opus de funk

Headed out to the Blue Note last night to catch legendary jazz pianist Horace Silver who, in his late 70’s, is still in prime form. Though the venue was packed, the group I was meeting (members of a jazz octet with which I play) had arrived early enough to get a table directly in front of the stage, so I ended up sitting about five feet in front of the piano, directly in Silver’s eye line.

Silver pulled up one of his classic compositions, “Song for my Father”, early in the set, and as I had played the same piece earlier in the day at a lunchtime jam session, my fingers were unconsciously moving through trumpet fingerings along with the music. He saw me doing so, winked at me. And for the rest of the show, Silver shot me sidelong glances whenever he did something he was particularly proud of – working bits of Rachmaninoff or “When John Comes Marching Home” (aka “The Ants Go Marching Two By Two”) into his solos, laughing to himself about it along the way.

Most of the rest of the group were younger guys, in their twenties and thirties, and Silver clearly relished the enthusiasm they put forth. “That’s right,” he’d shout, in the midst of their solos, “that’s how you say it!” And, indeed, that was how you say it, as the group laid down funky jazz line after funky jazz line.

I’d not seen Silver play live before, and, as he and many other jazz icons are aging rapidly, I wanted to catch him while I still could. It was indubitably worth it, in part to simply hear such great jazz being played right in front of me, in part to see that, no matter how seriously the audience was taking his playing, Silver wasn’t taking it seriously at all, was simply jamming his heart out and having a hell of a lot of fun.

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May 1, 2004

back to the books

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children’s Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone – it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts – but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn’t much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I’d pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I’d go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was – in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start – I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I’d never read. I’d pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I’d replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I’m on my fourth book of the past week. And I can’t help but think those Children’s Library librarians would be rather pleased.

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April 27, 2004

archetyping

This past weekend, watching the last Sex & the City, part of me was thinking: “Thank god this thing is ending; the show’s gone so far downhill this is basically a mercy killing. And clearly Carrie’s ending up with Big. I could have called that from the first episode.” Yet, another part of me was thinking: “Thank god Carrie’s ending up with Big, because if she doesn’t, I’m utterly fucked.”

Truth be told, from that first episode, I identified with Mr. Big. Or, rather, I identified with his archetype, the broader class of Bigs who show up in film after film: Jack Nicholson’s Harry Sanborn in Something’s Gotta Give; Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown in the remade Thomas Crown Affair; any of cinematic history’s laundry list of men who too late discover the same traits that made them moguls led them, in their personal life, to push people away, to end promising relationships abruptly, to bounce from fling to fling with no apparent end destination in mind, finding increasingly little joy in each.

While I may only be starting out on the route to mogul, I’m already well seasoned in ending good relationships for bad reasons. Which is why I’m always secretly thrilled by the redemptive endings Hollywood inevitably lays out for these characters. It’s an odd relief to find one somehow changing his spots, reconciling his romantic streak with his inability to actually sustain that romance. The happily ever afters let me tell myself: if that’s the path I’m heading down, at least it ends up somewhere good.

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February 26, 2004

and all that jazz

At most of the jazz gigs I play, the audience is predominated by late-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white couples, the sort who golf clap after each solo, chortling “oh, I say, wasn’t that delightful!”

Every so often, I’m lucky enough to play a bebop gig up in the heart of Harlem, where I’m the token white kid in a band otherwise comprised of wizened black guys in their 70’s, guys who wear bowler hats and say “hep”, “cat” and “like, dig.” There, the audience is little old black couples, who shout “mm hm!! mm hm!!” or “yeah! come on!” while we’re playing.

Nowhere I play, however, do I see many young people. Sure, there are a handful of twenty and thirty year-olds at any gig, but they’re almost invariably musicians themselves. I’m not sure why my peers have never discovered jazz, though in part I suppose it’s the fault of jazz musicians ourselves, who somehow let music once synonymous with defiant, up-yours cool become instead synonymous with soothing elevator rides.

