All Life Is Vibration: Music, Social Movements & Guest Buddy Booker

This week, host Ian Heller starts where everything starts — at the frequency. Before the guest arrives, Ian makes the case that music isn't just a soundtrack to social change, it is the change: from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" cracking open the civil rights movement, to the science of string theory suggesting that at the core of the universe, we're all just vibrations looking for harmony. Then Ian is joined by his old friend and former bandmate Buddy Booker — Harlem native, 40-year bass teacher, adjunct professor at The New School, and a musician who has spent his career doing the thing most people won't: holding everyone else up from the back of the band. Together they explore what it truly means to be a good teacher — not just technically skilled, but genuinely attuned to how each person learns. Buddy also opens up about raising what he calls his "forever children," two kids on opposite ends of the autism spectrum, and how that experience shaped everything about how he listens, teaches, and plays. And why the world right now sounds less like a band and more like the Tower of Babel — a room full of angry soloists who forgot the music is still going on all around them.