Upstate

Monday mornings are a worm that eats through books. We wake up. Sarah, usually and alone, guides the kids through preparing for school and day care. Often, if engaged enough, I warm up my incorporated trumpet playing appariti and address the instrument’s crucial fundamentals and unforgiving technique.

We move the car to avoid the sweeper and a fine. Sarah walks to and I, For the past month and a half hobble, wheel, and slowly proceed to our favorite neighborhood breakfast place. We have until about eleven thirty to discuss our week, our goals, our worries, our dreams, our love. Then the week begins.

This week, wrought by a stupid early argument, were a little less personal. Just mostly business. Still, to have this time is wonderful.

I spent the weekend in Red Hook, NY. My friend John Halle is retiring from his job as Theoriemeister of Bard College. (Check him out—he’s a cat! Has done pretty much everything. Chops like a mother!) Were opening his recital with the hardest piece I’ve ever played on trumpet, but one of the best and most beautiful too: Invisible Hand.

A real pleasure to play with and know this guy. He’s “natural tea-chin”. I find every conversation important to hear.

SUmmer LoVin’

Love. Sex. Summer. Music. 

Every 4th season, around this time, my body starts craving interaction.  Everyone looks so much more interesting than before and...well, sometimes you get lost in dreams. 

It is also a time for intense feelings. The sun, the intense AC on the subway, the smell of sweat, the music on the street all whisk you away in an aroma of emotion. 

The inspiration is very real, as is the pain from desire.  And if you can do the work, you can create some pretty beautiful things-art around it.  

Can't share it, but "Call My Name" by Prince tells a good story. 

As does this below. 

That's all. For now. 

enjoy.

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Actually, this is better.

16 July 2016

I sit in Parkette, a controversial joint in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, listening to Leny Andrade, drinking really good coffee, away from my delicious, delightful children, missing my unbelievably hard-working wife, preparing to muse about a "new bohemeanism". 

Forget that.  I'll write about suffering.  It annoys me that, according to my wife, the Budda says that Life is all about suffering, or something like that.  I think alot of artists cats throughout the ages have had some pretty well documented bouts of suffering.  Werther was where it first started, I think.  And there's Job,  although I don't think that suffering is what that section is fucused on.  The expressionists in Vienna 1875 or so made a fetish of it, and Jazz musicians Bill Evans still suffer...from excessive suffering. 

A great teacher once told me that frustration is necessary for learning.  I personally feel that I tend to overdo it sometimes, with most things.  But it's all conditioning really. Let's take the famous chord from Mahler 10: 

It might or might not sound shocking.  To someone that has been conditioned to extremes of volumes and extended harmonies, this  might not be terribly jarring, but to one who's idea of music consists of top 40 hits and who's conception of classical music is digestable Mozart piano sonatas, and some light orchestra  pieces, this could be upsetting.  But we become conditioned.  Perhaps generationally, perhaps gradually, within small, measurable, observable increments, and I like to take notice of interesting thing happen when we do. 

Here's an elegant, tasteful quartet that to me, thru this song, delicately comment on the articulations of life music and art. 

15 July 2016

Here we are.  Suicide attacks.  It is like something out of an 1980's dystopian movie. Art, I was told and taught, is medicine for society.  But not everyone enjoys or tolerates the same art. Some find things bland, and some find other things revolting. Then there's the artist, just trying to do their job, their vocation, their calling.  Sometimes it's grunt work, sometimes it's inspired.  It's never everything tho-well, perhaps seldom times it is.  

I listened to something today.  Something wonderful, made by someone I know: 

As a trumpeter, I see the craft, I feel the technique, I understand what it takes to do this.  How does one measure the art, however? Is it really a composite score of all the effort and material elements combined? 

Furthermore, how does this heal our world today? Can the beauty of this performance inspire some person to compassion, truly?  I do know that I've been healed a little bit.