Gone

About to climb into the horseless buggy and ride it to the border of Canada at Niagra. And then thru Ontario to the Ambassador Bridge crossing the Detroit River and into the city itself to be with Mom in her (our) time of grief.

Went on another run this morning. This time after repeating the beginning of the route, I turned into the forest and around the tip to the Hudson. The mighty Hudson. Got right down to it, to where you hear the lapping of the currents (tidal and maritime).

I miss spending time down there.

Good to sweat.

Heard from a few people responding to the limited email I sent out. And everyone on the Bateaux last night was really supportive.

It is times like these that people stand up and you can feel it and it is good.

Must go!

Death In the Family

Was awakened this morning at 6:00 by a call from my Mom in Detroit. My stepdad Bob Howard passed away last night around 9-10pm.
I really loved Bobby and I can't stop bawling right now.

As per my usual, I was just attempting to deal with the emotion through music. The playing of...

I was just trying to play "Blame It On My Youth" on piano and could barely see through the tears.

The crazy thing is I was playing nylon string last night - at around 10 - and I started playing a little progression going down from e minor that was one of those, "This could be something" moments. I picked it up this morning and there it was - this little tune that is Bob's. It's not finished (needless to say!), but...

I have been very fortunate to have been pretty well insulated from death of immediate family (which Bob for me most assuredly was) over the last few years and, the ever present Death, has been experienced at a remove.

I didn't cry immediately. It was like, "Oh look at that piece of information". And then the sound of Mom's voice. The finality of it. The one way-ness of it. And then the memories start coming back. Memories you hadn't thought about for a long time. And that's it. That's all there is, at the end of all of it. The impressions he left on my little mind. Not overarching dogma or orthodoxy, but actual experiences that summed him up when I thought (think) about him.

And there were SO many GOOD ones! This is where the love is. And this is where the corresponding amount of grief is. This is why I couldn't play that sappy (but beautiful) tune. It just triggered how much I miss Bobby already. And now those very same impressions are what I will have to go to to remember him.

A better case for treating each other well - here, now - has rarely been made. Love each other peeps!

So once my own grief started settling in for the long haul, I just wanted to get out and go for a run. The weather has cooled off and turned gorgeous around here (NYC). Getting out was the best thing. I was not disappointed. Strange b/c I just this week was watching some of that 6 Feet Under box set I got. And Nate - one of the undertaker dudes (the reluctant one) - is always going out on runs and sweating It (whatever) out. To feel what it feels like to be alive, still on this plane.

And I watched those runs of his on my tv screen as I sat on my ass in my apt and ordered sushi delivered because I didn't even want to leave the bldg.(!)

Today I had to get out.

It is so beautiful up here on the northern tip of Manhattan. I ran to a spot in Inwood Hill Park which is below the Henry Hudson Bridge, and you've got the Hudson/NJ in the background, the great forest of Inwood Hill rising up to meet the bridge on the Manhattan side (where at the moment the Parks Dept is into about it's third year of re-introducing bald eagles to the lower Hudson Valley) in the foreground and the swirling waters of Spuyten Duyvil (Harlem River) at your feet.

I just kept looking up into the sky. The clear, blue sky. It is just an instinctive thing to do at a time like this. To look for your loved ones, in their non-corporeal forms, up above in the ether, somewhere, in some no-place. Or maybe it is just the place to look when you are forced to consider the inscrutable Mystery of our existence here, for this limited time.

So from that spot I ran along the north shore of Manhattan to a point across from the Columbia U. rowing house/football stadium. That is the spot to go to get the full-on rising sun. It was about 7:00am. The sun was so brilliant. Impossible to look even in the general easterly direction without a hand-shade, the effect doubled by the reflection on the water.

This was a sunrise Bobby did not get to see. But in some sense, he is a part of it now. A wave of energy in this Whole Show.

