassandan Cloud Leopard (Neofelis nebulosi Bassandiensis), which typically measures less than 40 inches in length, weighing less than 23kg, it was deemed impossible that the “giant black panther” was anything other than a hallucination, probably brought on by overindulgence in Bassandan peach brandy, and the warder was summarily sacked. Whatever the truth of the escape, the fact remains that the adolescent girl disappeared from Bassanda, leaving little trace of her presence (her few possessions remained at the asylum) and no word for Kristina Olenev.

She reappears a few months later in San Antonio, Texas (not far from Las Cruces in the American Southwest), where Lisle Goncharov was working as a teenaged bicycle messenger. One night in October 1947, Goncharov was making a drugstore delivery on the city’s South Side when she was knocked off her bicycle by a corner gang of young men who recognized the lucrative nature of her cargo. Though she was tough and courageous, having herself grown up in the barrio, Lisle, a small and small-boned woman (her signature role in Bassanda ballet was Ariel in The Tempest) would have been no match for the four assailants, were it not for the sudden appearance, as she later recalled, “of this wild-haired barefoot demon”—“Azi”, who had been asleep on a hotel heating grate but, witnessing the assault, threw herself into the fray. No testimony from the street gang’s perspective survives, and Azi, even after she learned Bassandan, was exceptionally reticent, speaking very little, but Lisle (of whom the Band later joked “Lis’ does enough talking for both of them!”) was voluble in her subsequent descriptions to the EHS Oral History Project of the ferocity of Azi’s assault:

You couldn’t hear her; you could barely see her. The streetlight had gone out—probably why those pachucos had picked that corner—and I had my back against a wall, but she was like a panther. Those putas never knew what hit them: she clobbered one of them across the neck with a brick, I kicked one in the balls, and then I saw her pick up my bike like she was going to smash the other two to bits with it. I yelled “Don’t hurt the bike!” just in time; she changed her grip and slung it by one wheel like a scythe. Took ‘em both across the face and they went down like stones.

All of a sudden it was over. The four punks were on the ground and we were facing each other for the first time. She didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything, and then suddenly I saw a flash of teeth as she grinned. She held out her hand, kind of tentatively, but she still didn’t say anything. I said, “Ahi, Hermana. You’re a miracle from heaven, but let’s get the hell out of here while we can!” So I got on the bike, and she straddled the carrier behind me, and we got the hell out of there.

We’ve been sisters ever since.

The assault in San Antonio’s back alleys is not the only battle they fought together: during the brief 1948 attempt to overthrow the authoritarian colonial government of the island nation of Naboo, Azi piloted the converted oyster boat La Raza which spearheaded the assault upon the harbor at Theed, and upon whose deckhouse roof Lisle Goncharov danced her “Rebel’s Hornpipe” as the fleet steamed into the harbor. Though the pair was briefly imprisoned in the aftermath of the failed rebellion, by some legerdemain they again managed to escape and were in Ballyizget before the end of that year (how, is not known, but it has been argued that this journey, and perhaps the escape from Theed itself, were a product of Azi’s instinctive aptitude for Rift Portal travel), at which time she was introduced to Yezget Nas1lsinez.

1948-49 was precisely the period in which, under the artistic direction of Yezget-Bey and the practical leadership of “straw boss” Terese-Marie Szabo, the loosely-organized “People’s Liberation Orchestra” was coalescing into the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra. A number of influential contributors to the BNRO and the (eventual) Eagle’s Heart Sisters were still to come, but already in place were crucial personnel, including Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk, and Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire.

As part of this process, early music/dance experiments were undertaken, particularly the sketches for the anti-totalitarian fable Casting Out Snakes, but dance historians regard this as a “prototypical” version of the team: Jaṅgalī, Madame Szabo, and Olenev were present, and recognized immediately the contributions that could be made by the teenagers Azi and Lisle, but the seminal choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was in the Caribbean with Maya Deren, having never yet visited Bassanda, and Federica Rozhkov, traveling by motorbike somewhere in Southeast Asia with her lover Ashitaga Emishi, would not appear until early in 1951.

The watershed changes which yielded the explosive creativity of 1949-51, including the foundation of the Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir and the accession of Zoya Căruțaș, Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, Extaberri le Gwo, and the Ŭitmena Sisters into the Band, were accelerated in October 1949 by the arrival of Nijinska in Ballyizget. Following her transformative visit to Trinidad with Maya Deren, during which she had encountered the healing powers of the oris̩a Shango, Nijinska experienced the burst of choreographic energy which yielded the 1949 The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus (based upon the lost sutra of the Bassandayana); this groundbreaking choreography was later the subject of an ethnographic film still extant in the Archive, in which appear Madame Szabo, Olenev, Goncharov, Jaṅgalī, and Azi herself.[7] A bond quickly formed between the Apache girl and the Russian choreographer, who christened her with the surname “Jangchi” (Uzbek: “Beloved Warrior”), and once said to her: “You remind me of Maria.”[8]

As a dancer, Azizlarim Jangchi specialized in strong, sometimes mythological female characters: the Yoruba Oris̩a Ọ̀ṣun, the wife of Shango; the Haitian loa Anaisa Pié; the Apache Esdzanadehe; and so on; in the same watershed 1961 Ballyizget production of Nijinska’s ballet on The Tempest, for which Goncharov played Ariel, Azi portrayed the sorcerer Prospero, a characterization which influenced later versions by Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren. With the other members of the Eagles’ Heart Sisters—whose name derived from the folkloric myth that had inspired the 1951-52 Xlbt Op. 16, a watershed moment in modern dance—she was part of the extraordinary generation whose creativity in the post-Stalin 1950s and ‘60s drew artists musicians to Bassanda from all over Europe. Yezget Nas1lsinez and the BNRO were at the heart of this artistic ferment; the 1960s are thus looked upon, in hindsight, as a golden period for the dancers of the EHS, who became a very significant part of the BNRO’s artistic world.[9]

This golden period was cut short by Nijinska’s much-lamented death in 1972. She was mourned across Bassanda, by the extended family of the BNRO, and by thousands worldwide. The Sisters themselves gathered at Libertas Domum, the no-kill animal shelter “Freedom Farm” Nijinska had founded in the hills north of Bassanda, closed the gates, and barred entrance to all others for three days. When that period of mourning was ended, Azi, who had been formally adopted by Madame in 1967, took over the day-to-day administration of Libertas Domum. She was joined by Goncharov, who would periodically appear at the Farm’s gates with another load of rescued dogs from the capitol in the back of her tiny Citroën TPV.

After the mass-defection to the West of the BNRO and the death of founder Nas1lsinez in Helsinki in 1985, the First of April became an anniversary to be celebrated at the Freedom Farm, when members of the far-flung, multi-national BNRO family would gather to reminisce, trade stories, write music, admire new children and new choreographies, and plan for the next generations. Inevitably, at some point in the extended celebrations, the Sisters would withdraw to sequester themselves in the vast empty sunlit space of Nijinska’s second-floor dance studio over the barn, and recall Madame. Spouses, lovers, offspring, and friends often remarked that, after one of these annual “Conclaves of the Eagles’ Heart,” the Sisters typically emerged, not mournful or sad, but energized and joyful. They were quite reticent about the experience of the Conclave, but one night in 1997, driving away from the Farm en route back to the capitol, Goncharov’s current beau said “What is it you Six get up to upstairs in the loft?”

Lisle smiled, put her arm around his neck, and leaned her face against his shoulder as he drove. For a moment she did not respond, and then she spoke.

“We go to see Madame, on board The Beast.[10] That’s why we’re never sad afterwards—because we’ve been again to see Madame.”

She paused for a moment, smiling with a far-away expression, and then added,

“Azi takes us there.”

[caption: Azi, around 1970, in the Barn at Libertas Domum]

[1] Uzbek: “Beloved Warrior”, alias bestowed upon her by her root-teacher Bronislava Nijinska.
[2] Much of the material in this biographical sketch comes from the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project, an extended research undertaking of interviews, archival history, and reconstruction begun in the post-glasnost 1980s.
[3] A Renaissance-era deck-cutting-and-comparison game, introduced to Bassanda via Swiss soldiers of fortune.
[4] Post-War, Erohmas Erohmasfelt attempted to take partial credit for his “contribution” to the Eagles’ Heart Sisters personnel, but was accused and convicted of collaboration, profiteering and war crimes. He spent the rest of his life in a Ballyizget prison.
[5] Though the seemingly random sounds she made prior to learning Bassandan were subsequently recognized, by Madame Szabo, to be a patois combining elements of Scots Gaelic and Mescalero Apache.
[6] An undated painting, but probably from 1944, employs her as the model for an idealized peasant girl.
[7] The experience of filming Lotus may have been Azi’s first exposure to the techniques of cinema, which became an ongoing interest. Though dance cinematographer Maya Deren died in 1961, her legacy lived on in Nijinska’s expressions of gratitude to Deren and—particularly—her influence upon David Tudor, for whom Azi danced in Sweden in the 1960s.
[8] The Native American ballerina Maria Tall Chief (Osage: Ki He Kah Stah Tsa), born in 1925, was one of the great dancers of the 20th century, and would have met Nijinska while Tallchief was dancing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carol in the early 1940s.
[9] Goncharov became an advocate for the Bassanda Bicycle Trekking Consortium and professor at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, Rozhkov a world traveler, Szabo the lifelong business manager for the BNRO/ESO, Olenev a political advocate, Jaṅgalī an orchestra pedagogue.
[10] “The Beast” is the semi-mythological locomotive, flagship of the Grand Celestial Bassanda Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation, which Bassandans believe is capable of using the earth’s magnetic ley lines to fold both distance (miles) and also time—hence permitting time travel. A Bassandan proverb translate as “Everyone you’ve ever loved can be found somewhere and some-when, on board The Beast.”

Mirror photograph of a young Yūhannā, c1950
Yūhannā Casco Encabezado

Born 1935 of mixed Romany, Castilian(?), Moorish, Pueblo blood in southern New Mexico (formerly the Viceroyalty of New Spain). In the early 18th century, ancestors had settled on El Camino Real Adentro, which ran all the way from Mexico City north to San Juan Pueblo, near what is now the Colorado border. Family history had it that his first relative in the region, Juan Casco Encabezado (c1566-c1617), had traveled with the explorer Oñate from Mexico City in the 1590s, but left the expedition and “went native” after various atrocities inflicted by the Conquistadors upon native opponents (Oñate was actually convicted of cruelty by a Santa Fé court but was absolved of punishment; he died in Spain).

The surnames “Casco Encabezado” roughly translate as “the casque- (helmet) headed”, an indication of Castilian noble blood, but the given name “Yūhannā”, which appears in multiple generations of the family tree, is a bit of a mystery. The closest parallel is the Bassandan/Nepali यूहन्ना—and there is no immediate explanation for the appearance of a Central Asian name on the rolls of the Conquistadors. One possible interpretation is that his ancestor Juan, as was the case with a number of individuals on Oñate’s expedition, might have been not pure-blooded Castilian, but rather a mestizo (mixed-race) person whose own ethnicity may have reached back through North Africa all the way to the East. Certainly, like the Muslim and Jewish conversos, nominal converts to Christianity who traveled with Coronado, Oñate, and others, Casco Encabezado’s descendants retained a number of private devotional and magical practices which suggested both Muslim and pre-Muslim pantheist beliefs: divination, palmistry, and so forth.

Another, later branch of the family is associated with the San Patricios: German and Irish Catholic emigrants who fought against the Protestant-dominated US government in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and Mexican nationals also served: though the vast majority were captured, tried, and executed for desertion, a few escaped—these were among the ancestors of BNRO pianist/trumpeter/vocalist Rahmani Boenavida, and possibly of Yūhannā as well.

Maternal ancestors were Băieşi (otherwise “Ludari”), Romani immigrants who had escaped Wallachia and Moldavia and were hereditarily associated with hand trades, especially blacksmithing and woodworking.

First contact with BNRO ensued after he saw a print, in an Albuquerque avant-garde theatre, of the Eagles Heart Sisters’ 1949 choreographic film The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus. Writing away to the small distribution company of Joseph Burstyn Inc, best-known for their advocacy on behalf of Rossellini and the young Stanley Kubrick, he located a mailing address for the BNRO offices in Ballyizget, and, unsolicited, sent a portfolio of chalk costuming sketches inspired by the EHS film. The manila envelope, covered with stamps, address emendations, and cancellations, lay unopened on a desk in the small, cluttered BNRO offices until the band returned from its spring tour of 1950. When it was eventually unearthed and its contents discerned, Madame Nijinska immediately wrote to New Mexico to encourage the aspiring designer to consider a visit to Bassanda, and authored a request to the Bassandan Central Soviet for funds to bring Yūhannā to Ballyizget as a protégé of the BYO (this request was denied after BCS secret police operatives reported “irregularities” in his dossier).

A devotee of the Tarot and an authority on its history; his translation of Le Monde Primitif by Antoine Courte Gébelin (1781) was widely reproduced via mimeograph in early speculative-fiction circles in the 1960s. This may account for his acquaintanceship with the SF author Roger Zelazny, whose Amber series uses the Tarot as a major motif; in acknowledgement of this influence, Zelazny may have modeled “the minstrel Lord Rein,” knighted by protagonist and narrator Corwin in the first volume of the series, Nine Princes in Amber, after him.

An avid bibliophile, he became something of a self-taught low-brass prodigy in the world of “New Music”: his personal copies of methods by Spohr, Paganini, and Tartini, purchased at library sales and used bookshops, and heavily-annotated with fingerings and transcription notes, are still in the Miskatonic Archives. Stumbling across a dog-eared copy of New Musical Resources (pub. 1930) in the Albuquerque public library around 1950, he immediately wrote to author Henry Cowell, who after his release from imprisonment on a “morals” charge had gone to work as a free-lance editor and author. Yūhannā became a protégé at a distance of Cowell, who would listen to and comment upon his wire recordings of practice sessions, and whom he eventually met c1952 in the office of Folkways Records in NYC. The purpose of the 17-year-old’s first documented visit to the East Coast is unknown, but certainly the label’s remarkably (and notoriously) diverse recordings catalog, which included not only the folk & traditional music for which they became famous, but also a huge diversity of “New Music”, ambient sounds, and other esoterica, was a huge attraction and would have been consistent with Yūhannā’s interests. There is a strong possibility that he was also exposed at this time to recordings of Balkan brass bands, which shortly afterward were included on various volumes of the label’s Music of the World’s People’s LP compilations.

It was through Folkways president Moses Asch, a legendarily irascible figure in the American recording industry and folk revival, that he became ae early devotee of BNRO bassist Krzysztof Arczewski’s “Grey Sleeve” LP series, released by the Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Co. label. Arczewski, only a few years older, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto in Spring 1943, arriving in Houston on a Liberty Ship but in Bassanda, working first with the BYO and then with the BNRO by 1951; he is prominently featured in the iconic (and talismanic) Cifani Dhoma photo of the “Classic ’52 Band.” The “Grey Sleeve” discs, later highly influential in the 1960s and early ‘70s “Bassandan Folk Revival,” represented a hugely diverse sampling of Polish, Romany, Jewish, klezmer, and Bassandan folk tunes, mostly played unaccompanied on double bass, pizzicato cello, and bębna basowego (see below), using a vast array of independently-developed extended techniques.

An additional affinity between Arczewski and Encabezado of course emerged from the functional uses of their respective instruments; likewise in the ways that Yezget Nas1lsinez had challenged each to re-think their conceptions of those instruments’ role and technique. The result in Arczweski’s case had been his creative breakthrough in the capacities of the “drum-cello” called, in Bassanda, bębna basowego; his iconic 1962 unaccompanied recording of the folk-song Zamknij ryj, Donnie (made during a period when he had left the band to take a post at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory) captures some of the polyphonic, overtone-exploiting extended techniques he had developed for what was essentially a folk instrument; Encabezado later arranged a performed a solo F-tuba version of this piece which demanded extensive use of extended techniques (multiphonics, circular breathing, percussive diaphragmatic overtones derived from dijeridu, etc) to imitate the folk source.

May have finally visited Bassanda in 1953, in company with the naturalist and author Edward Abbey (1927-89), later author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, among many other titles, who visited Ballyizget for the first time while a Master’s student in English at the University of New Mexico. Abbey probably brokered the introduction of Yūhannā to the legendary combat and BNRO photographer and animal-rights activist Cifani Dhoma at her hermitage in the High Hills above Ballyizget; a series of contact sheets containing portraits from this introduction is still extant in the Archive.

Yezget Nas1lsinez, a correspondent and rough contemporary of Cowell’s, had tracked Yūhannā’s musical development from the age of 12, and the Founder found the youth a place as the costumer for the 1954 premiere of the Eagle Heart Sister’s Casting Out Snakes, an allegorical critique of Soviet oligarchs. Though the piece was sufficiently controversial to be banned by the Central Committee, it remained iconic: the guitarist Mississippi Stokes commented, years later after Yūhannā had been added as brass bassist, “Some kinda pow’r in ‘at ‘un. Snake-handlin’ music like Sand Mountain.” Yezget Nas1lsinez did not program it very often—it appears, for example, on none of the advance programs required to be submitted to the Central Committee between 1949-64—but it was of notorious, semi-mythic power. Based on the very few extant live recordings, the piece seems to have been built upon sub-sonic bass notes, achieved by Yūhannā’s overblown multiphonic sub-tones on low-C tubas, to an earth-shattering roar which, according to Yezget-Bey, replicated St Patrick's use of bronze horns to drive the snakes from Ireland (the piece was subsequently expanded again, after 1957, through the addition of live tape-delayed electronics developed by the young savant Yannoula Periplanó̱menos). Dr Hazzard-Igniti, very late in his life, speculated upon the interaction of magnetic ley-lines, human electrical synaptic fight-or-flight reactions, and gold-plated brass instruments in the peculiar terrain of the Rift Valley (“Notes on Sub-sonic Synaptic Development”), but died before any of this preliminary research could be cast into lab-tested form.

Even after joining the BNRO as full-time musician around 1958, he continued to exert very powerful influence upon the designers and costumers of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters’ concert programs and conception. He was chief designer for the Tarot-inspired production of The Tempest in which Lisle Goncharov appeared (1961 Ballyizget); about the stage designs, which borrowed visual elements and costume ideas from the Bassandan folk carnivals called Mjekësia Trego as well as the Aleister Crowley Tarot deck, the Parisian dance critic Alexandre Dumas Cochon commented “It is a remarkable, shape-shifting vision of the gulag which can portray it as comic hallucination—even more subversive than a polemic would be, perhaps.” He was inducted into the Iliot shamanic tradition by the sisters Морган and Kaciaryna Ŭitmena, and Col. Thompson himself, highly “sensitive” to wind and weather (see elsewhere in the Archive), may have tutored him practical telekinesis and divination. He was present, with Kristina Olenev and Nasilsinez himself, during the last days of the Prague Spring, and wrote a series of heartfelt “open letters to freedom” decrying the Soviet incursion.

Later in life, he became obsessed with measuring the mathematical proportions of architectural spaces unique to Bassanda—cathedrals, archaeological sites, remote locations—developed a complex approach to making solo music in such spaces, and eventually wrote a method for low brass extended techniques and their adaptation to site-specific “installations.” It was alleged that certain exercises in this treatise, played in a certain sequence and at certain seasons within the peculiar electro-acoustics of the Rift Valley, could open new Portals between Bassanda and various locations and eras. It’s in fact a possibility that Yūhannā may have revisited the Rio Grande Valley homelands of his ancestors via such a Portal in the 1970s, by which time Zelazny was living in Santa Fe; an unpublished fragment in Zelazny’s papers is a sketched anecdote, date of composition unknown, in which he describes “Lord Rein raising the spirits of the Canyon with the Druidic Dord Fianna (bronze horn),” which may represent a thin fictionalization of actual events.

Within the Band, however, which he rejoined periodically on summer tours when his very busy Ballyizget-based theatrical career permitted, he was known by the nickname “Star,” from emblematic Tarot symbol Les étoiles, whose associations include “free-flowing love; pure essence; inspiration; regeneration; and ‘the harmonious renewal of forces’.”

dressing-room shot of Jamīnasvāmī, c1964,
on tour with the BNRO, USA West Coast
Nirbhay Jamīnasvāmī

viola, violin, tabla

b1937 among the foothills and pine forests of the Northeast Punjab, just south of Kashmir. His ancestors had fled Ludhiana c1849 at the end of the Second Sikh War, finding refuge to the east at the depot of Ambala on the British Raj’s Great Trunk Road. Ambala had been claimed by Rajah Runjit Singh in earlier years, but after the Sikhs’ defeat at Gujarat and the 1849 annexation of the Punjab, the town became a major staging area for supplying the British Residency at Lahore in the “Five Rivers” country, and for expeditions beyond, toward the Northwest Frontier.

Lying as it did roughly equidistant between the Punjab, the Subcontinent, and Tibet, throughout the 19th century the province was also a hotbed of scouts, spies, and players in the “Great Game,” the covert war for influence fought between England, Russia and (eventually) China. There is some thought that another branch of the family, arriving at Ambala from quite another direction, might actually have been ethnic Tibetan, displaced by Lord Curzon’s “diplomatic” invasion of 1903-04, led by Francis Younghusband. Certainly Jamīnasvāmī had no use for British officialdom, when encountered on BNRO tours, but whether this stemmed from a Tibetan or a Hindi aversion is unknown.

Established in Amballa by the 1860s, the family developed skills in the traditional medical profession of hakim. By the early 20th century, they were well-respected healers, and also merchants and traders, branching out into spices, cloth and optical technology (telescopes, microscopes, and the like); they were thus well-situated to take advantage of the region’s gradual economic expansion and industrialization.

A wave of Hindu revivalism in the 1890s renewed calls for Indian independence and, especially in the Northwest, a gradual heightening of tensions between (minority) Hindus, who sought closer connections with the south, and Muslims, who clung to traditional dominance in the north. It was a period of considerable inter-ethnic dispute, but also—at least, so his family believed—of enhanced economic opportunity, when individuals from other social ranks might have the chance to enter professions and occupations formerly reserved for Brahmins. His family was strong supporters of Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, but also sought further social and technological advancement.

He was born in 1937 into an atmosphere of political progressivism and economic ambition, being educated at home and in the public schools, where he learned English and Urdu and was first exposed to music. His parents hoped that Nirbhay would take advantage of their economic security to train formally as a surgeon, but both personal and global geopolitical events intervened. Like many Indian children, he was encouraged to learn to play Hindustani classical music (first singing, then on tabla) and developed a connoisseur’s ear, though—also like many others—there was never a thought or imputation that he might consider music as a serious profession, but rather only as a hobby. A devoted son, Jamīnasvāmī allowed himself to be pressured into planning a career in medicine (his mother later lamented: “Maiṁ apanē saphēda kōṭa sabhī bāhara uṭhāyā thā!”), but, despite his family’s wishes, this was not to be his path.[1]

In the wake of Independence from Britain in 1947, and the Mahatma’s lamented assassination within a year thereafter, the situation for Hindus in the predominantly Muslim northwest Provinces became less and less tenable. Nirbhay sat his medical board examinations in 1956, in the midst of this distracting, topsy-turvy environment, and unfortunately did not achieve passing marks. Tremendously distressed at this (though, as he himself later admitted, “secretly relieved…I wasn’t ready to be a doctor!”), he did not even return home after the examination, but fled in shame to Pakistan under the assumed name “Niḍara Gu’ācī Singh.” Why an upper-class Hindu would take a Sikh name and head north toward even more exclusively-Muslim regions is unknown, but perhaps he made this choice precisely because it would have seemed so uncharacteristic to any of his family seeking him.

