Letter to My Band

Writing the words “my band” is not anything I ever expected to say in this life and I still feel like I’m a bit of an imposter daring to use those two words. But having just performed our 10-Years-Together Anniversary Concert to a very small group in a hall I rented, I do feel some encouragement to step forward more confidently into those two words. The “my” part feels off because every single one of these four musicians is at a higher level of jazz experience, virtuosity and expression, but it feels spot on when it comes to putting those talents to a different use than background music in the club, my vision of music’s power to create community and to include kids in that community. Truth be told, I left the concert a bit depressed about the way my own playing is always “a reach that exceeds my grasp,” but after beating myself up a while, a closer reflection narrowed the issues down to soloing on fast tempo tunes and there were many other inspired moments I had that I need to honor.

But that’s not interesting to anyone else. The letter I just wrote to the band might be closer, another look at this always emerging vision of music, soul and community that is a big theme in the 3,000 plus blogposts I’ve written and thus, worthy to be included here. 

 

Fellas,

 

I don’t know how you felt about it, but leaving aside my own nagging self-doubts about my playing, I thought we hit a new peak yesterday—we ain’t just a band for little kids! Every single one of you was killin’ it! The combination of hard swingin’, soulful blowin’ and deep listening turned that room into a church/ dance hall/ ritual space where I could feel the Ancestors peekin’ in to check it out. As Karen confirmed in her comments, the range of the musical expression was far beyond the ordinary jazz concert. From the bottom of the belly to the height of imagination, from the gentle and lilting to the shouting and proclaiming, from the whimsical and humorous to the profound and deeply serious, we covered a lot of territory. Add to that the unique mixture of body music and the call-and-response singing, the 70 yr. old and the 13 yr. old, the blues and the bossa, the fast, slow and in-between, the solos/ duos/ trios/ quartets/ full group , the pre-arranged and wholly spontaneous, the virtuosic and the simple (but musical), all of which gave the concert the shape of a larger piece of music with connection and contrast far beyond a collection of random tunes. If, as Coleridge says, “every object rightly seen (every music rightly heard) unlocks another faculty of soul,” there were a lot of doors opening in that room!

 

The audience was almost all people who don’t ordinarily go to jazz concerts and I do think we’re worthy of an audience who does. But it’s also a great service we’re performing in our ability to draw anyone in regardless of their interest in jazz, be they kids or adults. Obviously, we’re not exactly hitting on the formula to “monetize” it, to carve a clear niche and fill it, but luckily we have our day jobs!

 

I do think the universe conspired to bring the five of us together in this way and to keep us connected for 10 years and I, for one, am grateful for it all. Here’s to the next 10—and beyond!

 

Love you guys!

 

-Doug

 

Free Pass

After listening to an interview with Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and passionate defender of wrongly-accused prisoners on Death Row, I then watched the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. The next day I read my daughter’s new piece My Husband Punched A White Man and Nearly Spent 20 Years in Prison. All three of them had three common themes:

 

1) Our Justice System is more broken than even I thought it was. Mind you, I’m still grateful it exists in the way that it doesn’t in China or Turkey or North Korea. That matters. Even though brazen criminals like Trump, Guilliani, Matt Gaetz and their ilk are still somehow walking free while innocent black men are on death row, still some Capitol rioters may actually spend some (not enough!) jail time and Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, has been sentenced to 22 ½ years in prison. Still a lenient sentence compared to those given to black men, but a long, long, long overdue tiny step in the right direction. 

 

2) Our Justice System is broken. In spite of “making it” as a successful American who graduated from Harvard Law and argued cases at the Supreme Court, Mr. Stevenson was still accosted by a policeman outside his own apartment, had a gun pointed at him and was told that if he moved, he was dead. For the crime of being a black man getting out of his car in front of a nice apartment building. The Sidney Poitier character is threatened in the same way by a policemen and arrested on suspicion of murder with no other evidence than being a black man waiting at a train station. My son-in-law is arrested for defending himself against three white racists threatening to jump him. And after going through a vicious and indifferent court procedure, has to pay the white man about to do violence to his body $1000. And in so doing, the Court affirms the unspoken understanding that you can threaten to hurt a black man for no just cause and not only get away with it, but earn $1000. And the cop who threatened Mr. Stevenson? No consequence. He gets a free pass.

  

3) The white folks also get a free pass at having to develop into a decent human being while the black folks have to prove themselves of upstanding character far beyond the norm— still without any guarantee that they won’t get beaten or arrested or killed. The robes the judges wear, the badges the cops wear, the sheets the KKK terrorists wear, the “shaman” horns on the head of the Capitol rioter, are symbols of their freedom to be the worst versions of humanity if they so choose with no consequence whatsoever. In the Poitier movie, the cop who would have wrongly jailed two white men for a murder they didn’t commit were it not for Poitier’s defense of them, smiles at the Poitier character as he boards the train and says, “Take it easy,” leaving us with the feel-good sense that finally he could see the humanity and good character of a black man. And in so doing, takes us all off the hook from having to investigate further what were the systemic causes behind his privilege to dismiss an entire race. 