I ran to the loop and on into the forest itself to go to the lookout above the Hudson where you can see from the George Washington Bridge (the GWB) to the Tappan Zee bridge 15 miles north in Westchester. It was on my way up there that I got the germ of a thought: I noticed how dark the forest was down below, on the floor, on my level, but how bright the sun was 80 feet up at the tops.

Here are the lyrics so far:

It's so dark here on the bottom
But it's bright up on the top
With the whole world spinnin' round
You think it ain't ever gonna stop

Well I'm here to serve you notice
And its sittin in your hands
That the time that's come before
You don't ever understand -

Until it's gone


For Bob Howard

R.I.P. Dear Friend

Solo

Getting ready to go over to the Dyckman Farmhouse to do my solo gig.

Yesterday I went to Sam Ash and got a great little mini mixer made by Yamaha. The MG8/2FX. It has onboard effects, so it totally changes what I can do with a mic (and the Boomerang sampler).

Finally had a night off last night. Monday night the Bateaux lost steering out by the Statue of Liberty and we limped home/were towed into the dockage. Tuesday we sailed on the Spirit of New York (which was cool - 4 decks!) and last night they called off the cruise.

Off to play some Joao!

Create

I have a million connective thoughts. Mostly when I'm driving. Something about the mixture of motion with static (the world whizzing by vs. sitting in the cockpit).

So why, when it seems it is flowing so freely at 11:00pm as I'm driving home from the gig up the West Side of this amazing city, do I struggle when I get in front of this machine to recreate those thought-fractals?

Write it down (or these days, speak it into the cell phone).
I do remember some of the main ideas. But they are more like the major trunk or limb of the fractal. The best thoughts are those tiny, unintended loops that bring everything back again. Back to symmetry. Back to some kind of order. Not an Imposed Order. The natural order. The celestial order (if you like). Not a phony religion of self satisfying, self serving rules and regs. The order that is inherent in the overtone series for instance.

The wave frequencies of light (color), sound (harmony), the ocean (gravity), these are all realities. Fundamental, physical realities. We, if we are going to be in tune at all, must attune ourselves to this order. This order will not bend and change it's properties to suit us.

There is that middle way. Gotama Buddha called it as such. Surfers (when they're surfing) physically render it.
Not the extreme of austerity, nor the luckless lot of the lazy lout. But in the middle. You've got to take that step towards it and the rest as they say, will take care of itself. What does that mean, though, 'Take care of itself'?

I think it has to mean that you don't have to re-create the laws of gavity and light, just get to work on building the cathedral. Just make patterns framing what already exists in some no-place that has no-time. Use the achievments and advancements of the craftsmen that came before you and get to work.

I think good music sounds good to us not because "gee whiz, that guy's a magician", but because it suggests a possible way of being that was there all along, but it had never been pointed out.

Like the profile of JFK, naturally occurring in the rockface on the way to the Iao Valley in Maui. We recognize it. Someone just happened to look up one day and see it. It was there long before anyone named John F. Kennedy walked the face of the earth (and ironically, come to think of it, I think I heard about 5 years ago that it had fallen down in a rock slide).

This is a rather mundane example.

Geniuses that well-understood the laws of vibrating audible waves were able to craft windows onto the play of sound (Bach, Mozart, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, etc etc). The don't come along so often. The thing is, many times it feels to me that the marketplace is glutted with what I would call magicians employing tricks and sleight of hand to achieve a triggered response.

This may be veering off course...?

I think my point for now is only to get busy with the work.

For me, that means the Gaikyoku and Honkyoku pieces for the shakuhachi, Bach flute sonatas, the myriad standards of the Great American Song Book (on piano, guitar, flute, singing), and the great Bossa Novas of Brazil (on nylon string/singing). And accompanying all this, of course, is the life blood that can run through (nearly) all of it - the musical language of jazz and be-bop.

There are tons of other things. Life is not long enough to get to all of them. But the world of musical exchange is opening up like never before, facilitated by the revolutionary age of internet communication that we are now living through.