Vortex, Baba: Park Vibe Notebooks

211 pages, with notes and references. Eight original black and white photographs. Cover from original painting by Druid Hill Park Vibe artist Kaki Edwards. Paperback. 9 x 6.

"The book dances: tapestry words delight energetics, reminiscence pics do cosmic flashback, an importation of the now and into a future of offworlds here on earth"--Baba L'Salaam, Elder and founder, Park Vibe Baltimore

Think of it as live archive.  It moves fast, the book leaps, it conjoins precarity and resource.  Cultural vortex: it whirls, it worlds.  Vortex, Baba proximates around Black space and time, around parks and trees and roots and ancestors.  Think with Christina Sharpe of "beauty as method," think with Fred Moten para-phrasing ontologies and holds, "feeling you feeling me."  This book rumbles respect, care, and neophilia, love of the new.  Vortex, Baba looms language and form fresh and wild, the book spinning through bright matter moments, memory glow quanta, tripping energy times.             

Gerald Majer engages with Black urban spaces of experiment and creation, of blessing, prayer, and improvisation.  At an intersection of Black philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics, Vortex, Baba sounds through the people, the histories, and the profound diasporic-cultural vibrations gathered at Baltimore's iconic Druid Hill Park.  Vortex, Baba traces the personal and collective lives of Baba L'Salaam, Adon Aesh, Jamal Moore and other Park Vibe players rooted in a drum circle community sustained from 1960s Black Arts radicalism onward through today's rising generations. Joining immersive literary journalism and philosophical explorations, Majer interrogates immediacies of race, feeling, and sociality.

A PLAYLIST for VORTEX, BABA!

                                                                                    (see Playlist on Bandcamp, Vortex, Baba)

With Open the Gates leading

and Saul Williams and Carlos Williams going out--

In the middle, Baltimore Park Vibe generations (with DC and Philly friends) continue to bud blossom root branch with new music!

  Moor Mother/Irreversible Entanglements, Open the Gates (2021)

                                                            PRIMER

Luke Stewart, Warren "Trae" Crudup III, For Mdou (2023)

                                                            TA ABU

Mojuba Duo (Jamal Moore and Nik Francis), Hardship, the Land, and the Shining Sun (2019)

                                                PLAYLIST WITH ABDUL

Ancestral Duo (Jamal Moore and Luke Stewart), Two Sides (2020)

                                                KALIMBA WITH DENNIS

Bashi Rose, Ritual of Rebellion (2024)

                                                ADORATION WITH AESH

Nikolas Francis, The Path Chosen by Travel (2024)

                                                VORTEX, BABA

Kemetic Lullaby, Shu Movement 1 (2022)

                                                APP WITH GERALD

Jamal Moore, Thomas Stanley, Luke Stewart, Cargo (2019)

                                                AS SHAWL, ARMOR OF FLIGHT

Konjur Collective, Blood in My Eye (A Soul Insurgent Guide) (2022)

Saul Williams, Carlos Rossie, Saul Williams Meets Carlos  Williams and Friends at Tree People (2025)