Still, I don’t think today’s musicians hold all the blame – even while the Brittney Spears of the world dominate popular radio, for example, people in their twenties and thirties continue to dig back into rock of the ’60’s and ’70’s. For some reason, however, almost none of them are digging into (or simply digging) that era’s jazz.

But, in many ways, jazz was far enough ahead of it’s time to have less in common with rock of the time, and more with today’s indie rock. Lo-fi? Miles Davis practically invented it. Ironic hipster cool? Check the unimpeachably wonderful names of Charles Mingus compositions, like “The Shoes Of The Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.” Or perhaps more in common with today’s hip hop – Herbie Hancock’s thirty year-old releases, which fathered both funk and fusion jazz, are some of the most used sources of samples, hooks and beats.

So perhaps there’s hope for jazz after all. Perhaps the fact that jazz now lives relegated to Starbucks sampler CDs and Sophomore year faux-sophisticated hook-up music playlists represents the darkest hour just before dawn. After all, at several points in jazz’s century-long history, the art has been prematurely autopsied, declared DOA just before some new innovators lifted it back up to new heights and new public recognition.

If any music is about comebacks, about the quintessentially American-ness of rising, Phoenix-like, from one’s own ashes, jazz is it. So I have hope. Or, at least, faith. Faith that, even without people looking for it, jazz good enough to revive the medium would find listeners. Find people who may not know exactly what they’re waiting for, but will know it when they hear. People who will, for the first time, understand Louis Armstrong’s timeless description of what makes jazz: “Brother, if you have to ask, then you’ll never know.”

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February 23, 2004

moratorium

On a slightly lighter note: this past weekend, I spent about an hour going through my overflowing bookshelves, weeding out those books I knew I’d not read again but might be able to put to good use at the New York Public Library. In the process, I not only pulled nearly fifty donatable tomes, but also some twenty-six other books I had either not finished or never even started, but would still really love to read.

Resultingly, I’ve consolidated those twenty-six onto a single shelf, and have effected a new-book purchase moratorium until I plow through those plucked lost gems. Based on the way I scarf down books, I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.

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September 22, 2003

versification

Arriving uptown last night fifteen minutes early for a rehearsal with my jazz septet, I popped into the neighboring Barnes & Noble to waste time wandering the piles of books. Thumbing a few in the “New Releases: Poetry” section, I was suddenly and intensely reminded that I love poems, that I have since at least kindergarden, and yet have somehow fallen almost completely away from reading them.

With a bit of reflection, I was unhappy to realize the reason: over-education. Too much time deconstructing poems, picking apart the nuances of their language in an attempt to second guess the writer’s intentions and unintentions, had almost entirely robbed poetry of the joy of pure and simple reading. So, to remedy that, I’ll be falling back on the suggestion of Poet Laureate Billy Collins: reading a poem a day. Not analyzing and discussing. Not “unpacking”. Just reading. Reading and enjoying.

Don’t worry; I won’t be subjecting you all to those daily poetry choices. (Not most of the time, anyway.) But, on the off chance that some of you might similarly be inspired to rediscover a lost love of the form, here’s one to kick things off, by Laureate Collins himself, that sums up rather perfectly the bind poetry finds itself in today.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

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August 28, 2003

small screen revenge

Remember that polo game, years ago, when Biff (that rat bastard) scored his winning goal on your defense, then lifted your girlfriend Delilah onto the back of his horse before galloping off to the country club’s dock and embarking, just the two of them, in his catamaran, leaving you forever behind in the dust? Remember how you’ve hated Biff passionately ever since? Well, finally, here’s you big chance to extract revenge: pit yourself against him in competitive feats of physical prowess, televised nationally!

Too good to be true, you say? Nay! Because my friend Caitlin is casting a new (and possibly quite crappy) reality game show called Bragging Rights, and will totally hook you up. If you’re a guy between the ages of 20 and 40, have a grudge (or at least can fabricate one convincingly and thereby fulfill your lifelong fantasy of making an ass of yourself on national TV), and want to win “valuable prizes”, send an email to braggingrights@atlasmediacorp.com, attn: Caitlin.

Sorry, Biff, but your comeuppance has finally arrived.

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July 10, 2003