Category Archives: music

Mood Music

It can be a challenge, keeping the mood steady, positive, relaxed, especially when there is no particular schedule to keep you on task and distracted.    My mother was probably depressed for most of her life, though she didn’t often succumb to it in any noticeable way.   She did housework, cooked a delicious dinner every night, raised my sister and me, went off to work every day when we were old enough to fend for ourselves.   This routine kept her busy and her mind off the kind of fearful musing that would occupy it when she had too much time alone in her final years.

“I’m afraid your nephew might be subject to depression,” she told me when the kid was about three.   “Sometimes he’s just so down, he won’t look you in the eyes, it seems like he’s sleep walking.  Then we take him to Lester’s and the waitress brings him a cookie when we sit down.   He eats the cookie and suddenly he’s like this” and she does a wild dance.   Eyes suddenly wide open and mischievous, manic grin on his face, moving like Carmen Miranda with a pair of castanets, swinging long arms from side to side, snapping his fingers, mugging.

I wish I had a movie of my mother doing this imitation.  She would often oblige and reprise a remark or imitation and she was not shy in front of the camera.  If only I’d had one when she told me about my nephew’s amusing mood swings.

The challenge for all earthlings, getting the mood music right.  Is it easier to dance with music that moves you?  Of course.  But how to keep the right music playing in your head– or how to learn to dance to music that might not move you as much as other music?

Here’s one to try– patience.   The hardest thing in the world, perhaps, and maybe the most necessary thing.   With patience ridiculously hard things can be accomplished.  Without it easy things are sometimes too hard to master.   The funny thing about patience, or maybe not, it must be absolute to do much good.   Being patient 99 times and enraged one time won’t butter the biscuit, as they say.  

But 99/100 is still a very good score, particularly when we’re talking about something as crucial as patience, so don’t lose patience with yourself.  It is like anything you would master, takes constant practice until you can do it every time.

It’s not like the world is teeming with masters.  But if you would be one, begin learning to master your moods first.

 Image

Feedback

No less an authority on having his ass kissed than Pablo Picasso, on the subject of an artist working purely for love of creation, without any need for feedback or praise from anyone who might experience the work:  a false idea.  

But don’t take it from him.  Imagine hitting a baseball further than you ever have before, admiring the arc of the ball, trotting around the bases trying to suppress a smile.  The crowd is large, among them many people you know (your ‘cheering section’) but they are talking among themselves, when you scan the crowd they’re not even looking at the field, most staring at electronic devices, nobody has any reaction to your clout.  Does it diminish the hit?  Not at all.  Diminish the moment?  Completely, transformed from  a great high to a significant bummer.   “Let them show me their latest poem,” you think grimly as you step on home plate, “I’ll show them how it feels”.

But once in a while you not only connect solidly with the pitch, but you get a spontaneous shout of appreciation.  Here’s one, moments after sending a couple of demo tracks trying to convince an ailing musician friend to buy a small, cheap USB keyboard:

Haha love it-  amazon.com here I come!

Started new chemo yesterday, 3 days in a row has me sleeping in fits and starts… Back to sleep with those mimgus like bass lines swimming through my head, you made my day
(night) thnks for sending

meefs

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Playing together

If it’s music we’re talking about, the first thing is listening.  Don’t do anything at first, listen to the beat.   There are many places to put a note, a beat, an accent;  against the beat, on the beat, next to the beat, slightly off the beat.   The first thing though, is to feel the groove that is waiting to emerge from the beat.

The groove is not the beat, it’s all the stuff around it that makes the beat groove.  Check it out.  One note put in the exact place to make the head jerk forward slightly, or one of the hands to unconsciously, or consciously, flick an invisible, or visible, drumstick.   It sets the groove in motion, wait for it… AH! oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

I think this is a wonderful metaphor for a good life and playing nicely with the people you meet.  Before you can say something helpful you have to have heard what the person is really trying to say.   Thinking back, many times I could have been more helpful if I’d listened better, and paused to listen to my own thoughts, before launching into a particular solo.

A Man Without A Smiling Face Should Not Open A Shop

Famous, and wise, Chinese proverb: a man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  It is very true, few people will continue to come into the shop of someone who is depressed or hostile.  Having nothing much to do with anything, I once had a less well-known piece of advice in a fortune cookie, perhaps no less profound:  laff alla time people think you crazy.

The mystery to me is how one keeps the smile on the face when the proverbial wolf is at the door, his cheeks full, ready to huff and puff and blow the whole thing to little pieces in the stink of wolf’s breath.

“My father had a great sense of humor, but he was such an unhappy man,” is something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. feared his children might say about him at the end.   Happiness is a talent like any other, I suppose, some people are good at it, some people not so good.  It is something worth cultivating– being grateful, and full of wonder, and optimistic.  Enjoying and appreciating the things and people you love.  There is a predisposition to melancholy, or pessimism, but happiness is probably like a muscle you can develop by constant use.   Let’s assume that happiness can be cultivated, for the moment. 

There are innate talents, sure, but the most exciting demonstrations of talent are given by those who love what they do and spend hours and hours doing it until they do it well.  Their love for the thing is expressed in the way they do it, and it’s an inspiring thing to see.  Many people have more innate drawing talent than I had as a boy, than I have now.  Few people, I think, love to draw as much as I always have.  Doing anything endlessly will make you better at it.  Not to say that some ability is not also involved, but the perpetual doing of a thing you love will make you better at it than someone who is able but doesn’t care.