 

Take a moment to read my daughter’s piece and keep reflecting on the things your school, church, family or government didn’t—and don’t—want you to know, don’t want you to think about. And pass it on.

 

 

 https://keralataylor.medium.com/my-husband-punched-a-white-man-and-nearly-spent-20-years-in-prison-84279896b582?sk=b35b2ca9638da7af7a97fdde19d53a50

 

The Art of the Pitch

My one baseball game of the year I watched yesterday was thoroughly unsatisfying in terms of the excitement that players generate when they actually hit the ball and get on base. This was mostly a game of strikeouts and clearly a pitcher’s game. And yes, there is a subtle drama as the pitcher tries to fool the batter (and yesterday succeeded) with the pitch swerving left or right or down, the speed varying and the unknown of which kind of pitch is coming next. And so I remembered this poem by Robert Francis, comparing writing poetry (or it could be improvising jazz) to pitching: 

 

PITCHER

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

 

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

 

The others throw to be comprehended. He 

Throws to be a moment misunderstood. 

 

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

 

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late.  

Four Meditations on Watching the SF Giants Lose the Playoff Game Last Night

1) Remember Mary Oliver’s advice:

You must not ,ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life. (Or for your happiness.)

 

2) Console yourself with this realization: You have just freed up some 20 to 35 hours of your life by not having to view any more games. Good time to finally read Moby Dick, master Chopin’s Impromptu  or learn Coltrane’s Giant Steps in all 12 keys.

 

3) Secret to happiness when your team is losing? Suddenly switch allegiance to the other team! Go Mookie Betts!

 

4) Consider the moon and stars when you step outside after the game. No star is trying to slide into the moon, no crowds are cheering, the celestial orbs are all perfectly content to be where they are, slowly circling without ambition, nothing to win or lose. 

 

Apples and Walnuts

 

I took my usual 5-mile walk through the park today, but something felt different. There was a certain feeling in the air that soaked into some ancient part of the psyche—or at least as far back as some childhood recollection. Crisp feeling, slight chill, a familiar smell that sang of “Fall!” Back home had a fresh apple with some walnuts and now taste joined sight, smell and touch to evoke the comfort of Autumn. A few posts ago, I shared the October Song that sent me to the heart of the leaf-falling descent into darkness and the settling in to the solace of home. 

 

Comfort food. Comfort music. Comfort smells, sights and the touch of the Fall breeze on the skin. We could always use these touchstones in our lives and certainly, now more than ever. It’s tempting to say that once we could just absorb the beauty and not worry about protecting it, but that has never been true for indigenous people encountering the Western conquerors, for our own small farmers in the face of agri-business, indeed, for most anyone in any field dealing with the ravages of time and change and especially, changes imposed by human short-sightedness. But of course, that mandate of protection is hitting more of us, more often and larger than ever before. 

 

But see how quickly our happiness on a Fall day can go off the rails. Somehow I hope we can immerse ourselves fully in it without the fear creeping in, settle down into the hot tub without the tension of the emergency pager going off. Just eat a crisp red apple with walnuts and savor each bite. When the moment calls for us to rise up and act to defend what we love, we will be acting from that love, pushing the car off our child from the accumulated power of life properly lived and loved. Joy and Justice belong together, like apples and walnuts, walking hand in hand through the crunch leaves on a splendid Fall day.

 

 

Browsing in the Bookstore

Amazon be damned—I’m a lifelong browser of bookstores and CD/ record stores(Amoeba Records is still alive and well in San Francisco and yes, the vinyl records are coming back!). It’s a pleasure akin to fishing, with the same sensation (he says as someone who has never fished) of having a sense of which kinds of fish lurk below the waters in this particular bookstore aisle, but never knowing which will nibble on the hook. The element of not-knowing, of surprise, of serendipity that this fish chose you, gives a distinct pleasure to the enterprise. 

 

At the same time, sometimes I’m overwhelmed and feel that there are simply too many to choose from and how does one actually decide? It’s a practice of checking in to some part of yourself to see what you need at the moment. Some of it is time— Medieval times? The Future? 1969? (like the one I just finished—always a winner.) Some is place—China? Norway? Ghana? San Francisco? And of course, some is genre—mystery? Romance? Sweeping family saga?

 

But truth be told, if you took all the back cover synopses and mixed them together in a salad bowl or in a blender, they all come out pretty much the same.

 

“The story of a terrible tragedy, the secrets that get revealed, the hard-won redemption that shows the intrepid human spirit.”