Fortunately, in their several generations living on the Great Trunk Road, the Jamīnasvāmī clan had also become expert mechanics and railroad copers. He found work at a shade-tree garage in Islamabad, particularly specializing in diesel engines and the Sajāyā Traka (“decorated trucks”) for which Pakistan eventually became famous (early contact between Nirbhay and Ken Kesey, on the same 1864 BNRO tour of the USA West Coast that saw Yezget-Bey meeting David Lindley at the Topanga Canyon Banjo and Fiddle contest, may actually have served as the inspiration for the Merry Pranksters’ Day-Glo school bus called “Furthur,” prominently featured in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). This was a skill-set Nirbhay would find extremely useful in maintaining the BNRO’s rackety and aging tour busses and panel-vans; while later in life he was reputed to have traveled as medical clinician of Sleipnir, the semi-mythical flagship locomotive of the Grand Bassanda Top of the World Railroad and Transport Consortium, when that train was deployed on behalf of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

But the 1950s were a period of enormous turmoil in west Asia, as they were indeed throughout southeast Asia, eastern Europe and elsewhere around the globe: the notorious 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup d’état nicknamed “the 28 Mordad,” which displaced the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, destabilized the entire region.

Fortunately, at precisely this same historical moment, Nirbhay, who was working odd-jobs in hostels in addition to his piecework pay as a diesel mechanic, befriended several peripatetic members of the BNRO during the slow mid-winter “off-season” of 1958-59. At this particular juncture, the Band was somewhat in flux: Yezget Nas1lsinez had spent most of the 1957-58 academic year as a guest lecturer at the University of Munich and had thus been unavailable to shield members from the Central Committee’s excessive scrutiny, much less from their own occasional self-inflicted excesses. Shortly thereafter, Madame Szabo, Rezeg Vagyok, and their infant son had been temporarily interned by the Czech government, on highly suspect allegations of “currency violations,” only being rescued when Žaklin Paulu, Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, and Yezget-Bey himself drove 23.5 hours nonstop from Ballyizget to Prague, in a supercharged 1943 US Willys Jeep hot-rodded by Mississippi Stokes and reserved for serious emergencies such as this one. Likewise, Federica Rozkhov a/k/a Ferikarohasu had disappeared in Sofia in February of ‘58, apparently in order to reunite with her erstwhile stand-mate and lover Asher Vidnyye (“Ashitaka Emishi”), and while strong new players (Ceridwen Ifans, Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, Fionnuala Nic Aindriú, others) came on board between late ‘57 and Midsummer 1959, they were nevertheless very young and the Band’s identity was undeniably shifting.

It was Yakub “Sanjo” D’Aunai, the “Barefoot Walker” of contemporary Basssandan folklore (so-called because, on occasions when the Band was off the road, his compulsive nocturnal restlessness led him to undertake long wandering unshod journeys, carrying his guitar, across and beyond the nation’s borders), and ‘cellist Jérome Courvalle, an ex-US serviceman who moved into and out of the band unpredictably and chaotically in these years, who met and befriended Jamīnasvāmī in February 1959, while he was working as a night porter at Islamabad’s ਸ਼ੁੱਧ ਮਨ ਯਾਤਰਾ ਕਰਨ ਗਣੇਸ਼ ਦੇ ਆਰਾਮ ਘਰ ਅਤੇ ਚਾਹ ਹਾਊਸ Hostel.[2] Courvalle had inquired at the desk about over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, and Nirbhay, who despite failing his medical boards still retained a wealth of practical and traditional remedies from his family’s hakim background, had been able to prescribe a Nepali caravanserai chai which effectively ended the ‘cellist’s migraine headaches. On a subsequent evening, observing the young “Sikh” playing tabla with a group of visiting Carnatic musicians in the hostel’s breakfast room, Sanjo had said, in his typically gruff, monosyllabic fashion: “You should come to our Band. Baba could use you. For music. Maybe.”

Within n a few days, both D’Aunai and Courvalle had moved on, the former continuing his spring journey into the Hindu Kush and the latter hopping freight trains back to Ballyizget, but the brief, noncommittal invitation had stuck with Jamīnasvāmī and, as 1959 devolved into political turmoil and ethnic violence, he fled Islamabad. Once again—paradoxically—he travelled north and west, further into Muslim territory: years later, he commented, to the collectors of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project, “It was as if something was drawing me. I couldn’t seem to choose the direction, but something was telling me to go.”[3] Over the course of that summer of 1959, he walked (or occasionally rode on the roofs and running boards of 4th-class trains) all the way from Islamabad, via Kabul and Ashgabat, to Turkmenbashi, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, where he signed on as a “pill-roller” (de facto ship’s doctor) on a tramp steamer heading north toward Atyrau.

He arrived in Ballyizget as the first snows of September were sifting down onto the medieval streets of Bassanda’s capitol. With no acquaintances and no means of contacting BNRO personnel or support staff—he barely even knew what the Band was, only that “I had been drawn there” by D’Aunai’s gruff and vague invitation—he took the first off-the-books job available, at the Tsentr Zdorov’ya Grigoriy Kaminskiy clinic, as a janitor, occasional stretcher-bearer, and orderly.

He was working an overnight shift late in November 1959 when an unlikely trio consisting of Courvalle, stand-mate Elzbieta Purves, and violinist Jakov Redžinald appeared in the clinic’s lobby, Courvalle sporting a swollen jaw and knuckles, Redžinald a magnificent black eye, and Purves unscathed, but with (for her) flushed cheeks and bared teeth. Jerome immediately recognized Jamīnasvāmī behind the night desk, calling out “Nirbhay! I knew ya’d make it, boy!” smiling and seemingly unfazed by several bloody, loosened teeth.

It transpired that, while drinking in a Ballyizget tavern, Redžinald had managed to exchange heated words—a not-uncommon occurrence for him—with six ethnic-Russian soldiers from the local barracks, and had collected a well-deserved black eye for his pains. Courvalle, a notoriously effective street-fighter possessed of a hair-trigger temper, had intervened, despite the unbalanced odds, with his usual bareknuckle expertise, but according to Courvalle himself, it was the unscathed Purves’s tactics that turned the tide: though Elzbieta declined to comment, merely rearranging her clothing and hair, Jerome said proudly “The biggest meanest Cossack of ‘em all? Ya know what Elly did? She bit him! He squealed like a stuck pig, an’ the rest a’ those assholes saw the blood an’ they ran!” while Purves ignored him.

Though no dentist was on-call at the Clinic (a notoriously underfunded operation primarily catering to Ballyizget’s working class), Jamīnasvāmī again delved into his hakim’s knowledge, and was able to treat Courvalle’s jaw with topical herbal anti-inflammatories and astringents, probably saving teeth he might otherwise have lost. Though Redžinald was still preoccupied with his sore eye—now bright purple and swollen nearly shut—Purves regarded Nirbhay in her usual cool, remote, yet penetrating manner. Eventually she said, “Sanjo and Jer’ tell me you play music. What kind?” Upon hearing of his background and experience with Hindustani music as violinist, violist, tabla-player, and dancer, she considered briefly. Then, after bundling up her two bruised and bandaged band-mates, who were vociferous in expressing their thanks for Nirbhay’s first-aid, she handed a card, bearing the street address of the Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory’s rehearsal hall, across the counter. She said simply “Come to rehearsal. You should meet Baba.” Jamīnasvāmī attended his first BNRO rehearsal on 22 November 1959.

He stayed 27 years.

During his tenure, he was a target for particular scrutiny by the commissars because, as a non-Bassandan and an Indian national (his Sikh disguise did not last long), and coming from a family background in the Independence movement, he was widely suspected of being a spy for Delhi or Langley. Regardless of the degree to which he insisted he was “without politics” (and indeed, his bandmates knew him to be far more interested in the next meal or the next dance party), and the evidence of his not-inconsiderable clumsiness of word or deed, various Party functionaries, presuming he was a double agent, made it a long-term project to “uncover his status as a cunningly-disguised ‘deep mole.”[4] Years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and as a result of the Bassandan democratic government’s extended and comprehensive program of “De-Sequestration of Information” (modeled upon the United States’ Freedom of Information Act but taking advantage of Bassandan database technology and de-cryption to vastly speed public access to public information), the secret-police dossiers which had been mandatory for every member of the BNRO were discovered and published. Upon analysis, it was found that, after the dossiers of Madame Szabo, Antanas Kvainauškas, Etxaberri le Gwo, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire (four BNRO members, three of them non-Bassandans, with the longest and most complex tenures in the Band), and Yezget-Bey himself, that for Jamīnasvāmī was one of the longest and, simultaneously, most riddled with inaccurate and/or hypothetical information.[5]

Later in life, and especially after the BNRO went into exile in 1985, on the eve of the Soviet dissolution, he became a leading figure in the international community of natural healers, and a consultant for Doctors Without Borders, drawing upon both his family’s hakim knowledge and the practical first-aid and triage expertise and sensitivity to refugee experience he had developed in over 25 years with the Band. A popular catch-phrase on the BNRO tour bus went “Nirbhay’s Potions will make you better, but Nirbhay’s Notions will keep you well!”[6]

[photo caption: dressing-room shot of Jamīnasvāmī, c1964, on tour with the BNRO, USA West Coast]

[1] Hindi: “I had his white coat all picked out!”

[2] Punjabi: “Ganesh’s Rest Home and Tea House for the Pure Minded Traveler.”

[3] Transcribed from EHP OHP tape 14.II.1983_012; Miskatonic Archives.

[4] Russian: “…raskryt’ svoy status khitro zamaskirovannoy «glubokogo mol…’“: report of [name redacted], 23 June 64, BSP file 06.64 box A file 2: contemporary transcript obtained through formal De-Sequestration of Information request, January 2 1959.

[5] Interestingly, no dossiers for Colonel Thompson or the General have ever been discovered in any de-classified Soviet-era archives. It is not known whether the Bassandan Communist Central Committee was literally unaware of the Brethren’s existence (which seems hardly plausible, given their central role in Bassandan cultural and political history over nearly 150 years), or whether some unknown hand, presumably of an unidentified individual employed by the BCCC’s archival staff, had extensively redacted the record. It is no surprise, on the other hand, that Részeg Vagyok’s name nowhere appears—both he and Madame Szabo had spent decades “brushing over the tracks” on that drummer/scrounger’s background.

[6] “Potions”: e.g., his herbal and homeopathic cures; “Notions”: e.g. his Nirbhay’s Guidelines for Peripatetic Natural Health, a document circulated first in mimeograph and later via the Internet, and eventually published as a guidebook employed worldwide by Doctors Without Borders.

Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, with "Kleió̱",
BNRO concert after-party c1963.
Photo by Ceridwen "Ceri" Ifans.
Yannoula Periplanó̱menos

flute, whistle, Theremin, electronics

b1941; English, Greek, Bassandan ethnicity

There is a family story that a Sussex ancestor fought with Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. After the defeat and death of the Anglo-Saxon king at the hands of William of Normandy’s mounted knights, the family retreated into the south and east of the country, and was taken off by a smugglers’ ship from the Channel Islands. However, other branches must have remained, as the Hundred Rolls of Wiltshire records a “Johanna Gatelyn” in Sussex in 1273, and variants of that name (from the Anglo-Saxon “gaedeling”: “cousin, companion, wanderer”; e.g., “gadding”) appear in Cuckfield and Jevington in the 15th & 16th centuries. Members of this branch appear to have emigrated to the New World: the name “Gateling” appears in Virginia c1636, while the variant “Gatlin” appears in muster rolls for both US and Confederate regiments during the American Civil War, and an “R.C. Gatlin” settled on the Texas Gulf Coast around 1866.

Her great-grandmother and namesake Dzhoanna Shrjmolik (Armenian: “wanderer”) was an early scions of the Bassandan cottage-industry in hand-wound electric bouzouki pickups. A “wise woman” from the northern headwaters of the Izget, Shrjmolik was raised within the peculiar magnetic landscape of the Bassandan Rift Valley, which probably accounts for her intuitive sensitivity to electrical phenomena. Most extravagantly, family history insisted that Madame Shrjmolik was actually capable of controlling heat-lightning by “talking to the Ley-Lines” [Ed: obscure; see original term] a capacity she may have passed on to Col. Thompson during his visits to Bassanda from the northern Rio Grande via the Rift Valley in the 1860s.[1] Dzhoanna Shrjmolik may also have been related to Robert Cruickshank (Bassandan: “Kroog-sheng”), son of the inventor of the trough battery, who fought with the Turks opposing Napoleon’s invasion at the Battle of the Nile (1798), later wandering eastward and arriving in Bassanda c1800. This may account for the paternal line’s capacity to synthesize the intuitive and the technological, a capacity certainly manifested by Yannoula during her BNRO years.

Her Bassandan father (b1896) served during WWI as a youthful radio-man on Greek merchant marine ships supplying Allied forces in the eastern Mediterranean and Dardanelles; he was among the crews who evacuated survivors of the disastrous raid at Gallipoli in 1916. “Ioannes Periplanó̱menos” appears on ships’ rolls between the Wars as well, in the Aegean, Mediterranean, and farther afield: a ジョン·ワンダラー [“Jon· Wandarā”] is listed in court rolls of the last king of Ryukyo-Han (later Okinawa) as “Gaikoku no gijutsu-sa" [“foreign technician.”

He married a Japanese woman, a distant relation of Maiko Shorijutsu (later “Moira Ifans”), in 1920; their daughter Yannoula was born on Okinawa in August 1941, just a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Kýrios Periplanó̱menos, who through long military experience understood precisely what had just occurred, and the certain entry of the USA into the War, used his own hand-built, high-powered shortwave radio set to contact Bassandan connections in the Merchant Marine, and he, his wife, and their infant daughter, avoiding the internment ordered for enemy civilians, escaped on an oil tanker just before Christmas 1941.

After long and complex wanderings as supercargo on merchant ships, in March 1942 the undocumented little family landed at Newhaven Shore Base, at the mouth of the River Ouse in Sussex: a major naval port pulverized by the Luftwaffe Blitz of 1940. Despite his “advanced” age (he was almost 47, and thus outside draft strictures then in place) and the fact that he was the father of an infant, Ioannes Periplanó̱menos insisted upon volunteering for the crews that landed British and Canadian commandos and US Rangers at the ill-fated Dieppe raid in August: years later, he would comment “To eída érchontai sti̱n Kallípoli̱, kai ekeí í̱tan kai páli sto Dieppe.”[2]

On the other hand, the child Yannoula, who with her mother waited out her father’s enlistment with a host family in the tiny village of Iford (near Lewes), experienced a somewhat idyllic childhood on the South Downs. By the age of six she was trilingual in English, Greek, and her grandmother’s Bassandan, and had a good working knowledge of the region’s flora and fauna; she later commented “My friends were foxes, stoats, weasels, otters, badgers and birds.”

With Madame Bronislava Nijinska, Madame Teresa-Marie Szabo, Lisle Goncharov/Juno Eclipse, Raakeli Eldarnen, and Cifani Dhoma, she was a noted “animal-whisperer” and a very active member of the Bassandan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA). A long-distance walker and ultra-marathoner, scion of the Bassanda Bicycle Trekking Consortium, and lifelong friend of its founder Hafi Sari Mayoyu (“Hafi of the Yellow Jersey”), Yannoula possessed a particularly strong affinity for the rescued great cats resident at Nijinska’s Libertas Domum (“Freedom Farm”). She was known by the nickname “Leo” in the international long-distance running community, and would-be competitors described with awe her performances in the Bassandan “Peak-Leapers’ Marathon”—26.1 miles over steep trails, in the thin air of the high northern Alps—with a rescued panther, tiger, or cheetah loping at her side; it was said with rueful admiration “Tha éprepe kalýtera éna ischyró láktisma , an prókeitai na gýro oi dýo gates.”[3]

First enters the BNRO orbit at the age of 16, when she competed in the 1957 “Friendship of Nations” science and electronics contest in Ballyizget, where her project analyzing the distribution of mammalian populations vis-à-vis South England’s magnetic ley lines won honorable mention, and brought her to the attention of Rahmani Boenavida, BNRO pianist and audio-recordist, and a judge at the competition. A note in Rashka’s distinctive cursive hand, written on the back of her judge’s checklist, reads “Contact Y-B re/ little Anglo/Greco girl & BNRO apprenticeship.” It is not certain when Yannoula relocated from Sussex to Ballyizget, but her father’s antecedents would have found favor under the guidelines of the BCC’s 1950s “Return to the Homeland” program, which expedited the return of ethnic-Bassandan students and scientists displaced by the Second War.

With Raakeli Eldarnen, she was an influence upon the early development of the young 1960s political rock band Eliektryčnyja Drevy (“The Electric Trees”). While Eldarnen’s example strongly enhanced front-woman Polli Kilotona’s playing technique, Periplanó̱menos was personally responsible for the hot-rodded Habjar-Sonic magnetic pickups which powered Kiltona’s aggressive, spacey violin sound. In addition, in the early 1970s, Yannoula was a key participant in further refinement of the solid-body bouzouki (equipped with her Habjar-Sonic Mk. III individual-pole pickups) and was instrumental in the development of the prototype “Deathly Hallows” bouzouki synthesizer which appears on 1975’s Live at the Rift double-LP (see below), though there is significant unclarity about who played those parts.[4]

In addition to the gear that she rebuilt, customized, or invented for the Trees, she was also an inveterate tinkerer and electrical boffin. An expert on antique electrical and recording technology, she single-handedly terminated the (mercifully brief) “revival” of the Helio-phonic Recording Device (a hand-wound, push-carriage-borne “mobile” acoustical recorder) by a small coterie of collectors and fetishists: asked for her expert opinion about the “authentic sound” of the H-PRD, Periplanó̱menos is widely reported to have replied “To je stvarno preciznu reprodukciju nečega što zvuči kao govno.”[5] This phrase later entered into the parlance of political discourse and was regularly applied to the speeches of Soviet-era commissars.

She appears to have been a protégé, or at least devotee, of other early electrical experiments, including those documented in that portion of the General Landes Papers held in the Secured Rare Books room of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory Library. The quasi-legendary electronic-schematic “Documents” of Colonel Thompson, transport of which formed the basis of the epic 1906-07 “Great Train Ride,” went missing in the 1920s, and only reappeared in 1979 in the possession of Jackson Lawrence-Smyth (see “Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda”). But there is at least a possibility that Periplanó̱menos, at some point in the 1960s, may have stumbled across some portion of the Documents, because from 1968 onward, she is at the forefront of an explosion of experiment and sometimes-improbable technological advancement in the country.

Not only the Electric Trees but also the BNRO itself benefited from this “Golden Age of Bassandan Dharma-tronics”: Yannoula built, directly on the bench and without schematics, the super-charged Theremin which featured in 1960s collaborations of the BNRO and Eagle’s Heart Sisters; she developed wireless transmitters which permitted the instrument’s proximity-sensing antennae to be distributed throughout performance spaces, and thus activated by EHS members’ dancing bodies. While Boenavida and Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta particularly occupied themselves with documenting the 1960s and early ‘70s bands on multiple magnetic media—from which the LPs Suleiman’s Rock (1971), Youdou/Voodoo (1973), and the double-disc Live from the Rift Valley (1975) were drawn—Yannoula’s particular genius was for live-performance electronics. The brief snippets of “found sound” included on Rift Valley… were recorded in an epic open-air “guerrilla concert” in a meadow at the headwaters of the Izget River, a “place of power” within the magnetic ley lines of the Valley (see Hazzard-Igniti, 1926 & 1928), in defiance of BCC restrictions on public gatherings. In addition to towering performances of canonic Trees/BNRO repertoire, including “Battis Puttali,” “Out in the Sticks,” “Light Through the Leaves," the orchestral version of Krzysztof Arczewski's "Zamknij ryj, Donnie," and Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”), this recording also captures Periplanó̱menos’s live electronics, which imitate, allude to, or perhaps (most unnervingly of all) actually channel ghostly solo voices, massed choruses, and (according to eyewitnesses) onstage holographic manifestations of totem animals and departed Bassandan ancestors.

Yezget Nas1lsinez himself commended her artistic and technological instincts, saying “She looked like an elf, but she had a wizard’s skills on the test bench, and the heart of a lion on the trail.”

[1] “Khoselov hogineri elektrakanut’yan”; lit. “Talking to the Spirits of the electricity.”
[2] “I saw it coming at Gallipoli, and there it was again at Dieppe.”
[3] “You'd better have a strong kick if you're going to lap those two cats.”
[4] Yezget-Bey’s curt reply to BCC commissars who questioned the use of a “decadent bourgeois anti-Realist electronic instrument” (the synthesizer) was “No-one played it. Blame the General.”
[5] “It's a really accurate reproduction of something that sounds like shit.”

Fionnuala Nic Aindriú, late 1961,
on tour with the BNRO
Fionnuala Nic Aindriú

flute(s), piccolo, tin whistle

(b1939); Irish (Pavee)/Romany/German

Mother Saoirse Gorman (b1912) came from a family of Irish Travellers, particularly strong bearers of winds-playing and dance, who insisted they were the descendants of Irish nobility (specifically Viscount Gormanston) displaced during the Cromwellian conquest of the 1640s. Another ancestor, Janet Ní Gaobhann, was charged but acquitted in the Antrim witchcraft trials of the 1740s.

Father Andreas Peltzer (b1908), a South German bandsman, was brought to Drogheda on the Boyne River in Ireland to train its town brass band, and met Saoirse Gorman at quarter-day festival in Drogheda in 1929, while haggling over a timber flute with her father. Herr Peltzer’s family had been in Bavaria as dairy farmers for generations, often engaging in music as a sideline, and one or more branches of the family appeared to have been settled Ashkenazic Jews—the surname is found widely among European klezmorim (wandering musicians). The Peltzer clan was widely scattered in the wake of the failed 1848 revolution against Bavaria’s Ludwig I.

A family tale, possibly borrowed from the semi-legendary piper Turlough Mac Suibhne “The Mac Sweeney” (1831-1916), claims that the O Gormans, skeptical of Peltzer’s ability to care for their daughter, refused to pay any dowry upon her wedding. Saoirse, showing a flash of the bluntness and independence that likewise later marked her daughter’s responses to unthinking authority, tore off her slippers and threw them at her father’s feet, exclaiming “I need nothing from ye, for this man will shoe me in gold or carry me in his arms.”[1]

Family returned to Germany in 1932, in the last days of the Weimar Republic, when Herr Peltzer had been led to believe that progressive arts and culture, especially in Berlin, might flourish even in the midst of skyrocketing inflation and basic-goods shortages. However, the rising tide of fascist militarism—the accession of Hitler to power as Reichskanzler in 1933, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the burgeoning threat of war in Spain (after 1936), convinced Herr Peltzer that it was essential for his family—especially because his wife was considered “Romany” by Nazi officials, and thus an Undesirable—to flee the country. Drawing upon networks of contacts she shared with the international Romany community, the couple—Saoirse Gorman-Peltzer already pregnant—escaped over the Pyrenees in April 1939.

However, this respite was temporary, for Barcelona and Madrid had fallen to Franco’s Nazi-backed troops, and so it was necessary for the couple to continue their headlong flight, boarding the S.S. Winnipeg, bound for Chile on a rescue mission organized by the poet Pablo Neruda. In mid-ocean, they were able to exchange to a US Merchant Marine ship (whose crew may have included Mississippi Steve Stokes) and landed at Galveston Island in June.

Within a few months, they were living with Traveller relatives of Saoirse Gorman in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, a stevedores’ and dock-workers’ immigrant community; she gave birth in November 1939 and the child was christened Fionnuala Nic Aindriú Peltzer at St. Alphonsus Church on Constance Street.

She was raised in the polyglot Afro-Caribbean culture of New Orleans, where influences from Spain, Haiti, France, Cuba, and the Mississippi Valley all swirled together. The avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren, on the same New Orleans trip in which she met the violinist Etxaberri le Gwo (later of the BNRO) at a shrimp boil in Plaquemines Parish (before departing with Bronislava Nijinska by ship for the Caribbean in December 1949), mentioned the Gorman-Peltzers in passing, in a letter to her second husband, the Czech-born Alexander Hammid:

“…and also a very interesting family, Irish gypsy mother and Bavarian bandmaster father, and the child, a wild-haired exotic little street urchin with precocious musical and mathematical aptitudes; she formed my guide for more than one night-time adventure in the Vieux Carré while I awaited Bronislava’s arrival…”

Madame Gorman-Peltzer was, in the Traveller fashion, quite willing that her daughter should mature early, but—also in the Traveller fashion—quite determined to control the child’s conduct and contact with the non-Pavee world; this, and Fionnuala’s avid, extensive, and (for a young girl) rather indiscriminant reading, was a source of not-inconsiderable tension between mother and daughter.

