Give Thanks, 2011

1. Juliana is half a head shorter than me. In the rain I'm looking down anyway to keep it out of my face; she says something like 'that's why socialism is international, because one country can be socialist but it's gonna get screwed by other countries that want its resources.' The rain continues to pour, but in the clear plastic awning of the Tribeca Tavern we are sheltered from the brutal gusts of wind that send droplets down my collar.

2. 'I'm sorry you were waiting out in the cold,' or something to that effect, says Jean-michel. I say 'look at the trees. The leaves are beautiful.' 'You are enjoying it? I'm sorry for taking so long, I didn't realise you were out here.' I say 'We don't have autumn in Singapore.' He says 'Come in.'

3. Steve steps over to us, he might have said something but my ears are ringing and Chris and I share a look that says 'what just happened? Why did we stop playing' until I notice one of the strings on Nick's guitar is dangling, flapping about like a broken limb. Oh. Nick says that the new string isn't gonna stay in tune through a song like 'Power of Soul.' I say 'Nick, you wanna rap?'

4. In Singapore, I'm in a taxi crying my brains out. I thought you'd be better at this. What have you been doing? If you say that, it's never coming together. I will practice harder. I don't ever want to be a musician, it's too hard I've given it everything and here I am curled up like a stillborn foetus, covered in tears and afterbirth.

5. I am behind the cargo containers in the center of Taiwan. I can't remember my name, or what just happened; I know I failed in some way and that I shouldn't care but the rain and the gravel press into my feet and hands and nothing is escapable.

6. Can we do just one more quick one? Stella by starlight, around here (Gilbert counts it off fast)

hey man, I'm glad you came by--Sorry about the amp--Yeah man, Ray Brown is such a boss--I think that's pretty swingin'--Do you wanna learn this Ron Carter blues I've been working on--Sound good guys, that's just like the record. Are you reading from scores or something?

7. 'I think music is an inherently political act. That's why Darlene Clark Hine talks about 'sexual politics' when she discusses the blues singers. I mean - yeah, it's not political music as in it's not really a social critique, but just by, um, putting your experiences out there... I mean, what I'm saying is, it really kind of affirms that you're a human being, with real concerns and real experiences and I think once people accept that through music then there's the possibility for social change.'

8. 'So what I've really been meaning to tell you--and I only say this because you're my friend and I feel like I can trust you with this information--is that I'm basically Jesus.' 'Oh yeah, I think I've known for awhile, I mean we suspected that was the case.' 'Yeah. it's not really all that. People bitch a lot about stupid things. Am I walking too fast?' 'Yeah, I'm still getting the hang of these...' 'I'm sorry you broke your feet. I made those, you know.'

9. 山 is my friend. She has red hair and she’s a little bit less tall than I am. Usually she floats about five to ten centimetres over the ground, though, so we’re at eye level. She says my right profile is more flattering and refuses to walk on the other side of me. I say, ‘山, god fucking damn it.’ She says, glowing a little, ‘yeah. It’s shit. But look at the trees!’

10. The lights had been turned out and there was the feeling of hands and faces and teeth and some shared laughter, and some shared apologies. I say some things, I was drunk at the time, but I remember the words ‘yeah, it’s alright. Freely given, you know? And freely received.’

11. It was a disappointing sundown at the Hudson. I tramped four blocks there through the cold, I had Keith Jarrett or Grant Green or the Duke, something which I consider Proper Sunset Music on the headphones. It was too cloudy to see anything but the gradual fading of the day from orange-tinted grey to dark-blue-grey. The lights on the cliffs of New Jersey came on one by one.

12. Nick and Kim are a kind of conglomerate entity on the couch. I am on the armchair. I say 'Jesus the weather is fucking awful.' 'Yeah, it's been ridiculous.' It keeps raining, somewhat.

A few weeks later, it’s still raining and it’s going to be Thanksgiving in a few hours and the trees are dripping. Freely given and freely received. God fucking damn it, Christmas is coming. Jesus mother fucking Christ. I hate the weather.

13. Keith Jarrett is moaning. Jack is swirling like a blizzard and Gary is thundering like a tropical storm and Keith is moaning and screaming and playing and playing and playing.

Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Gary Peacock

are some kind of celestial triumvirate. Listening their 'Standards Live' recording, little pockets of light push up between the spaces, illuminating everything they play in a weightless glow. On this record at least his achievement is not gravitas, but a kind of transcendent ease that is buoyant to the earth-bound.

The Old Religion

I have a bad habit, which is a kind of a Catholic retention, which happens when someone asks, or I ask what do I think about music, or what is my place in this as a south-east asian, as a guitar player, as an immigrant, as an American, what do I think about the great living tradition of African-American improvised music, or European classical music, and what is my place in them? And how am I a part of the contemporary society of professionals and journeymen who have dedicated themselves to this music, as a Chinese person, as an educated person, as an atheist, as a human being who loves human beings?

At this point all I can think of is to get down on my knees and say 'what kind of fucking question is that, I am incapable of asking let alone knowing. I am not worthy.' I shouldn't; professing not to know is as absurd as professing to know, like asking 'What are we?' where the what and the are and the we are equally incomprehensible. I have a kind of provisional answer consisting mostly of notes and sketches on manuscript paper. Music contains many elements of living, but only really answers the one question 'Are we?' The answer is yes.

budpowellbudpowellbudpowell

Today I re-read Kurt Vonnegut's 'a Man without a Country' and listened to Bud Powell play 'Cherokee' and my heart broke in two.

swimming in Monk covers

Kurt Rosenwinkel - Reflections, Ask Me Now

Bobby Broom - Rhythm-a-ning

Jean-Michel Pilc - I've Got it Bad and it Ain't Good, Solitude, Rhythm-a-ning

Couple of fantastic Monk covers here - just when I thought it couldn't be done. Rosenwinkel brings a special kind of poise to Reflections, and he channels the crazy in a way that appropriates no Monk-isms, yet is definitively loopy. Broom's Rhythm-a-ning in a guitar trio setting lets him cut loose with some crazy harmonies, and he gets to play the blues. It's the most straight-ahead of all the cuts mentioned here. Which brings me to Pilc. The first two of those aren't strictly Monk covers (they're Ellington tunes) but the way he plays them is so strongly reminiscent of the Monk Plays Ellington album - he even does that Monk 'cat running down the keyboard in suspiciously good time' lick once - that I consider these covers of Monk's versions. Pilc is actually insane, though. Sometimes I can't make head or tail of his music, but when it's good, it's really good, and he gets it right here.

swimming in Monk covers

Kurt Rosenwinkel - Reflections, Ask Me Now

Bobby Broom - Rhythm-a-ning

Jean-Michel Pilc - I've Got it Bad and it Ain't Good, Solitude, Rhythm-a-ning

Couple of fantastic Monk covers here - just when I thought it couldn't be done. Rosenwinkel brings a special kind of poise to Reflections, and he channels the crazy in a way that appropriates no Monk-isms, yet is definitively loopy. Broom's Rhythm-a-ning in a guitar trio setting lets him cut loose with some crazy harmonies, and he gets to play the blues. It's the most straight-ahead of all the cuts mentioned here. Which brings me to Pilc. The first two of those aren't strictly Monk covers (they're Ellington tunes) but the way he plays them is so strongly reminiscent of the Monk Plays Ellington album - he even does that Monk 'cat running down the keyboard in suspiciously good time' lick once. Pilc is actually insane, though. Sometimes I can't make head or tail of his music, but when it's good, it's really good, and he gets it right here.

Michael Ondaatje - The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed

and leave the yellow bark dust

on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

you could never walk through markets

without the profession of my fingers

floating over you. The blind would

stumble certain of whom they approached

though you might bathe

under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture

neighbour to your hair

or the crease

that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers

as the cinammon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you

before marriage

never touch you

- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I burried my hands

in saffron, disguised them

over smoking tar,

helped the honey gatherers...

*

When we swam once

I touched you in water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell.

You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in the act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

peeler's wife. Smell me.

good jazz

you feel in your feet - you need to move, to tap, even though bebop isn't particularly danceable; but it possesses an energy of the body.

