by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

"I can explain it now," says Philadelphia jazz musician Rufus Harley, "but I couldn't explain it then. The mind is the last place that gets the message. The heart is the first, the ear is the second and the mind is the last."

The message in question is how and why the bagpipes became Harley's instrument of choice, at a pivotal point in 1963. "When I heard the bagpipes at President Kennedy's burial services on TV, it was the drone, the sustained droning of the pipes that really got to me."

In that drone Harley heard an echo of the blues, but he also heard something deeper. The instrument was a conduit for cosmic vibrations, a reflection of our human selves and our place in the universe - what Harley calls the "inner me" and "inner ma," respectively (they also represent the male and female, yin and yang, in and out - polarities in balance).

Since purchasing his first pipes at a pawn shop in '63, Harley has carved a unique niche for himself. As the world's greatest (and uh, only) jazz bagpiper - albeit one happy to tackle pop hits like "Windy" and "Eight Miles High" - Harley has played with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Roland Kirk, rubbed shoulders with Muhammad Ali and Bill Cosby, and performed on the White House lawn. In fact, Washington has apparently bestowed upon him the title of International Ambassador of Culture and Messenger of Freedom, and as such he's been all over Europe and even to Moscow, spreading the word that will bring peace, freedom and harmony to everyone. And that word is America.

The key is Harley's original approach to the pipes. Not only does he play them on the right side, not the traditional left (he points out that the Scottish likewise drive on the wrong side of the road), he "puts some English on there," in his words - as opposed to Gaelic or Celtic. "The American international English language, to me, is the highest artform language on the face of the planet."

With his pipes, sax, Liberty Bell replicas and copy of the Constitution in tow, Harley views himself as a modern-day Pied Piper, pimping positive possibilities. "I was in Berlin, back when they were tearing the Wall down, presenting the German people with a Liberty Bell on national TV. So when I went to pick up the Bell, I got possessed by the Bell. What the spirit was doing was gradually creating me into what is needed to be able to sustain our planet.

"I feel that all that slavery, the Holocaust, and even in Iraq, Iran now, the First World War, the Civil War - it was all based on language. I know this is a hell of the thing to say, but if you're not in tune - you're either in or you're the fuck out - if your soul is not in tune with the solar system, nature automatically is going to force you to go the fuck out of it, see. That's what's happening. We had a president, Thomas Jefferson, and he said, ‘We're not gonna have no peace and harmony until we learn to speak one common language.' That's where we, as people, have been getting our asses kicked, because we have to go through all of these changes to learn how to play on the changes, with everybody being on the same fucking page!"

With the Unireverse and other guests at la Sala Rossa on Thursday, June 24, 9pm, $10

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