Herr Peltzer had found work as a Diocesan musician, but—like many New Orleans-based players—also moonlighted as a “tailgate trombonist,” with street bands and in French Quarter nightclubs; some of the fiercest mother-and-daughter arguments ensued from Fionnuala’s habit of slipping out of her bedroom window and secretly attending her father’s club gigs. Madame Gorman became almost as incensed at such conduct as when the child would disappear for whole days at a time, only to be discovered curled up reading in the stacks of the Public Library on Napoleon Street; on occasion, she slept there. Stories also circulated in the BNRO that, as a young teenager, she was initiated into the syncretic religion of New Orleans Spirit Churches, which mixed African, Afro-Caribbean, Native American, and Catholic icons and theology—though these stories may also have been conflated with her own tales of her distant Antrim ancestors.

One night in 1949, she was standing on a packing crate in an alley behind the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street, peering through a dirty window that looked onto the stage, when seen by Rahmani Boenavida, a Mexico-born, New Orleans-raised musician who was playing piano on the gig. Confronted by “Rashka,” the young Fionnuala was initially defiant, but eventually relented when Boenavida said, “relax, petit chér: not gonna tell you mama.”

Rashka did, however, insist that the child come in from the alley and, seated on a stool in a dark corner of the bandstand, remain under Boenavida’s eye until the gig was over. They became friends—and co-conspirators—and when in 1950 Rashka left NOLA for the Caribbean and, eventually Ballyizget, she gave the girl a stack of stamped post-cards, addressed to various poste-restante locations in both places, and said “Don’t be a foolish little cow; wait a little longer, until you’re grown. You can always write to me.”

The abjuration persuaded Fionnuala as her own family’s dictates had failed to do: she returned to public school. She was a member of the superb marching band program at St Augustin High, founded in 1952 by the legendary Edwin Hampton, and subsequently discovered a remarkable, near-savant bent for mathematics. She could add columns of 4- and 5-digit values and figure amortized interest rates in her head at lightning speed and, in later years, it was not at all uncommon for Madame Szabo, the band’s financial manager, to call upon Fionnuala at crisis points in negotiations with agencies or customs officers.

However, she maintained her street urchin’s identity, regularly changing her hair color or dress mode, and—very atypically, for a Caucasian in the 1950s—sported a nose-piercing, performed by an Indian jeweler on Canal Street. She not infrequently appeared at city-wide music or math competitions barefoot and defiant, but regularly won top marks nevertheless. As her band-director Mr Hampton put it “Little gypsy Irish girl got it hard enough. We given her skills so’s she can make her own way.”

She appeared in Ballyizget in 1955, at the age of 16, via some itinerary not documented in any sovereign nation’s immigration records—though the international Romany network, and perhaps the intercession of Caribbean-familiar seagoing BNRO members (Boenavida, Etxaberri le Gwo, Mississippi Stokes, Lisle Goncharov/Juno Eclipse), seem likely allies. She entered but quickly exited the Bassanda Youth Orchestra, despite the appeals of the Srcetovredi Brothers who served as its artistic directors, disdainfully recalling “The players were children. I wasn’t a child.” Like Jakov Redžinald, her senior and predecessor in the band, she was articulate, well-read, and occasionally rash; it was his prior experience of arrest by the Nazis for clandestine publication that led him to counsel her to “be patient, wait for the right time” in the troubled times of the 1956 Prague Uprising. Initially hired by Yezget-Bey on a minor stipend to serve as band librarian, by 1957 she was a full-fledged player in the Orchestra, where her wide musical experience, fearlessness on stage, and command of a range of winds from bass flute to piccolo made her an invaluable part of the sound-palette.

She was strong-willed and possessed of strong leadership qualities, and was oftentimes blunt-spoken, especially with Soviet-era bureaucrats and officialdom. At the same time, she tended toward overly self-critical perspectives on her own performance, but this rigor also led to very quick musical development and assimilation of new ideas.

A lover of rich fabrics and textures, like Madame Szabo she tended to dress in the height of European fashion, and resisted footwear on any but the most essential occasions. As a bibliophile, she was invited to but was prohibited from attending the poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1965 “International Poetry Incarnation” in London. However, they were finally to meet in Prague in May of that year, where Ginsberg was crowned Kral Majales (“King of May”); “Madame Nula’s Salon” in Ballyizget eventually became a treasured destination for Ginsberg, Orlovsky, the late-‘60s poets and literati from both home and abroad.

In 1982, while on a brief West Coast USA tour with the BNRO, appearing at several large outdoor and “world music” festivals, she provided (uncredited) recorder and bass flute for the score of then-Disney employee Tim Burton’s first movie, the 5:00-minute stop-action horror film Vincent. Though the short was not seen until the early 2000’s, Nic Aindriú spoke for decades thereafter of the artistic satisfaction of working with Burton—who was so strongly influenced by German Expressionism—and of her pleasure at meeting the narrator, the legendary actor Vincent Price.

Later in life, and especially with the first glimmering reforms of glasnost in the mid-1980s, and the BNRO’s flight to the West in 1985, she participated as a founder and sponsor in the creation of the Dublin Travellers and Education Development Group, which later became the Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, marking a hugely positive official acknowledgement of the real lives of Irish Travellers and indeed a watershed moment internationally. She was likewise an influential and passionate advocate on behalf of itinerant peoples worldwide, about whom she famously said,

“All wanderers deserve homes. I am working toward a world in which the journey there is not so long or so painful.”

[1] Lit. An gá dom aon rud ó sibh, ar an uacht fear bróg mé in ór nó a iompar dom ina airm.

Ceridwen Moira Ifans,
All-Bassanda rugby football match
c1968. Image courtesy National Geographic
Ceridwen Moira Ifans

clarinet, tin whistle, recorder, pibgorn

Irish/Welsh/Japanese/German; b1940, Carmarthen, Wales

Maternal line is an old Welsh family from Carmarthen—mention is made of “Ifan” in the manuscript poetry collection The Black Book of Carmarthen (c1250), particularly in the scholarly 1906 edition of John Gwenogvryn Evans. The family is also possibly related to Saint Erbin of Cornwall, a hero of the medieval Welsh prose tales collected as the Mabinogion.

Her parents, Ellis Alwyn and Moira (“Maiko”) Ifans, may have met the infant Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, as, during the Irish Civil War, the O’Learys, escaping by fishing trawler from Cobh, were blown ashore at in Llanelli Harbor in Wales, where they found temporary shelter with the Ifans clan.

Related through marriage to Royal Welsh commando Taser Watkins (m Eirwen Evans 1941) of 5th Battalion, 1st Welsh Regiment, who won the Victoria Cross in August 1944 in Barfour. Normandy, leading a bayonet charge against superior odds; in turn, Lieutenant Watkins may have met Col. Thompson & Ismail Durang, temporarily attached to the US 75th Airborne. near Avranches, between 7.26-30.44

Her maternal grandfather was James Conall Lively (b1876 Arigna, vicinity of Lough Allen, Co. Roscommon, Ireland) , descendent of settlers from the English Pale but born into a poor coal-mining family, a Irish Republican Brotherhood member who left Ireland in 1889 after the fall of Parnell, later enlisting in the Royal Marines age 19. He served extensively abroad, most notably with the British naval forces supporting the Grand Alliance that suppressed the Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1900-01). Later stationed in Japan, he may there have met Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) after that Irish-Greek journalist had become a naturalized Japanese citizen (“Koizumi Yakumo”); this may account for the Ifans/Evans family’s ongoing connections to Japan and other parts of East Asia.

It is confirmed that James Lively married a Japanese girl and brought her back to Europe when he rotated home for service in the depot at Cardiff, Wales in 1905. Their eldest daughter Moira (b1906), called by her mother by the pet-name Maiko [舞子 “dancing child”], married Ellis Alwyn Evans (b 1905), a cousin to EE Evans-Pritchard (1902-73), the influential Oxford (All Souls) social anthropologist.

The daughter of Ellis and Moira/Maiko Ifans, born Carmarthen 1940, was christened “Ceridwen Moira,” nicknamed “Ceri.” Raised in the musical traditions of choral song and dance music unique to the River Towy Valley, she was particularly exposed to the reed instrument called the pibgorn, which appears as early as the manuscript of Hywel Dda (c940-950 CE), in stained-glass windows throughout the country, in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, for the Year 1824 (94/1), and was still employed in the folk-dance tradition at her birth.

However, by the mid-20th century, the instrument was experiencing steep decline, being played only by a very few elderly male musicians, most of whom did not speak English: the idea of a young woman undertaking to play the pibgorn at a high level was thus regarded as irregular and dangerously innovative. However, at the 1954 National Eisteddfod, age 14, she entered the “traditional music” competition and walked away with the Senior prize; music educators elsewhere in the nation were scandalized, but the Uwch Farnwr (head judge) simply replied “Dim ond rhywun heb clustiau yn dweud fel arall yn.”[1] The ambivalence of some conservative observers to her win may also have resulted in part from her ability to play both Western “classical” and Welsh traditional repertoires on the clarinet as well, and for the ease and facility with which she moved between and among various instruments and instrumental traditions.

However, she was also a noted teenaged athlete: members of the Ifans clan had been instrumental in promoting Welsh rugby in that country, and James Lively may have facilitated the sport’s boom in turn-of-the-century Japan as well; Ceri, as the youngest in a family of multiple brothers, early learned to take rugby’s rough-and-tumble in stride. Additional conditioning and competitive spirit was probably instilled during semiannual family visits to relatives in Roscommon, where she picked up camogie: the women’s version of the ancient Irish field sport of hurling. Finally, both the physical conditioning of rugby football and the stamina and stick-work of camogie/hurling played out in her occasional essays into English cricket, which she first encountered at 16 when sent to Ruthin boarding school (founded 1284) in North Wales, where she was notorious for instigating, and winning, batting and fielding matches against older schoolboys. She earned grudging respect, and the nickname “Windmill,” for the eccentric, camogie-inspired swing of her cricket bat.

She spent her Erasmus (overseas study) winter term 1957-58 investigating early music at the University of Munich; where she met both Yezget Nas1lsinez and Thomas Binkley, and picked up recorder and rauschpfeife. Though Binkley commented “Well, I have nothing to say to one so young! But: she does come from Welsh stock—probably has good instincts!” she was invited by Nas1lsinez to study on scholarship at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget.

In this period, between 1956-1961, the “cultural Cold War” with the West was heating up, and both the US Congress for Cultural Freedom and Soviet Union of Artists poured money into advocacy organizations and touring ensembles; this Kremlin cash may explain the very aggressive recruiting in which Nas1lsinez engaged in those years, leading to a significant influx of new young players, after a somewhat fallow period in the BNRO’s history following the scattering of the “’52 Band.” Ironically, such strategies both succeeded and backfired: Dizzy Gillespie, when “briefed” by the US State Department, replied “I’ve got 300 years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us, and I’m not going to make any excuses”, and the Kremlin-financed BNRO recruiting led to what came to be known as “The Classic ’62 ‘Beatnik’ Band”.[2]

She enrolled at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in September 1958, and within a few weeks met Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire, then adjunct faculty member in percussion when not on the road with the BNRO. O’Leary insisted that she was “just a child” and initially avoided contact with her, preferring to spend time in the Ballyizget underground clubs with his jazz contemporaries in the Band (Krzysztof Arczewski, Rashkha Boenavida , Részeg Vagyok, Zoya Căruțaș, others).

However, in a July 1959 pickup baseball match pitting the “BNRO Nine” against the Dave Brubeck Quartet (traveling with the USIA-sponsored Jazz Ambassadors tour), her scorching fastball, fielding and—especially—crushing hits at-bat (once again her cricket and camogie skills came into play) so impressed O’Leary that he commented “well—she’s such a good batter, she must have something on the ball.” They subsequently became a formidable dual threat on the BNRO and ESO scratch baseball teams; her batting and his pitching typically led the band’s teams to victory.

She was also a mitigating factor in “Dzejms’s” life, helping to manage his finances and providing a relatively stable, grounded home life to counterbalance the more topsy-turvy aspects of BNRO/jazz community existence (especially the destabilizing influence of the Srcetovredi Brothers, particularly Dzejms Rasel, who was called “Jack” to distinguish him from O’Leary); she once commented “I don’t particularly enjoy riding herd on them, but if they’re under my eye, at least I know where he is!”

Possessed a strong scholarly bent and was a highly methodical, organized thinker: this probably partly a legacy of her German ancestry. Throughout the first years of her BNRO touring (from 1962-66), she maintained a course-load via correspondence with professors in the graduate program in musicology at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, doing her research and writing her essays on the band bus and in dank Soviet dressing rooms before concerts. Though an elongated process (it took her four years), her Master’s thesis, on the early Bassandan reed tradition and its associations with shamanistic religion, is still cited by the historical ethnomusicology faculty at H-LC.

Immediately upon defending her thesis, in Spring 1967, she was hired as adjunct professor of North European folkloric music at H-LC, and continued in that post for over thirty years. She maintained continuing connections with Welsh folklorists, musicians, and cultural activists; she was a champion for the retention of the Welsh language (translating a number of excerpts of Afshak epic poetry into Welsh, and the Mabinogion of her family tradition into Bassandan) . She was likewise an inspiring elder figure for the Welsh folklore revival of 1980s. The “Ifans Lectures” at H-LC, a series founded and endowed by her, are still a central forum for investigating and fostering the nexus of research, creative activity, pedagogy, and cultural advocacy, and the “Ifans Collection” of rare and historical manuscripts is a cornerstone of the Conservatory’s library.

[1] “Only someone without ears would say otherwise.”
[2] NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/arts/music/29kapl.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Eldarnen in Sámi traditional dress
Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen
a/k/a “Inari” (b1944?); voice, dance, violin; indigenous- and animal-rights activist; vernacular ecologist; translator.

Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen a/k/a “Inari” (b1944?); voice, dance, violin; indigenous- and animal-rights activist; vernacular ecologist; translator. Born of Karelian ancestry in the Sámiid Ruovttuguovlu (“Sámi Homeland”), in northeastern Finland; her “map of Arctic consciousness” is an extraordinarily sophisticated document of the cultural, spiritual, and cognitive geographies of shamanic traditional culture.

From a family of hunters and trappers; her great-grandfather Arhippa Perttunen (1769-1841) was one of the oral-tradition rune-singers who provided the material for 19th century transcriptions of the epic Kalevala; another great-grandfather was a shaman and native healer, widely believed to be a shape-shifter (e.g., capable of taking on animal form). Her father (b1903) was known as Tapio “the rough-furred one” (Tapio Karhea), and was believed to be able to talk to bears; as with the Ainu of northern Japan, among the Sámi bears were not only hunted for meat but also respected as totem animals. Traditional animist and shamanic belief held that to ritually hunt and kill a bear (Karhunpeijaiset) was a means of liberating a god from his fleshly prison; Raakeli’s father and uncles were widely respected for their ability to “sense,” track, trap, and bring down Karhu, sometimes running cross-country in snowshoes with their hunting dogs on the scent.

During the Winter War (Talvisota) of 1939-40, the Karhea clan, who had previously participated in the anti-Soviet East Karelian Uprising in the 1920s, fought in the resistance against the Soviet invasion. Russian forces so massively outnumbered Finland’s defenders that long-term resistance was impossible; nevertheless, veterans of the Russian 7th Army later spoke of the terror of night-time winter assaults by “the red-eyed commandos” (Krasnyye glaza kommandos) including the Karheas, of the “unearthly howling” they emitted (possibly the animist vocal technique called “joiking”), and of the Soviet tank-crews and patrols found dead in the snow-bound woods, surrounded by gigantic bear-prints.

After a treaty was signed between Stalin and a puppet government, Finland continued as non-combatant de facto ally of Germany, but a significant portion of the Army’s North Finland Group fought on after the armistice; the Karhea clan was attached to this force as it transitioned to guerrilla and sabotage activities against the retreating Germans in the Lapland War of 1944-45. Raakeli was born to Tapio Karhea and Nella Perttunen (b1923) in a secret camp deep in the Lutontie Forest in May 1944; Perttunen had continued to march, ski, and fight into the second trimester.

Atypically among the combatants of the NFG, both parents survived and, also atypically, resisted the general population’s swift transition to an urbanizing and industrializing economy. Instead, the Karhea clan were early proponents of biodiversity, animal rights, and the preservation of undeveloped areas, most particularly as surveyors, trail-cutters, and guides in the creation of the Lemmenjoki National Park (Leammi álbmotmeahcci) in 1956. As a child, Raakeli (nicknamed “Tinuviel” by her father, a friend and correspondent of J.R.R. Tolkien) showed early musical and linguistic capacities, probably enhanced by the breadth and diversity of her family’s experience and acquaintance, and possibly in addition as a result of the clan’s complex genetic heritage.

Met Robin Dobar Momak, professor of ethnomusicology at Ballyizget’s Középiskolában a Művészet (“High School for the Arts”), in early 1961, when she accompanied her father on a visit to Helsinki, where he was arguing on behalf of national parks and preservation to a committee of the forming European Free Trade Association. Momak, as an advocate for similar parks & preservation initiatives in Bassanda, was present as an observer, and was struck by the 17-year-old’s precocious intelligence and articulate perspicacity in “speaking as one of the Earth’s Peoples.” Momak offered to arrange for Raakeli’s fees-paid attendance at the Hochschule, and for her opportunity to join the violin studio of BNRO concert-mistress Terésa-Marie Szabo. Following graduation, she stayed on in Ballyizget, continuing in Madame Szabo’s studio, attending University lectures, playing the occasional café or theater gig, and developing a network of friends amongst the hiking and trekking community. These circles eventually overlapped with and grew into the nascent Bassandan hippie movement, which sought to expand the range of expressive arts permitted by the commissars, and to link up with social and political progressives in the West. Such activities, though initially constrained by the vastly heightened tensions of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, accelerated in the period 1963-66; by the latter date, she was living an urban commune on the Ballyizget waterfront.

During Bassanda’s spring thaw in April 1967, she was one of the first party of communards who joined Robin Dobar Momak in buying alpine land north of Ballyizget; this was the origin of Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ (“The Wood-Elves’ Commune). While Momak was the community’s leader, guiding social and agricultural organization; Eldarnen was highly respected by commune members, particularly for her sensitivity to weather and climate, as well as her remarkable capacities for foraging: she was said to possess an almost supernatural ability to locate edible mushrooms (including the rare and highly-treasured Bassandan truffle she called Göbələk), berries, and, particularly, wild honey. As the Commune expanded and diversified its income streams, one of its first and most successful products was Raakeli Legszebb Vadvirág Méz, a wildflower honey much prized by Ballyizget chefs which, subjected to punitive export duties, was sometimes smuggled by “foodies” to the West.[1]

She mentored Electric Trees front-woman Polli Kilotona (b1952) when that teenaged street urchin joined the band at age 14 as vocalist; also appearing as violinist on the first Trees single (Svetlost Kroz Lišće / Svi Mi Treba Da Volimo Jedan Drugoga), where her electric fiddle break, incorporating the traditional Finnish tune Ievan Polkka, is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the development of Bassandan folk-rock.[2] In later years, upon occasion when the Orchestra appeared in Ballyizget, Eldarnen and Polli Kilotona would join Madame Szabo—three generations of BNRO/ESO violinists—for Yezget-Bey’s titanic orchestral version of Lišće, which was widely credited with the capacity to perform mass transformation of consciousness. Audiences, both in Bassanda and the West, described experiences of shared group hallucination—of trees, forests, constellations, animals floating in the sky—during performances of this arrangement. At such moments, certain band members, among them Elzbieta Purves, Yakub Sanjo D’Aunai, and Eldarnen herself, seemed to change shape and demeanor. Additionally, there are accounts of certain performances during which Raakeli would break spontaneously into joiking, invoking the spirits of animals and of the ancestors; as with the shamanic dancing of Морган and Kaciaryna Ŭitmena, this was an essential but quasi-clandestine part of the band’s expressive (and political) arsenal.

With Madame Bronislava Nijinska, Madame Teresa-Marie Szabo, Lisle Goncharov/Juno Eclipse, and Cifani Dhoma, a noted “animal-whisperer” and a very active member of the Bassandan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA). Later in life, between ESO tours she served on staff of Madame Nijinska’s Libertas Domum (Freedom Farm), a no-kill permanent-residence facility for injured or orphaned animals on the outskirts of Ballyizget.

An expressive player and singer, she was also a remarkable, intuitive dancer and, when dancing, displayed ability to enter quasi-shamanistic trance with relative ease: a non-verbal “flow” state in which she sometimes sang or recited quite ancient Karelian songs and ritual texts; after such experiences, she typically did not recall this conduct. As is common with the peoples of the circum-Polar sub-Arctic, she ended toward vivacity and nocturnal energy in the very long days and short nights of the summer months, contrasted to quietness and frequent napping in the winter.

As a result, especially in the post-Soviet ESO era, she preferred to join the Never-Ending Tour on the summer festival circuit in the West, and to winter at Nijinska’s Domum in Bassanda, caring for animals and sleeping a great deal. During these winter residencies, in cases of particular trauma—especially formerly-abused circus or draft animals—Madame Nijinska would call upon Eldarnen’s healing capacities. In such circumstances, she would sometimes sleep overnights in the animal’s presence—not only with equines and bovines, but even more hazardously, with injured and thus potentially dangerous canines, ursines, and primates. Nijinska insisted that “what would be madness for another is safety for Raakeli—and for the poor sufferers.” She likewise insisted that Eldarnen should be left strictly alone on such nights, clearing the building of all other personnel, and saying, cryptically “It is safe for Raakeli—but she wouldn’t be safe for any of us.” Certainly she bonded closely with animals both within and beyond the boundaries of the Libertas Domum properties. It was alleged that such healing sessions might have exploited her shape-shifting capacities, but Nijinska, Szabo, Goncharov, and Dhoma were tight-lipped mother lions in their defense of the young woman they called “Little Cub.”

[Photo caption: Raakeli Ursa Tinúviel Eldarnen in Karelian traditional dress]

[1] Raakeli’s Finest Wildflower Honey

[2] “Light Through the Leaves” / “We Should All Love One Another”: Ievan Polkka

Vilyum Balandjeor

Commendatore (ret.), Royal Bassandan Navy (landlocked)

[photo caption: Commendatore Vilyum Balandjeor confers the "Order of the Shard" on a disguised General, watched by Molotov c1935. This image, itself significantly manipulated by Soviet photo re-touchers, was the source of an iconic image of Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, who was later removed from the image after having been purged and executed.]

Royal Order of the Garter, former

Vilyum Balandjeor was born in Splrmnst in the 1880s (exact date unclear). He showed an early genius not only for music but also organization. At the tender age of eight years old he is said to have organized the first jogging bagpipe band in history, the Bassandan Bagpipe Blorzstjaszim, and a willingness to deal with the complex group personality disorders elicited by massed back-pressure.[1] In spite of the young Balandjeor’s love for and commitment to running, he eventually had to concede that it was not the ideal activity to combine with bagpipe playing.[2]

Vilyum’s father Gerlandagjeor, titular head of the Bassandan Ethnographic Service from 1893-1906, was one of the first high profile Bassandans to own a western style bicycle, on which he would make his rounds from one field research location to another; the great Irish folklorist Seamus Ennis was to say, years later, that he adopted from him the idea of bicycling as a fundamental collecting technique. It may be that Gerlandagjeor, an early scion of the Ballyizget Polar Bear Club (of which Žaklin Paulu was later patroness), was likewise the source of Ennis’s penchant for swimming in the open ocean in all seasons.[3] Vilyum learned to ride from his father and when one of the jogging bagpipers (sans incisors) suggested that they ride bicycles instead, he convinced his father to have the Ethnographic Service[4] order two dozen of Samuels’ patent 1869 hand-cranked Velocipedes (available for a song from the receivers of Samuels’ bankruptcy).[5] These were adapted from hand-crank to pedal drive by the Bassandan Royal Corps of Engineers, and a special steering mechanism was devised that allowed cycle-pipers to steer by leaning from side to side rather than turning the front wheel.

