I was so fortunate to hear Johnny Griffin play live a few times, mostly in the nineties. In fact, I think (that along with Phil Woods) he was one of the first saxophonists I saw live and was an early hero, and a big reason I switched from the alto to the tenor when I was a kid. Affectionately called The Little Giant due to his small physical stature, he left an impression that I'll never forget. He could blaze at some of the fastest tempos and play a beautiful ballad, evoking Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster with one of the biggest tenor sounds on the planet. He recorded until the end, but I'm a big fan of some earlier recordings of his. Thelonious Monk's Misterioso has some of the most fierce and distinctive tenor playing (and some great Roy Haynes too) ever recorded. He also led a record date for Blue Note called A Blowing Session featuring John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, and Hank Mobley in the front line and absolutely blazes through The Way You Look Tonight.
Even though he rarely played in the U.S. after moving to Europe in the 1960's, his presence on the jazz scene will definitely be missed. Here's Ben Ratliff's obituary from the NY Times:
Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.
His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.
His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.
And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles) , he left for Holland.
At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything any more,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”
Indeed his work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Mr. Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, who also taught the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.
Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: At the age of 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway ballroom, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14, he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the guitarist T-Bone Walker.
At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, switching to tenor saxophone. From then until 1951, he was mostly on the road, though based in New York City. By 1947 he was touring with Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan who ran a rhythm-and-blues band, and with Morris he made his first recordings for the Atlantic record label. He entered the army in 1951, was stationed in Hawaii, and played in an army band.
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became a force in jazz. He heard both with the Billy Eckstine band in 1945; having first internalized the more ballad-like saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he was now entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of the new music, bebop. In general, his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.
Beyond the 1960s, his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.
Starting in the late 1940s, he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his army service, he went back to Chicago and started playing with Monk, a move that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet back in New York in the late ‘50s; later, in 1967, he played with Monk’s touring eight- and nine-person groups.
In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.
A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes, especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.
In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to Poitiers, in southwestern France.
With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991 record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.
Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Perfect Pitch
Musicians and non-musicians alike are often fascinated by people who have perfect pitch, often referred to as absolute pitch. It's one of the most mysterious phenomenons in the musical world, and perhaps the cognitive/neurological world as well. Numerous studies continue to try to pinpoint the roots of it, often with surprisingly different conclusions. Perhaps it is one of the only concretely definable aspects of innate musical ability, one that typically makes its presence known early on and remains elusive to many of the most gifted and accomplished musicians on the planet. Many great musicians have not had it, and it's by no means a guarantee of musical talent or ability.
Despite the fact that both my parents are professional musicians with perfect pitch, I don't remember having any knowledge of what it was when I started playing music. Unlike many musician parents, overeager to gauge their children's musical abilities, my mother and father never did any of the tests to determine if I had perfect pitch (or if they did they never told me anything about it). After about a year playing saxophone, a year in which I started to listen to a lot of music as well, I realized that I could identify the notes that I heard other alto players play. Without really having an understanding of transpositions of different instruments, it didn't go any further than that in the initial stages, and it seemed pretty dependent on being able to recognize the timbre of specific notes on the instrument. Not knowing what perfect pitch was, I didn't think anything of it, and assumed that it was something any musician could do. It wasn't until people pointed it out to me that I realized that this ability wasn't something that all musicians had.
Never having not had perfect pitch, it's difficult to describe. The Psychology of Music defines it as "the ability to identify the frequency or musical name of a specific tone, or, conversely, the ability to reproduce a frequency, frequency level, or musical pitch without comparing the tone with any objective reference tone, i.e., without using relative pitch." The closest analogy I can come up with is that it is like the ability to recognize basic colors. Once you learn them, it is basically instant, and done on a level more basic than thought. Nobody ever needs a reference color to identify the color before them. Somehow, you just know what's before you, instantly, without having to consider it in any way. It's not an ability you need to practice once you know your twelve notes, and despite the fact that I've never been away from music for too long, I'm sure it wouldn't escape me if it wasn't used for a while. Some musicians with perfect pitch have it to the degree of being able to identify pitches to exacting measure, and can tell you if pitch is in tune or how out of tune it is, sometimes within a few cents. (A cent is 1/100th of the way from one pitch to the next closest pitch.) I can certainly identify when a note is egregiously far from our tonal system, but can't make such small distinctions of pitch. In fact, it wasn't until I tried to play along with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, famously sharp in its original version (supposedly the tapes on which it was recorded were running slow that day), that I realized just how out of tune it is. I rarely experience the physical pain that some musicians refer to when music is out of tune, and often struggle not to play sharp, which is a common tendency for saxophonists. I'm more bothered when pitch isn't even from note to note or between register than by a single pitch that's slightly out of tune.