Great jazz you feel in your hands because it washes down from the top of your head to fill your entire body; it fills you. That's the feeling I get when I hear Sonny Rollins's The Bridge, which you'll know that I've been listening heavily to this week.

The assuredness that characterises the playing on this album is hard to pin down but takes particular forms. Sonny's solos here are the mature culmination of his thematic explorations earlier on in his career, but they seem different in a way - compared to 1957's Night at the Village Vanguard or even Saxophone Colossus he plays less notes, more blues, and is unafraid of medium tempos and ballads. You could almost say this album is mellower in many ways than prior speed-fests, but that's a useless distinction. His gravitation toward the 'normal' or the 'mainstream' is not a mellowing-out of style but a movement downward toward the content of the music.

For example, the motivic solo that opens the album on 'Without a Song' is a paragon of grace. Of course to talk about the programmatic content of any jazz solo is complete garbage, but, as a way of understanding it, I could describe what he plays here as the return to self. Bird's freewheeling, catastrophic solos are slyly symbolic of the kamikaze consciousness of the 40s and 50s and concomitantly the terror and the exhilaration of life in the big city; it starts from a point then changes so rapidly as to become ecstatically mutilated. Sonny's solo is, on the other hand, a cry of understanding and acceptance, and a return to self. I enjoy listening to it for a different reason from Bird. Bird was crazy: Sonny Rollins is wise. There is a pleasure and a kind of hope in hearing that he had arrived at that place even in this place.

Psychological speculation aside, this is also music possessed of excellent technical mastery. The motif in the tenor solo is a simple repetition of the tonic note surrounded by the major pentatonic on the tonic (say that ten times). Sonny starts with pretty much just that, and then takes the line through the changes for awhile, but always with an incredibly detailed ear for when the line passes back through the tonic note. Every time he plays the Eb, even if it's buried in the midst of a line flying through the changes, it pops out at the listener and grounds even his wildest improvisations with the colour of the motif. I'm pretty sure that that particular musical awareness of the motif is part of the perception of assuredness that I get from this. It feels strong and stable.

I'd go on, but as it is I'm not being paid to come up with this shit. The rest of the album is more of the same; that is to say, powerful stuff. Hits : 'John S.' 'God Bless the Child' 'The Bridge' but everything's gravy, really. Highly recommended.

Bridges

I am assured by the gurus of social media that blogging at an irregular pace will cause me to lose all of my readers. That seems to contain some truth, but I dislike the notion that my readers will lose their erections if not repeatedly stroked at regular intervals. I'll blog whenever I damn well feel like. That said, please don't leave me. I'm all alone here.

I spent the last few weeks catching up with the developments in music of all sorts and trying to put my life back together. So: in that vein: Gogol Bordello. After the guy out on the street who shouted after a taxi cab 'What are you, fucking retahded?' they were probably the best thing that happened to me in Boston. I only wish I'd been down in the mosh pit instead of slowly developing a neckache from headbanging while turning my head to the right to try and follow Eugene Hutz's ridiculous stage antics. They are an an explosive band that has made their brand of gypsy punk-polka into a great party and an even greater philosophical triumph. Ask me again sometime how that happens - I'll figure it out eventually. I think that dancing like a fool is only enjoyable with the subtle realisation that it could be necessary for the health of the soul. Otherwise it's pointless and embarrassing. Or maybe I just don't know how to party. Anyway, Gogol Bordello tickled me well and good and at the end of the night I had a neckache, which is always a good indicator of fun being had. Those crazy immigrants.

On a different beat, I hit up Sonny Rollins and two albums from opposite sides of the Williamsburg Bridge - 'Saxophone Colossus' and the expertly named 'The Bridge'. Sometime in the middle of his career he stopped performing altogether and was often seen practicing alone on the Williamsburg bridge, the crazy hairy man. One expects strange things to have happened to his music after that hiatus - so it was confounding to most critics when 'The Bridge' came out and it seemed to sound pretty much like what he'd been doing all along, which is just gravy as far as I'm concerned because he's Sonny Rollins.