One of Samuel’s hand-cranked velocipedes, (Scientific American, March 27th, 1869)

This, then, is the actual origin of what would become, once it had proved itself and the Bassandan military decided to co-opt it, the Bassandan Bicycle and Bagpipe Corps. The military would later do away with the bagpipes in favor of more lethal weaponry, mounting twin Maxim guns on the bicycle with heavy plate armour in front of the rider/shooter, and of course the later use of tandems and folding bicycles as part of Bassanda commando tactics in both First and Second World Wars.[6]

Soon after inventing the world’s first mobile bagpipe band Vilyum, now a teenager, was preparing to enter the Bassandan Royal Conservatory as a cornet player when he was called up for military service in the build up to the Tajik Emergency (1903-04), which was called “Operation Khevsoor Shield” in the Bassandan press. Fully aware of the increasing lethality of the modern battlefield, Gerlandagjeor Balandjeor, using connections available to him through the Ethnographic Service, procured an audience with the Bassandan Draft Board’s executive director, an old school chum. Gerlandagjeor said to his friend “My boy just wants to play the cornet” but the old chum, having lost most of his hearing due to excessive exposure to Imperial sound cannon, heard this as a reference to the post “cavalry cornet” (the standard-bearer who rode at the head of a troop), and Vilyum was assigned to the Bassandan cavalry corps. Fortunately, during the Tajik Emergency (precipitated by Russian Czarist incursion into west-Central Asia), the Bassandan gorracharra (irregular) cavalry declined to serve under officers they had previously encountered as members of the Bassanda Young Men's Pennyfarthing Expedition Club (a byword for privileged aristocratic adolescence), and were disbanded.[7] In turn, a commission was finally procured for Vilyum in the Bassandan Royal Navy, which, the nation being landlocked, secured his safety for the duration of the hostilities.[8]

[1] Bassandan for “bullador,” a hybrid Bull Dog/Labrador Retriever.
[2] A spike in front teeth injuries in the records of the Royal Bassandan Universal Health Service attests to this.
[3] See ESO Personnel files, elsewhere in the Archive.
[4] See Gerlandagjeor Balandjeor, On His Majesty’s Ethnographic Service (Splrmnst: Splortnick y Hijos, 1921).
[5] According to an article in Scientific American (March 27th, 1869, p.200) these velocipedes were an improvement: “An objection strenuously urged by physicians against the velocipedes, now so popular, which are driven by the feet, is that the labor demanded of the lower limbs, tends to produce hernia, or rupture.”
[6] See ESO Gallery.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Sikh_War.
[8] Balandjeor, Service, p.1453.

Antanas Kvainauškas c1952,
from undeveloped Kodachrome reel by
Thorvaldur Ragnarsson
Antanas Kvainauškas
(b 1930) clarinet, chalumeau, recorder, tárogató

Lithuanian/Irish/Prussian

Born in the former fishing village of Nida, Lithuania on the Curonian Lagoon, to parents who were faculty members at the Kunstakademie Konigsberg school of painting.

Father Alexei a descendent of Prussian settlers who had ruled the Monastic State since the 14th century. One Alsatian ancestor, Andreas Kampfherr, had been a noted player of the chalumeau in 17th century Paris, frequently hired to provide “pastoral touches” in the ballets staged by Lully for the court of the Sun King. Mother Aislinn Ó Cathail, of Knocknagree Co. Kerry, had been a member of Maud Gonne’s Cumann na mBan ( the women’s auxiliary to the Irish Republican Army), and at the age of 17 had carried weapons to imprisoned soldiers in the 1921 Kilmanhaim Jailbreak. Disgusted by Eamon DeValera’s repudiation of women’s rights and socialist reforms after he came to power with Fianna Fáil in the late ‘20s, she left Ireland entirely, her observations of Mussolini’s Italian fascism and Hitler’s rise to power convincing her that another war was coming. She met Alexei Kvainauškas on a visit to the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdansk) in 1929.

Antanas’s Lithuanian birthplace, quite close to the border with Russia, explains his particularly high familiarity with Russian language, cuisine, and experimental music, although his family were outspoken critics of Soviet authoritarianism and expansionism. Nida was annexed by the Germans in 1939 as a spa and vacation space for Nazi officers, including most notoriously Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goring. The same function continued after the Soviets re-occupied Lithuania in 1940 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the community remained a popular vacation destination for high-ranking Soviet officials. After the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Baltic states were hotly-contested territories and military and paramilitary actions laid waste to much of the countryside. In 1942, when Antanas was 8, his parents fled Nida by fishing boat for Hamburg, then travelling via clandestine tramp steamer to Hull in the U.K. An uncle for whom he was named, Gregor Antanas Kvainauškas, remained behind and fought with the miško broliai (“The Forest Brothers”), bands of partisans resisting the Soviet occupation—this resistance continued for a number of years after 1945 and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Indeed, as late as 1952, small anti-Soviet bands were still active as “The Union of Lithuania Freedom Fighters.”

He was a relative of the martyred American Izabelė Vilimaitė, a medical student who had come from the US in 1932, and served as a combat medic for the partisans, before she was eventually captured, interrogated, and murdered by the KGB. This very direct loss probably spurred Antantas’s hatred of the Soviet commissars

Having been raised in the reed instrument tradition of the chalumeau and the tárogató (Lithuanian folk clarinet), he was of sufficient youthful promise that he won a full scholarship to the Leningrad Conservatory (Ленинградская консерватория), in 1949, where he had a brief and extremely unsatisfactory experience with the esteemed professor of clarinet Ilia Vasilievich Karugov. Years later Antanas—who possessed a particularly sardonic wit—punned Kad kvailas Rusijos rate gryno nežinojo, kas jis buvo, kaip į (“that stupid Russian didn’t know what he was getting into”). Transferred to Ballyizget, where he met Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, the Icelandic multi-instrumentalist who had won a “genius” scholarship to the State Conservatory at the age of 15 (of Thorvaldur, Antanas would later say, sardonically, “well, he’s got to be a savant at something, because he bloody well surely is idiotas!”)

At the height of Soviet post-war authoritarianism, Thorvaldur Ragnarsson played the patriotic fanfare Наша Красивая Родина (“Our Beautiful Homeland”), for the Spring 1947 graduation exercises at Ballyizget’s “Glorious Marxist Revolution’s People’s Bassandan Nationalist Conservatorium.” Unknown to the commissars, the student body were led by Antanas in a sotto voce rendition of the coded contrafact words “Nошел на хуй, вы чертовски фашистов” (“Fuck you, you fucking fascists”).

The bickering of Kvainauškas and Ragnarsson eventually became a part of BNRO comic myth—their within-the-section clashes sometimes being stoked by the leading questions and teasing “he said / he said” provocations of Морган and Kaciaryna Ŭitmena—but they were nevertheless firm friends and allies. The rest of the Band learned, over the years, that the only way to silence their chatter, at times, was to chant in unison, in Icelandic, Leggja það, þú fáránlegt lunatikai! (“Shut it, you ridiculous lunatics!”). Yezget Nas1lsinez recognized this unique dynamic in his “Sibling Rivalry Double Concerto for Bickering Reeds,” scored for accordion and tárogató soloists and orchestra, whose clashing textures, soli and key areas do not conceal a deep empathy and eventual reconciliation in a majestic bitonal theme to the rhythm of that same affectionate insult, Leggja það…

Like a number of other BNRO members, in later years—and in Antanas’s case, even into the 1990s—he held a post at the rechristened Habjar-Lawrence Conservatorium and was a much-beloved senior professor. He was also instrumental in the post-Soviet “revival” of older, oral-tradition, and pre-literate Bassandan musical genres, having met Thomas Binkley of Der Studio der Fruehen Musik, a close friend of Yezget-Bey, during that group’s 1960s Eastern tours. The first editions of Bassandan troubadour songs, which show the influence of Germanic, Slavic, Magyar, Turkish, Greek and Persian poetic traditions, were collected and annotated by Conservatorium students working under his direction and according to paleographic strictures he laid down. He was likewise an insistent advocate for not only the collection & publication but also the performance of older musics.

In addition to his teaching, touring, and scholarly activities, in later years he was a partner in a restaurant in Ballyizget’s theatrical district, “Brother Antonius’s”, which featured East Asian, North European, and local cuisine, and was much favored by Bassandan artists and musicians, not least because of its lenient billing policies and night-owl’s hours: 11pm-7am. On a given evening, especially in the capitol’s short summer nights, the shutters at Antony’s would come down around 10:30 as the wait-staff—many of them aspiring artists in their own right—greeted the waiting regulars. Dancers & actors after performances, painters & poets refueling after days in the studio, moonlighting politicians seeking creative ideas, and the occasional secret agent or journalist, would congregate to eat, drink, talk, boast and collaborate until dawn.

Eventually, the restaurant became a favored site for Kansas City-style “breakfast dances,” at which the teenaged Lyov Varushkin (later of the Electric Trees), and BNRO personnel Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta (voice/flute), Krzysztof Arczewski (bass), Rashkha Boenavida (voice/trumpet/piano), Jamey O Laoghaire (percussion), Részeg Vagyok (percussion), and Zoya Căruțaș (saxophone), among others, would jam with visiting Western jazzmen, while Mississippi Steve Stokes sang Delta blues and hillbilly songs at the intervals . Even after 1985, when the BNRO (with Antanas & Thorvaldir in tow) defected at Talinn, “Brother’s” remained open, and in 1988, with the continued demise of Cold War-era restrictions on travel, the rechristened Elegant Savages Orchestra, after a triumphant return to Habjar-Smythe Concert Hall, played an after-party at the restaurant that went on for three days.

Hanging over the legendary bar at “Brother’s”, hand-carved from southern jungle rainforest teak; alongside hundreds of photos, postcards, bumper stickers, 45s, and banknotes and coins from around the world, is a small, framed, faded scrap of score paper from a Soviet-era edition, which reads (in translation): “Sibling Rivalry: Double Concert for Bickering Reeds; cello, tarogato, accordion; Closing Theme,” and which is signed, in Yezget-Bey’s distinctive block capitals, “Nas1lsinez”.

Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta, photographed
circa 1965, departures lounge, Naha Airport,
about to board the long multi-leg
flight Okinawa—Taipei—Bangkok— Bombay,
en route to rejoin the BNRO at Ballyizget.
Astrid Mala’ika Hjärta
(flute, voice, dance, electronics)

b 1935, of mixed Okinawan/Native American/African-American/Russian extraction.

Father was William Henry Harrison Brennan (1900-72), African American US musician (saxophone), born in Louisiana of Creole/Cherokee parents and relocated to New York City to join James Reese Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra. When Europe’s band enlisted en masse in 1917, as the 369th Harlem Regiment “Hellfighters” band, Brennan went with them and served with distinction on the Western Front. Astrid’s maternal grandfather, Count Nikolai Hjärta (born St Petersburg 1861), was a member of the Russian nobility who served as a colonial administrator and mercenary commander in West Africa (notably the British colonies of Gold Coast and Nigeria, as well as Cote d’Ivoire) between c1885-1907. The Count he married a Yoruba princess and their daughter, Miriam Kuti, Astrid’s mother, was born in Paris in 1911.

After Europe’s death in Harlem in 1919, Brennan did some work in the Caribbean as both radioman and musician on ships owned by Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line. However, following Garvey’s arrest in 1922 on corruption charges trumped up by J. Edgar Hoover, and the collapse of the Line, Brennan returned to Paris, where he became a leader of the African-American expatriate community, worked with Josephine Baker and Sidhey Bechet, and was part of the circle around Bricktop’s Club in Montmartre. Yezget Nas1lsinez was an informal member of Nadia Boulanger’s composition studio in the mid-‘20s, the same period when Algeria Main-Smith was serving as Bassandan and Central Asian specialist (and anonymous patron) for the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. Likewise, Bronislava Nijinska, the dancer Celeste Roullet, and the Breton mother of saxophonist Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, were participants in Parisian arts society at this time. Miriam Kuti met W.H.H. Brennan at a surrealist dance performance in 1932, and their eldest daughter was born three years later.

Astrid herself grew up in a trans-Atlantic context, as W.H.H. Brennan’s work in music and politics took him to various postings in both Europe and the coast of west Africa. There were also continuing journeys to family connections in the Caribbean, particularly Costa Rica, Cuba, and Jamaica, and occasional visits to her father’s relatives and old associates in New York. Astrid was thus exposed to the artists and writers of the late Harlem Renaissance, and to the rise of bebop in the 1940s. It was there that the child met the remarkable jazz vocalist and “scat-singer” Slim Gaillard (1916?-91), who played guitar and piano, and spoke, composed, and sang in eight languages, including Yiddish and Arabic.

She was herself a noted wordsmith, having learned both “The Dozens” (a venerable African-American tradition of rhyming insult) from her father and the Nigerian childrens’ game Ikocha Nkocha from her mother. In later decades, Astrid was the BNRO’s “designated hitter” on the infrequent occasions when the band was troubled with intrusive audience members or interviewers, being quick-witted and accomplished at insult in nearly as many languages as Slim Gaillard (she also developed a remarkably sophisticated and scatological vocabulary in American Sign Language for the same purpose).

Brennan re-enlisted in the US Army in 1941—serving mostly on the trans-Atlantic oil runs from Trinidad to Nigeria to England—and post-War was reassigned to Okinawa as part of the US Occupation, his family accompanying him and living at Kadena Air Base. Astrid, as a teenager, may have met the violinist/dancer/singer Federika Rozkov a/k/a Ferikarohasu of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters and BNRO (see elsewhere in the Personnel files) in Okinawa in 1949, during the latter’s travels by motorbike in the Archipelago with Ashitaka Emishi. “Fedi” was probably the connection for communication between the Brennan family and the Ballyizget offices of the BNRO, and when Astrid first traveled there as a teenager, it was as a member of the “summers program” (running approximately January – March, in Bassanda’s “false summer”) offered by the Bassanda Youth Orchestra.

She graduated from the BYO into the BNRO—as had previously Jakov Redžinald, Etxaberri le Gwo (possibly a distant cousin through shared Creole relations), and the Srcetovredi Brothers—around 1954, when post-Stalin changes were already causing shifts in the Orchestra’s personnel. Over the next several years, some members, including Ferikarohasu, Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk, and Binyamin Biraz Ouiz would rotate out of the Band, some departing for the West, some taking teaching posts at the Ballyizget People’s Conservatorium, and others whose movements are undocumented (certainly Mississippi Stokes continued his wandering ways, and Jamey Mac O Laoghaire is rumored to have played a season, under a pseudonym, for the newly-relocated San Francisco Giants in 1961). Nevertheless, there was a brief overlap in the winds section of Antanas Kvainauškas, Zoya Carutis, Chaya Malirolink, and Astrid herself; aficionados of the “post-‘52” band often remarked upon the 1954-55 winds section’s unique sound, much like that of the Ellington reeds section of the 1940s.

Electrical boffin: when she entered the Bassanda orbit in late 1954, she apprenticed in electronics with “Rashka” (Rahmani Boenavida), and the resulting recordings, a cornerstone of Archival scholarship, is literally thousands of hours of audio, capturing concerts, rehearsals, informal jam sessions, and even conversations, braggadocio, and tall tales on the band’s succession of Latvian “Kuban” tour busses, between 1956-89. Sadly, there are no high-quality studio recordings of the classic 1952 lineup, but a very large body of on-site and concert recordings were made using a wide variety of formats. They are a treasure trove of musicological insight regarding the evolution of the band’s sound and Yezget Bey’s musical concept.

The material was captured using everything from wire to acetate to paper “V-Discs” to ¼-inch magnetic tape to multi-track magnetic 2-inch to an early version of Digital Audio Tape: introduced in the West in 1987 by Sony, an earlier version had been developed by Rashka and Astrid as early as 1970, using recycled 8-track tapes and a succession of hand-rebuilt Lear Jet tape machines. On cross-border tours into Central Europe from Bassanda, Rashka and Astrid would scour the junk shops and auto-salvage yards of Vienna, Frankfurt, and Hamburg for discarded 8-track machines which could be “hot-rodded” to serve the recordings regimen. For years after, and indeed all the way into the1990s, “Rashtrid” (e.g., “Rashka”/”Astrid”) 8-track machines were prized by ethnographers in the field and political activists in the streets for their audio fidelity, simplicity of design and repair, and indestructability).

Though not planned for such usages at the time, these clandestine and on-site recordings, by Rashka, Astrid, and their apprentices—some of them street urchins who were recruited into the recording crew as young as age 9—were the source of the treasured, unlabeled “Mystery Discs” passed hand-to-hand by collectors in the 1960s West. Years later, as the contents of the first LP reissues of BNRO material (Suleiman’s Rock/1971; Youdou/Voodoo/1973; and the double-disc Live from the Rift Valley/1975), the crew’s recordings provided an important first entrée for the BNRO into Western touring circles in the post-glasnost era, and a small window into the sprawling, colorful, instinctive/intuitive sound of the ‘60s Band live.

Astrid herself, like Ferikarohasu, was an invaluable resource for the touring band in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: with the expansion of touring by US musicians sponsored by the State Department, which activities we now know were largely funded and largely directed, clandestinely, by the CIA, groups like the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band toured widely in East and Southeast Asia; the Ellington Far East Suite (released 1966) dates from this same decade and initiative. There was some pushback by Soviet satellites’ arts commissars, though—as was typical with arts diktats in the Eastern Bloc—there was a significant gap between mandated policy and actual execution, and some satellites’ ensembles, like the BNRO, did tour eastward.

Along with Fedi (before ’58, when Ferikarohasu mysteriously departed the Band at Sofia; see elsewhere in the Correspondence) and Śamū'ēla “Princess” Jaṅgalī, Astrid’s familiarity with East Asian post-War culture made certain elements of Japanese folkways and foodways part of the Band’s social community: Mississippi Steve Stokes and Žaklin Paulu both swore by Okinawan Awamori rice whiskey, for example (though arguing over whether the liquor was better employed medicinally or for starting cold engines), and the Srcetovredi Brothers, Jakov Redžinald, and the other young males of the band fought over Astrid’s kamaboko (fish cake) and Tebichi soba (noodles with pigs’ feet). Madame Szabo herself had a version of Hungarian Liptai túró (cheese spread) which was given additional fire through the inclusion of Korean kōrēgūsu (pepper sauce), and which was entirely impervious to mold or spoilage.

Much-discussed but (seemingly) never brought to fruition was the publication, post ’86, of a Bassandan Peoples’ Liberation Samizdat Cookbook, in which BNRO recipes for “Astrid’s soba with pigs’ feet,” “Madame Szabo’s Firey Liptai Túró,” “Rashka’s Shrimp & Grits,” “Jackson’s Psychoactive Mushroom Momos,” and many other favorites would have been collected (the “samizdat” appellation resulted from the fact that numerous BNRO recipes included ingredients deemed by the commissars to reflect “decadent western elitist culinary influences inconsistent with Socialist Realist flavor ideals”). Though the proposed collection never saw publication, certainly the recipes—many of them variants on regional and ethnic dishes adapted for alternate ingredients or on-the-road touring preparation and preservation—were a treasured part of the BNRO’s oral culture. And the Band’s eclectic repertoire also lives on in the wild and delicious diversity of the 21st century’s Ballyizget food-truck scene, of which globe-trotting carnivore and chef Anthony Bourdain eventually said “OK, OK, I give—you’re right that we shouldn’t kill animals, and I guess I was an asshole to say vegetarian food can’t taste good.”

Astrid played with the BNRO steadily from ’54 for almost ten years, though her other professional and personal opportunities in the latter part of that decade increased the frequency of her absences. In the 1960s, she returned to the Okinawan Archipelago as a member of the proto-hippie experimental community “The Tribe”, founded by Gary Snyder and Nanao Sasake, at Suwanose-jima. On the island she built the first hand-wound crystal radio that let Tribe members, who lived a near-Stone-Age lifestyle of fishing and hunting/gathering, communicate with the freighter which brought supplies once every two weeks, except when prevented by storms in the East China Sea.

In later middle age, while continuing her residency as music teacher and record producer in the Okinawan archipelago, she made annual summertime visits to Ballyizget, where she would give master-classes in flute and recording, dish up nostalgic Southeast Asian feasts for band alumni & families, and assist in the cataloging of archival recordings, a task for which her encyclopedic linguistic capacities and 35-year history with the BNRO / ESO uniquely suited her. Though repeatedly invited to take up permanent residence, she would laugh and say “I love this place. But I can’t take the cold. I’ll see you next summer.”

Lisle Goncharov (a/k/a "Leia," "Leslie,"
"Lester," "Juno Eclipse," "Steela Gerrera") as Ariel,
The Tempest, Ballyizget, 1962
Lisle Goncharov

a/k/a Leia, Leslie, Lester, Juno Eclipse, Steela Gerrera

Born 1932 in the tiny fishing town Ciudad del Carmen in the Mexican state of Campeche. As the town was only accessible by water, she became expert with small boats, especially the ferries called “pangas.” Family may have been related to the pirate clans that were ejected from the town in 1717 by Spanish imperial forces, but later returned, often intermarrying with local indigenous peoples and/or escaped slaves from elsewhere in the Caribbean—this may also have led to contact with the Barbadian privateers who plied the Gulf and the South Atlantic, and who were Etxaberri le Gwo’s mother’s people. Lisle thus had a particular intimate, direct, and instinctive connection with the folkloric and sacred musics and dance of the Spanish Caribbean: Belize, Honduras, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were all touchstones for her dance vocabulary.

Her family had been involved in Chicano political activism in San Antonio ever since 1919—several cousins and uncles had worked as reporters for La Prensa—and she inherited a rich tradition of cultural activism on her mother’s side as well. The Great Depression struck San Antonio’s Latino community especially strongly, and many families either split up to find work, or sent some members, especially children, back across the border to stay with aging elder relatives. This “re-migration” significantly impeded educational and career opportunities for an entire generation.

Lisle herself was born in Campeche but was living with extended family in San Antonio by 1945—in the wake of the War’s ending, the demobilization of soldiers and sailors provided many opportunities for service workers and leisure industry. At the age of 13 she was working as a bicycle messenger in that booming city (an avid cyclist, in the 1960s she served as spokeswoman for the Bassandan Bicycle Trekking Consortium, the peacetime outgrowth of the WWII-era Bicycle Corps; a favorite promotional poster showed Lisle astride a vintage Dejouannet Randonneuse—an iconic image which graced the bedroom walls of many Bassandan teens).

At the age of 16 she took work as a waitress and dish-washer on cruise ships out of Galveston; in that same year of 1948, she may have met pianist/trumpeter Rahmani Boenavida aboard the NOLA-based steamer that took them to Havana, where Boenavida met Celeste Roullet. If Lisle and Rahmani were traveling together, that would account for the sudden discovery, by Madame Roullet, of Lisle’s remarkable, intuitive talent, dancing in the rum shops and open-air dances of the Cuban capitol.

She thus encountered the fields of folkloric and modern dance only in her teens, but an intuitive, instinctive, unself-consciousness marked her movement vocabulary, and she was a natural clown, especially effective at comic or supernatural roles: her Ariel in the 1961 Ballyizget production of The Tempest—a black-comedic take on the play, employing a setting which imagined Caliban’s island as a camp in the Soviet gulag, was described by the Parisian dance critic Alexandre Dumas Cochon as “a comic sprite in combat boots.” Her status as a beloved Shakespearian clown in Bassanda may also proceed, in part, from her ability to integrate tumbling and acrobatic skills she learned through academic study of various Mjekësia Trego (“Medicine Show”) companies, where she may also have met Kristina Olenev. On the other hand, it may be that Oleneva and Lisle had met previously somewhere in the New World—possibly Mexico City—in the years before Kariss appeared in Ballyizget in 1943, when Lisle would still have been a child.