 Nobody ever seems to write a book about the reasonably well-adjusted family that have a pretty good time and make good decisions. Who would want to read that? Likewise, no one would ever go to an opera about a couple who falls in love, receives the blessings of their parents and the community, learn to be honest and forthright with each other and content with what each has to offer. Even in music, the classical music listener wants some serious straying from the home theme, some sense of exile before returning to the triumphant closing chords. The jazz listener wants that horn or the singer’s voice to scrape down deep into the marrow of the soul far beyond where polite conversation ever goes. There was a short period of New-Age music where no note was ever in any kind of tension with another, a smooth Jazz station with all the dissonant notes removed, and I imagine that still is played in the yoga class or the dentist office, but it doesn’t satisfy our deep yearning to get down into the muck of it all so the rising up has some value. 

 

Every wise teacher I’m listening to these days (and always have) agrees that the only genuine path to the spirit is through the wounds of sorrow, suffering and trauma. Don’t wallow in the wound but don’t kid yourself that you can simply walk around it and find the yellow-brick road to Oz. So art is a replay of this in miniature in the safety and comfort of your armchair, with the luxury of imagining that all of this is happening to someone else and at the same time instructing you that there is no someone else—they’re all you. As many yous (and more) as there are books in the bookstores with their back covers acting as if this story is unique. And yes, the time, place, artistry of the writer, idiosyncracies of the characters and details of the story are unique, but the overall narrative is universal. 

 

In fiction and in life. On one level, everywhere we go is a browsing through a bookstore to discover which story is singing out to us and figuring out how to claim it as our own. Without the damn Prime truck delivering it! 

 

Which Holiday Will You Celebrate?

 “They willing traded everything they owned…They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” 

-      From the log of Christopher Columbus meeting the Awarak people for the first time

(p. 1: A People’s History of the United States)

 

And that is exactly what Columbus did when sponsored in a return voyage by the King and Queen of Spain, with the promise that he would return with “as much gold as they need—and as many slaves as they ask.” He commanded that these native people who had so generously and peacefully shared anything they owned with him had to go out and bring back gold. If they collected a certain quantity within three months, they were given a copper token to hang around their necks. Those without the token had their hands cut off and bled to death. And in celebration of it all, Columbus wrote:

 

“ Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way…”

 

And so a wrathful and vengeful God (whose Son preached love) created a mindset based on power, domination, greed, private ownership of material goods, brutality, punishment, violence, intolerance that created a story of White Supremacy, Manifest Destiny and the plundering of the earth that has brought us to exactly where we are. A nation (and world) beset by collective trauma, injustice, climate catastrophe, fear, cynicism, hatred, abuse, purposefully perpetuated ignorance and all the other cancers carried in our cells from these short-sighed ancestors that make it so supremely difficult to wake up each morning and have a nice day. 

 

But a worldview created by the human mind is one that can also be dismantled by the human mind, a mind that can consider a different worldview created by other human minds. And there are other Ancestors singing in our blood. For example: 

 

“We love the earth and all things of the earth. Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky and water is a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there exists a brotherly feeling that keeps us (the Lakota people) safe among them and so close do we come to our feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood we speak a common tongue.

 

Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; that lack of respect for growing, living things soon leads to a lack of respect for humans too. So we keep our youth close to its softening influence.” 

                       - Chief Luther Standing Bear (p. 6 of Touch the Earth)

 

Here is a worldview based on kinship, on interrelations with humans and non-humans, on relationship with the natural world, on a kind and mostly benevolent Great Spirit, on the sense of belonging. A world that can lead us to a new vision of humanity and our place on this precious planet.

 

One of the chapter in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost(p. 70) tells a story of some Spanish conquistadors (note the language: conquest) who got separated from their group, wandered until they were taken in by an indigenous tribe and “went native,” learning their ways. The indigenous view of the conquistador culture these Spaniards came from was right on target: 

 

“We came from the sunrise, they from the sunset. We healed the sick, they killed the sound. We came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed and lanced. We coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.”

 

And there you have it. One world view that leans towards death (the sunset), kills the healthy, clothes our vulnerability and barefoot contact with the earth, carries weapons, robs all and gives nothing. Another that arises from the promise of the sunrise, walks in direct contact with the earth, brings healing, lives simply and gives generously. That’s what we’re choosing when we decide whether to celebrate Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. 

 

On Friday, President Biden officially declared this day its renamed Indigenous People’s Day. That’s a good sign. Yes, the lost children of the conquistadors who have built their identities around conquest and domination and privilege and power and money will sputter and spout and fume on Fox News, but there is a growing movement of folks ready to change the story for the benefit of our healing in the moment and the future of our grandchildren. 

Really, there is no choice as to which to celebrate. Let’s do this.