One of the most common questions with perfect pitch is whether it's something that can be learned or acquired. There's a company that persistently runs ads in music magazines and journals that not so slickly claims to teach perfect pitch. However, I'm skeptical, as are most people who have it, but it might just be a matter of definition. I think that with practice somebody can learn good pitch memory, perhaps by identifying specific moods and colors with certain tone centers, and from there develop a relative sense of pitch that allows them to identify notes with some degree of consistency and accuracy. As far as I know, this is what the perfect pitch course accomplishes for some. Some studies have proved that perfect pitch is a genetic trait, and that somebody is much more likely to have it if a sibling has it. One study even identified a relatively enlarged left planum template in the brain in people with perfect pitch. The presence of it in my family supports the genetic theory, although my two siblings don't display it. However, the presence of perfect pitch can only be known once somebody has some degree of musical training, making it difficult to study conclusively.
I won't deny that perfect pitch helped me develop quite quickly as a musician early on. I listened to jazz obsessively from about the age of thirteen to twenty, and could internalize musical vocabulary without having to go through many of the motions that somebody without perfect pitch has to go through. As a jazz musician, it's incredibly helpful to be able to easily identify what is going on around you and thus interact with a group. Professionally speaking, it's great to be able to recognize the key that any song is in without having to ask or make efforts to find it. I've also been able to work over the years as a music transcriber, something that I can do quicker than most musicians without perfect pitch.
However, I think that along with perfect pitch comes some common limitations. Most basic, it isn't something that can ever be turned off by people who have it. Thus, somebody with perfect pitch will never experience music the same way most other musicians and non-musicians experience it. Music always enters the brain as specific information, thus subject to a greater degree of analysis than commonly experienced. No note, or even common noises, can enter the consciousness simply as sound. It's always subject to a degree of categorization that most don't experience.
Also, because I can instantly identify notes, my retention for music is not very good. I can instantly play something back to you, but most likely won't be able to remember it the next day or the next week, because I haven't had to grasp the musical relationships in order to learn it. Because music enters my mind as little bits of information, it took me a long time to learn to identify the larger, mostly systematic categorizations that help musicians
learn and understand material. I tend to be slower at transposing than many musicians, probably because I hear pitches as single events and not as much in terms of their relationships, which also affects my ability to identify chord qualities, where most often I first have to identify all the individual notes before I can identify the quality of the chord. Also, I have a lot of trouble playing instruments not pitched in C or Bb, as I tend to be confused when everything around me doesn't relate to my own instrument in a familiar way. When I play alto saxophone, I can hear the notes on the instrument itself quite clearly but hear everything around me in a different pitch center. (Playing the alto flute, which is in the key of G, is a total mess, despite my love for the instrument!)
All in all, I don't want the long list of gripes above to be any sort of whine about how I feel about perfect pitch. Basically, along with many great things about it, I think there are some drawbacks and limitations to it, and thus it's not something to be quite so idealized or coveted. Other than the various party tricks that somebody with perfect pitch has at his/her disposal, I think good relative pitch can benefit any musician as much, if not more, than perfect pitch. However, it's undoubtedly a mystery that continues to fascinate musicians and non-musicians, and hopefully with more study and advancements in genetics and brain-mapping more can be learned about it.
If anybody wants to read more, particularly on the science of it, the Wikipedia entry on it (found here) is quite good and has a lot of good links.