Took part in 1948 in a small revolution against the vestigial colonial class on an island in the Caribbean called Naboo, having become embroiled in this conflict after stowing away on a tramp steamer carrying sugar cane, disguised as a cabin boy, “Lester Gomez.” Though the rebellion was defeated in the short term, political change precipitated by that failed revolution eventually led to the withdrawal of the colonialists and the foundation of democratic government on Naboo. Though still only a teenager, “Lester” became an iconic hero of the revolution, with popular prints commemorating the only ship-to-ship action in the conflict, when, aboard a converted oyster boat rechristened La Raza, she led the assault attempting to liberate Naboo’s port city of Theed, and danced her own “Rebel’s Hornpipe” on the foredeck as La Raza steamed into the bay and the cannon thundered over her head.

In the wake of that failed revolution, she changed her name again, and continued her wandering East, entering the Mediterranean on cruise ships as “bus boy” and occasional novelty dancer, at age 19, as “Juno Eclipse” (this pseudonym’s origins are not known). She thus appears very suddenly in the BNRO orbit, in early 1952, when she arrived in Ballyizget with a medicine show returning to the capitol, where she renewed acquaintances with Raksha and Kariss and was introduced by them into the circle around Nas1lsinez, Nijinska, and the preparations of the Eagle's Heart Sisters for the final, first performance of “Xlbt. Op. 16”

A devoutly spiritual person, she found particular expression of her ethical beliefs through her dedication to compassionate treatment of children, the elderly, and animals. With Madame Bronislava Nijinska, Madame Teresa-Marie Szabo, and Cifani Dhoma, a noted “animal-whisperer” and a very active member of the Bassandan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA). She was seldom without a “family” of at least 3 mongrel dogs, which she rescued from the streets of poor cities, housed on a small working farm on the outskirts of Ballyizget, and for which she facilitated adoption; as a result, the “no-kill” “rescue” animal shelter was a fixture in most Bassandan towns literally decades before this kinder innovation was common across Europe.

Remarkable seamstress: her needlework was an essential part of the BNRO’s touring apparatus. She was particularly adept at crafting articles of clothing with concealed pockets and compartments for purposes of smuggling small objects across borders: scores, manuscripts, samizdat recordings, and the unique and inimitable hand-wound “Habjar-sonic” electric bouzouki pickups. These were prized by players around the world but only available through the clandestine Bassandan women’s cottage industries: they used ferrite gleaned from meteorite strikes in the northern Bassandan Alps, and hand-drawn copper wire created with a secret annealing process. The Central Committee closely controlled access to this technology, but certain adventurous (or avaricious) western players managed to find ways to get them: Lisle was able to design and create garments (especially surplus Red Army duffle coats carefully retailored to provide copious secret compartments for such activity).

The balance of her career was spent as choreographer and professor of dance at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget, where she taught generations of young students, maintained contact with Kristina Olenev and (until her death in 1972) Madame Nijinska, and from which she passed-on the insights of a lifetime’s experience in the expressive kinesthetic arts.

A small copper plaque over the entrance to the largest of the dance classrooms at the HLC reads “Thank you, Miss Lester—for everything.”

Kelemen Misha Forsàidh demonstrates
the large Bassandan frame-drum and fighting-saucer
(edged with blades and reserved for direct
infantry assault on fortifications),
Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, c1972
Kelemen Misha Forsàidh
b c1882, Throbshire Isle

Sometime Percussionist, Bassanda Freedom Fighter, Adjunct Faculty at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory

[the following excerpted from the forthcoming A Line in the Sand: Biographies from the Bassandan Resistance (ed. Homer St John with S. Jefferson Winesap, Proceedings of the 1988 “What Comes Next? The post-Soviet nation” conference, Ballyizget; reprint Miskatonic University Press 2016]

KMF’s Father was a scientist of Irish and Teutonic lineage studying Throbshire Isle’s unique geology, who in the course of his fieldwork married a local woman of Swedish and Galician decent, the couple later settling in a modest-sized town on the outskirts of Droole-On-Xthlan. KMF’s childhood on the island appears to have been rather unremarkable save for an interest in music developed from a young age. KMF’s closest childhood friend on Throbshire Isle was the rambunctious Armenia Main-Smythe.1

Throughout his youth, KMF displayed a strong affinity for the sea. As a result, he departed home around the age of ten to join his maternal grandfather Ernst Manning in service before the mast on the MRTMV2 Rebecca, a three-masted packet that dealt mostly in coffee and tea between Ireland, Throbshire Isle, and the West Indies. Cargo manifests from the ship, still in the possession of the Throbshire Isle Pub,(lic) Library, indicate that the ship traded primarily at ports of call in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, among other locales. KMF’s time aboard ship also put him into contact with sailors, longshoremen, and merchants from India, Indonesia, Arabia, and the Celtic lands.

Coming of age after several years spent at sea, KMF felt he had found his true calling and embarked on a life-long study and assimilation of the musical traditions of his heritage and of the peoples he came in contact with during his adolescence. His facility for languages and gifted ear for musical transcription quickly brought him to the attention endeared him to the Central Committee’s Commandant for the Preservation of the Arts, at which time he was granted permission to travel to Bassanda and engage in a multi-year cataloging of the region’s indigenous martial and percussion traditions.

It is not known when or precisely how Forsàidh first visited Bassanda, but biographical and other information held in the Archive tends to confirm Dr Hazzard-Igniti’s suggestion there was an additional Portal to the Bassandan Rift Valley, paralleling the one in the northernmost Rio Grande Gorge, somewhere on Barra, Uist, or Throbshire Island itself. Electromagnetic imaging in the Outer Hebrides confirms the existence of very peculiar patterns in the earth’s ley lines in this region of the northeast Atlantic (see the biographical sketch of Lewis’s Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie). And his prior experience as a deepwater sailor would suggest a certain competence with small boats and a sensitivity to terrain and weather. He was certainly in Ballyizget by around 1906, as he appears in photographs of the Bohemian Orchestra of Bassanda.

Sometime around 1911, the Central Committee called for the assembly of the Bassandan Yeoman’s Offensive Brigade (BYOB).3 KMF was encouraged to join this endeavor, owing to his training in Kyūdō imparted to him while at sea at the hip of his grandfather.4 KMF’s BYOB unit cross-trained as snipers during the Great War and were embedded deep within the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria for much of the conflict. While held in high regard in the gossip of the homefront, in reality the unit saw no combat action and suffered no casualties, the only combat unit on any side known to exit the war entirely intact.5

In the wake of the war, KMF found himself disillusioned but mostly just cold. He then spent the next several years trekking the southern upland plateau, an inhospitable arid region largely isolated from the rest of Bassanda by a small mountain range whose name is roughly translated as “The Eagle’s Teeth.” Finding the southern heat much more to his liking, he persuaded the local Iliot shamans to allow him to study the traditions surrounding the Kenffán, the large frame drum and fighting saucer indigenous to the area, becoming proficient both in its performance as a musical instrument and as a melee weapon.6

There is a mysterious gap in his biography c1930-70, and no apparent explanation for his appearance in 1970s photos, in which he appears to be considerably younger than the 40-year-old who disappears from the record around 1931. It has been speculated that perhaps the 1970s “Kelemen Misha Forsàidh” is in fact an entirely different person, a premise substantiated by the fact that other members of the Electric Trees (most notably leader singer “Polli Kilotona”) operated under noms de band in order to avoid scrutiny by the Státní Bezpečnost (secret police). It would have been consistent with Trees/BNRO semantic legerdemain, and their snook-cocking impudence toward officialdom, for a new percussionist to take the name of a character out of early 20th century Bassandan folklore. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence to support the idea that entering Bassanda itself was enough to significantly expand or otherwise alter individuals' life span and aging process: Dr Hazzard-Igniti likewise made claims for the impact of the Rift Valley's peculiar magnetic behaviors: see biographical details of Elzbieta Purves, Reszeg Vagyok, and the Colonel and the General themselves.

Between 1971 and 1973, this KMF was intermittently retained as an adjunct faculty member at the Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory8, lecturing on the history of martial music and helming a popular course entitled “Music Beyond the Rift Valley”. During this period he often taught in conjunction with Seamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire and “Reszeg Vagyok” or could be found engaging in various good-natured shenanigans and hijinx with Žaklin Paulu. It has been confirmed that he was present at or possibly involved in some of the BNRO’s performances during their 1975 tour of Nepal and Bhutan. He was not seen again in Ballyizget until the fall of 1976 and by the late 1970s had become a notable member of the revamped “free-jazz” marching band incarnation of the Elicktrynčnyja Drevy, his innovations playing a prominent role in the success of that group’s contributions to the BNRO’s1977 album “Live from the Rift.”

Perhaps KMF’s most important and lasting contribution to the cause of Bassandan Resistance revolves around the flag of the Bassandan Liberation Front currently on display at the Archive. This flag, originally sewed by Madame Szabo while on the road with the People’s Liberation Orchestra in the 1940s, is thought to have been rescued by KMF following a BNRO concert that was, immediately upon its conclusion, set upon by a well-timed Soviet administrative crackdown.10

The flag was not seen again and was believed lost until its resurfacing twelve years later. It is logical to presume that KMF, ever the pack-rat, unbeknownst to any of his colleagues and at great personal risk to himself, successfully retained possession of the vilified flag during his tenure at the Conservatory, surreptitiously smuggling the flag with him during a State-sponsored and supervised academic excursion to Miskatonic University in 1987 (itself a notable glastnost-era cultural exchange). While the exact details surrounding the transfer are unknown, it has been deduced that KMF transported the flag in a wooden box masquerading as a leather-bound copy of The Buttress of Windsor, ostensibly a gift for host Professor Homer St. John and innocuous enough for an academic endeavor to elicit no notice by the official censors.

This later Forsàidh disappears again between c1990 and 2013, when he reappears, quite unexpectedly, in the inaugural concert of the reconstituted Mk II “Modern ESO”. It is once again unknown either where he went or, in reality, who he actually was. KMF has not been seen in Bassanda since this unexpected appearance.

Nevertheless, the Archive continues to receive intermittent communiqués from him: in an undated private message to Winesap, KMF did reveal that he is a card-carrying member of the Supporters of the Society of the Crossed Keys and is particularly fond of the work of émigré Bassandan filmmaker Vassily Uel’s Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā. He has also indicated that he wishes to continue to disseminate his writings and advocate for the ideals and spirit of Bassanda, even at a distance.

Notes:

1. Also born c1882 and conjectured to be an over-looked niece or distant younger cousin of HM-in-exile, the Duke S. Owsley-Smythe. Further research may reveal her to possibly be a vital hereditary link between the labyrinthine but as-yet unconnected Owsley-Smythe and Main-Smith family lines.

2. Mostly Royal Throbshiri Merchant Vessel

3. This motley group of individuals, trained variously in Welsh, Mongol, and Kyūdō bow forms, was originally encouraged to operate with near-total autonomy, tasked with seeking out and preemptively pacifying any suspected incursions into the territory. Nearly from the outset however, the group reverted instead to more defensive postures, patrolling and defending the hills and high passes of the Northern Bassandan frontier. In later generations, the expertise of noted freedom fighters including Cifani Doma would later swell the ranks of the BYOB (by this time now adjunct to the RBBC), drastically improving their combat effectiveness and elevating their prestige.

4. Ernst Manning spent many years studying Japanese Martial Arts in situ in the latter half of the 19th Century. A note in the Captain’s journals from the time claims that the elder Forsàidh “was very steady with a bow and could cut a ratline at the top of the mast in a squall while standing in the hold.” KMF’s grandfather was later known to have accompanied the Colonel on one of his early excursions to Japan in the 1880s, perhaps serving to make several vital introductions. Although uncorroborated, he may have also been the photographer who chronicled the infamous “Sensei Showdown of ’68” for the international press, a particularly evocative image of which is held by the Archive and is currently on display in the Gallery.

5. This fact was often cited and much emphasized by the propaganda press in the post-War years. The fact that the unit saw no combat action categorically went unremarked.

6. No small feat considering the likelihood of injury involved in executing many of the extended techniques on the jingles mounted around the circumference of the instrument’s frame, which doubled as stabbing and slicing weapons in combat.

7. A popular cadre of Socialist-Temperament Bayan enthusiasts active among the guerillas was also passed over for integration into the fledgling RBBC for the same reasons. Photographic and anecdotal evidence does however indicate that the RBBC riders did eventually become proficient at firing while mounted and on the move.

8. Originally chartered as the Bassandan Royal Conservatory, later renamed the Owsley-Lawrence Conservatory before finally settling into its current title.

9. The suffix (FoB) denoted individuals or organizations who are recognized Friends of Bassanda.

10. The exact date of the fateful concert in question is unknown, but possibly during the latter stages of the 1975 Nepalese Touch the Stars Tour. A photograph of the flag, taken at Dolphu Village early in the tour, is known to be in the collection of Jackson Habjar-Lawrence, an apparently non-exceptional scion of the family, and not to be confused with his relation Jackson Lawrence-Smyth, also a resident of Dolphu, mentioned elsewhere in the Correspondence.

Yakub “Sanjo” D’Aunai,
Bassandan Craft Beer Competition,
1959
Yakub “Sanjo” D’Aunai

b1919 of Norman-French / Bassandan extraction

A very old Norman surname; one branch of the family may have gone east to Antioch in the 13th century, and then individual younger sons might have adventured further east and north toward Bassanda. Another branch may have been Scottish: there was an Alexander Dendy, a soldier of fortune, in the imperial guard at Constantinople in the 1820s. On the mother’s side, of a very old and extended Bassandan family: the family tree (in the Archives at Irkutsk) shows multiple generations which included triplets, quadruplets, and even quintuplets. The family is also mentioned, though not explicitly by name, in Henry Boguet’s Discours exécrable des Sorciers (1602).

Yakub was born to a distaff branch, a family of woodcutters from the far eastern frontier; he came from one of three sets of triplets born to his mother. A family story said that he had been born with a full head of hair. The middle child of the middle trio, he was not particularly well-behaved, slipping away from school or chores, wandering the forests and steep mountain valleys, learning to play a small parlor guitar that an uncle had brought home as a souvenir from service in an English battalion in World War I. However, he also developed instinctive and precocious skills in the development and construction of crystal radios and then vacuum-tube sets (the legendary tinkerers’ magazine Popular Mechanics, first published in 1902, reached even as far afield as Bassanda).

With the gradual intensification of hostilities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, food shortages, especially in the forested eastern marches of Bassanda, likewise intensified. With a family of such size, it became difficult for his parents to maintain their extended brood of children, and the majority of the their smallholding was sold off. As the middle child of the middle trio, Yakub opted to remove himself as a burden upon his family, and simply left, “gone walkabout”. When asked later why he had opted for a northerly direction, he merely replied “I like the cold.”

A fabled walker—years later, one of the few in the BNRO orbit who could keep pace with Cifani Dhoma—he traveled with a loping stride that covered ground very quickly, and preferred to go barefoot, even in winter or on rough gravel roads in the high hills. By July 1939, and without any apparent difficulty either regarding, or even awareness of, the numerous borders and frontiers he was crossing on foot, he had reached Gdansk. Though ragged, dirty, barefoot and nearly inarticulate, and clutching a battered guitar, his chance 2-minute conversation on a street-corner with a party of French and British intelligence officers (one had attempted to use a phone-box whose shorted-out main circuit Yakub fixed with a twisted piece of chewing-gum foil) led to his recruitment for the Enigma Project, the code-breaking technology that had been developed by the Poles and which would prove crucial, after war broke out in August, to providing the intelligence which enabled the Allies’ victorious and comparatively unobstructed invasion of Normandy in 1944.

He stayed on in Britain after September 1945—there is a story of a young female coder in Norwich—and, after being demobbed from the Enigma team, played occasional dance gigs with Cliff Townsend’s “Squadronaires”. He also developed a distinctive, idiosyncratic fingersytle guitar approach, playing for Morris dance in Oxfordshire pubs—he had legendarily strong curved fingernails. By 1949, he was back in Ballyizget, extensively decorated by the British government but having shed most of his other obligations. Yezget-Bey heard him playing and singing “The Cuckoo’s Nest” on a street-corner near Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory and immediately engaged him as an intervals singer for the BNRO’s occasional nightclub performances, and by January 1950 he was an integral part of the full Orchestra. He may have been the third BNRO member present on the notorious occasion in 1951 when Madame Szabo, Részeg Vagyok, and a group of Roma janitors were alleged to have (intentionally or inadvertently) burned down the Romanian 4th Territorial Army Corps barracks at Cluj-Napoca.

One of the quieter but more idiosyncratic members of the Orchestra, he dressed in ragged, nondescript clothes, and was often shoeless. But he was never without his battered guitar and, curiously, an expensive, obviously antique silver medallion engraved with a wolf’s head, which he evidently treasured: he would pawn shoes, or coats, but this medallion he retained. He was famously nocturnal; there was a ribald joke about how Yakub “did most of his heavy lifting at night”. Like Elzbieta Purves he had excellent night-vision but was rather near-sighted in strong sunlight. And he was capable of prodigious feats of strength: on the wild ride by Jeep from Ballyizget to Prague in 1959 to rescue Madame Szabo & family from the secret police, Žaklin Paulu drove with Yezget-Bey as passenger, but it was Jakub who rode shotgun and, when necessary, lifted the Jeep over washouts and rock-slides.

He was also famously hirsute: BNRO photographers repeatedly complained that, even in the context of the stiffly-posed postures and black concert-wear required by the Central Committee, “he still looks like a hairy beast”. He maintained a lifelong preference for sleeping out-of-doors, especially in the warm summer months, as “shut doors and windows make me uneasy.” It was not unheard-of that, returning after a night out with Mississippi Steve Stokes and Binyamin Biraz Ouiz at one of the legendary Bassandan Craft Beer Drinking Bouts, and unable to find the latch to the band’s dormitory, hostel or bus, he would simply curl up in the snow, arms around his guitar, and go to sleep. Blowing and drifting snow would cover and insulate him, like an Arctic Circle sled dog; he typically said he was “perfectly comfortable” and “slept sounder” in such conditions.

He admitted to a modest irrational fear of open flame, which he attributed to a childhood accident with a torch, but he appreciated the odor of Madame’s cigars, and certainly he, Madame Szabo, and Elzbieta Purves, especially, were stereotypically most productive and alert in the small hours of the night. Conversely, he was capable of sleeping at any time and in any circumstances: his band-mates occasionally expressed rueful envy of his ability to sleep soundly in the band’s various rackety and noisy coaches, vans, and tractor-trailers, no matter the weather or road conditions. He could and would sleep up until the moment before his presence was necessary at sound-check, at which any band-mate could whisper in his ear “Yakub – Yakub – Yakub” and he would instantly be awake and alert.

He claimed that returning to the Homeland was “more painful than being on the road...so many people I loved passed on so many years ago” (e.g., before he joined the Orchestra), and he frequently importuned Madame Szabo or Yezget-Bey to increase or extend the BNRO’s touring obligations. On those relatively infrequent occasions when the Band did come off the road, if there were no beer competitions in the offing (his World War I veteran uncle had opened a brewery), he would frequently depart again to hitchhike Bassanda’s farthest provinces, ragged and shoeless, clutching his guitar as a talisman.

“Krzysztof” Arczewski, 1962
during recording sessions for the
Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc &
Talking Engine Co. label
“Krzysztof” Arczewski[1]

b1932

Bass, cello, dance, bębna basowego (“drone cello”), conducting

Born into a family of rabbis, musicians, and Talmudic scholars in Poland. One branch reaches back to the klezmer tradition of Ashkenazic Jewish street music; the klezmorim traveled widely and exchanged music extensively with Romany, Turkish, and Greek musicians as well. Aspects of their approach to wind- and string-playing—particularly the high schrei of vocalization found in klezmer and early jazz as well—recur in Bassandan music all the way back to the Middle Ages, and are certainly evident in Arczewski’s mature playing.

Another branch of the family, the Sephardic de la Porta’s, had come from Portugal and settled with Jean Lafitte’s pirate community on Galveston Island in the 1810s; there are connections here with the experience of the Haitian/Barbadian violinist Etxaberri le Gwo and this may account for Krzysztof’s destination of Houston as a refugee in 1944.

Several uncles and cousins, having served with the Polish Air Force during the 1939 German Anschluss, flew and fought with the RAF; there is some thought that Krzysztof later entered the BNRO orbit through this family connection with the Srcetovredi Brothers, who themselves flew paratroop gliders during Operation Overlord at D-Day in 1944.

A child prodigy as low strings player, recognized by no less eminent a musician than the Krakow-based pianist Władysław Szpilman, upon whose memoir of the Uprising the later film The Pianist was based—Krzysztof played the Bottesini Concerto No. 1 in F♯ minor with the Warsaw Ghetto Symphony at the age of 8. There is an iconic photograph, a still from the unissued Nazi propaganda film Das Ghetto, of Krzysztof as a child of about 10, playing the ‘cello in the street outside a shuttered Jewish school.

Warsaw was a tremendously hazardous and dangerous place for Jews after the German Anschluss (invasion) of 1939: segregated, subjected to persecutions, curfews and food/medicine shortages, many sought to find ways to escape the city and go to the West. During the Warsaw Uprising of April 1943, when Jewish activists took up arms to resist Polish Nazi “relocation” (in fact, genocide), Krzysztof and several siblings and relatives escaped through the sewers, escorted by Szpilman and Icchak Cukierman, a leader of the Polish Jewish resistance.

He entered New York City on a Liberty Ship in February 1944 as “Theodore Donald Karavatsos Arczewski”; there is no immediate explanation for the entire replacement of “Krzysztof” with three names of Greek derivation. However, there were many false identifications and transcriptions of foreign names at Ellis Island, even as late as the 1940s, and he was a 12-year-old boy traveling alone. However, he carried letters and documents connecting him to family relations in several Gulf Coast cities and—as was not uncommon amongst the offspring of Polish Jewish intelligentsia—he was fluent in English and German as well as Yiddish. Once situated with relatives in Houston, and attending public schools in the post-War boom, his precocious musical talents made him a star of local live radio on the powerful KXYZ, from 1948, as “Little Tommy Ace, the Boy-Wonder Bass” (some of these recordings were heard as far away as Havana—and may have been heard by the hugely influential ska bass player Thaddy Mowatt in Kingston), and it may be he, billed as “Tall Tommy,” playing slap-bass on the obscure “Creole Gal Blues” recorded in Houston by the Cajun singer Edgar Blanchard in the following year.

It appears likely that Rahmani Boenavida (see elsewhere in the Personnel files) may have been his entree into American jazz circles; a precocious teenaged trumpeter who had been active in New Orleans brass bands and Second Line parades from around 1941, she introduced Krzysztof to Charles Mingus at a Preservation Hall jazz gig in 1948, while Mingus was on the road during a (brief and contentious) tour with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. This introduction may have led to Krzysztof’s later participation, as a teenaged section bassist, on Mingus’s first Debut recordings, Strings and Keys (DLP2; 1 April 1951). Also, though undocumented, there is a remote possibility that he may have accompanied Boenavida in her journey to Havana later in the same year, where she met the dancer/pianist Celeste Roullet.

It is not known precisely when, or how, he journeyed to Bassanda some time after April 1951, but he was an early recruit, probably through the Srcetovredi Brothers, to the task of rebuilding of the pre-War Bassanda Youth Orchestra (reconstituted 1946); he was certainly in Ballyizget by the middle of 1952, when he appears in the iconic photograph of the BNRO.

He subsequently became a virtuoso also at the “drum-cello” called, in Hungary, tőgardon, and in Bassanda, bębna basowego. A simple folk accompaniment instrument, using a carved single-piece body and open strings struck as drones with a drumstick, in Krzysztof’s hands it became an astonishing, polyrhythmic, and virtuoso solo voice. His 1962 unaccompanied performance of the off-color folk song Zamknij ryj, Donnie, released on 78rpm disc in one of Bassanda’s last recordings in this format, reveals the influence upon him of Mingus’s muscular, free-form double-bass approach, and is testament to the degree Krzysztof had transformed the bębna basowego’s expressive capacities.

