The Tisziji Munoz Interview

The Degradation of Love...

"To soon after birth, we are not allowed to come into the world and then be called to love. We come into the world as some egoic manifestation self serving extension of our ancestry. This is the first hurdle. How do we get over that? Now we're a Bobby. Now we're a Mary. It's just that, no more no less. Already subordinate to anyone larger then we are. So we are born into this madness and we are just kids! Kids have the potential of the divine. We are born out of and from the royalty of spirit. The culture doesn't see it that way."

We have a caste system. We have a racist system. Anything but life as a royal thing. We are talking about the materialism that has been in ingrained in us which is suppose to be good! But it serves a self defeating purpose. It makes people less. "Oh you have ears this size? You don't have hair like us. So the materialism then relative to appearance is misused and its been perverted to a degree where we have the kind of racism that's total nonsense. Where in the world does the heart enter the conversation. When does the heart get to speak for itself. We have self speaking for itself everywhere. What it perpetrates is more difference and less division amongst people and sadly conflict and destruction."

Playing the Drums.

I had a fever and it was intense. As a child I was snuck into the Palladium and met peeps like Mongo Santamaria. It actually was like coming home. Coming from a culture that on the weekends particularly we would be congregating in the park for these meditations these descongas as they were called or discharges. The people are from the islands and in the same manor that people would go to church, they would feel the rhythms to calm the body. Whatever the people could make of the music, you had several drummers, got some horn players anybody and everybody was welcomed into this particular healing. From that culture which is a beautiful culture. It was socially integrated and tribal and functional in a social way. Then I found the Palladium. These guys found me playing my five Conga drums in Brooklyn Heights and they said; "man check this kid out! Check this cat out." I felt at home but It wasn't meant for me to stay with these Latin Cats. My particular function was to appreciate my roots as sacred feeling power and tune into the rhythms of the cosmos.

"I didn't know what music is or was. I just played it."