I worked my way through four chapters of my new Piano Jazz book yesterday. It came in the mail along with two other books (Jazz Theory and Jazz History books).

I have been glancing through books that supposedly teach Jazz for years and have never found one that hit me as useful. Until this book. Not sure if it’s the approach this writer uses or my receptiveness. I think it’s probably a bit of both. But maybe more Levine’s approach. Which is very coherent from the getgo.

I’m not really interested in performing Jazz. I would just like to be understand a bit more about it and get some in my fingers. Last year I bought three fake books. These books are standard for young Jazz musicians. You see them at gigs, even. They are full of Jazz tunes with nice Jazz changes in them. Last year I surprised myself by sitting down and playing through these books. I was prepping for a meeting with another late bloomer. Vic the sax player was in love with Jazz and willing to come to my house and “jam.” I wanted to be able to hold my own when we improvved the music he likes.

Even without the Levine approach, I found it easy to lay down the changes and improv with Vic. If he promised to play sax on a gig for me I promised to do a bebop tune on it. He was interested. We rehearsed several times. Then he got a gig in Wisconsin (a day gig) and moved away. O well.

I remember this brush with Jazz yesterday when I was studying Levine’s ideas about Jazz harmony on the piano. At the end of the chapter, Levine suggests that you tranpose the patterns into all keys. And he gives a list of tunes (found in those fake books I bought last year) that specifically apply his concepts. I played through all this yesterday and found it pretty easy.

One of his insights is to take a basic chord pattern (ii7 V I) I have known most of my improvising life and showing how you can see most chord changes through the prism of this simple pattern. It hit me immediately.

I am hoping that his book with continue to make sense to me.

I also received his theory book in the mail.

He uses the same logic in this book as his piano book. In other words the chapters are corallary but he has rewritten it in more general terms for any musician not just pianists.

Both of these titles were in footnotes in Rob Hodson’s book,  “Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz.”

I am reading this book. The author goes to my church and teaches at the local college. I plan to invite him out for coffee to ask him some questions about his book and Jazz in general.

According to the Council of Conservative Citizens’ “Statement of Principles,” the Council believes that “the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character” and supports restricting immigration from non-European and non-Western peoples.” Additionally, the group opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

“Racist Group Holds Anti-Immigration Demonstration” May 16 2007

Two of the four articles on the front page of the local paper, “The Holland Sentinel” are about religion today.

The first is an article about Jerry Falwell. I have to admit when I heard that he had died all I could think was “well, there’s one less purveyor of hate in the US.” I’m not proud of that, but it was an involuntary thought.

The article is an AP article but they have added some frightening local stuff:
“I’ve been to a few meetings with him…. He could make friends real easy, you know?” This is Ron Conkiln’s quote. He served on Falwell’s Liberty U board of regents. He lives in Zeeland.

“Roger Ver Lee, a Hudsonville resident who served on the baord of Calvary Baptist Church in Holland, said he first met Falwell at the ground breaking of Liberty University in the early 1970s, and describes Falwell as ‘probably my best friend.'”

Ver Lee goes on, “We were flying in his jet…. He told the pilot to roll the plane, so we went and rolled the plane once. He was always playing a lot of jokes and haviang a lot of fun.”

WE WERE FLYING IN HIS JET?

Is it just me or is that incongrous? The Moral Majority must be about more than hating abortion and gay people, huh? Making money must be in there too…..

Later in the article, “Matt Foreman, executive director of [the] National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended concolences to those close to Falwell, but added ‘Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America’s anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nations’ appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation.”

Couldn’t have said that better myself.

The other article was about a Zeeland Area Prayer Initiative which “consists of ministers from several denominations.”

Call me silly, but this atheistic church musician is reminded of the injunction to pray in a closet not publically (and probably not in front of a photographer). Oh well, probably too many gay people in that prayer closet locally anyway.

It just drives me crazy…. Here they go again…. It makes me want to make a note and boycott every track they fine these kids for. Who needs this music? There’s lots of great music out there. Screw RIAA!

“Downloaders face the music as record industry sues”

by Levi Pulkkinen Seattle PI.com May 13, 2007

The wind is blowing here in Western Michigan this morning. It was especially nice before I turned on this silly computer which has a loud hum.

