All That Democracy (Jazz)

Miles Davis

There’s an organization called Jazz At Lincoln Center. It’s a great resource for Jazz music. This is from their mission statement.

We believe Jazz is a metaphor for Democracy. Because jazz is improvisational, it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression. Because jazz is swinging, it dedicates that freedom to finding and maintaining common ground with others. Because jazz is rooted in the blues, it inspires us to face adversity with persistent optimism.

As I heard someone say the other day, “Let’s break down that prose.”

from Pops journal

So there you have it. Maybe you already love Jazz, maybe you do and don’t know it. Or, maybe you haven’t really tried it yet. If you do, give it time. It’s an acquired taste. The Jazz At Lincoln Center is a great resource. Visit http://www.jazz.org

Here’s what I really wanted to tell you about—a project called “Recollect”. I love storytelling, remembering and recollecting. So this project fascinated me from the start.

Recollect is a project of short videos where a famous jazz musician goes into a record store to dig through the crates of jazz albums. While they do this they tell stories. (I'm adding to my bucket list to be present for the filming of one of these episodes). These are jazz stories and so they are also democratic stories. They are important because they can give us a context to understand more about ourselves.

Of course jazz is not the only musical genre that’s important in this way. Country music is also rooted in personal story. And, without a doubt, there is no more heart-felt music than the poetry of the early hymn writers. I can prove it. Read the lyrics to “It Is Well With My Soul”, or “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”, of “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross”. Here’s a sample:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Talk about remembering and recollecting; I’ve heard those words all my life and they move me like I’ve just heard them for the very first time.

Well, back to the Recollect project. What first caught my attention was a video episode of the project featuring a jazz pianist named Helen Sung. Helen was introduced to me by my dear friend Mako Fujimura. I heard her play with her band at the Jazz Standard in New York City. She is one of those who can tell a story with a piano.

That prompted me to watch other episodes of the project. My favorite to date is one that features Jimmy Cobb.

Jimmy Cobb was one of the drummers I tried to emulate back in the day. He played with Miles Davis on a album called Kind Of Blue, the album that first drew me to jazz. The band on that album is a who’s who of jazz: in addition to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cobb, there’s John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly.

If you haven’t yet, give Jazz a try. This album is a great place to start. At least watch the Recollect videos on Jimmy Cobb and Helen Sung. Listen to their stories. Really, really listen.

In review: Jazz & Democracy. Improvisational=sometimes we have to make it up as we go. Freedom and expression. Swinging=there is a groove. Sometimes we march to the same beat, sometimes we don’t. Rooted in the Blues (stories)=It is important. It’s the thread of our common fabric.

Pianist Bill Evans

It's Not All Black & White

There is something that stirs within me this time of year. I think it has to do with feeling like summer is slipping away and the start of school is just around the corner. I haven’t started back to school in years, but still this haunting feeling returns.

Soon now, good times at the pool will be replaced with learning locker combos, class schedules and how to conjugate a verb. No more sleeping in or staying up late. Not that it’s all bad. There are some things to look forward to, like Friday nights, when the air begins to turn crisp and the atmosphere crackles with the excitement of a high school football game. Yes, I’m a band nerd, but at least I was in the drumline—the rowdy rebels and evil necessity of every band director.

I better be careful or I will reminisce myself into a longing to go back to school.

Recently, My Amazing-Missus took the grand-girls shopping for their back to school supplies. I got to playing around with the boxes of crayons and created one that was all black and white crayons. I showed it to our oldest grand-girl and she looked at me like I had jerked a rainbow from the sky and strangled a unicorn with it. Then she said, “That can’t be real. That would be horrible!”

She’s right.

Attention boys and girls. Today’s lesson is about the importance of having colors in your crayon box.

Here’s the thing about politics and religion and dogma and institutions and fundamentalists: They will steal all the colors out of your box if you’re not careful. Everything will be reduced to this or that, right or wrong (their version of it of course), black or white. When it happens, our worldview narrows, we become narrow-minded and single-minded and mean and bitter. We think everyone is out to get us. We believe every conspiracy theory that comes along.

