Tonight I'm thinking about standards - a broad word, that, with a whole host of connotations, but I'm talking about standards of the (Great) American Song Book. We played a few tonight, as we do everynight, but something about it tonight rang true.

I was thinking about that tune "The More I See You" and so I called it in the first set - and sang it as well. Drawing on Chet Baker's great version from '58. First time I've sung that tune on the Bateaux.

And then we got a request to play Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" - what a tune! The way it succeeds in juxtaposing a certain 'nonchalance' of the descending chromatic motion - with the very 'sophisticated' bridge. I would say somehow it is able to mirror harmonically what the sentiment of the tune, lyrically, actually is. Brilliant.

And a final mention, we also played an instrumental version of "Skylark". Another great tune. This might be a reach, but I wonder if it doesn't do the same thing I mentioned in Sophisticated Lady. I've been working with my hard disk recorder alot this past week and the sonic possibilities are endless. All recorded sounds are in the digital realm and therefore can be sped up, slowed down, stretched out, squeezed together, etc etc. I wonder if I took the whole 32 bar melody of Skylark and compressed it into about a second :01or two:02, would it sound like some kind of birdsong?

I told you it was a stretch. I'm probably subconciously being affected by the fact that I've now stayed up so late, its now early, and the birds just started singing in the forest across from my apt. I should have noted the time precisely, but it was about 15 minutes ago - about 5:15a. Maybe I'll try the experiment and see. The last thing I'll say about that is if you're playing it in Eb, the bridge goes to Ab and then abruptly makes it's way to G, one half step away. This is unusual and could be likened to the free, harmonically wide open melodies of our feathered friends. Come to think of it, if Sophisticated Lady is played in Ab, the bridge goes to G(!).

So anyway, the feeling I had later once I'd gotten home, was that devoting yourself to learning, playing, and improvising on these tunes is a very noble and worthwhile thing. As corny as that sounds. Because for one thing, there's no end to it, and you could easily spend the rest of your life perfecting your craft, finding new things, discovering new ins and outs, trying new angles. But also because the material itself deserves to be revisited and not simply lost or surrendered to canned recordings - no matter how great - because a living language is living only if it is spoken.

Pulling back into pier 61 tonight (Thurs.), as we played "New York, New York", I noticed one of those Police vans that are about the size of an ambulance rushing to the event space at the end of the pier with it's lights blazing. Anything like that is going to get your attention, and sure enough as I was walking toward the bus stop, there were about a dozen emergency vehicles - paramedics, fire trucks, as well as a helicopter flying overhead.

And as I kept walking thru the scene, I looked into the water - the water between piers 61 and 62 - and I saw what was drawing all the attention - a red, upside down, passengerless kayak. Kind of an eery sight.

I know they offer kayaking at Chelsea Piers and we see them sometimes, not very far out there in the Hudson. My guess is it was someone inexperienced. The weather was not bad at all tonight after the week of rain we've had (kind of inconvenient, but also the catalyst for making lower Manhattan appear much more dramatic, as the sky skrapers literally interact with the weather).

There was one summer's evening I remember when I was driving down the West Side Highway - I was probably somewhere between Christopher and 14th Street - and I'll never forget how those World Trade Towers looked. The sun was setting and was bathing everything in an orange-pinkish glow, and it looked as if someone had spun an immense cotton candy swirl that was both completely surrounding, but also brilliantly interacting with the Towers. Like some enormous vacuum cleaner were sucking the clouds up directly above the Twins.

Its hard to describe. It was just one of those moments when everything was 'just so': the light, the barometric pressure, the temperature... all the variables which created this rarity. I never once saw anything quite like that again. Although it was not unusual for the very tops of the towers to be socked in by a thick storm.

Anyway, I digress.

I wonder what the whole story was down there tonight. I haven't yet checked any news coverage. I wonder if it was just one, unfortunate person. The response was impressive. There were literally about 12 emergency vehicles of all shapes and sizes. I think I counted two helicopters by the time that bus pulled up.