“Oh, no,” you will say, “that’s not true.  There are geniuses who can do with little practice what a less talented person could not do in a lifetime.”    Well, let me entertain that dispiriting cavil for a second, before I get back to practicing my fucking shopkeeper’s smile in the mirror.

I met one person in my life who is, without any doubt or qualification, a genius.  We went to high school together, this very bright and original kid and I, and his musical talent was off the charts.  So much so that his destiny seemed clear at 15.  I could tell you a couple of great stories about this kid’s talent, and what he grew to compose, arrange, improvise, perform, the many instruments he plays virtuosically, but there could be no question, comparing him even to other great musicians, that his talent is of another level.  Frank Burrows is the guy’s name, you can look him up on youTube.

We had another friend, a prodigiously talented musician who, like Frank, played for hours a day and lived to play music.   These guys played together in bands, prodded each other’s musical growth and invention.  Both have their eccentricities, to be sure, and both endured traumatic childhoods.  As brilliant as David was, Frank was in an otherworldly category in terms of the grace with which he assimilated musical ideas that inspired him.  I have the feeling it always embarrassed Frank when I singled him out as a genius.  No offense intended, my man.

David taught me most of what I know of music theory and chord voicings on guitar.  He was an often brutal master, hard on himself and just as hard on me, though I had a small fraction of his talent.  There are some who consider me a decent musician now, but I am nowhere near being able, after playing for more than 40 years, to do what either of these guys was able to do in high school.  Anyway, David’s main pedagogic tools were derision, scorn, sarcasm and a certain ruthless pursuit of perfection that’s hard to describe.   I took abuse from him while I was learning, eventually learned that it is never a good idea to take abuse from anyone, no matter what else might come along with it.

I recall, years later, trying to fake some jazz with David who responded in his inimitable withering way that I would never be more than a journeyman.   I’d heard an echo of this comment from a keyboard player friend of mine who disparagingly told me “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a keyboard player.”  There are people I could fool in that regard, but apparently this chap is not among them.  I’m no virtuoso, but I can play a little piano when I need to.

Anyway, we fast forward a few decades.  I record a catchy little piano and acoustic guitar vamp, leaving lots of space.  I send it to Frank and to another fantastically talented musician friend and ask each of them to overdub some parts on it for a friend who is dying.   (I have another track to make for a friend who is currently dying of a rare and relentless disease, but that time the dying friend was a composite of people I’d lost, was losing and part of myself).  My friend Paul played a haunting and beautiful fretless guitar improvisation over the top, I can hear it in my head now as I type.  

Frank, to my great surprise and delight, spent probably forty hours producing a symphonic masterpiece out of the track.  He added a dozen or more parts, harmonized it in ten different ways, on twenty instruments, wrote a brilliant intro and an unforgettable outtro.  I told you above, the man is a genius, was born that way, but he’s also spent well beyond the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell prescribed for becoming a master.  To this day, I still can’t get over what Frank was able to create out of that simple two chord vamp.

I sent it to David, who was impressed with the composition.  And this brilliant composer and harsh teacher– and this is why I have rolled out this long, tedious story– emailed me to say he was unable to tell which of us, the genius or the journeyman, had played which of the several guitar or keyboard parts.  A moment of great, long-delayed satisfaction was had.

So the point is, even a hack, with enough love of something and enough dedication to practicing it, may eventually play a few notes that will be indistinguishable from notes struck by a genius.  

Similarly, this strained, cracking smile I am practicing now can be molded, with enough true desire to do so, into a sincere and radiant grin that will attract customers to my cobwebbed shop.   I am betting the shop on it, my friends.

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

Only Time I’m Happy’s When I Play My Guitar

Cream had a song called NSU that contained this great bit:

driving in my car, smoking a cigar, only time I’m happy’s when I play my guitar

No idea what NSU stands for, but, dig it.  If I could spend most of my time playing my guitar I’d be a much happier camper, no doubt about it.  Yet, somehow, three days  sometimes pass when I don’t so much as pick up my guitar (though I sleep next to a tenor ukulele every night that Sekhnet’s not next to me– and it is rare that I don’t at least play the uke a little as I’m lying in bed).

What’s up wif dat not playing the guitar, though?

It’s not that I’m too busy cleaning up the mess on my desk, or kitchen table, or chair, or floor.   It’s not that I’m a workaholic rushing straight ahead in a crazed, glassy-eyed pursuit of greater income and success.   What the hell?   Why don’t I play the guitar three hours a day?  

One of the great mysteries of my mysterious life.

Peak Experience

We experience countless things each day.  A person with a great memory, which I am often reputed to have, might remember a few grains of these experiences.  Certain experiences are unforgettable, when they involve our senses directly.   This cuts both ways, great memories and terrible ones, both enduring.  But when things are exciting, fun and spontaneous they inspire us, they stick in our memory.  That is because these are the moments when we are most fully alive.

Your soul is on fire, poet, but there is nothing we can do for you but throw spears.

Peak experience is when you operate intuitively against the beat, chose notes and flavors that have not been tried before.   Seasoning a new dish with fresh herbs from the garden, a different combination, delicious.   Hitting the cowbell perfectly against the side of the beat.  The colors spread thickly in a perfect brushstroke gradient, that succulent array of sunset blues going dark.   The spatula of a hand, bending supplely against beats from the Indian Ocean.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please send me an email.   I will in turn send you a rhythm track to improvise to.   You can then send me the youTube link and I’ll add an animation to it.   These times are in many ways hellish times, but the technology is getting fucking amazing. 

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.