Happy Without Machines

This morning I cleaned out my closet. Picked through my shirts, sorted, hung on new hangers, discarded for the Thrift store. Then I cleaned my desk. Shuffled through papers, wrote some checks, put them in envelopes, affixed stamps. Organized the piano books on top of the piano and then played a bit. Washed out the oatmeal pot, cleaned out the refrigerater, chopped some vegetables and got some soup started. After a couple of hours of touching fabric, paper, ivory keys, wood-handled knives, water, vegetables, I was buzzing with tactile pleasure, satisfied with the look of three-dimensional clothes neatly hung and organized, papers tucked into the letter organizer, books stacked atop the piano, condiments lined up in the refrigerator. 

It feels okay to arrange my files on my laptop desktop, but it’s just not the same. The virtual world is…well, virtual: “existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form.” This morning I touched real things that had weight, texture, color, shape, form. I was happy without machines.

And then I turned on the laptop to write this blog. 

Happy with Machines?

I had the good fortune to hear author Zadie Smith speak last night. I’ve enjoyed her books, but the big pull was to connect with the person who inspired my granddaughter’s name. She proved to be an eloquent, charming, funny and thoroughly educated person with multiple perspectives across class, race and culture (born to a Jamaican mother and British father in working class London and now teaching at NYU in the U.S.). She’s conversant with a wide range of authors while still grounded in Dickens and Shakespeare and other dead white guys.

In talking about the inevitable impact of Facebook and fast-paced media (“most of my students confess they can’t make it through a novel”), she came to this simple conclusion: “The question is whether these machines are making us happier. If yes, enjoy! If not, stop.”

Which prompted me to wonder, “Are they making me happier or more miserable?” And the answer of course is, “Yes.” Today, the wireless cut out on me a dozen times. Half of them at school and half at home. It’s a pleasure to post these blogs, it’s great to announce workshops and such and e-mail has certainly become the default way of contact from the frivolous to the profound. But it would be interesting to chronicle the number of times a stranger entering the room would find me cursing at a screen. That can’t be good for my health.

The cliché is that technology is neutral and it is we who use it for good or bad. As anyone who has done their homework and read Marshal McCluhan or Neal Postman can testify, that’s only partially true. Each technology accents different parts of the psyche at the expense of another. The difference between radio and TV, for example, is profound.

And we all have different deep-seated longing that certain technologies promise to fulfill and then fall short— like mistaking a Facebook friend for a real friend. We have deep-structures in the brain that stay alert for flickering motion for survival’s sake and seduces us to keep looking at a football game we couldn’t care less at in a sports bar instead of attending to the scintillating conversation of our friend at the table.

But in terms of what we watch, how much we watch, how and where and with whom and for what reason we watch, yes, we still can choose all of the above and that makes all the difference in the world. The Youtube video of the two twin babies talking out of context is pure entertainment, but when shown after a scat-singing exercise in tandem with Jazz Dispute and having read the book The Singing Neanderthals, it carries a greater meaning and weight.

Today we showed the 6^th grade a remarkable artful short on Youtube about rhythm and life in a Mali village. We used Apple TV and an i-Pad while admiring people who still work with their hands, pounding millet, cutting a tree to make a drum, forging an iron bell, tuning into the rhythm of language sprouting into song— in short, people who were not walking around with i-Pads in their backpacks surfing Youtube. At the end, the narrator pleads for the continuity of their way of life— which has something to do with keeping the i-Pads away. Irony piled on top of irony.

In the 8^th grade class, the machines were extremely useful in framing the long, convoluted and just plain weird history of the minstrel show, the granddaddy of Broadway musicals. We saw Al Jolson sing Mammy and then dug deeper (on the i-Pads) to uncover things about Daddy Rice and Jump Jim Crow, Ernest Hogan and his unreapeatable hit song, Clorindy and the Origin of the Cakewalk. Modern technology used with a purpose and a point of view. So hooray for the chance to make these points vivid. But we could have arrived at a similar place through books or storytelling. Or maybe if we all were just out living our lives, hanging out with the kids I see out the window building a fort from milk crates, we could finally forget about the sordid history of just about everything and just enjoy being together on this bountiful earth without a single screen to mediate. Might that make us happier? Just wondering.

Jazz Playground

“Say say, oh playmate. Come out and play with me.

 And bring your dollies three. Climb up my apple tree.

Slide down my rainbarrel, into my cellar door.

And we’ll be jolly friends, forever more, more, more.”

Yesterday afternoon I played perhaps the best concert of my modest performing career. My partner in crime was the great Joshi Marshall on sax and the gracious host who opened her beautiful home and shared her remarkable Grotian piano (also literally sharing it also in an inspired duet with me) was Samia Clark. It was a late Sunday afternoon, the weather perfect, the food extraordinary (pumpkin tiramisu!) and three people independently commented after it was over that they noticed the setting sun on the golden leaves out the window while we were playing Autumn in New York.

The duet is perhaps the most revealing and vulnerable format, two musicians listening and responding with a conversational intensity distinct from the large group format. I always feel like I’m the low end of pianistic technical flash and polish, still growing toward the latest hip jazz chords, scales and voicings. But the breadth of my dilettantish musical career— from Scarlatti to Scriabin to Satchmo, from Bali to Brazil to Burkina Faso— all leaks into my conception of entering a jazz tune and catches people’s attention— they have to listen with more attentive ears and at the end of the matter, the depth and quality of listening is 90% of the concert experience. The lovely house, the intimate setting, the autumn trees out the window, the convivial company, the exceptional piano, the carefully-crafted and selected repertoire, the interplay between Joshi and I, the familiar tunes given a new face all combined to make some memorable musical magic. One woman said, “I felt like you were speaking to each person separately, each of us going on our own surprising yet familiar journey with each piece.” Well, maybe a little weird to review one’s own concert, but it’s as much a complement to the audience as to Joshi and I and a chance to look at what makes any musical event notable.

