Homeland Security

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		Good Morning Love	2:19	Play
2		The Rock of Truth	3:50	Play
3		Walk for Peace	3:20	Play
4		Old as Dirt Grandpa	5:12	Play
5		Most Gracious Great Spirit	4:09	Play
6		The Enemy Within	1:14	Play
7		Adjust Your Attitude Intro	2:54	Play
8		Adjust Your Attitude	4:11	Play
9		Lightin' the Lamp of Peace	4:40	Play
10		Every Woman Mary	3:34	Play
11		How Did I Get Here Blues	2:05	Play
12		Fight the Good Fight	3:20	Play
13		Reap What We Sow	1:35	Play
14		What a Wonderful World	2:33	Play
15		Simply Love	5:19	Play
16		All I Really Need	1:34	Play

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Description

"Long time ago, a wise man said, 'The enemy is within.'
Our enemy is our excess. We burn the oil too fast."
-- Hajb the Mad Poet on track 6 of Homeland Security

In the fall of 1979, when Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey (HAJB) was stationed aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier en route to the unfolding "Iranian Hostage Crisis", he had a guitar with him along with his first ever journal of music, poetry and stories. Inside the front cover of that journal he wrote "The first book of Hajb the Mad Poet." Newly married just a year and a half prior with a first child on the way, he was also embarking on parenthood and family life.

Hajb had been christened at birth in a Nazarene Protestant Church with a Muslim name and grew up in a West Indian home in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. In his early twenties, while attending school near Chicago, IL, he acquired his first guitar and took a folk music class after hearing a friend work slowly through a solo guitar rendition of Bach's Jesu. The music seemed to offer a hint of spirituality with no strings attached.

By the year 2000, Hajb had written, illustrated and published a warmly humorous book (based on a story that he had told to an elementary school class in the mid-1990s) about an African-American Muslim family finding similar symbolism in Christmas and Ramadan. He had also joined an international interfaith peace fellowship, started a non-profit "Imagine Peace Project" and begun to share his "Free Black Ink" music and stories in recordings and live performances of "Ali Ibn Musa," the musical storyteller. He gave his first musical storytelling performance for anyone other than his own children in 2000, during Black History Month at a bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he traveled to Washington, D.C., that summer to perform during a 40-day interfaith peace vigil. In the summer of 2002, he was a featured performer at a Storytelling for Peace Festival in Los Angeles, CA.

Sharing music and stories beyond the confines of his home led Hajb on an entirely new journey, however, encountering people and ideas from cultural and spiritual traditions throughout the world. From the African continent alone, his new "discoveries" included the Forest of the Forest People, the rock paintings of the San, the Cosmological Wheel of the Dagara, the Orishas of the Yoruba, and the Black Madonna of Ancient Kemet (Egypt). The dreadlocks of the Rasta connected African with American "discoveries" that included the Sacred Hoop of the Oglala Sioux as well as a much deeper appreciation of old acquaintances, such as the Tao Te Ching and quantum physics. Such are the spiritual streams that carry Hajb the Mad Poet on musical storytelling journeys through the peace jungles of the world.

In the fall of 2004, 25 years after Hajb embarked on his first musical storytelling journey, Hajb had become a grandparent, and what was once called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis" continued to unfold in deeply disturbing ways. So Hajb released a CD of poetry and music touching on all of his varied life themes, under the title "Homeland Security." He continues to pursue that hint of spirituality with no strings attached.