'Full Mantis' offers excellent look at Milford Graves

For those of you who have access to Amazon Prime’s streaming service I highly recommend the documentary film “Full Mantis” which is about Milford Graves who is considered to be one of the greatest free jazz drummers.

Several years ago there was a segment about him on NPR because doctors were referring patients to Graves who was getting these patients irregular heart beats back on track. Graves uses a combination of computers and drum beats to do this.

This is just one of the many things Graves has mastered making him a modern day renaissance man.

Graves invented a new form of martial arts (Yara) that he created after hours of observing praying mantis movements and then combining it with African ritual dance.

He is also a master gardener and his global garden in South Jamaica, Queens, New York City, is a wonder to behold. To see it go here: www.milfordgraves.com

“In 2013, Milford Graves along with Drs. Carlo Tremolada and Carlo Ventura received a patent for an invention that relates to a process of preparing a non-expanded tissue derivative, that is not subjected to cell proliferation in vitro, which has a vascular-stromal fraction enriched in stem and multipotent elements, such as pericytes and/or mesenchymal stem cells, or for preparing non-embryonic stem cells obtained from a tissue sample or from such tissue derivative…” --Wikipedia

If you want to hear him there is quite a bit of Milford Graves’ music on YouTube.

LEE SANTA

Sandpoint