Words Project II bonus track

There's a bonus track from Words Project II, which will be out on New Amsterdam in September. It features Monika Heidemann, and due to reasons beyond my control won't be on the CD. Feel free to listen to it and/or download it here.

Beauty

"I cannot believe that the artist who establishes beauty as his fundamental approach to art can go very far wrong. No one denies that beauty is broad in scope, so broad that no single lifetime could encompass more than a small part of it. The great danger lies in allowing beauty to get bogged down in personal opinions, trends, and isms, in narrowing our individual understanding to the dogmas prated by the few. Beauty must be free, belonging individually to you and me, as far as we are capable of grasping it. Beauty is all around us, waiting to be discovered, and every artist interprets it on paper or canvas in his own particular way." - Andrew Loomis, The Eye Of The Painter

Morning on the Q Train

So many times I've looked around me on the train at the incredible diversity of NYC and wondered just how many stories lurk inside a single train car. So few people of this city were actually born here. Everybody seems to have a story as to how they ended up here and why they've stayed. The NY Times did a story on just this (read it here) and it has one of the coolest photographs I've ever seen, somehow stitched together from a number of photographs taken while the train crossed the Manhattan Bridge.

8/8/08 - South Ossetia

It looks like another regional conflict has escalated and is taking on global proportions. Here's to the new edition of the cold war, which never really stopped.

The War Works Hard
by Dunya Mikhail
Translated by Elizabeth Winslow

How magnificent the war is!



How eager



and efficient!



Early in the morning



it wakes up the sirens



and dispatches ambulances



to various places



swings corpses through the air



rolls stretchers to the wounded



summons rain



from the eyes of mothers



digs into the earth



dislodging many things



from under the ruins...



Some are lifeless and glistening



others are pale and still throbbing...



It produces the most questions



in the minds of children



entertains the gods



by shooting fireworks and missiles



into the sky



sows mines in the fields



and reaps punctures and blisters



urges families to emigrate



stands beside the clergymen



as they curse the devil



(poor devil, he remains



with one hand in the searing fire)...



The war continues working, day and night.



It inspires tyrants



to deliver long speeches



awards medals to generals



and themes to poets



it contributes to the industry



of artificial limbs



provides food for flies



adds pages to the history books



achieves equality



between killer and killed



teaches lovers to write letters



accustoms young women to waiting



fills the newspapers



with articles and pictures



builds new houses



for the orphans



invigorates the coffin makers



gives grave diggers



a pat on the back



and paints a smile on the leader's face.



It works with unparalleled diligence!



Yet no one gives it



a word of praise.





Copyright © 2005 by Dunya Mikhail and Elizabeth Winslow. From The War Works Hard. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.

Becca Stevens

Nate Chinen did a great article on Becca Stevens in the New York Times over the weekend. Read it here. Becca is definitely one of the most uniquely talented and dedicated people I know. She has a new, self-released record out that's fantastic, and is also featured on three songs on Words Project II, which will be released on New Amsterdam Records in September. Catch Becca tomorrow night (8/7) at Barbes.

internet fads

Things seem to pass so fast on the internet, especially the various social-networking websites that seem to be all the rave of anybody under forty. I tend to be pretty uninspired (maybe even a little bit intimidated, frightened, and lazy too) by things that beckon me to spend even more time online than I already do, and thus I've been relatively late to get on board with the social-networking sites of our times. One minute everybody is crazy about Friendster, then it's MySpace, only to have that replaced with Facebook, which seems to have left MySpace strangely passe in the past few months, likening it to a once indie band that is just not what it once was.

Once I stopped holding out, I remember being genuinely excited about the possibilities of MySpace... I found a few people I didn't expect to find and spent a lot of time going to people's pages, listening to their music, and would even check most every friend request that came my way, with the same hopes that people were checking mine. Just a year later, it all feels strangely dead to me, and slightly loathsome. It feels like most people have moved on, and it's become yet another e-mail account that I have to check regularly, on the off-chance that someone has used it to contact me for work, which has happened a few times and is certainly a good thing. I'm not quite sure what Facebook offers that's so different or new, but it leads me to think that maybe we're all seeking something that just can't be found online, something based more actual human warmth and connection, somewhere we can share music without it being so shrouded in self-promotion. Maybe this unsatisfied desire keeps us flocking from one site to another. Or maybe it's all just for dating... who knows? In the end, maybe we're all just excited by online presence, where we can show people what we want them to see (none of those awkward smiles that take place when we actually see people in passing), where we know people from our distant past (and maybe even that attractive person from the bar whose number we lost) can find us. For musicians today, any online presence is a good thing, so it seems hard to justify not spending an hour or two setting up a page (or a blog, shame, shame, shame). Certainly these sites are compelling in a lot of ways and still free(!), but the way in which users flock from one to the other every few months leaves me thinking that in the end, they're places that largely remind us of our loneliness (or if you're a musician using them, the fact that you might not be performing as much as you would like to). Are we really happy, absorbed, gratified being when we spend an hour modifying our profiles? What are we really expecting from all this time we spend socially-networking online?

Oh well.... off to check my latest friend requests.

food for thought

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear. -- Dick Cavett

Cannonball Adderley

A few months ago, after having spent way to many consecutive hours traveling in subways, cars, airplanes, and vans, Frank Basile and I had one of those conversations most people stop having when they're fourteen years old, one that began, "If you could play in a frontline with any other horn player, living or dead, who would it be?". Pretty dorky, I know, but then again, if you're reading this blog, likely indoors on a beautiful, sunny day, it might be time to make some similar personal admissions.... However, it was something I hadn't really thought about, and pretty entertaining to mine jazz history for an answer.

Somehow, Cannonball Adderley has consistently come into my world over the years, and ended up the object of my adolescent fantasy that day. There are so few improvisers who've been able to combine such an combination of elegance, virtuosity, unpredictability, lyricalness, blues, and swing like he did. Every time I hear him, he still sounds modern to me and totally surprises me in how he weaves in and out of changes, even just simple turnarounds. He had one of the most distinct alto and soprano sounds in the history of the saxophone, and conveys such a profound joy in his playing, no matter what the material. This man could make you cry and smile at the same time, and thankfully a few YouTube videos have surfaced recently and allow us to watch him in action. Most people know him for the Miles Davis albums he was on, and later for the original recording (and memorable pre-tune monologue) of Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, but check out the stuff in between and you'll definitely find one of the hippest bandleaders of the sixties and seventies. Much of what Joe Zawinul later did with Weather Report certainly came out of Cannonball's band, and even the more commercial ventures that Cannonball released as a solo artist are incredibly compelling and inspired.

There's a pretty impressive tribute site and discography here.