He later made a series of long-playing records in the 1960s, on the now-defunct Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc & Talking Engine Co. label, partially documenting his encyclopedic repertoire of Polish, Romany, Jewish, klezmer, and Bassandan folk tunes. These LP’s, in their distinctively thick, matte-gray, coarse cardboard sleeves, pressed in very heavy vinyl, with poorly-mimeographed but extensive typewritten liner notes, were found in every Bassandan county and university library—though checking-out the discs, whose contents were considered “potentially subversive,” as opposed to listening within the libraries, could result in scrutiny by the KGB.[2] They were a treasure trove of music, and a source both for the Hungarian group Muszikás’s Matamaros: The Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania, and the remarkable refulgence of the “Bassandan Folk Revival” of the early 1980s.

In this era of the early ‘80s, progressive young college students from Ballyizget and Xlbt “rediscovering” their own indigenous folklore, and sporting “retro” handlebar mustaches, ragged second-hand Red Army duffle coats, and unfiltered “Domani” working-class cigarettes, would gather around enormous vacuum-tube-driven stereophonic record players in order to listen to and transcribe “Arcy’s” tunes. Like the “Harry Dean Smith Collection” in the 1960s US Folk revival, the “Collection” thus became as essential to the Bassanda Folk Revival as were the air-checks of the BNRO, the explosion of cottage-industry bouzouki craftsmen and the remarkable technical virtuosity of the women’s bouzouki-pickup-winders, and institution of innovative “folk music” / “improvised music” / “new music” curricula in the conservatories and secondary schools throughout the country.

Late in life, along with Etxaberri le Gwo, Jamey O Laoghaire, Elzbieta Purves, Részeg Vagyok, and several other senior ESO members, he taught lessons and master classes at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory in Ballyizget, as well as making recital and orchestral appearances all over the world.

Wherever he travelled, or when he returned home to Ballyizget—where he maintained a rambling apartment in the Old City stuffed with images, recordings, books, and thousands of scores (many rare, out of print, or in manuscript)—he carried with him two additional items: the first scroll of his great grandfather’s leather-bound copy of the Pentateuch (printed Lodz, 1806), and a small, framed photograph of Władysław Szpilman, inscribed “To Krzysiu, my wonderful student. Wladek, 1940.”

[1] There is no explanation in the records for the use of the forename Krzysztof in an Ashkenazic Jewish context, though it has been suggested that the name itself, like the later contraction of “Arczewski” to “Arcy” in the 1960s, may have represented intentional concealment of his specific ethnic identity in certain contexts.

[2] It was in fact a badge of particular prestige and cachet, amongst these Bassandan tradycyjni (“traddies”), to own personal reel-to-reel copies of these LP’s, which could only be got by checking them out from the Soviet libraries and taping them in secret. In the height of the Brezhnev ‘60s these recordings, because “inimical to workers’ progress”, were considered samizdat, and possession of same was a criminal offense. The highest ranks of prestige were reserved for those tradycyjni who had stolen the library copies, and who could thus supply taped bootlegs to other aficionadi.

"Mississippi" Stokes, around 1960
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco CA
Mississippi Stokes

b Issaquena County, Mississippi 1919

Mixed Choctaw-French Creole-English ethnicity

Family story has him related to “Daniel Stallings” of the Elizabethan Jamestown settlement in Virginia’s early colonial period, but the line was lost when the settlement failed. He may have been the offspring of a major banking and cotton-farming family in North Mississippi, though his “Stokes” surname, primarily associated with African-American sharecroppers, is probably a pseudonym and thus obscures the historical record.

He was powerfully attached to trains; after 1929 there are multiple references in the Stallings Family letters to “young Steven” having run away by hopping freight trains; in the ‘30s, he appears to have visited, through this means, Dallas, San Antonio, San Francisco, Denver and Oklahoma City.[1]

His love for trains and of the roaming life may have originated in his childhood experience on subsistence farms in north Mississippi. He later said “I done my share a sharecroppin’. I decided I druther drink whiskey an’ set down ta work.”

While still living in the Hill Country as a teen, he learned harmonica and guitar licks from Mississippi Fred McDowell (b1904), from whom Stokes got his monicker; the panpipes called “quills” from Henry Thomas (recorded 1920); and the fife from Otha Turner (b1909), patriarch of a family of fife & drum musicians whose repertoire reached back before the American Civil War. This cross-racial access between older black and younger white blues players was a characteristic of the north Mississippi Hill Country context, and differed significantly from that of the highly-segregated turpentine camps, cotton plantations, and penal farms of the Delta and south Mississippi. The Hill Country was much more heavily populated by small, family-run subsistence farms, where before the Civil War there might have been only one or two slaves on a homestead. The result was that, during and after Reconstruction, black-white shared work and musical exchange continued.

Of the juke joints, picnics, and fish fries he played as a “lead boy” and second guitarist for older black musicians, while reminiscing years later with Muddy Waters, Stokes said:

“Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.”

He heard Huddie Ledbetter, “Lead Belly,” busking outside the Harlem Theater in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood in 1937, and the Texas songster’s booming voice and 12-string guitar became a powerful influence. Lead Belly’s “Take a Whiff on Me”, which references Deep Eullum in its lyrics about cocaine, became part of Stokes’s own repertoire, though “Mississippi” later said “Lead Belly had a way of gettin’ inta things. He could git out agin—but I didn’ wan’ ta get inta them in th’ firs’ place!”[2]

Part of Stokes’s aversion to the southern parts of the Delta may be a reflection of not only racial discomfort but also personal trauma: he appears to have been in Greenville MS, August 15, 1938, on the night that the seminal bluesman Robert Johnson was poisoned in a juke joint: an anguished note found in his guitar case decades later, crawled on the back of a bar napkin, reads

“I seen it—I seen her hand him the sekund botle—but I didn’t think nothin’ iv it—the wimminz allus loved Robert. I uz talkin to the furriner wit that crazy long-necked tater-bug mand'lin & we wuz drinkin’a bucket a beer. I didn’t think nothin of it, not ‘til Robert tuk sick. An’ by then it uz too late.”

In 1940 he was busking in New Orleans: there is a series of photo-booth images of “Steve” and a succession of fashionably-dressed young women from May of that year. May have met Rashka  Boenavida during this period (she was 14, and playing in the Second Line with street bands while washing dishes on Royal Street) but there is no confirmation of that meeting.

In March 1941, perhaps anticipating the long arm of the Selective Service (e.g., Draft Board), he shipped out with the US Merchant Marine, at the opening of F.D.R.’s “Lend-Lease” program which sent billions of dollars worth of materiél to England, France, and those European nations who resisted Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. Claimed to have hated the sea (“I’uz a Hill Country boy. Don’ wan’ nothin’ ta do w’ no ocean”) but a virtuoso engineer: he spent much of his time below-decks greasing engines, and during the July1943 voyage that jumped-off to Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily), he spent off-duty shifts lovingly rebuilding the engine of a particular, brand-new 1943 Willys Jeep. This vehicle disappeared from the ship’s manifest upon landing at Palermo—it was later claimed to have been requisitioned by and assigned to the legendary combat cartoonist Bill Mauldin—and its eventual point of arrival is unknown; however, a supercharged vintage Jeep was part of the BNRO’s motor pool in the late ‘50s, and in 1959 Žaklin Paulu used the same vehicle to drive Yezget-Bey non-stop from Ballyizget to Prague in the Bassandan monsoon, in one night, on an occasion when Madame Szabo, Részeg Vagyok, and their offspring, after a visit to Madame’s Roma relatives, had been detained by the Státní bezpečnost (Secret Police) for “irregularities” in their papers.

Stokes also played on Merchant Marine ships with Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie in 1944; of him, Guthrie (d1966) said “Mississippi Steve was the blackest white man I ever did see, and I seen a few. If you couldn’ta seen ‘im, ya wouldn’ta knowed.” After the War, Stokes appears to have returned to his wandering ways: he met Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in Denver Colorado in 1948, during one of the extended road trips that Kerouac later thinly fictionalized in On the Road. He was present in the Sun Records studio in 1950 as a tape operator and second engineer when Chester Arthur Burnett, “The Howlin’ Wolf,” laid down the tracks that later led the great American producer and music impresario Sam Phillips to say “This is where the soul of man never dies.”

By this period of 1949-50—still only in his mid-30s—he was already regarded as something of a sage by younger musicians. He played some gigs in the tough black clubs of West Memphis (Arkansas), but the rootlessness and sense of adventure from the War was obviously still with him: in summer 1952, he abruptly boarded a coal barge in Memphis, telling the bandleader Phineas Newborn “there’s somethin’ callin’ me. And it’s back East. Way back East.” There is a record of a “Stokes – stoker (coal-heaver)” on a tramp steamer out of New Orleans in September of the same year, and also in that year, both Edward Abbey (naturalist and author of The Monkey Wrench Gang) and Mississippi Stokes appear in Ballyizget. The BNRO was already at full personnel, but Yezget-Bey, recognizing immediately the particular and unique contribution that this “white bluesman” could make to the Orchestra, rewrote a number of arrangements to feature a second guitarist (the presence of Robert Johnson’s ”Walking Blues” in the band’s book reflecting this rearrangement).

Abbey, whose Bassandan experience was a powerful influence on his sense of “radical allegiance to the natural world”, and whose “George Hayduke” character (in the environmentalist adventure novel The Monkey Wrench Gang) displays many stereotypical Bassandan traits, said of Stokes “He was a philosopher at a truck stop. He had traveled so far, and seen so many things, and kept on traveling: all he cared about was insight. And compassion. Amazing man.”

Stokes played with the BNRO throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, and made periodic returns to the band years later—though he appeared to be happy settling in the northern hills of Bassanda and raising an extended brood of children.

Yet his hobo ways died hard: as late as the 1970s, he was teaching young Bassandan “beatniks” (the social and poetic insights of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Ferlinghetti arrived in the Soviet bloc—partly through “Mississippi’s” influence—some years after their apotheosis in the West) how to jump freights. So well-known was he, as treasured transplant and cultural icon, that when “Sippie Stokes” and his hobo proteges were recognized in the freight yards, the railroad guards would typically laugh, ask for his autograph, and wave them on.

"I wadn't interested in nothin' else but the blues, you know. Course now I ain't gon' pour no water on somebody else 'cause he like jazz, how-high-is-the-moon and who-bop-a-dop, that's his business."”

[1] He has a brief cameo in the highly evocative Riding the Rails documentary produced in 1997 by WGBH Boston (USA): interviewed in the Ballyizget railway yards in his mid-70s, he is visibly energized and engaged by the sight of the antiquated diesel engines and open boxcars of the Xblt-Bassanda line, and clearly considers one more attempt at hopping a freight.
[2] Ledbetter was twice arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for manslaughter, but sang his way into a pardon both times.

"Žaklin Paulu, age 25, from the
BNRO Souvenir Collectors' Calendar, 1954
Žaklin Paulu (b1928)

Percussion, dance, song.

Born to a farming family on the far northern tundra of Bassanda, a stark, high-altitude landscape largely given over to barley-cultivation and yak herding, which is probably the original model for the land Herodotus, in 450 BCE, called “Hyperborea” (from the Bassandan word Хипербореја). This region neither contained valuable mineral deposits nor represented peak farming country, and as a result was largely unmolested during the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Indeed, many “Hyperboreans” were largely unaware of the changes of regime (the folk saying was “Që kujdeset se çfarë bëjnë njerëzit hollë me gjak të jugut?” [“Who cares what the thin-blooded southerners do?”]).

Visited London in 1946 on a trip with her parents, who were consulting with the Atlee government regarding the at-cost sale of Bassandan barley and dried yak-meat to supplement the rationing still in effect in the post-WWII era. Many Londoners born in the war years had fond memories of this basturma, marketed under the brand name “Bass-tur-mite”. The guitarist Keith Richard, b1943, insists it has been essential to his long life and physical stamina, saying “Bassturmite was better for your health than that shite they were canning at home”.

During this trip, she became a protégée of the American-born xylophone virtuoso Teddy Brown, a star in vaudeville and “talkies” in the 1930s and ‘40s. It is thought that she developed her capacity for beer from the experience of taking lessons with Brown, who weighed over 400 pounds. On the other hand, it is also the case that Bassandan barley wine, typically home-brewed with a very high alcohol content of 12-14% by volume, tended to create the fabled “strong Hyperborean heads”; possibly both factors played a contributing role in her stamina.

Recruited into the BNRO during a tour-stop in late 1951 in Nizhny Novgorod by the Ŭitmena Sisters, with whom she had previously shared a nightclub act in “novelty” song, dance, and percussion, just after Kaciaryna and Морган had themselves joined the Orchestra. Žaklin had just finished a four-mallet xylophone tap-dance solo, inspired by Brown’s vaudeville theatrics, at the “American Club” in Nizhegorodsky Okrug (District), when she looked up to see the Sisters across the dimly-lit basement café. As she later described it, “Katché and Mó said there was a place for us, a place where we could use everything we knew. They said I should come with them and with the Orchestra. And then I met Zeg and Jamey, and I thought maybe something new could come from that.”

She was a driver of prodigious stamina and concentration, and regularly took the wheel of the Soviet-made ZIS-120N tractor-trailer which provided tour support for the BNRO, or the Latvian “Kuban” bus that carried the band; she once drove the latter 22 hours straight through a blizzard on the northern steppes in order to make a last-minute concert date. Her musicianship was likewise unfailing and non-pareil; Részeg Vagyok later said “you could set a pacemaker by Jacky’s time-feel."

Seemingly impervious to cold: she was the scion of the Ballyizget “Polar Bear Club,” which made a ritual of midwinter plunges into Bassanda’s frigid alpine streams. There is a photograph of Paulu in a swimsuit, with her dog Vojvoda, in mid-leap from the icy bank into the swift-flowing center stream of the Volga at Ulyanovsk.

She had also a prodigious capacity for home-brewed Bassandan beer. In fact, she was the designated representative from the Orchestra in craft beer competitions, or on the infrequent occasions when a local prodigy challenged the band to a drinking contest. In the back-country of Bassanda, it was the custom to offer liquid refreshment without let to guests—this proceeding from their Central Asian-influenced traditions of مهمان نوازی (“hospitality to travelers”). In rural sections, locals typically presumed that “city folk” were “too light” to be able to compete drink-for-drink. Yet Žaklin, though she weighed less than 110 pounds, was capable of drinking under the table blacksmiths and coal-miners 3 times her weight.

It was a matter of tour folklore that, if monthly stipends or petrol money failed to arrive from the central Soviet directorate, she could be sent out to the nearest raki shop to engage the locals in wagers for drinking competitions or bilek güreşi (the particularly ferocious Bassandan version of arm-wrestling). Her “theme song” in the late-period ESO was a Bassandan-language version of Albert Collin’s’ “I Ain’t Drunk” (Jag är inte berusad / jag bara dricker), which the band would sing ironically on the tour bus when Žaklin had returned, victoriously bearing the necessary winnings, from yet another barroom competition.[1]

[1] Translation: “I ain’t drunk / I’m just drinkin’.”

Bronislava Nijinsky, dancing to Shango,
courtyard Mount St Benedict monastery,
Trinidad, 1 March 1950. Kodachrome
photograph by Maya Deren.
Bronislava Nijinska
, the choreographer of Xlbt. Op. 16, had an early career nearly as glittering as that of her more famous (and unstable) elder brother Vaclav. But her early successes, as soloist and choreographer, were later eclipsed by personal and psychological troubles in the 1920s. Especially after the death of Sergei Diaghilev in 1929, and Nijinsky’s increasingly frequent institutionalizations for schizophrenia and related mental disturbances in the late 1930s, it began to seem as if Nijinska might have lost her own way. Her Autobiography, edited and published after her death by daughter Irina, heavily redacts and modifies the life story, at times amplifying, at times excising, at times wholly fabricating, but it remains the only full-length, if highly selective, examination of her life and work, flawed though it be.

We know that she had contact with the Creole “novelty” dancer Celeste Roullet in 1909 (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), but that collaboration, so exciting to the partners at the time, does not appear to have yielded concrete final results. Even when the two met again in Paris in the early ‘20s, the collaboration does not appear to have been renewed. The following account, however, points toward the possibility of a remarkable creative “renaissance,” later in Nijinska’s life, for which the Yezget Nas1lsinez / BNRO circle may deserve partial credit, and which may go toward explaining why, 40 years after its first sketches, Xlbt. Op. 16 was finally completed in conception—though still without premiere until the new millennium.

One piece of contextual information: as a White Russian, who declined to consider citizenship in the post-1917 Soviet Union, Nijinska held what was called a “Nansen” passport prior to 1949; she was essentially “stateless,” but this particular US government document permitted remarkable freedom of movement—not least because its very anomaly made it particularly resistant to tracking. Something similar may have occurred in the case of BNRO percussionist “Részeg Vagyok”—though in the latter case it is at least equally probable that Vagyok, who in all likelihood was actually an ex-American serviceman on the run, obtained his papers through that Roma underground networks which Terése-Marie Szabo exploited so masterfully in service of BNRO projects and personnel.

These fragmentary excerpts have come to light in the Maya Deren papers, most of which are held at Boston University and Syracuse, but a few previously unrecognized elements of which have been uncovered by Winesap in the Bassanda Archives.

The most revelatory materials are those which document a 1949 Caribbean field-trip, heretofore unknown, undertaken by Bronislava Nijinska with the guidance of Deren herself. This trip came after the Haitian sojourn of 1947 which formed the basis for Deren’s book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, and the feature-length documentary her husband assembled after her death from her fieldwork films. Deren, a correspondent with Nas1lsinez who had previously introduced him via letter to the Haitian creole violinist Etxaberri le Gwo, had received a short note at her Greenwich Village apartment from Yezget-Bey in October 1949, while the conductor was in Ballyizget programming the first post-War performances of the newly-christened and –incorporated Bassanda National Radio Orchestra:

Chére Maya:

Shortly there will be coming to you in New York the great choreographer Madame Bronislava Nijinska, of whom you will perhaps have heard—and if not of her, then her brother Vaclav, the brilliant though troubled prima danseur and choreographer who worked with Stravinsky. Nijinska, though lesser-known, is of equally great talent and creative genius.

But, like her brother, she is also troubled and carries many sorrows, both inner and outer, and these have afflicted her sorely—at times even making it impossible for her to work or to leave her lodgings.

She knows the States but has never traveled in the Creole parts of the Hemisphere. In light of your extraordinary experiences and discoveries in Haiti over the past 18 months, it has occurred to us to wonder whether perhaps there may be healing for Nijinska to be found in those other spiritual practices. She is a friend of Bassanda and, could she come to us here in Ballyizget, it is possible the Iliot shamans could help her. But, alas, she is so well-known, and so strongly associated with the White Russian cause, that we fear she would be detained, deported, or worse if she tried to cross the border. And we do not believe she could survive that particular trauma.

Can you help her?

Baba[1]

Any reply from Deren to this missive is absent from the (voluminous) correspondence file, but it is confirmed that Deren, Nijinska, and a small party of Louisiana expatriates (possibly including Etxaberri le Gwo—this may be the occasion which eventually led le Gwo eastward to Bassanda later in the year) took ship from the Battery on 1 December 1949, making landfall at Charleston, Miami, Nassau, Port-au-Prince, and Montserrat before arriving at Port of Spain in Trinidad on the 1st February 1950. Deren’s diary picks up the tale:

3 January 50

There being no occasion for hurry and some valid arguments for leisure, we have allowed ourselves the luxury of frequent halts to visit friends in South Carolina, Florida, the Bahamas, Haiti and other island stops. As we have fled the cold south into the Islands, I have observed Madame’s gradual relief and peaceful state: she is less restless at night, more vivacious and engaging in the morning, and curious and eager to explore at each landfall.

One evening about three weeks ago, just after we had left Miami and found fair and mild weather for the loop ESE toward the Bahamas, we sat in two deck chairs by the taffrail, speaking of life and art and the challenge of creativity to the modern woman. At a certain moment, apropos of no topic in particular, she stared aft at the setting sun and said, “I remember this. I remember conversations like this, a long time ago...forty years.” And she told me of the conversations she had had with the young Creole dancer Celeste Roullet, in the Eastern Mediterranean before the Great War. She said “I wish only we had been able to continue—but our Ballet of the Springtime was not to be. At least, not then.”[2]

The Diary breaks off (or sections are missing) until mid-February, when Deren resumes:

16 Feb 50

Carnival here in Port of Spain has been wonderful: full of light, color, smells, and tastes of the most exotic and alluring sort. We have journeyed into the hills by jeep to harvest plants and spices for holistic cooking and we have swum, fished, cooked, and eaten on Trinidad’s beautiful beaches. BN is tanned and rested, speaking with great animation about all we see and do, and of the beautiful dancing and percussion music in the street parades [NB: this was precisely the period when the steel-pan orchestra emerged in its modern configuration] ...[3]

A short series of photo-booth images depicts Nijinska and Deren wearing the color-themed costume of the stilt-walking moko-jumbie dancers of the carnival celebrations. Linked with the syncretic folk-religion called Obi or Obeah, itself an outgrowth of west African pantheist religion overlaid with colonial Catholicism, these dances are said to create healing power, especially for those who have experienced the loss of children.

21 Feb 50

It is the morning after a night in the hills, in the grounds of a monastery called Mount Saint Benedict. There was an Obi ceremony there, not unlike the ones I knew in Haiti. But here, the intended beneficiary of the Orisha’s (saint’s) healing was determined by the priestess to be Nijinska herself...[4]
- Drums are beaten in Trinidad when a healer undertakes to cure a person who is seriously ill, especially one who is possessed by an evil spirit....One may receive healing remedies through a dream-experience, or a power may give one a message or a warning to pass on to another person. If one dreams that he [sic] is ‘keeping a feast,’ or that [s/he] has been sent to the river to perform a ritual, [s/he] is supposed to carry out such acts later.[5]
And there is a scrap of paper, a scrawl of Cyrillic in Nijinska’s own hand (undated), which reads:
Старые боги исцелил меня. Бог они называют здесь Shango. Он пришел ко мне во сне и сказал, что мне не нужно идти по пути дорогого Вацлава, но это искусство, и Богиня, может исцелить меня. Он сказал мне, чтобы искать сестер, в том месте, далеко на восток называется Bassanda. И я ему верю. Я должен идти.

[The old Gods have healed me. The god they call here Shango. He came to me in a dream, and said that I need not go the path of dear Vaclav, but that art, and the Goddess, could heal me. He told me to seek the Sisters, in the place far to the east called Bassanda. And I believe him. I must go.] [6]

No more information on this 1949-50 journey can be found in the Archives or in Nijinska’s own Autobiography—but two years later, in collaboration with the Eagle’s Heart Sisters, Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography for Xlbt. Op. 16, the “Bassandan Rite of Spring,” was completed in Ballyizget.

As Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez said, decades later in another context, to another interlocutor who questioned the necessity of propitiating the pantheon of Bassandan spirits:

“Just because I don’t believe in the Old Gods doesn’t mean they don’t believe in me.”