Today I am going over to my friend Jonathon Fegel’s house presumably to do some recording. I find myself in an odd space mentally these days. I seem to be hungry for some reading and thinking. Consequently I am drawn to books by Charles Rosen like the one he wrote on the classical period and also Saint-Simon’s memoirs and some books on Jazz.

I have been memorizing an early Haydn sonata just to prove to myself that I can indeed memorize.

Rosen in his book on piano playing points out how difficult memorizing is for older players. thanks a lot. I’m trying anyway. I have about two pages sort of memorized. Early Haydn is simple and sectional. This is one of the two reasons I chose the piece I am working on… the other is that I marked it with a sticky as one that was so charming I wanted to keep coming back to it….. If anyone is keeping any kind of track of this it’s the Sonata in A (written before 1763) Hob. XVI/5; L8. I like all the movements.

There is a change that came over music in the last 25 years of the 18th century. This is the time of Mozart and Haydn. Rosen is especially insightful about this music. He points out that is rhythmic pacing is the pacing of comedic opera (emphasis on wit and elegance) and its phrasing is the phrasing of dance music. He cleverly points out how structure replaced the function of Baroque varied ornamentation. He is very convincing on this.

It’s sort of nice to have a group of significant piano sonatas by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven to refer to as I think about Rosen’s ideas. Rosen himself is a pianist. Another thing he says in his book on piano is that young concert pianists (of which I am certainly not one, heh) should play through the works of the great piano composers. He was startled to do master classes with top flight pianists in their twenties who had not read the piano works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schuman straight through. He even calculates how long it would take them to read them. It takes me much longer than his calculations because I often play under tempo in order to play accurately.

But reading through these works has had a big impact on my piano technique and understanding of music in general.

This might seem to contradict my resistance to a perfoming canon of great classical and jazz music. But in my mind I distinguish between the need to study music and the needs that music fulfills in listeners.

Charlie Parker apparently listened primarily to classical music and then performed in the living style of his time. Miles Davis studied Prokofiev concurrently with his own innovations in music. These notions make imminent sense to me.

I do wonder about my own current sort of quiescence regarding composing and performing my “tunes” (i.e. what I call my bad paul simon songs). Recently I tried to rehearse “Coming up for air” and decided the song was kind of a piece of crap. This continous dance with your own creations is pretty regular for creators I think. Nevertheless it’s painful sometimes to consider the things you have made and how flimsy and ephemeral they actually are.

I also wonder about my relationship to listeners. Who are they? Do people pull down mp3s from web site? Do they hear what I perform at church and will soon be performing on the street? Who knows?

Okay Blitz Scrabble has scrambled what’s left of my brains. I have been playing far too much today. I walked downtown to sit and read to get away from the computer.

Went to a used bookstore earlier today and found the rest of Mishima’s tetralogy sitting on a display case. Bought the three I don’t own.

Ran into Phillip Muzzy at the coffee shop. He looks great. He just got back to Holland a week ago and is all graduated. Looking for a job as an acoustician.

It is gorgeous in Holland Michigan today.

In today’s Sentinel, local business consultant and adjunct teacher at GVSU, Jeff Wincel, writes about businesses that look beyond the profit motive. (“When the bottom line isn’t the only priority” once again I link it in for those of you with the patience to subscribe to the silly Holland Sentinel web site.)

I began reading the article with skeptisim. I don’t see businesses in the current economic environment do much but maximize (usually short term) profit. After all that’s their purpose, right? Here in Holland there is that goofy idea that profits are rewards from God for good behavior (Calvinistic silliness that also teaches that if you’re having problems it’s because you are not living right. Take that you dang homeless and hungry people. In the words of the Hope College graduate and wild-eyed California evangelist, Robert Schuller: what failures and victims in life need is “Posssssssibility Thinking!!!!!!”)

But Wincel caught my attention with this “Once Magna bought Donnelly, the noble cause of stakeholder service was abandoned by a singular focus on share-holder returns. The same happened with Prince and the JCI buyouts.”

I remember when the locally owned Donnelly Corporation sold itself to Magna. An acquantance of mine was on the board of directors. When he mentioned to me what was going on, he couldn’t look me in the eye.

I knew some of the Donnelly family. They are good people and some are even dang liberals who seem to think that homelesss and hungry people could use some help. But when this sale went down it felt like Gordon “Greed is Good” Gecko time.