But anyway, what happened? He did swap out his pianist for guitarist Jim Hall, who as an accompanist is far stranger than anybody save Monk could have been - listen to the A sections of the title-track rhythm changes. The electric guitar changes up the soundscape, too. The pounding, effervescent swing of his earlier records is still there, but no more the grounding presence of a piano. Guitars play less notes at once, and with less range in terms of pitch, and Jim Hall as a particular guitarist is also very fond of counterpoint rather than continuo-style block chords. The result is an emptier, freer sounding record where the interplay between Hall's deadpan counterpoint and Rollin's bubbling energy often becomes delightful. I was a little depressed with the ballads, to be honest, where they both seem to become trapped in idioms that signify more than they deliver in terms of musical interest. I rarely like jazz ballads anyway, unless Coltrane's playing them. But those uptempo numbers! I couldn't tell you what he found up there on the Williamsburg bridge, but it must have been some kind of awesome.

In contrast to that album is the earlier Saxophone Colossus - a fairly universally well-regarded one. The piano's there, so the swing is a little more focused and hard-rocking. Which is not to say normal, Sonny's anything but, but he's a genius in a slightly more (to our accustomed ears) expected way. The calypso opener St. Thomas, now a well-deserved standard, set the precedent for his later calypso albums, in which he all but plays the same tune with a series of different titles (Don't Stop the Carnival, for example, with who I think is Bobby Broom on guitar). Me, I don't care. The careless happiness of the calypso underneath the colorful urgency of the saxophone is a winning move. And, as if to point out that they haven't gone completely native, he turns up the swing for a second solo.

For an interesting comparison, you might look up his later recordings of St. Thomas with Jim Hall, or Jim Hall's solo versions of that tune.

In America you get food to eat

won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet

you just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day

it's great to be an American

Ain't no lion or tiger, ain't no mamba snake

just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake

everybody is as happy as a man can be

climb aboard, little wog, sail away with me

sail away

sail away

we will cross the mighty ocean into charleston bay

sail away

sail away

we will cross the mighty ocean into charleston bay

in America every man is free

to take care of his home and his family

you'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree

you're all gonna be an American

sail away

sail away

we will cross the mighty ocean into charleston bay

sail away

sail away

we will cross the mighty ocean into charleston bay

- randy newman

1988, the Pixies

Frank Black (or is it Black Francis in this year? I think it's Black Francis) is sweating. So is Kim Deal, who is the most beautiful person ever to grace the electric bass with her presence. She radiates a smile at the audience as she begins to play. 'And this I know...' the smile vanishes. She giggles out the bridge, tightropewalking between exuberance and incoherence. She's wearing a huge raggedy grey smock and black francis has a dark collar of soaked shirt and they're both nodding and singing and spit is flying everwhere.

Freeze the action for a sec -

we are at a juncture in history where lovering and santiago and francis and deal weave wide streams of logic around the heads of bewildered college students. They never coalesce. They are playing four different songs. And kim deal is almost crying with the labor of the moment - she is all lips and teeth and the relentless charging of six bass notes with centuries of womanhood

nodding and singing and spit is flying everwhere, and Lovering and Santiago are suddenly there as well, and it is transfigurative. Rock and roll shining on stage, emanating from the unwashed and sweat-soaked underwear.

HOW TO BE HAPPY

Lie.

adam constructs an elaborate rationalisation of his constant inebriation

There is a reason for the College Experience. For College Experience, read : excessive drinking, smoking, recreational drug use and free sex (or at any rate, frequent pre-marital copulation. It most certainly is not free). The reason has something to do with generations of stratified pre-conceptions aided and abetted by movies like American Pie and Eurotrip and Harold and Kumar. But really - the marketing basilisk bites its own tail. These movies wouldn't have been able to sell their brand of ridiculous college-hijinks schtick if there weren't an audience that was (if not actively participating in it) appreciative of such a lifestyle.

Part of it is the experience of being away from home. That's what happens in college, usually - in NYU, anyway, most small towns in America are less well represented than a tiny country like Singapore (kudos to Terence for pointing this out), and aside from the odd Brooklyn/Queens/Bronx and the even odder Manhattan native, almost everybody from NYU is hours if not days away from home. The concomitant relaxation of restrictions undoubtedly fuels the drugs-and-free-sex ethos that permeates the residential halls.

