blog meets dream

I had a dream last night that Barack Obama was at my birthday party. After the dream-party I stopped a mugging in progress and the police shot the mugger. In my dream I then thought "I'll have to write a blog about this!"

Yes, the weekday blog streak continues on and its essence has now entered into my unconscious mind. If I keep doing this for another few weeks I feel that I'm pretty much guaranteed to find the secret of life. I promise to share.

The good news of my computer being fixed was perhaps a little premature. I can't start it up now, so I'm bringing it back into the repair shop. If I were Simon Cowell I would say to my computer, "you've taken a lot of flack in the blogosphere lately, and no one should have to go through that. I just wish you were a better computer." This would be followed by my laptop crashing as it tried to start using it's own operating system one last time.

Brandon is in the top twelve! Hiyo!!! Thank you for voting for him.

There are dishes to do, promises to keep, and miles of floor I need to sweep so I'll bid you adieu for the day after one final thought.

Wynton Marsalis was on the Daily Show this week and said in regard to the state of jazz music, "the question for us as jazz musicians is just how to play better," and that "people play not as good today because the conditions are less extreme."

I agree that the issue of jazz is how to play better, but "play better" needs to be clarified. There are a large number of jazz musicians who play with technical facility that is equal or superior to the giants of the past, although that technical facility can be cumbersome and is often not used for the best artistic purposes. I further believe the problem is not that the conditions are less extreme. Jazz musicians are struggling to pay rent in New York City as much as they ever have and perhaps with less paying gigs, but more musicians vying for those few paydays. Also, the state of affairs the world over gives a cornucopia of social and political problems to be inspired about. The issue is that jazz music has reached a point where you will often sound archaic if you play music that is palatable, or your music will lack any discernible esthetic quality if you're trying to move the music equal to or past where Coltrane pushed it back in the '60's.

To me, to "play better" would mean to find a way, like Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk did, to play music that doesn't put an emphasis on virtuosity, but rather music that makes an artistic statement that is both simple and profound. That's simple enough to state, but the wheel already exists, and it's hard to improve on it

Let's keep working on that.