“This is your wake-up call, pal.”

I think the profit motive pretty much stinks. But at the same time I am amazed to watch businesses seek short term profit at the expense of long term profit and investment. An obvious example is the auto industry. After the seventies oil crisis, it didn’t take too long for SUVs and other gas hogs to become market dominant. Crazy. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have made what sold. I’m saying it would have been nice to have a choice for more responsible gas mileage. Silly me.

I do believe that this is part of the reason for Michigan’s depressed economy: short term thinking.

Speaking of Charkes Rosen, in his “The Classical Style,” he uses the word, cancrizans. What a great word! It means “to move backwards” and comes from the Latin verb cancrizare, to move backwards.

This word was not in Websters. Did not come up in Google under the “define” command.
Rosen defined right in his prose.

But looking it up on the web led me to this cool site:
The Phrontistery.  At least I think it’s cool.

Phrontistery means “a thinking place” and seems to be a blog mostly about interesting words  Cancrizans is on the Forthright’s  Favorites page of this web site.

Another lovely day in Holland Michigan. Eileen and I went for a long walk this morning. We walk down by the river. It’s a lovely walk and most people don’t seem to know there is a path that runs between downtown and the river’s edge. We did see a few people. But most people were there for the ongoing Tulip Time.

I made more food yesterday. Moussaka for me and pork chops for the wife. Actually I kind of forgot that Eileen doesn’t like eggplant. Ahem. Anyway. She liked her porkchop just find and I had fun making the Moussaka.

Life goes on. I am still reading “Blue:the murder of jazz” by Eric Nisenson and Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima.

Nisenson’s rant is giving me food for thought. He seems to be drawing a line between himself and the neoclassic jazz guys like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch. I agree with his notion that Jazz needs to keep transforming itself in order to preserve it’s artistic nature. But actually I go much further. I think that most art and music is like that. So Nisenson keeps talking about validity and who should be included on Jazz’s best list. I find this uninteresting. I am interested in what music has meaning for people and why. If that’s old timey Jazz, then that’s fine. But for myself I find that music has a function of helping me make sense of life. This cannot be just from the point of view of historical music Jazz or otherwise. What about now?

Unfortunately, most Jazz by living musicians doesn’t do it for me. I heard Dave Holland‘s group last year and they blew me away.

Here’s a link to 58 seconds on Youtube of Chris Potter taking a solo with this group. He’s the sax player and is also a composer.

Robin Eubanks is the trombone player and is also a composer. Here’s a video of him playing with a larger group but you can get an idea from it.

This is Dave Holland standing next to Miles Davis in 1991. I think he played with him at one point. As I listened to the Dave Holland group play, I quit thinking about whether it was Jazz or Contemporary or whatever. I just thought it was good music. But still most contemporary Jazz stuff I hear isn’t as interesting as what these players did when I heard them live.

The drummer, Nate Smith was pretty amazing. Very intuitive. Anticipated what soloists were doing and played right along with them. He’s playing on the Chris Potter video.

Anyway. I’m also plugging away on Mishima. I read some Mishima when I was young. I started reading Spring Snow because David Mitchell (who is an author I like right now) said Mishima’s tetralogy was a masterpiece. Spring Snow is the first volume.

The following articles are among the ones that caught my eye in today’s New York Times.

“I know what happens in a country when you don’t teach history correctly…. It’s insane not to teach your children the truth.”

This man is Michael Honda. He’s a Congressman from California. He was a teacher. Now he is a Congressman who stands up for what he believes in. His family was sent to the Japanese interment camps. His wife is a survivor of Hiroshima. Read the article, “A Congressman Faces Foes in Japan as He Seeks Apology” by Norimitsu Orishi

In the story, “A Father’s Pain and an Empty Pizzeria,” Richard G. Jones tells the story of the father of the accused terrorist who scoped out Fort Dix when he delivered pizzas there. The father is now ostrasized by the locals who used to patronize his pizzeria. They shout epithets. So the father has put up a sign, “Under New Management.”

So the story is about hate and fear. The response is to put up a sign that isn’t true. Hate, fear and lies.

Finally, Charles Rosen is the subject of “At 80, He’s Hardly Done Talking or Performing” by Vivien Schweitzer. I admire this man very much. I have read most of his “The Romantic Generation” and also other works by him. He brings a performer’s insight into musicology.