I would like to believe however that pointless rebellion only constitutes part of our lifestyle. Part of it is also the experience of becoming an adult in an increasingly bewildering world. Part of it is the slow realisation that the ideals of our childhood cannot apply to the Real World, or better yet, must be paid for in the things we hold most dear. Perhaps the drugs and the drink are our way of cushioning our way into the stupor of adulthood. Pete Townshend was right - I never want to grow up, if growing up means getting comfortable, if growing up means losing my rage (what use is your virtue otherwise, Nietzsche says - I agree), if growing up means settling down and becoming part of the Civil Society I loathe. It is more of a conflict than teenage hormones and piercings and leather jackets imply. It is the fundamental disease of youth without which progress is impossible. Ray Bradbury wrote that all 17 year olds are all fundamentally insane. I am 18. I wasted two and a half years in the army becoming angrier but not older, more efficient but not more mature, wiser but not more self-assured.

The drink and the drugs are cushioning against the horrors of adulthood. They are also a vindication of youth. Adults are afraid of alcohol and of marijuana and LSD because they have conditioned themselves against reality. But I want to be high not because it makes me passive and comfortable; I want to be high because it makes me more truthful. The adults are comfortable and any touch of the truth rankles. I say for this generation that we are not afraid of the truth. That is our war cry. We are not afraid of experiences and of conflict and of violence because they are the path to a better world, and we have dreamed of a better world. We are now bringing this dream to war with reality, with the aid of some drugs and some drinks but mostly with the aid of the untainted innocence that is our birthright.

I say : let us embrace the conflict. Let us embrace the violence. We are warring against corporations. We are warring against liars. We are warring against the appropriation of pleasure for reasons outside the self. We are warring against God. Let there be rage and let there be violence - change and goodness know no other name.

music is an affirmation of consciousness

Music is an affirmation of consciousness. Its structures belie a primary joy: the joy of existing and perceiving. The act of music-making is the fundamental act of triumph over existential angst.

The improviser chases the sacred. Scales and rhythms and pitches and sounds are our tools; by the exercise of what is inherently sacred (mind) we seek to elevate the physical.

The act of performing is an affirmation of love. Music itself expresses consciousness and joy; performance expresses the desire for communion with other consciousnesses. The appreciation of music by an audience is the moment of communion with the performer, where his subjectivity transcends its logical status as an unprovable hypothesis into an experiential reality. This is love. Hence performance seeks the same status as love, in a primary acknowledgement that both performer and audience exist in joy and consciousness.

2011

It has been a great year. Coming to New York has been the best thing that has ever happened. Yet I've been sad and lonely and broken more times than I can count this year, and happy and full of life even more than that. I guess I'm thankful that I'm still breathing - we all should be.

This year has been a year of learning. I've learned that it's more important to be a good person than to be smart or clever or funny - not that those things aren't important. But they are secondary. The only thing we have in this short existence is the presence of other people to help us on our little way. It is the mystery of our lives, a nonsensical proposition we accept in order not to feel so alone - and we are accepted in order for others not to feel so alone. We have no reason to believe that anybody else exists, but the assumption is necessary - it defies logic. Yet it is not merely comforting but necessary.

I am glad for the presence of other people in my small, dark and terrifying world. It makes the nights bearable and the days joyful. My dad was right - and Zarathustra was right - you can live on the mountaintop as long as you want, but out of love you must descend into the valley to share and be shared. I miss my old friends and I cherish my new ones. I accept them unreservedly.

Every new year is bittersweet - I treasure the accumulation of the detritus of thought, of work, of love and friendships, and yet I know that I am one year closer to not existing anymore. At this age I rail against the thought. I am too much in love. But barring any bus accidents, it will get easier. Death is a slow process, and I hope by then to have accumulated the presence of the people I treasure the most to make my passing pleasant.

For 2010 I give thanks for the presence of people. For 2011 I resolve to be peaceful, to give thanks for kindness, and to be kind.