Despite the fact that both my parents are professional musicians with perfect pitch, I don't remember having any knowledge of what it was when I started playing music. Unlike many musician parents, overeager to gauge their children's musical abilities, my mother and father never did any of the tests to determine if I had perfect pitch (or if they did they never told me anything about it). After about a year playing saxophone, a year in which I started to listen to a lot of music as well, I realized that I could identify the notes that I heard other alto players play. Without really having an understanding of transpositions of different instruments, it didn't go any further than that in the initial stages, and it seemed pretty dependent on being able to recognize the timbre of specific notes on the instrument. Not knowing what perfect pitch was, I didn't think anything of it, and assumed that it was something any musician could do. It wasn't until people pointed it out to me that I realized that this ability wasn't something that all musicians had.
Never having not had perfect pitch, it's difficult to describe. The Psychology of Music defines it as "the ability to identify the frequency or musical name of a specific tone, or, conversely, the ability to reproduce a frequency, frequency level, or musical pitch without comparing the tone with any objective reference tone, i.e., without using relative pitch." The closest analogy I can come up with is that it is like the ability to recognize basic colors. Once you learn them, it is basically instant, and done on a level more basic than thought. Nobody ever needs a reference color to identify the color before them. Somehow, you just know what's before you, instantly, without having to consider it in any way. It's not an ability you need to practice once you know your twelve notes, and despite the fact that I've never been away from music for too long, I'm sure it wouldn't escape me if it wasn't used for a while. Some musicians with perfect pitch have it to the degree of being able to identify pitches to exacting measure, and can tell you if pitch is in tune or how out of tune it is, sometimes within a few cents. (A cent is 1/100th of the way from one pitch to the next closest pitch.) I can certainly identify when a note is egregiously far from our tonal system, but can't make such small distinctions of pitch. In fact, it wasn't until I tried to play along with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, famously sharp in its original version (supposedly the tapes on which it was recorded were running slow that day), that I realized just how out of tune it is. I rarely experience the physical pain that some musicians refer to when music is out of tune, and often struggle not to play sharp, which is a common tendency for saxophonists. I'm more bothered when pitch isn't even from note to note or between register than by a single pitch that's slightly out of tune.
One of the most common questions with perfect pitch is whether it's something that can be learned or acquired. There's a company that persistently runs ads in music magazines and journals that not so slickly claims to teach perfect pitch. However, I'm skeptical, as are most people who have it, but it might just be a matter of definition. I think that with practice somebody can learn good pitch memory, perhaps by identifying specific moods and colors with certain tone centers, and from there develop a relative sense of pitch that allows them to identify notes with some degree of consistency and accuracy. As far as I know, this is what the perfect pitch course accomplishes for some. Some studies have proved that perfect pitch is a genetic trait, and that somebody is much more likely to have it if a sibling has it. One study even identified a relatively enlarged left planum template in the brain in people with perfect pitch. The presence of it in my family supports the genetic theory, although my two siblings don't display it. However, the presence of perfect pitch can only be known once somebody has some degree of musical training, making it difficult to study conclusively.
I won't deny that perfect pitch helped me develop quite quickly as a musician early on. I listened to jazz obsessively from about the age of thirteen to twenty, and could internalize musical vocabulary without having to go through many of the motions that somebody without perfect pitch has to go through. As a jazz musician, it's incredibly helpful to be able to easily identify what is going on around you and thus interact with a group. Professionally speaking, it's great to be able to recognize the key that any song is in without having to ask or make efforts to find it. I've also been able to work over the years as a music transcriber, something that I can do quicker than most musicians without perfect pitch.
However, I think that along with perfect pitch comes some common limitations. Most basic, it isn't something that can ever be turned off by people who have it. Thus, somebody with perfect pitch will never experience music the same way most other musicians and non-musicians experience it. Music always enters the brain as specific information, thus subject to a greater degree of analysis than commonly experienced. No note, or even common noises, can enter the consciousness simply as sound. It's always subject to a degree of categorization that most don't experience.