[1] YN correspondence, ink on paper, dated 1 May 1949. Accession #2007.X.23 99df1. Bassanda Archives
[2] Undated Deren diary fragment in the Bassanda Archives, though internal evidence confirms its general provenance in 1950. See elsewhere in the Correspondence, for the narrative of the 1909 collaborations, never completed, between Nijinska and Roullet on shipboard in the Eastern Mediterranean, but which yielded the first scenario and sketches for Xlbt. Op. 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring.”
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] George Eaton Simpson, “The Shango Cult in Nigeria and in Trinidad,” American Anthropologist 64/6 (Dec. 1962), 1213-14.
[6] Reconstruction. The handwriting is at times distorted by what appears to be intensity of emotion (the pencil point is broken at two places in this passage), and some passages have been blotted by drops of tears or sweat.
Elzbieta Purvis
self-portrait, c1997
Elzbieta Purves

b pre-1880

Another BNRO member whose historical and autobiographical time-lines are difficult to reconcile: her birth date is not known, but she was evidently of an age to serve as fieldworker and research assistant for Dr Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti’s watershed article exploring aging and transformation in Bassanda, “Quantum Drift and Apparent Time Displacement in the Bassandan Rift Valley,” in the 1926 edition of the Journal of Speculative Geographical Metaphysics (Paris). A footnote in that essay, a classic in Bassandan physics and metaphysics, reads:

xvii Special recognition is due to the contributions of Miss Elzbieta Purves, an invaluable research assistant in the fieldwork of 1922-25 in the Rift Valley which made this study possible. She was a tireless interviewer, displaying a fine touch of sensitivity and empathy toward informants, and a tremendous stamina for long hours, especially at night, with very little sleep. Moreover, her very wide reading and skill set are astonishing to contemplate in a person of such young age. It is highly unlikely that I could have completed the necessary fieldwork in the time period allotted by the Central Soviet, were it not for Miss Purves’s remarkable round-the-clock stamina and dedication to the project.

This encomium, in Dr Igniti’s 1926 article, points to a particular paradox in Purves’s biography: although her birth date is lost, she is documented as a young adult “of wide reading and skill set” by Hazzard-Igniti in 1922. Yet the only person in the family records who corresponds to the known details of her father is an “Alexander Purves” whose dates are c1795-1880.

It seems therefore to be the case that Elzbieta was born some time before 1880 (the year of Alexander’s death), and that despite appearances Dr Igniti was simply mistaken when he presumed that, in 1922, she was “of such young age.” His error is however understandable: photographs taken in the field during these research trips certainly give the impression of a woman in her early 20s, not her middle 40s. And this analysis does not even begin to address the evidence of the 1952 band portrait, in which she again has the appearance of a woman in her early twenties—not her middle 70s. There is no ready explanation for the paradoxical discontinuity between her unchanging appearance and the intervening 30 years.

We know that her father’s family had been in the Scottish Borders (specifically, “Purveshaugh” in Berwickshire, a land grant to the original Norman clan) since the 11th century, while her maternal grandmother came from Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides (western islands). The Clan (Gaelic root Mac Fhionghuin) had supported the Jacobite cause in the 1745 Rebellion and had assisted in the escape of Charles Edward Stewart, disguised as a washerwoman, to France after the defeat at Culloden.

The grandmother, Aurelia MacKinnon, like a number of other women in the extended family, was credited with paranormal capacities. The incidence of telepathy—for example, the ability to communicate over long distances, and/or to predict future or distant events (known in the Islands as “the Second Sight”)—is found with particular frequency in the Hebrides: it has been argued that the isolation and comparatively small gene pool of the available population led to this heightened sensitivity.

Her father was reputedly a relative of Niel Gow (d1807), the dance fiddler and composer whose brother Donald had accompanied him playing improvised basso continuo on the ‘cello. Yet the only “Alexander Purves/Purvis” listed in the Berkwickshire parishes’ baptismal records was born in 1795—so,unlikely though it seems, evidently her father Alexander was in his early 80s when she was born, and she herself was in her mid-forties, not her mid-twenties, while working with Dr Igniti in 1922.

Moreover, though “Alexander Purves” was a noted scientist who served as a combat engineer in “Queen Victoria’s Little Wars” and a spy in the Great Game—most notably, in the chaotic tribal conflicts on the borders of Nepal, Bassanda, and Afghanistan—the paternal line’s roots in the intuitive world were equally strong: there is a Stone-Age megalith in Purveshaugh to which the wildest supernatural tales are attached.

Alexander Purves appears to have remained in the East after mustering out of the British Army, and to have wandered widely: his diaries and sketchbooks, which are a trove of carefully-observed and beautifully-rendered arcana of flora, fauna, and archaeological reliques, evidence visits, in addition to Afghanistan, Nepal, north India, and Bassanda, to Wallachia, Galicia, and the Moldavian Mountains. There is some evidence to suggest that, despite having been demobilized from regular Army service, he continued as a clandestine British operative in the Great Game, dying in a “howdah accident” in Peshawar 1880, the last year of the Second Afghan War. Most of his personal papers are held, not in the family archive at Purveshaugh, but in the files of the Foreign Office in London, and some are still sequestered, 130 years after the cessation of that conflict, under the Official Secrets Act. Purves married a Transylvanian lady of quality and, though the birth records for the region were lost with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1918, appears to have fathered at least two children before his death.

Elzbieta herself also appears to have been receptive to paranormal communications—an immediate bond between her and the Uitmena Sisters Katché and Mó. Her particular sensitivity, which is consistent with patterns of paranormal sensitivity in the Inner Hebrides, was to weather, climate, and the natural world. She was regularly consulted by the BNRO drivers, especially during the arduous tours by coach in the 1960s, as to the best and safest routes in light of Bassanda’s sudden and fiercely disparate weather patterns. In particularly harrowing situations—for example a coach breakdown in the Bassanda Alps in February 1967—Elly was able to predict the duration of the storm and advise Móprah Uitmena on the shamanic dances necessary to curtail bad conditions. And band folklore insists that it was Elly who “called down” the sudden Baltic hurricane that night in 1985 when the Band defected by tramp steamer from Talinn to Helsinki.

A few other behavioral notes seem relevant: she drank only red wine and single malt, and avoided plain water, insisting upon “diluting” it with a few drops of whiskey. Particularly enamored of very rare meat, and an aficionado of tartares of all kinds, especially Nepali kachila (probably a legacy of her father’s Great Game experience), and Lebanese kibbeh. A standing joke in the BNRO, which may be more revealing than might seem on first appearance, referenced Elly’s aversion to Rahmani Boenavida’s dried-meat machacada, of which she said “why in Vlad’s name would someone want to take all the juice out of it?”

She was near-sighted and wore eyeglasses, but her night vision was nevertheless astonishingly good; in fact, there is a hair-raising BNRO anecdote about a late night bus ride over a high pass, after the coach’s headlights failed, when Elly perched on a front fender, peering ahead in the starless dark, and called back steering directions to Žaklin Paulu at the wheel, as the latter wrestled the “Kuban” coach around the mountain curves.

One other note: in addition to her apparent longevity—the degree to which, seemingly born in Transylvania c1880, she simply did not age between the 1920s and the 1980s—has to do with her complexion: she never tanned no matter the conditions, even after extended exposure to the ferocious Bassanda summer sun, wind and dust storms. In fact photographers frequently commented upon her "porcelain complexion." She insisted that her perfect skin resulted from careful avoidance of the sun, preferring night-time and wearing hats, sunglasses, and light scarves and gloves during the day, and even the most intrusive and insistent Bassandan glamour reporter was unable to penetrate “Elly’s Secret”—which became the name of a popular skin cream.

When pressed, she would simply smile and say “I come from some very long-lived genes. On both sides.”

Jerome Courvalle
Hanoi, 1952
Jérome Courvalle

b Montpelier VT 1933

From Quebecois Métis (mixed-race French/First Peoples) background: family line includes Scottish, Mi'kmaq, Abanaki, and Southern French (there is a “Curvalle” in the Tarns commune in Aquitaine). Possibility that the first European members of the family may have arrived as voyageurs with Jacques du Noyon in the 1680s. Some Native American elements seem particularly evident in his background and cultural experience; he was renowned in later years for his remarkable skills as a woodsman and freshwater sailor, though these may also be a reflection of his early experience lumbering in Maine and smuggling on Vermont’s Lake Champlain.

The name Courvalle also appears on muster rolls for the indigénes forces that fought on the French side during the North American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War in the 1750s and ‘60s; a “Jehan Courvalle” served in a regimental fife & drum band at the Battle of Fort William Henry in 1757, and there are other mentions as well. It seems clear that, through the 17th and 18th centuries, various branches of the clan moved across the St Lawrence River and Lake Champlain without much regard for imperial borders or allegiances

Family connections as well with the Francophone population exiled from Canada after the defeat of the British in the American Revolution, post-1783: displaced Tories went from the Colonies to Canada, and these in turn displaced French Catholics who embarked on long wanderings: some to the Acadian country of southwest Louisiana (exemplified in the folk-tale of the Acadian maiden Evangeline) and others slipping over the border, through the deep pine forests of northwest-central Maine and Vermont. In Louisiana, they became associated with the deep-bayou communities who in turn intermarried with the Creek and Seminole populations, and developed the southwestern Louisiana culture and musics called “Creole”—years later, Courvalle and Etxaberri le Gwo, of Haitian/Barbadian/Louisiana extraction, would develop a strong Francophone friendship.

In northern New England, the Courvalle clan carved out a living as loggers, trappers, subsistence farmers, sugar-makers and rumrunners; a “Jack Currier” served as a lieutenant to Boston-based bootlegger Charles “King” Solomon in the 1910s. Though the family denied that connection, there is no question they had long expertise in small boat handling and an encyclopedic knowledge of New England’s rivers, and the craggy coasts of Maine made smuggling (tobacco, rum, salt fish) an easy, common, and profitable second occupation.

Years later, in his cups on tour, Jér would regale members of the BNRO with backwoods tales, and yarns of having spotted or even attempting to harpoon Lake Champlain’s alleged crypto-zoological aquatic monster “Champ,” known by the Abenaki as “Tatoskok”.

In addition to Métis fiddle music, he was trained in Catholic hymn-singing and organ-playing, but also inherited the traditions of using 3-stringed ‘cello as improvised continuo for Scottish fiddle tunes as well. Something of a savant, he was already playing guitar and piano, as well as ‘cello, in tough French-Canadian dance halls by his early teens—an experience that may have shaped his social as well as his musical instincts.

On the early evidence, was prone to rather antisocial behaviors: at the age of 10, he attempted to run away from home by hopping freights on the Vermont Central Railroad, and got as far as Albany. At 13, he broke the jaw of an adolescent assailant after having been attacked by a group of schoolmates calling him “a [expletive deleted] Canuck.” At 15, he was already working as a deckhand and swamper on the tiny blacked-out sloops that smuggled rum and cigarettes down Lake Champlain from Canada into the USA. And at 16, after he hospitalized two loggers in a brawl over a young woman, his uncle, a policeman in Henniker, New Hampshire, marched him down to the Army Recruiting headquarters in Portsmouth and oversaw his enlistment, roughly 12 hours before police arrived at his parents’ home in Montpelier with a warrant for his arrest.

During the Korean conflict was assigned to a platoon of forward observers which included a number of Indians. During the frozen retreat from the Yalu in November 1950, members of the platoon fell behind, but Jérome, who had been wounded in the left leg and arm, and PFC Jerome Adams, a Devil’s Lake Sioux, insisted upon remaining behind to prevent those comrades’ capture by the Mongol soldiers fighting for North Korea—an action for which Courvalle received the Purple Heart and both the Bronze Star. Interviewed in Seoul after the awards ceremony, Jérome said, with typical rude candor: “Merde, it wadn’t any colder’n a Mount Blue lumber camp in Feb’ury, and them Koh-rean wadn’t any tougher’n some a’ them loggers on a Sat’dy night. Humpin’ an M1’s still better work than digging potatoes or harvestin’ cranb’ries.”

Invalided and honorably discharged after this wound but—in a pattern that recurred throughout the BNRO’s decades of touring itineraries—he “missed his flight” on a military transport back to San Francisco and stayed behind. Over the subsequent six months (January-July 1951) there are reports of him playing piano and ‘cello in cabarets in Busan, Fukuoka, and Hong Kong and other port cities in the South China Sea, though how he traveled is unknown; his name does not appear on any ships’ manifests (it may be that he exploited contacts in the sailors’ communities who used steam-junks to smuggle rice, petrol, and refugees between Taiwan and mainland China in this confused period).

He enters the orbit of the BNRO in early 1952 during their sole tour of Southeast Asia in the Indochinese Wars; a USIA co-sponsored set of performances in the French-colonial city of Hanoi under the banner of L’amitié des Peuples" (“the friendship of nations”). These performances coincided, with tragic irony, with the final stages of General Vo Nguyen Giáp’s anti-colonial “people’s war”, which would culminate with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May. In February, in the midst of the besieged city, the Orchestra played a few performances for members of the ancien régime in black tie, and Légionnaires still in reeking combat fatigues who had rotated back from the jungle firefights just a few kilometers away.

At one of these chaotic performances, with the American-made Grumman F8F’s heading for the front lines screaming overhead, a crewcut young Caucasian with a limp, wearing nondescript civilian clothes, pushed his way into Yezget-Bey’s dressing room at the interval, talking his way in voluble French past the military police guarding the door, and the even more formidablé presence of Madame Szabo herself. Without ceremony, he said to Nas1lsinez “I’m an American, and I play the ‘cello. I need help gettin’ outta this city. And you need me.” After a few minutes’ conversation, Yezget-Bey motioned to Madame to close the door on the guards. After a few more minutes’ conversation, a decision was taken, and that night, after the curtain calls, when the Orchestra boarded its coach, with Žaklin Paulu at the wheel and Jamey O’Laoghaire at the wheel of the baggage truck behind, they drove out of the city on the last road left open. And they departed with one more ‘cellist—a tall crewcut American--than they had arrived with.

He stayed with the BNRO/ESO for fifty years. About him, it may be most useful to give Yezget-Bey the final word; the Leader said, “Jér was a good boy. We just had to make sure that he never got bored.”

“Rashka”, Big Sur
around 1966
“Rashka” – Rahmani Boenavida

Born c1926—Monterrey?

Brass, keyboard, guitar, song

Musical polymath: self-taught on a range of instruments; particular expertise with Afro-Spanish musics of the Caribbean (Veracruz, Cuba, Dominica).

First enters the historical record at about the age of 16, busking trumpet solos in the street and working as a dishwasher at a small oyster house on Royal St in New Orleans.

Extremely reticent about her family origins; on the infrequent occasion when an acquaintance inquired—her band-mates knew better than to pry—she would say “my life began in the Ninth Ward. Before that doesn’t matter.” Similarly, in the 1980s, she avoided the inquiries of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters History Project, which after engaging with that dance group expanded their mission to include the BNRO/ESO and correspondence with the Bassanda Archives, and when she was interviewed about her background she gave evasive or downright internally contradictory stories. But a few possible backgrounds emerge:

There is a possible family connection to the Batallón San Patricio: Irish Catholics who fought on the side of Spain in the Mexican-American War. Very few survived, being arrested and hung as deserters after the War’s end. However, a few did escape punishment, and there were many mixed-race Irish/Mexican children born in the war years through this connection.

A contrasting version of the family story suggests that the military ancestor—a grandfather or great-uncle—fought not with the “San Patricio’s” in the Mexican War, but with Meagher’s Irish Brigade (Union Army) in the US Civil War. This may account for the existence, in the Archive, of a series of letters in Spanish between “Captain Thomas Francis O’Boyle” and Colonel Thompson, dated 1869-72, in which they discuss the possibility of O’Boyle and his Spanish-speaking wife homesteading in the American Southwest (Colonel Thompson was in residence in the High Hills of Northern New Mexico by this time).

Rashka was unquestionably a Spanish speaker; there is a possibility that yet another branch of her family had been in New Orleans ever since the early 18th century, in a period when the city was largely administered as a colonial outpost from Havana. Yet another theory believed that the family might have come from Sephardic converso stock in Nuevo León, in northeastern Mexico, which shared a border with the modern US state of Texas.

The very proliferation of alternate tales about her background, and her reluctance to confirm or contest any of them is itself revealing of her personality and priorities. A skilled and well-regarded player in a range of musics (jazz, brass bands, son montuno) in which women were seldom admitted, she had clearly learned to break through boundaries of gender and race, and it seems that she generally resented and resisted attempts to categorize her as person or player.

In the ‘40s, she was one of the few female trumpeters to perform with NOLA street bands. She was a junior member of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band (founded 1938)—apparently she began following the band in the Second Line, playing the trumpet parts she could, perhaps as early as age 12 or 13—and also played some gigs with the Eureka Brass Band. Also was one of the few women to appear with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band; not as a regular member, but “first call” substitute.

Though only infrequently heard as vocalist, she was a marvelous, smoky-voiced stylist whose more modernist interpretation of ballads associated with Miles was particularly notable—there are later amateur recordings of her singing If I Were a Bell and Autumn Leaves in the jazz clubs of Ballyizget around 1956. As a teen, occasionally played keyboard with ceili bands appearing in the dock-workers’ bars of the Irish Channel as well—which leads a very modest, indirect credence to the possibility that there was Irish as well as Spanish ethnicity in her family background.

Also in her late teens appears to have sailed as ship’s cook on luxury cruise ships plying between NOLA and Havana. Many of these ships carried Mafiosi as well as civilians, given the close connection between La Cosa Nostra and the entertainment and international banking communities of Batista’s Cuba. It is certain that she was in Havana in ’48, because there is documentation (a photo-booth snapshot) of a meeting between Rashka and the pianist/dancer/choreographer Celeste Roullet (born c1890 in NOLA), who was in the Capital to advise on the founding of the Cuban National Ballet.

Her aptitude for technology, shortwave radio in addition to recording equipment, was extremely valuable to the Orchestra: through her skills, they were able to participate in clandestine samizdat recordings at the height of the Cold War, frequently recording and broadcasting the music of banned composers or “tribal” minorities. Some of the rarest and most treasured recordings uncovered by the Bassanda Archival Digitization Project were originally made by Rashka, in remote locations and on archaic and temperamental equipment, which capture the BNRO in full flight on otherwise-unheard repertoire like Big Chief, Buddy Bolden’s Blues, The Guanajunto Mummies’ Return from Budapest, Jesus on the Mainline, and a host of others. S. Jefferson Winesap, Archival scholar of the BNRO/ESO and its satellites projects, comments “we wouldn’t even know that these treasures had ever existed, much less had the chance to hear the Orchestra playing them, had Rashka not been in the right place, with the right skills, at the right times.”

A noted cook, especially of creole and Gulf-coast dishes. While a number of the BNRO personnel had culinary aptitude (in addition to Madame Szabo’s Hungarian and Etsy le Gwo’s Caribbean dishes, Mophrah Uitmena was a noted pastry chef, and there were several others with good kitchen skills), Rashka was the most conscious of expertise: she carried her own knife roll and chest of specialized condiments, and her Neuvo Leonian machacada (dried spiced goat meat) was a tour staple, particularly popular on long bus rides in cold conditions or as a hangover cure.

There is a story that, one night in a traveler’s dormitory on the Silk Road, with the BNRO in the early 1960s, a member of another musical ensemble (not BNRO personnel), picked up a Ka-Bar knife from Rashka’s roll. He said “I don’t recognize this sort; what’s it for?” With a blood-freezing glare, Rashka replied “it’s for shanking perras estúpidas who don’t know enough to keep their hands to themselves.”

Late in life, having previously visited northern California (there is a photograph of her playing piano in a bungalow in Big Sur) she retired to a cottage in the redwood forests near Arcata, where she cooked, wrote music (often for independent films), and played host to a string of visitors from all around the world. Particularly welcome were those occasions when friends from Bassanda or the NOLA musical community, concertizing on the West Coast, would “drop in,” and Rashka would dish up food for all and sundry.

Clarinetist John Casimir (1898-1963), founder of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, said of the teenaged trumpeter he’d met in the early 1940s: “Little Spanish girl had guts and chops, and she could burn, too. And then she went on. We proud of her.”

Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī,
Manila, 1949 (age 16)
photo by Teresa-Marie Szabo
Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī a/k/a “Princess”

Violin, dance.

b1933 Sarawak (Borneo) of mixed Chinese, Indian, Dutch, Portuguese, Malay, and Irish extraction. Father a serviceman, scion of the Lawrence military family (Ulster), detailed to the Sarawak Rangers. Additional family connections to James Brooke, the “White Rajah,” which may account for the respect accorded to her by the Dyak peoples of the Borneo coasts and rivers, who called her “Princess”.

Learned old-style sean-nos Irish dancing from a paternal aunt born in the Glens of Antrim, who fled Shanghai’s British Concession in late 1937 during the Japanese invasion and joined her brother’s family in Borneo. A photo exists of Śamū'ēla, aged probably about six, dancing in hard-shoes on the wharf at the mouth of the Kuching River. At the same time, she was also trained in aspects of Hindi temple dance as practiced in those northeastern provinces which were most strongly influenced by South India.

Her father was reputedly a bastion of the Irish Freemasons in Southeast Asia; certain elements of Masonic symbolism and practice recur in both family history and her own poetry:

The blue pillars that support the banner of heaven
Are dearer to One Who Knows than all other things.
Could I find my way home from long wanderings away,
I would sing all things’ praises as the nightingale sings.[1]

She also wrote poetry in the complex meters of the Bassandan Afshak شاعر ("Shama" / “bardic”) tradition, a point of connection with Yezget Nas1lsinez, whose mother came from the same lineage—though where she got this expertise is unknown. Typically the Afshak tradition is carried in the mother’s line, and not much is known about Jaṅgalī’s mother other than her mixed-race Malay origin.

She met Madame Szabo at age 16 in Manila, where her father had traveled on construction contracts resulting from the explosion of building and new arts initiatives in the Golden Age of Philippine reconstruction. At a concert performance of Sulu Pangalay (folkloric dance related to silat martial arts), she was recruited by Szabo into the BNRO auxiliary as a dancer.

This was the same year (1949) that the Soviets began phased withdrawal from occupied Bassanda, ceding control to the newly appointed People’s Soviet Central Committee. In turn, the Central Committee’s heavy investment in the arts included the incorporation and rationalization of various performance ventures like the newly-christened “Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir” and the erstwhile “People’s Liberation Orchestra.” It’s thought that this “cultural nation-building” was a major factor contributing to the swift expansion of forces—and thus payroll requirements—in the BNRO between 1948-52. The first stages of collaboration between the Orchestra, Bronislava Nijinska, and the Eagle’s Heart Sisters likewise date from this same fertile period.

Thus, in 1953-54 Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī was present as a participant in the extensive redevelopment and re-envisioning of Bronislava Nijinska’s Xlbt. Op. 16, first sketched by the choreographer and the Creole dancer Celeste Roullet almost forty-five years before. It is not known why the 1909 collaboration broke off or the 1954 premiere was cancelled, although there are very significant gaps in the timeline of Nijinska’s life and at times she left the world of the arts altogether. In any case, the completion (though not performance) of the work in early ’54 represented a kind of culmination of the PLO’s transformation into the BNRO, an ensemble capable of collaborations of international weight and impact.

Jaṅgalī was enamored of children, and especially of the Szabo infants. In the communal and self-sufficient world of the BNRO, in which all members were expected to acquire and employ multiple skill-sets in service of creative vision and practical actualization, it was at Śamū'ēla’s insistence that every member of the organization learned how to diaper a baby; decades later, even Yezget-Bey himself boasted of his expertise at this task.

In 1958 took on expanded duties as player in place of Federica Rozhkov, when the latter departed the Never-Ending Tour at Sofia, destination unknown, to rejoin “Ashitaka Emishi” (Asher Vidnyye). Śamū'ēla met the American multi-instrumentalist David Lindley in 1964, during the BNRO’s American tour which culminated in their impromptu performance at the Topanga Canyon Banjo and Fiddle Contest, where she also encountered Appalachian flat-foot dancing, to which she quickly became avidly devoted.

She subsequently became a linchpin of the reconstituted Bassanda Youth Orchestra and authored the highly-influential violin method Este Vorba Despre Iubire, și Cântare.[2] She was renowned as a pedagogue, particularly for her dedication to and success with a very wide range of young players and/or those with special needs. On breaks between BNRO tours, she not infrequently departed, with a backpack and a fiddle case, to quite distant locations around the world, there to found or inspire youth orchestra programs. Especially in Latin America, more contemporary and innovative approaches, including the so-called “Garbage Orchestras” of found instruments, owe a debt to her inspiration, and her vision of “art for all”:

No one is alone
No matter how distant
We can all recall the One Mind
That we may sing together with One Voice.[3]

[1] SJ diary, 1947 (Bassanda Archives, accession 72.XI.15.092a)
[2] “It’s about Love, and Scales”
[3] SJ diary, 1981 (Bassanda Archives, accession 92.III.06.092a)

Etxaberri كزافييه le Gwo
Kingston, around 1962
Etxaberri كزافييه le Gwo

Violin, banjo.