I tried to add a favicon (favorite icon) to my web site. I seemed to have failed (according to Sarah J. in England). I can see the icon I designed on my computer using Mozilla, but nothing in Explorer.

But in the meantime I noticed that my middle column was not way down on the bottom of the Explorer page as usual. Hmmmm. So if someone is reading this in Explorer and is not experiencing the usual difficulties, it would interest me to know that.

Also if you happen to see a little green icon somewhere, I’m also interested.

Yesterday I made crepes.

This morning, I fried up some apples.

Then put the apples in the crepes and topped with peach yogurt. Yum.

In Michigan we are about to run out of money for our State government. As I understand it, the bucks end on June 1. Local services in this state are in trouble. Education is being cut.

But we are largely a conservative state that abhors taxes.

Still I hear people complain that there must be too much fat in Lansing (our state capital).

In today’s local paper, Rep Arlan Meekhof tells us the gospel that tax hikes are unnecessary. (“Simple Reforms Make Tax Hike Unecessary“) I’ve linked in the story but like so many people on the web, our local paper insists on an annoying registration in order to access their site. I emailed them this early on in their web site days. But true to form, I got emails back not acknowledging my comments but arguing that I basically didn’t know what I was talking about. Screw the public.

You may think that I’m just kvetching here and indeed I am doing so (the privilege of the blog, right?). But it drives me crazy how people in the public sector don’t seem to think that they have a responsibility to the larger community. Just their own usually narrowly defined interests.

Take Meekhof for example. In his article he instantly compares our governor to a CEO of a company and “her” proposed tax hikes to raising prices.

Here’s how he says it:

“If the state of Michigan was a corporation, CEO Granholm would never even consider raising taxes. Any good CEO will tell you that when times are tough, the last thing you do is raise your prices. Yet raising prices is exactly what the governor is trying to do.”

Get it?

That makes us citizens not shareholders but customers.

I have a problem with that.

This dang business metaphor has taken over all aspects of society.

And how does Meerkof propose fixing our problems here in Michigan?

1. limited able-bodied welfare recipients to four years of benefits

2. place just 5 percent of Michigan’s prison population in privately run prisons

3.reforming public school health insurance benefits. By opening insurance contracts to competitive bids and requiring reasonable co-pays and preferred-provider networks

So cut back those dang moochers (of YOUR money) on welfare and privatize prisons and reduce health care for teachers.

But as Jack Lessenberry points out in his recent essay, “Taxing,” taxes are lower than they used to be, we don’t have enough money to educate Michigan’s children and we will never slow the rushing loss of jobs in our state by reducing infrastructure.

It’s a simple notion. You get what you pay for. If we want to have schools, roads, police, firemen and godforbid libraries, they must be paid for. By us.

We are shareholders. We are stakeholders. We don’t consume the government. Government is us.

The notion that a market philosophy will govern the society well is not working. Markets, businesses and shareholders are more interested in short term profit than long term investment.
So ultimately, greed is good and screw the public.

“like Spiderman’s “spider sense,” a soldier could be alerted to danger that his or her brain had sensed, but not yet had time to process.” story link on Wired

“GOOGLE is to add sounds to its Google Earth virtual globe.

Users will soon be able to hear birds, tropical storms, whale song and other noises as they zoom into the planet on their PCs.

Natural modern-day sounds will play alongside those of past decades to show man’s environmental impact.

from the Mirror

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
– Charles Bukowski

“A young man was dead and he and his motorcycle lay at the side of the road at the end of a short skid mark.” more

There was a check in the mail today from Holland High School. Let’s see that was back in December of last year. I had pretty much figured I would never get paid unless I went and rattled some cages over at the high school.

The funny thing is the check was $230.00. I could swear they owed me more like 300.00 something but what the heck. At least now I have been paid something. Toujour Gai, Archy.

Hamas Mickey Mouse clone mimes using an AK47.

Youtube video of him

Der Spiegel article: Hamas Mickey Mouse Teaches Jihad

John Buckman the founder of Magnatune Music is giving a talk today about How to Piss off the Music Industry for Fun and Profit at Queen Mary, University of London, Department of Electrical Engineering, aka The Centre for Digital Music.