Also, because I can instantly identify notes, my retention for music is not very good. I can instantly play something back to you, but most likely won't be able to remember it the next day or the next week, because I haven't had to grasp the musical relationships in order to learn it. Because music enters my mind as little bits of information, it took me a long time to learn to identify the larger, mostly systematic categorizations that help musicians
learn and understand material. I tend to be slower at transposing than many musicians, probably because I hear pitches as single events and not as much in terms of their relationships, which also affects my ability to identify chord qualities, where most often I first have to identify all the individual notes before I can identify the quality of the chord. Also, I have a lot of trouble playing instruments not pitched in C or Bb, as I tend to be confused when everything around me doesn't relate to my own instrument in a familiar way. When I play alto saxophone, I can hear the notes on the instrument itself quite clearly but hear everything around me in a different pitch center. (Playing the alto flute, which is in the key of G, is a total mess, despite my love for the instrument!)
All in all, I don't want the long list of gripes above to be any sort of whine about how I feel about perfect pitch. Basically, along with many great things about it, I think there are some drawbacks and limitations to it, and thus it's not something to be quite so idealized or coveted. Other than the various party tricks that somebody with perfect pitch has at his/her disposal, I think good relative pitch can benefit any musician as much, if not more, than perfect pitch. However, it's undoubtedly a mystery that continues to fascinate musicians and non-musicians, and hopefully with more study and advancements in genetics and brain-mapping more can be learned about it.
If anybody wants to read more, particularly on the science of it, the Wikipedia entry on it (found here) is quite good and has a lot of good links.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Blessed Unrest
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” - Martha Graham
composition, illusion, and inevitability
Composition is a strange world. Very strange. A skilled composer is one who consistently surprises you, showing you that he or she has the depth and skill to take a composition in any direction, that they own the composition at hand and are effectively its master. Yes, we could go there, could go there too, but we're going here, whether you like it or not. Since any composer worth his or her salt commands a broad and developed language, I like to think that some of my favorite works could have been quite different and still exist as masterpieces.
However, an outstanding composition, much like a great novel or movie, damningly creates the illusion of inevitability. Bovary had to kill herself in the end... Chinatown had to end in bloodshed. Once the opening gesture or mood of a piece is established, the composer must convince us that all that happens from there must happen. In music, it's not enough just to listen to a series of events if a work is to demand repeated listening. Successive musical events must flow from one another seemingly effortlessly, temporarily convincing you that each one only could have lead to the next. For a piece to exist as itself and preserve the special identity we give to it, each event within it is crucial, unavoidable, and cancels any other possibilities that might have existed otherwise. Later on, upon analysis, we can say that this chord might have lead here, this part could have been played by the oboe instead of the clarinet, this gesture could potentially be sequenced a certain, perhaps more obvious way. However, in the end, these possibilities didn't happen, and that just is. If a piece is going to momentarily transform us, we accept this and go along for the ride, dismissing any serious thought that it might have been any different .
Within all this, though, one can't underestimate the importance of surprise. While creating this myth of inevitability, the composer must constantly create a feeling of expectation in the listener. Depending on the whim and skill level of the composer, this expectation is then either fulfilled or broken, leaving the listener constantly on edge, never knowing whether or not to trust his or her instinct. In the end, however, once that next idea comes, whether it fulfills expectation or jolts the listener out of any sense of comfort they might have achieved, the listener simply accepts it as part of the ride, part of a vision that is greater than the human involved in creating it, a vision that has transformed the work at hand into something timeless, something that despite all the options a composer might have considered, ended up like this, and now exists and has an identity all to itself.
However, an outstanding composition, much like a great novel or movie, damningly creates the illusion of inevitability. Bovary had to kill herself in the end... Chinatown had to end in bloodshed. Once the opening gesture or mood of a piece is established, the composer must convince us that all that happens from there must happen. In music, it's not enough just to listen to a series of events if a work is to demand repeated listening. Successive musical events must flow from one another seemingly effortlessly, temporarily convincing you that each one only could have lead to the next. For a piece to exist as itself and preserve the special identity we give to it, each event within it is crucial, unavoidable, and cancels any other possibilities that might have existed otherwise. Later on, upon analysis, we can say that this chord might have lead here, this part could have been played by the oboe instead of the clarinet, this gesture could potentially be sequenced a certain, perhaps more obvious way. However, in the end, these possibilities didn't happen, and that just is. If a piece is going to momentarily transform us, we accept this and go along for the ride, dismissing any serious thought that it might have been any different .