Born Galveston Island,1931.

Though conventionally understood as a place-name (the village of Xabier in the Basque country of northern Spain), another etymology suggests that the name “Xavier” is actually Moorish, from the Arabic Ga'afar meaning "splendid", "bright". In the case of Etxaberri le Gwo, the Arabic derivation becomes more plausible in light of genealogical research which has suggested that his mother’s family was actually 16th century American criolla, descended from Esteban de Dorantes (c1500-39), the Moroccan-born black African who came to New Spain with the Narváez expedition, after prior stops in Hispaniola and Cuba. It is generally accepted that Esteban died in the Zuni Uprising of 1539, but another, possibly romantic school of thought argues that he was not killed; rather, that he and Indio friends faked the death as a means of winning his freedom—and that he lived out his life, fathering an extensive clan, in the New World. Some folklore legends even hold that the dark-faced Zuni Kachina dancer Chakwaina is based on Estevanico.

Etxaberri’s own father was of Caribbean Creole ancestry; he thus inherits the tradition of Barbadian rukatuk acoustic music, and the lineage of the smugglers and privateersmen who shipped out of Barbados during the War of 1812. There are likewise family connections with the communities of pirates and slavers that revolved around Jean Lafitte (1776-1823), who fought at the Battle of New Orleans after settling at Barataria Bay (Louisiana) and Campeche (Texas). Etsy himself was extensively tattooed, which lends credence to the possibility that he may have also had South Seas heritage (one grandfather is said to have come from Rokovoko, the home island of the harpooner Queequeg in Melville’s 1851 Moby Dick). Given his father’s Haitian and Barbadian maritime experience, and the evidence of his Eastern Mediterranean encounters in the very late 1940s, it therefore seems possible that, prior to his European sojourn, Etxaberri might have shipped out to the South Seas as a teenaged deckhand.

Another branch of his father’s family served as informants for Lydia Parrish in her 1920s Southeast collecting for the 1942 book Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands: the book contains a photo labeled “Snooks dancing ‘Juba’,” which may be an older cousin, around age 6.

Revealing mention of “Etsy” himself comes in a 1947 letter from the New York-based Ukrainian film-maker (Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti) and collector Maya Deren to Yezget Nas1lsinez, whom she had met at Cannes in 1946, while she was in New Orleans just prior to her departure for Haiti. That initial introduction may have come through NOLA’s Caribbean expat community:

“...I also make known to you the young American violinist Etxa le Gwo. He is about nineteen [actually seventeen], from a Haitian Creole family I think [NB: actually Barbadian]. He has extraordinary aptitude for concert music, but surely within him there is also the music that comes from his family lineage.

He is fit and energetic—I went with him on horseback to a family gathering southeast of the City, beyond the paved roads, in the watery Plaquemines Parish, at a place called Bay Tambour, and he is a remarkable horseman. The music played, featuring the unlikely combination of accordion, violin, guitars, percussive triangle, and laundress’s scrub-board, was energetic and infectious.

“He has very little money and I think it unlikely that he would be able to travel to Bassanda without assistance. I leave for Port au Prince within just a few days, but I enclose his mother’s mailing address in Houston Texas. Perhaps there may be a way for you to employ him in the future...”

In the event, despite Deren’s enthusiastic introduction, there is no evidence of immediate correspondence between le Gwo and Bassanda at this time.

What we do know is that he left school at 17 to ship out as deckhand on Caribbean sugar boats, which further explains his familiarity with Haitian vodun, Cuban rhythms, and—especially—Jamaican musics. Not all of his voyages are documented, though his music and accent showed influence from all these island nations. He certainly visited the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the South Pacific, in the late ‘40s; and he is said to have played with the saxophonist Zoya Carutas on shipboard as she was completing her service with the United Service Organizations, just before she met Nas1lsinez in Odessa in early 1949. It seems possible, therefore, that Zoya brokered the re-introduction of le Gwo to Yezget-Bey early in 1950.

An additional reunion was made, with the drummer Részeg Vagyok, when Etsy joined the band—though Vagyok’s Displaced Persons papers were almost certainly forged through Madame Szabo’s contacts in the international Roma underground—and they were first “introduced” in a Ballyizget rehearsal hall in June 1950. At sight, they called one another “Zag” and “Zayv,” and in that first rehearsal it became apparent that they had musical repertoires and even possibly prior experiences in common. Though the following is unsubstantiated, if Vagyok was in fact an American ex-serviceman (see elsewhere in the Personnel files), the two’s shared experience with music of the English-speaking Caribbean might have occurred as members of various South Atlantic maritime communities just after World War II.

The period during which Etxaberri joined the ensemble is conventionally regarded by scholars as marking the historical watershed in which, for both practical and formal purposes, the ad hoc “People’s Liberation Orchestra” morphed into the Bassanda National Symphony Orchestra. During these years, the war-time chamber group (Nas1lsinez, Szabo, Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk, Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire) was swiftly augmented: in 1946 by the Srcetovredi Brothers Willie & Jack, and Részeg Vagyok; Jakov Redžinald (a former member of the BYO) around 1947; Zoya Căruțaș in February 1949; Chaya Malirolink and Etxaberri himself around 1950; the Ŭitmena Sisters in 1951; and Federica Rozhkov a/k/a Ferikarohasu some time before 1952.

This explosion of personnel recruitment—precipitated most probably by the social unrest, mobility, and economic uncertainty of Bassanda’s post-War reconstruction—led to a vast expanse in the ensemble’s expressive range and orchestral capacities, but also in its financial obligations. Nas1lsinez and Madame Szabo, the latter a particularly canny businesswoman, appear to have concluded that the only way to sustain the group’s sheer survival, as its payroll list expanded, was to diversify and formalize its relationship with the new Socialist regime put in place by the Soviet occupiers. BNRO historians suggest that this enhanced financial stability is the most plausible, if not the only, explanation why Yezget-Bey, a notoriously anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic individual, might have agreed to submit to formal “State Ensemble” status.

le Gwo, a strong section player and—although the collectivist ethos of the BNRO/ESO tended to eschew focus upon the bravura individual—a firey soloist, became a sought-after guest artist with Eastern Bloc orchestras and chamber groups. Decades after joining the BNRO, and especially after 1985 (the death of Yezget-Bey) and the re-re-christening of the group as the Elegant Savages Orchestra, he continued to spark chamber ensembles and youth orchestras, both in the former satellites and also in the West.

Interestingly, “Etsy” was also an instinctively skilful chef: during his time with the band, he introduced both Jamaican music and iTal (holistic) cooking into their touring regimen. Junior members, for example, swore by both Madame Szabo’s Gulyás leves (paprika soup) and Etsy’s callaloo to ward off winter colds and the notorious Bassandan Seasonal Flu.

In later years a particularly imposing presence, with white beard and dreadlocks, le Gwo was nevertheless a kind and patient teacher whose students, of all ages and skill levels, loved and revered him. He was a key liaison between the BNRO and Thomas Mapfumo’s chimurenga group “Blacks Unlimited” for their watershed collaborative performance at the chaotic Independence Celebrations in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1980, where he also met Bob Marley for the first time.

Of him, the roots reggae singer Winston Rodney (Burning Spear) said, “I and I know him righteous man; Irie to all who love Jah and Bassanda. Me know Etsy as Bredraahn.”

フェリカロハス
Ferikarohasu in Okinawa.
c1949; photo Asher Vidnyye (?)
Federica Rozhkov
a/k/a Ferikarohasu (b1930)

(フェリカロハス)

Violin, dance, song.

Born Puerta Vallarta 1930 of mixed Filipino / Peruvian hidalga / Japanese heritage; family inherits South American creole and folkloric styles through the father’s line, part of the Pacific coast communities of fishers, coasters, and deepwater sailors. It has been suggested that junks plying east from the South China Sea might have made landfall in Latin America as early as 800CE, which might in turn provide explanation for the strain of Pacific Rim culture which appears in her family’s music and cultural experience.

Her father (a self-taught guitarist/violinist) had toured from the 1920s with Cuban opera companies who participated in the very swift Westernization of Japanese orchestral culture from the Meiji period. Her mother was a Noh dancer, and may have been a niece to the Greek / Irish journalist Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), who had become a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1896 and married into a Matsue samurai family. Her parents met on Montgomery Fruit Company-sponsored tours to Hawai’i, the Philippines, and Japan. May have been conceived during trans-Pacific voyage in 1929, while parents were on goodwill tour for the new revolutionary government of Plutarco Elias Calles. Other links to Japan came through the Main-Smith shipping family of Salem Massachusetts, whose ships made regular circuits to both the west coast of Jalisco in Mexico and the Japanese harbor city of Shimizu from the 1850s.

Colette St Jacques, the Haitian creole who had accompanied Algeria Main-Smith on her 1880s adventures in Central Asia, during which Miss Main-Smith first encountered the monkish tale of the Brethren (later tentatively identified as Col. Thompson and Gen. Landes) remained on the west coast of the United States after that journey. St Jacques appears to have maintained contact with both Main-Smith, but also Qingdao on the East China Sea, another port-of-call for the Smith clipper ships as late as the 1890s, and met Federica’s parents in San Francisco’s Japantown around 1936. It is thus possible in fact that Federica, unusually among foreign-born BNRO personnel, enters Bassanda from the East rather than West, as a result of long wanderings in Central Asia as musician and dancer.

Not much is known of her early musical training, but it seems clear that her talent was both precocious and diverse: fragmentary penciled notes in her extant music manuscript collection appear in three languages and mention ensembles from more than a dozen different nations. In her late teens, she was back in Asia, and guested as soloist and section-musician with Nihon Gendai Ongaku Kyokai (Japanese Society for Contemporary Music) in 1947-48.

Her stand-mate for those performances was a young Bassandan expatriate listed in the Society’s programs as “Ashitaka Emishi” (明日か えみし). It is suspected that the use of this obvious pseudonym derives from “Ashitaka’s” prior activities as a member of the anti-Soviet Bassandan underground; he has been tentatively identified with Asher Vidnyye (b1928), who had been a scholarship student at Owsley-Lawrence Conservatory but in 1944 joined the partisans fighting the Nazis as a teenaged sharpshooter, participating in the battles to liberate Xlbt and Ballyizget even after sustaining severe shell wounds in his right elbow and shoulder. Despite this heroism, he was compromised to the Russian invading forces due to his family’s origin in the Bassandan aristocracy, and had to flee the country to avoid being purged. No confirmed photographs are extant, but the physical descriptions from Japanese who played in the Society’s concerts tally with known biographical details: “Emishi” employed an unconventional technique, bowing with the left hand and playing the violin with the strings reversed; when asked why, he would jokingly dismiss the question with the quip “oh, it’s an old war wound.”

At the end of 1948, Federica and Emishi departed Tokyo on a motorbike, heading west and south to Nagoya and Fukuoka Prefectures. Her infrequent diary entries suggest that, after extensive wandering and interaction with aging indigenous musicians, they took ship on a tramp steamer that called at Okinawa and then Shanghai, where they spent some time playing on soundtracks for the new Shanghai Film Studios. After November 1949, the diaries break off (or are lost).

Met the Malaysian dancer Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī, a correspondent of Teresa-Marie Szabo, in Macau in 1951; whatever had become of Emishi, Federica was by this time traveling alone. Jaṅgalī’s letter of 2.16.51 to Madame Szabo says “She is tall and beautiful, and her violin is sublime. Moreover, she is a lovely dancer, kind and generous in her manner. But there is some tragedy there—some sorrow. Perhaps she could find a home with the Bassanda orchestra?” Any correspondence between Szabo & Federica is lost, but evidently she did join the BNRO some time in that period: she appears in the series of photographs taken by Cifani Dhoma in the Ballyizget rehearsal hall in 1952, and she stayed with the Orchestra for a number of years thereafter.

With both Jaṅgalī and Madame Szabo, was part of the collaboration of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters with choreographer Bronislava Nijinsky, where her combination of very high musicianship skills and extensive early dance training made her a particularly important linchpin of the partnership. She never spoke of Emishi, though the dancers, to whom she was especially close, believed that he was alive but somehow not at liberty to join her; it has been suggested that in this period he might have been involved in Khampa resistance against the Chinese incursion into Tibet.

On February 1, 1958, at the Grand Hotel in Sofia, while on an Eastern European tour with the BNRO, a package was awaiting Federica upon check-in. The desk clerk later reported that it had been handed in to the desk several hours before by an olive-skinned “foreign” young man in civilian clothes, who held his right arm oddly. Śamū'ēla, who was her roommate, said that the packet, which seemed to be unexpected, contained a book, an old photograph, and a note. She said “Fedi read the note, and her face lit up—I didn’t know she could smile like that.” That night, after the evening’s performance, Federica and Madame Szabo sat up very late in a corner of the hotel’s lobby, talking animatedly. At dawn, they shook Śamū'ēla awake in her bed; Madame said “Sam, you need to take over for Fedi. Fedi, we will take care of your other belongings. You go to him now.” Federica embraced both, and Madame said to her “Someday you both will come home, to Bassanda. We will be there for you.” Taking up her traveling bag and fiddle, Federica went to the door, smiled over her shoulder, and said, “Yes. We will come home some day,” and was gone.

The book, a treasured artifact in the ESO archives, bears the stamp of the Tokyo Imperial University library, where her uncle taught from the 1880s; it is an 1899 edition of Hearn’s folklore collection In Ghostly Japan. The photograph, tucked inside the flyleaf, shows Federica perched behind “Eimishi” on a motorbike, very young, smiling at the camera.

On the back is written, in a flowing, masculine kanji:

“1.II.58. 明日か からさん, ため。 永遠に。。(“Ashitaka kara Ferikarohasu, tame. Eien ni.”)

Madame Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk,
c1985, interviewed by the Manchester
Guardian, Bassanda
Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk

b c1910 of mixed Ukrainian and Scottish ethnicity; her father’s people were established in the Scots Borders by the Middle Ages and served in Henry V’s wars of opportunity; a “William MacMhuirich” is listed as armorer and master of archers at Agincourt. In the wake of the 1745 Highland Rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart, however, the Curry fortunes deteriorated and they largely left the British Isles to join the service of foreign powers; there is an Alasdair Curry listed in the Vatican Guard in the 1750s.

Syntiya’s great-grandfather James Curry fought with Colin Campbell’s 93rd Sutherland Highlanders—“The Thin Red Line”—at Balaclava in the Crimea in 1853; this action probably represents the precipitating event that led eastward. Her mother came from the hills outside Chernivets'ka oblast in Ukraine, just over the border with Romania. By the late 19th century, the family’s fortunes had deteriorated so significantly that they became, effectively, stateless: Syntiya grew up on a subsistence farm in the foothills of the Bassandan Alps. Though based in a very frugal rural existence, her family life was strong and she learned practical agricultural and mechanical skills—years later, her expertise with diesel engines was often crucial in repairing the aging buses and panel trucks employed by her touring ensembles. As a teenager, she travelled with the Mjekësia Trego, the “medicine shows” beloved at Bassandan country fairs and festivals, on which circuit it seems likely that she met the visiting American musician A. P. “Pappy” Lilt (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), from whom she learned a body of Appalachian mountain songs to supplement her family repertoire.

An early marriage to an alcoholic shepherd began to unravel when Syntiya found a worn balalaika in an abandoned mountain hut and commenced singing at harvest and seasonal festivals. In 1932 she left her husband and was recruited into the Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir, which—as in other Soviet satellites—was charged to present to the outside world (especially the West) an integrated and polished version of Bassandan “cultural diversity.” Although she resented the packaging of “quaint” traditional costume, homogenized and sanitized choral realizations of traditional songs, and over-controlled concert staging, she was sophisticated and realistic, a pragmatism which served her in good stead as she negotiated the tricky realities of artistic life under the early Stalinist state. She became a starring soloist with the Choir, though Bassanda’s comparative sequestration meant her voice was not widely known beyond the nation’s borders in this period.

In summer 1935, on a break between tours of the BSRFVC, she was heard singing to her own accompaniment in a teahouse by a party of Western alpinists which included Roy Douglas, a collaborator and copyist for Ralph Vaughan Williams, the English nationalist composer who had visited Bassanda decades earlier in company with Bela Bartók. Douglas, a skilled amanuenis for a number of English composers including William Walton and Richard Addinsell as well as Williams, immediately recognized her unusual talent and insisted upon taking a wax cylinder of her singing the traditional song M-am săturat de aceste oi blestemat (“I’m sick of these damned sheep”). That autumn, upon return to Oxford, Douglas played the cylinder for Vaughan Williams, who immediately wrote to Yezget Nas1lsinez in New York City, saying “I have heard a folksinger from your nation whose music you must come to know—she is extraordinary”.

Unfortunately, the intervention of Soviet diplomatic pressure from the East, and the growing threat of Nazi Germany from the West, meant that Bassandan travel and artistic collaboration in the late 1930s was significantly constrained. The BSRFVC toured little, which required in turn that its personnel were forced to cast about for other occupation or income. Syntiya sang in Ballyizget cafes, which linked her to diverse circles of locals and expatriates in the capitol’s underground musical community. But with the Nazi Anschluss in 1939, even that community’s fragile financial network collapsed, and she was reduced to the occasional cafe performance for the occupiers, coupled with a return to her early occupation as diesel mechanic.

At a truck garage on the outskirts of Ballyizget, on 14 September 1942 (one of the few precise dates in the BNRO’s early history, because documented by a receipt still in the Archives), Nas1lsinez and Vyrobnyk met for the first time. Yezget-Bey was ostensibly seeking repair of a persistent engine-knock in the 8-seat Rolls-Royce 353 touring car with which he, Terese-Marie Szabo, Jamey Mac Padraig O Laoghaire and one or two other musicians undertook the first clandestine collecting and guerilla concertizing of the “People’s Liberation Orchestra” in occupied Bassanda. In point of fact, Nas1lsinez had sought out Vyrobnyk: as she ran the car onto the lift, in the midst of a garage full of Nazi mechanics and chauffeurs, Yezget-Bey quietly whistled to her the melody of M-am săturat de aceste oi blestemat, Syntiya’s wax-cylinder recording of which he had heard six years before through the efforts of Vaughan Williams. After the repair, they adjourned to a basement raki shop on a side street, where Nas1lsinez proposed that she join the ensemble as vocal soloist and collector. Her vocal sound, particularly after completion of a unique choral approach with the arrival of Kaciaryna and Морган Ŭitmena in 1951, became a signature of the BNRO’s arrangements.

With the departure of Soviet occupying troops in 1949, and the gradual easing of internal autocracies during the Kruschev era, Syntiya somewhat reduced her touring activities, having moved her aged parents in the late 1950s from Ukraine to a mountain chalet in the hills above Ballyizget, which she purchased with royalties from a BNRO-backed recording of her signature song. She continued to appear as featured guest on certain recordings, and it was “Syntiya’s Mountain Blend,” a fiery brandy she distilled from Bassandan peaches, which fuelled the Orchestra’s winter tours and enabled the occasional convenient ejection of intrusive Soviet komissars from the band bus.

Reached by the Manchester Guardian at her mountain home in 1985, seeking a comment from her on the legacy of Yezget Nas1lsinez in the wake of his April 1st death, she said “I am grateful to Yezget-baba. Wherever I would be if he hadn’t come and found me at that garage in ’42, I wouldn’t be here. I will miss him.”

Rehearsal photograph of Kristina Olenev;
date, decade, age unknown.
As with a number of other members
of the BNRO/EHS circles, aging appears
to function quite unpredictably; see Ibrahim
Hazzard-Igniti, “Quantum Drift and Apparent
Time Displacement in the Bassandan Rift Valley,”
Journal of Speculative Geographical
Metaphysics (Paris, 1926)
Kristina Olenev

b N-Central forest highlands of Bassanda, 1918

At the age of 14, seeking—as she later described it—“wider horizons”, she ran away from her village to join a small mjekësia trego (“medicine show”), the pony-drawn carnivals which toured the mountain and steppe provinces. The trego was a well-loved folk art form which provided multiple generations of singers, players, dancers, acrobats, magicians, and comic actors their first performance training—and inspiration for the first tableau in Stravinsky’s 1911 Petrushka.

She was inveigled into the troupe by an unscrupulous “manager,” Dzhozef Ceaușescu, who persuaded her that her “future lay elsewhere,” and by whom she shortly became pregnant. In the first months of their travel together, she learned circus skills from aerial stunts to novelty dance to knife juggling.

As time went on, however, during her pregnancy and after the delivery of her infant son, she found herself isolated from the outside world: poorly housed, doing hard physical labor for very long hours, and on occasion physically mistreated by Ceaușescu. The manager also exploited the trego’s quasi-stateless status to engage in smuggling, a time-honored Bassandan tradition at which local legal customs often blinked. However, he trafficked primarily in opium: it was in precisely this same era that unscrupulous traders and smugglers realized the fortunes to be made by shipping poppy outside the nation’s borders for refinement into opium, in Turkey and Southeast Asia. Members of the troupe, in thrall to the manager’s brutality, were reluctant participants in this trade. Madame Nijinska told a story of Kristina attempting escape, in the dead of winter, over the mountain passes into the south, carrying her child in her arms, only to be recaptured and beaten again by the show’s guards.

The cycle of abuse only ended after the troupe was joined, around 1937, by the wandering American singer and banjo-player A. P. “Pappy” Lilt (b1871; see elsewhere in the Correspondence). Members of the troupe, interviewed years later, said:

“The man with the shaved head and white beard—the big man who came from the east, with the banza—he saved her. One night after our performance, Ceaușescu tried to beat her again, and then her child, but the big man stopped him and then fought with the show’s guards with his hands” (A.P. Lilt had learned Appalachian “cotch as kin” wrestling—a particularly brutal, no-holds-barred unarmed fighting technique—on the Cincinnati waterfront in the 1880s, and even into his old age was a formidable opponent)

“And after the guards lay unconscious, or moaning with broken heads and limbs, or missing teeth or ears, the big man said to Kariss, ‘Now do what you have to do to finish this—to be free.’ And Kariss for the first time struck back at Ceaușescu, and then again, and knocked him down, and stood over him, and drew her knife, and held it to his throat, and said ‘You will never hurt others again.’”

The troupe disbanded, with several of its members returning to their families and the animals adopted among them—even as late as the 1950s, there were tame elephants and tigers to be found in the high mountain villages. Ceaușescu disappears from the historical record but unconfirmed rumors suggest that he might have been killed in a back alley during a failed drug deal in Piraeus in 1941.

Olenev was devoted to children; there exists a remarkable series of photographs of her dancing with an infant in her arms—identified by a penciled notation as “Kariss, with David--1928”. It is not known how she spent the years between ’37, when the troupe disbanded, and 1943, when she entered the orbit of Yezget Nas1lsinez and the People’s Liberation Orchestra in Bassanda. She may have wandered, perhaps as far as Paris, St Petersburg, and even Buenos Aires; all were centers of dance training, but exhaustive archival research has revealed no record of a “Kristina Olenev” in the known rosters of any conservatory. Either she entered a program under a pseudonym or else, despite her extensive acrobatic training and very high natural aptitude, she was adjudged “too old” or “too unformed” for classical ballet.

She appeared in Ballyizget café culture, alone, in September 1943, a period of tremendous upheaval both within and beyond the borders. The Nazis still held the capitol, though Operation Barbarossa had stalled at the gates of Moscow and the Allies had already landed in Sicily. The nucleus of the People’s Liberation Orchestra (later the BNRO) was coalescing, with Teresa-Marie Szabo, Anthea Habjar-Law

ESO / EHS Personnel

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