Worse yet, we miss out on the wonder, the beauty, the possibilities. I asked Karlee, our oldest if she knew who Roy G. Biv is. “Of course.” Of course she knew. We could all learn something if we would pay more attention to Roy G. Biv.

I am sick and tired of politics. I’m tired and sick of the religious right telling me who I should hate and why. I’m tired of people saying, make up your mind. It’s either black or white. 

No it’s not. Meet Roy G. Biv, or as Karlee knows him, the colors of the rainbow: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo and Violet.

Make a note of that, it will be on the test. And put some color back in your crayon box.

If I Had A Hammer

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

That’s one of my favorite “proverbs”. I’ve used it for years and always attributed it to Abraham Maslow. But, have I been correct in doing so? Wiktionary to the rescue:

From the book Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow (1962):

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Similar concept by Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, (1964):

“I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

This blog post is about tools and utility and reductionism and throwing away some of life’s wonders like so much ephemera.

One of the frustrations of aging is losing your tools, not your physical tools like your screwdriver or tape measure, but finding you don’t hear as well as you once could, or see, or smell, and that wonderful tool of memory, where did I put that? Years ago a guy named Stephen Covey reduced the concept of being “highly effective” to seven habits. Number 7 was, “Sharpen the Saw”. Sometimes these days I can’t even remember where my saw is, much less how to sharpen it.

But even more tragic than losing tools through aging, is when we recklessly throw out tools—reducing the options in our toolbox by seeking simple, quick solutions—casting aside the tools of wonder, creativity, inquiry, spiritual quests, and in their place adding dogma, doctrine, principles, processes—tools that certainly have their time and purpose, but ugly and dangerous when they become the only tools we have.

If Kaplan is right about his “law of the instrument”, then I can probably look at my behavior and attitude and learn something. If I’m constantly pounding everything, there’s a good chance that I’ve reduced my toolbox to a hammer. You know what I mean?

So today, I’m taking stock. I’m thinking of my worldview, my politics, my religion, my relationships, my motives, my dreams, and I’m asking myself: what tools do I have in the box?

I read a column in the Washington Post. As I read I thought, I want more hope, that somehow we can collectively see that it’s going to take more than a hammer to pound everything, more than a screwdriver to continue to do what screwdrivers do. The proof is in the opening paragraph of the story:

There is so much anger out there in America: “Anger at Wall Street. Anger at Muslims. Anger at trade deals. Anger at Washington. Anger at police shootings of young black men. Anger at President Obama. Anger at Republican obstructionists. Anger about political correctness. Anger about the role of big money in campaigns. Anger about the poisoned water of Flint. Anger about deportations. Anger about undocumented immigrants. Anger about a career that didn’t go as expected. Anger about a lost way of life. Mob anger at groups of protesters in their midst. Specific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.”

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I love poetry. Since our culture tends to reduce the idea of manliness to a caricature that real-men shouldn’t enjoy reading much of anything, especially poetry, I’m including a manly-esque poem, written by John Updike, author of works every guy should read. I share it because it has helped me take the measure of my tools.

Tools
By John Updike

Tell me, how do the manufacturers of tools
turn a profit? I have used the same clawed hammer
for forty years. The screwdriver misted with rust
once slipped into my young hand, a new householder’s.
Obliviously, tools wait to be used: the pliers,
notched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench
with its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough
to take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit
still fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought;
the tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk;
the carpenter’s angle, still absolutely right though I
have strayed; the wooden bubble level from my father’s
meagre horde. Their stubborn shapes pervade the cellar,
enduring with a thrift that shames our wastrel lives.

IF I HAD A HAMMER. Click and listen. Makes me long for the beautiful complexity of the 60s and my first Coming-Of-Age, when my toolbox was full, even though I often tore up more things than I fixed or built. At least I was alive.

For This Sunday, December 13, 2015

“The idea that nothing is true except what we comprehend is silly, and that ideas which our minds cannot reconcile are mutually destructive, sillier still.”

— Winston Churchill

“​For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

— Paul the Apostle; FKA: Saul of Tarsus (1 Corinthians 13:12)