Within all this, though, one can't underestimate the importance of surprise. While creating this myth of inevitability, the composer must constantly create a feeling of expectation in the listener. Depending on the whim and skill level of the composer, this expectation is then either fulfilled or broken, leaving the listener constantly on edge, never knowing whether or not to trust his or her instinct. In the end, however, once that next idea comes, whether it fulfills expectation or jolts the listener out of any sense of comfort they might have achieved, the listener simply accepts it as part of the ride, part of a vision that is greater than the human involved in creating it, a vision that has transformed the work at hand into something timeless, something that despite all the options a composer might have considered, ended up like this, and now exists and has an identity all to itself.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
heat wave!
My living room clocked in at 95 degrees at one point yesterday, and I live on the ground floor. Brian Lehrer on WNYC asked listeners to complete the sentence "It's so hot..." at one point in his show and there was a definite winner in:
It's so hot my grandmother doesn't need her cardigan.
Kept me laughing the whole day.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Take Toriyama
It's hard to believe that a year has passed since Take left us. It's still such a shock to most of us and so painful to realize that he's gone. Like so many others, I had some of the most beautiful and wonderful experiences with him personally and musically. The guy really had a sound, and when you played with him, you were never just playing with a drummer... it was always something greater than that, and so incredibly selfless. He was really the whole package, and exuded such groove, sensitivity and joy when he played. I'll never forget the string of trio sessions and hangs that Take, Chris VanVorstVanBeest and I did at my old place in Park Slope, and fortunately there's some material from a recording session that Take and I did together with Ethan Herr in 2004 or 2005 that I'll cherish.
I'm still amazed when I remember how many people showed up to share their grief and pay him tribute at his memorial. Never had I seen a gathering of musicians that transcended the cliques or divisions that supposedly exist in our little music world.
In just a few short years in New York, Take had touched so many people. Anybody who was there for the walk down 9th street from Prospect Park will never forget the intensity and the collective feeling present that morning. Such a strange mix of sadness and joy to see the music community together that morning, so many friends normally wrapped up in their own lives who rarely come together otherwise unless it's for a gig.
To take his life the way he did, Take had to have been suffering in a deeper way than any of us can imagine. I remember the Buddhist monk who conducted Take's formal memorial pointing out that just like cancer can invade the body, there is a sickness of the mind that is so powerful and debilitating that one loses all hope that things can get better. Take and I were never the closest of friends, which never seemed to matter to me. We're both fairly quiet people and he was somebody I felt close to without opening up to or spending loads of time with. Regretfully, I didn't see him much in the last six months of his life, but through others I know he was going through some really difficult things and kept so much of it inside, fearing that he would burden others by sharing his pain. One of the most tragic things is to think of just how many people would have done anything for him had he reached out. Most people knew he was down, but nobody saw what was coming, and I think his suicide made all of us aware of just how real of a phenomenon it is, one we all need to keep in the back of our mind when we know somebody is suffering.
Take's friend and teacher Hal Crook spoke at the funeral, and it's been posted on Yoshi Waki's website. I don't think anything better or more comforting could have been said.
FOR TAKE
We have gathered here today to honor and pay our respects to our dear friend and brother, Take Toriyama, who made all of our lives better simply by being a part of them. Take’s life touched us all in the best of ways, and his death has left us with an unfathomable emptiness.
At a time like this, it seems that Silence is the real super-power. In Silence, things become clear, and we understand. In Silence we are consoled and healed. We may never get over our sorrow, but in Silence we can accept it and get used to it.
Words can never explain or clarify what went wrong. Words cannot console us, or heal us, or diminish our pain. At times like this, the purpose of words is to set the stage for Silence to take over and do its thing. Silence is the real power here today, so I will be brief.
I met Take when he first came to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music, some 13 or more years ago. He became like a son to me, and like a brother as well. Not that I could ever replace his natural family, whom he loved dearly, but I was grateful for the opportunity to fill in for them while Take was living here.
