UrbanTherapy.

This started when I was to give a professor a CD of some software he needed. I put it in a Nina Simone jewel case. He noticed, and we talked briefly about the merits of the CD (it was a compilation). That evolved into a the question: “You like jazz?” and ended with him offering me two tickets to Friday’s performance at the CSO. You never know who you’re going to meet in this world, I suppose.

Joshua Redman was the headliner, I’m sure, but opening was a young woman named Anat Cohen. A quick read of her bio identifies her as a relative newcomer, arriving in New York City in 1999. Her multi-ethnic trio powered their way through four compositions and about 40 minutes of play time. What struck me most was her energy, a quality that isn’t so easily captured on studio recordings. She would catch the beat and happily bounce in place with clarinet in hand.

A slow piece, an Brazillian composition, and a couple of selections from the album she had just put out rounded her evening. What was apparent that, sometimes she would miss her lead in, and the band would have to come back around to pick her up. At those times, she would grin at her bandmates and keep her foot tapping. She introduced the band twice, obviously happy to share the spotlight. An insert in the program indicated that she’s be in the lobby after the show, and she was, beaming and talking excitedly to new fans.

After a short intermission, Joshua Redman and his James Farm project took the stage. One of the things that bugs me about jazz shows is the fact that the temptation is always there for a big name to phone it in, assured that their place in the canon and the grand pantheon of American music has assured them of another sizable paycheck. In my opinion, Redman didn’t phone it in. But you wouldn’t have known it from the audience’s reaction.

What DID happen, though, is that a LOT of people left. Early. In the middle of the second composition, the exodus started. After he played his last, the crowd on the main floor was about half standing O and half packing the aisles. Even as he came back out for an encore, people did not scramble back to their seats in a madcap rendition of musical chairs; they were headed to Michigan Avenue and all points that were not Symphony Hall.

In our usual seats in the Gallery, you only tackle those Alps-like stairs when you’re sure the show is done. In this Other World we had inhabited for the evening, the lack of stairs emboldened people to get up and leave. The show ended close to 11pm, so I assume that the time had something to do with the rate of exit. Was it Redman’s music? I don’t think so, although there were a few times were the effect would have been doubled if he’d played some passages louder or expounded on some seemingly lazy phrases, but it was what it was.

If anything, this evening introduced me to an artist I had previously not heard of and her music although,a s I mentioned before, I don’t know if her live presence translates well to anything but a live DVD, if only as testament to her energy. Redman? He didn’t suck, but he didn’t bring anything particularly challenging to us either. A lot of chord runs, a lot of discordant drumming and piano playing into which both Cohen and Redman would insert a few notes for significant parts of time.

All in all, my wife and I had a decent time, and we certainly appreciated being able to go.

I’ve been studying some computer stuff at work in these random lulls in activity we’ve been having. Figured that I’d be productive and crack open a book and take some notes. Problem: since college, I have no aptitude for sitting and reading and taking notes. I was getting so sleepy I lost consciousness for a few seconds. Then I figured it was best if I just got up and did something else.

So I got up, put my coat on, and went to the 57th Street Bookstore, which is a short trek through an alley and half-a-block away.

The penultimate Twilight Zone episode features a dude who only wants to read, and when the world ends, and it’s nothing but him and books. Then, the most dastardly, wrongish, coldblooded thing EVAR happens to him that I shudder thinking about it. (That episode is also why I have not watched a single episode since I saw that one; I have no idea how anything else could affect me as badly as that episode did. I keep a spare pair of glasses just BECAUSE OF THAT EPISODE.)

I’ve raved about the bookstore before; I come not to praise it as a customer service haven, but a place where books are waiting. Picking them up, reading the back covers, maybe flipping through and reading a few pages. Recipe books about cooking with fat. A biography of Louis Armstrong. Sonia Sanchez haikus. And I, quite literally, am a kid in a candy store. And it makes me happy to write about.

And then I remember that I can’t buy anything because I have no money to buy them and we have no place to put yet more books. But I’m okay with that. For now.

Little pieces of me die when I can’t (or don’t) draw. So much of my self-identity is tied up in me doing it, that it just feels weird when I look at my little site-that-could and see that I abandon it for months at a time. I usually blame the job, but, 12 hour workday or not, I wasn’t drawing a whole lot when I was unemployed.

Now that I’ve started to write more, my creative energies are diverted. I want to write better, and for a while there, I felt like I was improving. I did reviews, short fiction, but writers’ block hit and my progress halted.

Now, yet another outlet has popped up, and this may take a while to rectify with what my self-identity is/was. For ten years, I’ve been paid to be the computer nerd, but I hung on fiercely to the notion that, once I left work, I wasn’t fixing anyone else’s computer but mine and e’s (with some notable exceptions). I was a person, dammit, working eight so I can live the other 16 the way I wanted to. Nowadays, I’m working 12 so I can live 4 so I can sleep 8.

But now I’m into this trumpet thing. And it is awesome, because I’m playing actual notes and whatnot. Even learned how to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” at my first lesson. Very excited about that!

So, what am I? I am not what I get paid to be, although some individuals have embraced their vocation as who they are. What am I? I’d rather define myself than to be defined, but due to time, necessity of sleep, and so much going on, I’m pulled in a few directions, but I wonder if it’s too many or is endemic on a short attention span.

The trade of writing about music hasn’t changed in the nearly 200 years since it became a journalistic sideline. The trick is still to find concrete images to describe and appraise non-verbal art and the feelings it engenders, while sustaining one’s youthful candor and openess…despite the mellowing or wisdom or crankiness or despair or “revelations that comes with age.”

– Gary Giddins

My wife got me this great book by Mr. Giddibs, who’s written jazz criticism longer than I’ve been alive, puts into words what you’re trying to do when writing about music. The trick is to put something that’s not all words into words. To make someone feel as if they’re feeling it themselves as they’re reading the words you’re writing. That’s the kind of thing I aspire to.

His role in jazz is also something that I want to emulate in some way. He’s heard good music, doe research on it, talked to those who’ve done it, and simply can’t understand why more people aren’t in the know. He wants to share, to “here, I got some good music for you!” without making a mix CD or sensing you mp3s over email. His sense of enthusiasm is evident in his writing, and it’s almost infectious.

One of the links I’ve found is what he says about jazz and libraries. Without promotion, and people coming in and talking about it, all they’re doing is storing this stuff for someone to find, instead of searching it out.