But perhaps the quality in yesterday’s music that was the most important is the sense of play, that feeling of being set loose together in the playground and joyfully romping from one thing to another. For that I can credit the Orff approach and my four decades of playing with children. You might take a tumble down the slide or miss a rung of the monkey bar, but no one is judging you or assessing you in the playground— and you aren’t judging yourself either. And that gives you such freedom! I played a little of a classical piece yesterday and I was instantly transported back to those old piano recitals where you lived in fear of hitting a wrong note. But in jazz, it’s different. As Joshi said, “If it’s wrong once, it’s wrong. If it’s wrong twice, it’s jazz!”

So this my way of announcing to the world, “Hey, we’re available to play at your house!”

(If there’s a decent piano there). We’d love to get this message:

“Say, say jazz players. Come join us in our home.

And bring your saxophone. Sing out those pretty tones.

Climb up the blues scale. Slide down to end the tune.

Can’t wait to hear you play, we’ll see you soon!”

Mutant Mosquito

The mosquito was back last night. Frankly, I don’t get it. It’s almost November, the house is a cold as a proverbial witch’s teat and as far as I know, there are no stagnant pools of water in the vicinity. What mutant strand of mosquito is evolving here?

And what’s with the constant buzzing in my ear? Can’t it just suck my blood and go off somewhere to digest? What’s with the constant “Naa naa naa naa naa naa na-naa naa” teasing that’s making me miserable? Is there some mosquito counseling center that might help the species mature emotionally? Some Miss Manners column with a five-step program?

1. Land on unsuspecting prey.
2. Insert probiscus.
3. Suck blood.
4. Thank your victim for the meal.
5. Fly away.

I suppose evolution suggests that I need to be larger physically, emotionally and spiritually here and pity the lower life form. I’ll take some small pleasure in my more varied diet, my opposable thumb and a voice that can sing more than one annoying note. But I must admit that Mutant Mosquito has the superior name for a cool rock band. 

The Power of One

… mosquito buzzing in your ear to completely destroy a night’s sleep.

And so while we grapple with life’s Everest-size problems, it’s those tiny whining things can undo us.

PS The Power of One is also an excellent South African novel.

Premature Nostalgia

Ancient cave paintings. Portraits of kings. The family photo album. From pre-history to yesterday’s graffiti on the freeway bridge, we humans have a deep “Kilroy was here” urge to mark our presence. (Maybe the entire history of art is nothing more than the human equivalent of dogs peeing on trees.) Not only to let others know that we were here, but to document for ourselves the arch of our ever-changing self. Save for a rainy day the photos of old girlfriends (“now, what was her name again?), the Woodstock ticket, the babies grown kids grown adults grown parents.

But when someone had the bright idea of cameras on cell phones, that natural urge went into intense overdrive. The ratio between living and documenting the living has always been high on the side of the living— now it seems we’re crossing the line where we’re documenting almost half of what we’re living. Today’s conversations:

“Here’s a shot of today’s breakfast.”

“Here’s me and my friends at the coffee shop. Here we are the next day. And here we are at the bar that night.”

“Hey check out this photo of us. Man those were good times.”

“But didn’t you just take this yesterday?”

Not only is every moment available for documentation, but then there’s the storage and organization and by the way, who has time to look at these things? There’s some 10 family photo albums on my bookshelves with perhaps 50 photos each over the past 40 years. Today we shoot 500 photos in a week! Do the math. Is life long enough to document, organize and review?

And I’m talking, as always, to myself here. These 650 plus blogs are my own photo library in words. But running experience through the neuron circuitry of language has a different feel than clicking the photo and I think a different effect. At any rate, it’s all footprints in the sand, eventually washed away by the tide.

Hey, anyone want to see my photos of the footprints?

Price of Admission

Hey you music teachers out there! Want an amazing pedagogical practice that will transform your teaching, make kids happy, feed your own artistic and spiritual life and keep you fresh and excited about teaching after 40 years of non-stop classes? Of course you do! Who wouldn’t?

But there is a price. You have to work your tail off every day of your teaching life, constantly hit the walls of your limitations and be expected to keep trying to climb over them, write apology letters to all your former students for your less-than-stellar teaching. Once you get through the door, it’s a great show. But you better be prepared to pay the price of admission. And you don’t get to sit in the center orchestra seats and watch it. You’re at once the director, the conductor, the theater tech crew, the stage set-up and clean-up crew (non-Union wages) and often the composer, arranger, screenwriter, producer as well. It ain’t easy. But it sure is rewarding! And when everything is clicking— ie, happy, engaged children— there’s few things finer or more fun.

So went my talk with a music supervisor thinking about who to send to the summer Orff training. As much as I want the world to see the beauty and wisdom of the Orff approach to music, movement, education and life in general, I recognize that it’s not for everyone. You have to have a certain predisposition to this way of working and thinking and a hearty appetite for improvisation mixed with precision.Though I base my life on the belief that all people are capable of such high-level development of mind, body, heart and spirit, I’ve lived long enough to know that many will decline the journey. And many more will find other journeys that fit their style better. And so Orff never will be a mass movement and that’s just fine with me. But for those who are intrigued, the door is always open and my hand happily waves you in.

Just be prepared to pay the price of admission!