Rough year to be homeless in Los Angeles, especially if you’d taken up residence on the islands of dirt and debris occupying the center channel of the LA River between Burbank and Figueroa. A year ago, a resident of the area told me they’d moved to the islands when the city dislodged them from the higher, safer, gated zones between the 5 freeway shoulder and the bike path. Where did they find refuge this winter, during our exceptional rainy season? Some have built shacks on the cement shore, in the mouths of smaller drainage arteries, but that can only be a small portion. A man loaded with a grocery bag slips through a breach in the fence next to the Griffith Park tennis courts. The brave soul who had settled halfway up the ridge leading to Beacon Hill, in Griffith Park, has vanished. Not surprising, the hill is invaded by black mustard (Brassica Nigra), or is it shortpod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana), tall and dense, and quite pretty in full bloom like today, but not habitable. They say you can eat the greens and flower though. I won’t try it. Not today. Today, I’m surrounded by the color of this invasive, non-native plant and I’m thinking of a Mingus tune, “Orange was the color of her dress, then blue silk.”

Evidently, it’s the colors in the title that prompt the connection–or is it ‘conection’?–but I also find that the many tempo changes, the many conversations that take place between the players, the sense that at any moment the thing can unravel into anarchy but doesn’t, the drive of Mingus’s bass, somehow fit a good ramble across Griffith Park. The many changes of pace–fast going downhill, slooow uphill–the subtle changes in scenery, the inevitable urban incursion–“Cristo Viene” spray-painted on rocks, trash piles and the need for a multitude of signs forbidding entry, marking property lines–all contribute to a complex composition that gently comes together during a nap near the wisdom tree. So, yellow was the color of the hills thanks mainly to the sprawling mustard, and then blue made an appearance in the shape of a single flower at first, then patch of lupines.

On the album where I thought I’d heard “orange was the color of her dress…”–memory lapse, it wasn’t–there is another superb performance of another tune fitting the occasion, “I’ll Remember April”. A classic, with a memorable Bud Powell piano solo, full of reverence for the music that Mingus, in much of his work, pushed forward, beyond its comfortable boundaries. This ‘conection’ didn’t occur to me until later, long after I’d exited Griffith Park proper, skirting its southern perimeter along Mulholland, and I’d run into a library of sorts, which, in typical LA fashion was nothing but a facade, or rather a cleverly decorated garage door. Some titles of note: Marx and Hegel, Think, Conections of the world, and my favorite, Aphorisms.