In fact, I used to joke with Take about this, sometimes calling him the son I never had, and never wanted. But of course, during his years at Berklee and afterward, I wanted very much to be his mentor and his friend, and we became the closest friends. I’ve never had a closer, or truer friend.
In all my life, I’ve never met or known a kinder, or gentler, or more considerate soul than Take Toriyama. Always positive, always doing right, always taking the high road regarding his values and principles. To me, Take was a model example of the best in human potential. Sure, he may have been just a short little drummer guy, but he was a big tall hero to me.
Music was a major part of our connection, as it was with everyone who really knew Take. We got inside each other’s heads and hearts and hands on the bandstand every time we played together. I learned how to tap into the musical strengths of another being from playing with Take. He made it easy.
We studied music and life together, we practiced and performed together, we ate sushi and drank sake together. We recorded together and toured Europe together – sometimes just as a duo. And I can tell you that throughout all our travels and experiences together, everyone loved and respected Take as much as they loved and respected his music.
When I listen to Take’s playing, I think: This is someone who understands everything. Not just drums. Not just rhythm. Not just melody. Not just harmony. Not just form. Not just freedom. Not just music. Everything. Take got it all. He understood the things that matter most to people.
The first thing you read in Take’s self-written bio is, “An amazing parents raised Take.” His parents and brother Kazu were always a major part of his life, as was Natsu, the woman he called his soul mate. He was a great son, a great brother, a great musician, and a great friend. And he should not have died. But he did.
And now we want answers. We say it is human nature to try to make sense of things when they go wrong. We think there has to be an answer. And if we can’t find one we may make one up, just so long as things make sense to us in the end.
Well, maybe it is human nature to search our minds for answers. But it’s also a torturous game, a pathological mind game. Well, maybe it is human nature to search the mind for answers. But it is also a selfish, pathological mind game. The mind, after all, is as much the home of deception as it is truth.
At times like this, I remember what Shakespeare said about thinking. He said, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Nothing has meaning unless we think it does; or, if we prefer, everything has meaning unless we think it doesn’t.
So, it doesn’t really matter how we leave this life – unless we choose to think it does. One person’s tragic defeat may be another’s triumphant victory. Who is to say? Maybe, in his mind, Take chose victory. And who is to judge? Who is anyone to determine for anyone else what the right course of action is?
When we think about Take leaving us, and how it happened, we become angry and sad because we all loved him and we will miss him. We know that death is the ultimate irreversible act, and that he will not be back to play or hang out with us again.
But I will not think of Take’s final act as good or bad. I refuse to let my thoughts about his death make such an incomprehensible decision. Thinking is simply the wrong tool for the job.
I will let my laughter and my tears determine what is good and what is bad. I will let Silence make things clear to me, and console me, and heal me. I will never get over my sorrow from his dying, but in Silence I will accept it and get used to it.
And I will enjoy the deep and beautiful memories I have of my deep and beautiful friend for as long as I live.
。
Hal Crook
I'm still amazed when I remember how many people showed up to share their grief and pay him tribute at his memorial. Never had I seen a gathering of musicians that transcended the cliques or divisions that supposedly exist in our little music world.
In just a few short years in New York, Take had touched so many people. Anybody who was there for the walk down 9th street from Prospect Park will never forget the intensity and the collective feeling present that morning. Such a strange mix of sadness and joy to see the music community together that morning, so many friends normally wrapped up in their own lives who rarely come together otherwise unless it's for a gig.
To take his life the way he did, Take had to have been suffering in a deeper way than any of us can imagine. I remember the Buddhist monk who conducted Take's formal memorial pointing out that just like cancer can invade the body, there is a sickness of the mind that is so powerful and debilitating that one loses all hope that things can get better. Take and I were never the closest of friends, which never seemed to matter to me. We're both fairly quiet people and he was somebody I felt close to without opening up to or spending loads of time with. Regretfully, I didn't see him much in the last six months of his life, but through others I know he was going through some really difficult things and kept so much of it inside, fearing that he would burden others by sharing his pain. One of the most tragic things is to think of just how many people would have done anything for him had he reached out. Most people knew he was down, but nobody saw what was coming, and I think his suicide made all of us aware of just how real of a phenomenon it is, one we all need to keep in the back of our mind when we know somebody is suffering.
