Video: Boston Legal “Three Steves” speech – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
I’m not usually inclined to watch Boston Legal, or to link to pop culture name drops, but this speech makes too much sense.
Category: Thoughts
I love that feeling
I only have a couple of students that I teach at my house. I had a lesson yesterday with a high school sophomore. It was his second lesson, and he is a pretty good player. He likes jazz band, so we started talking about improvisation, which he said he wanted to learn. I played a vamp in Bb on the piano, and he played some stuff over it. He sounded pretty good for a beginner, so I put on the Aebersold Major/Minor and we traded 8’s, just trying to deal with playing simple melodies. As we kept playing, we went from 8’s to 4’s, then we were both playing together, and then it happened. I got that feeling. That feeling I get when something cool starts to happen, when there is interaction between improvisers, when it starts to really get fun. I love that feeling. I guess it can even happen with 15 year olds and Aebersold LPs.
Michael Brecker – RIP
Michael Brecker passed away today.
Saxophonist Michael Brecker succumbs to cancer – USATODAY.com
I first became aware of Michael Brecker when I was in high school. His band was on one of those PBS Newport Jazz Festival shows. They played “Original Rays” and he did that killer EWI stuff that he could do. It totally knocked me out. I taped it and watched it over and over. He played some stuff on that set that was SO burnin’. It was one of the first times I realized that jazz could be so fiery and energetic that it just made me want to jump in the air and shout.
Years later I heard him at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with McCoy Tyner. It was one of those special religious musical experiences. A few days ago I was listening to Pat Metheny’s 80/81 and thinking about how bad Michael Brecker is. Too bad that is has become a was. Thank you, Michael, for all the great music.
New Year’s Resolution
This year I am resolving not to judge people. Just because the guy is stumbling drunk and has fallen over the monitor into the sax player twice, it doen’t necessarily mean he is an asshole. That’s not for me to judge. I resolve to do my best to see every person I encounter in a positive light.
RIP James Joseph Brown, Jr. – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
The James Brown tributes keep popping up around the net. I love the following line about JB at a 1990’s Macworld convention.
RIP James Joseph Brown, Jr. – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Even for a corporate gig and a roomful of skinny geeks, he was not about to phone it in. It was an incredible show.
Leonard Pitts: My freedom linked to others — including gays
The local New Orleans paper (The Times-Picayune) ran this Leonard Pitts piece today. If we all thought like this, the world would be a better place.
MiamiHerald.com | 12/15/2006 | My freedom linked to others — including gays
…as white college students were risking their lives to travel south and register black people to vote. Somebody asked why. He said he acted from an understanding that his freedom was bound up with the freedom of every other man.
DD on life changing music and DRM
It’s nice to know that other musicians have similar thoughts on DRM.
Where would we all be without that first life changing album that a friend taped for us when we were 12? When I was in high school, I used to sneak my director’s albums out of the band room and take them home and tape them, then stealthily return them. (Well, I thought I was stealthy, come to find out, he knew all along.) In my adult life, I have purchased everyone of those albums that I could find.
Free Play
Read this book!
The professionalism of technique and the flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power; hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.
…if you create your own material your own way, developing artwork that is more and more authentically yours, people will spot it as genuine. In resisting the temptation to accessibility, you are not excluding the public; on the contrary, you are creating a genuine space and inviting people in.
Just a couple of my favorite parts of the book. This should be required reading for anyone who wishes to advance their creativity, in any discipline.
Alex Rawls on definitive
In this week’s Pop Life column, Alex Rawls talks about definitive recordings.
Rob Wagner addressed this subject once when his “Lost Children” album was coming out. He talked about having a hard time getting excited about the CD not because he wasn’t happy with it, but because the recorded versions didn’t represent anything special to him. They weren’t the best versions of those compositions that he had ever performed, only the best of those performed at the session, and when he played those compositions in the future, they would never sound exactly like the album. In short, there wasn’t really anything authoritative about those versions, even though listeners tend to treat recorded versions of songs as THE versions.
This fits in with the Ken Vandermark championed idea that recordings aren’t particularly good ways to experience a band. Hearing improvisers regularly over a period of time is a much better way to understand the essence and progression of a group’s music.
Dave Douglas is using technology to get closer to this ideal.
Just outside
Brian Olewnick has some interesting thoughts about writing about friends and acquaintances.
That said….I can’t deny that my perceptions of someone’s music is often biased to one degree or another by either what I think of them personally or, if I don’t actually know them, by what impression their (perceived) personality has made on me. It can work both ways.