Take's friend and teacher Hal Crook spoke at the funeral, and it's been posted on Yoshi Waki's website. I don't think anything better or more comforting could have been said.
FOR TAKE
We have gathered here today to honor and pay our respects to our dear friend and brother, Take Toriyama, who made all of our lives better simply by being a part of them. Take’s life touched us all in the best of ways, and his death has left us with an unfathomable emptiness.
At a time like this, it seems that Silence is the real super-power. In Silence, things become clear, and we understand. In Silence we are consoled and healed. We may never get over our sorrow, but in Silence we can accept it and get used to it.
Words can never explain or clarify what went wrong. Words cannot console us, or heal us, or diminish our pain. At times like this, the purpose of words is to set the stage for Silence to take over and do its thing. Silence is the real power here today, so I will be brief.
I met Take when he first came to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music, some 13 or more years ago. He became like a son to me, and like a brother as well. Not that I could ever replace his natural family, whom he loved dearly, but I was grateful for the opportunity to fill in for them while Take was living here.
In fact, I used to joke with Take about this, sometimes calling him the son I never had, and never wanted. But of course, during his years at Berklee and afterward, I wanted very much to be his mentor and his friend, and we became the closest friends. I’ve never had a closer, or truer friend.
In all my life, I’ve never met or known a kinder, or gentler, or more considerate soul than Take Toriyama. Always positive, always doing right, always taking the high road regarding his values and principles. To me, Take was a model example of the best in human potential. Sure, he may have been just a short little drummer guy, but he was a big tall hero to me.
Music was a major part of our connection, as it was with everyone who really knew Take. We got inside each other’s heads and hearts and hands on the bandstand every time we played together. I learned how to tap into the musical strengths of another being from playing with Take. He made it easy.
We studied music and life together, we practiced and performed together, we ate sushi and drank sake together. We recorded together and toured Europe together – sometimes just as a duo. And I can tell you that throughout all our travels and experiences together, everyone loved and respected Take as much as they loved and respected his music.
When I listen to Take’s playing, I think: This is someone who understands everything. Not just drums. Not just rhythm. Not just melody. Not just harmony. Not just form. Not just freedom. Not just music. Everything. Take got it all. He understood the things that matter most to people.
The first thing you read in Take’s self-written bio is, “An amazing parents raised Take.” His parents and brother Kazu were always a major part of his life, as was Natsu, the woman he called his soul mate. He was a great son, a great brother, a great musician, and a great friend. And he should not have died. But he did.
And now we want answers. We say it is human nature to try to make sense of things when they go wrong. We think there has to be an answer. And if we can’t find one we may make one up, just so long as things make sense to us in the end.
Well, maybe it is human nature to search our minds for answers. But it’s also a torturous game, a pathological mind game. Well, maybe it is human nature to search the mind for answers. But it is also a selfish, pathological mind game. The mind, after all, is as much the home of deception as it is truth.
At times like this, I remember what Shakespeare said about thinking. He said, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Nothing has meaning unless we think it does; or, if we prefer, everything has meaning unless we think it doesn’t.
So, it doesn’t really matter how we leave this life – unless we choose to think it does. One person’s tragic defeat may be another’s triumphant victory. Who is to say? Maybe, in his mind, Take chose victory. And who is to judge? Who is anyone to determine for anyone else what the right course of action is?
When we think about Take leaving us, and how it happened, we become angry and sad because we all loved him and we will miss him. We know that death is the ultimate irreversible act, and that he will not be back to play or hang out with us again.
But I will not think of Take’s final act as good or bad. I refuse to let my thoughts about his death make such an incomprehensible decision. Thinking is simply the wrong tool for the job.
I will let my laughter and my tears determine what is good and what is bad. I will let Silence make things clear to me, and console me, and heal me. I will never get over my sorrow from his dying, but in Silence I will accept it and get used to it.
And I will enjoy the deep and beautiful memories I have of my deep and beautiful friend for as long as I live.
。
Hal Crook
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
