Okay- limbo is getting old.
Yesterday, the movers finally brought all of our stuff to Carrboro. Nancy went over there to supervise them, and I stayed home to take care of Jess. Then we went back over there again last night and Nancy started unpacking boxes while I practiced the keyboard for a while.
So things are moving along very smoothly at a steady pace. So far, there have been dozens of potential problems that we have avoided.
Last night, I handed my mom a check for the remaining balance of the mortgage of our place in Carrboro. So, with the Brooklyn apartment sold, and the Carrboro mortgage finished, we are completely debt-free!
Great – so how many families in America today can say that they own their house outright, and have money in savings? And own their car? And no credit card debt to boot?
How does that make me feel? About the same as before, really.
Which goes to show you that money does not (in of itself) equal happiness. To clarify, I guess what I mean is that someone with $200,000 in the bank is not necessarily going to be happier at all than someone with $500 in the bank, all else being equal, etc.
OK, that is what I expected all along, so I’m glad that I was right! If you extrapolate that ideas into other areas of life, it gets really interesting. One pertinent example to me would be, the rich, successful rock-star is probably no happier than a regular guy who just picked up a guitar for the first time and learned the intro to “wanted dead or alive” by Bon Jovi. Actually, probably quite a bit less happy.
What can we take away from this? Here are a couple of ideas:
1. The bass player for any famous band is probably no happier than you are; at least not directly because he is the bass player for a famous band.
2. The guy driving a 2010 Porsche Carrera is no happier than the guy driving a 1983 Toyota Tercel. When you think about it, he’s probably a lot less happy or else why would he have needed to buy the expensive sports car.
3. Donald Trump, with all his millions, is no happier than you or me.
4. What the hell does this have to do with the title of my post? Okay, living in limbo does get a bit old after a while.
In NC
About a week and a half ago, we moved to NC. We’ve been staying with my mom. We finally closed on the apartment in Brooklyn, and we have the money we need for the renovations to our new place.
Right now, the movers are in Carrboro unloading all of the boxes into our new place. Nancy is over there overseeing the load-in while I’m here at my Mom’s house with the baby.
I’ve been practicing the organ for a couple hours a day, and it’s coming along pretty well. I haven’t touched my basses in over 2 weeks, but I’m going to unpack them as soon as I can.
I had a duo gig with Kevin Van Sant where I played organ and he played guitar. It went pretty well, I guess- no trainwrecks, but I gotta say that playing organ is exhausting!!!
Race To The Finish
There’s less than 2 weeks to go before we move to Carrboro, NC. I feel like that guy who is running a race, and then falls and breaks an ankle. Then he wants to finish the race so badly that he drags himself over the finish line by his fingernails. Or I guess I feel like the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings.
Actually, things are not that bad right now. Nancy is home from work to help with Baby Jessica, and I have a lot more time to do stuff. The thing is, I’m being pretty ambitious about doing a lot of things each day, especially like practicing the keyboard and doing some cardio vascular exercise.
Today, a couple of Nancy’s friends came to take away our wall bed. We had a great time bringing it downstairs. The bed is so big that it could barely fit, and we ended up trashing the bed and the walls of the building a bit.
I’m starting to think a lot about how to approach doing my organ group in North Carolina. I guess it will be better if I do less of a side-man role, and more of a leader. I’ve been practicing a lot, and I feel like my skills are starting to develop more quickly, but moving to a new place and starting fresh with a new instrument seems like a huge ordeal.
Then I decided to break it down into more of a schedule thingie:
Month 1-2 – Get together and jam with whoever is willing. Make a list of tunes I need to know, and identify the things I need to work on the most.
Month 3-4 – begin to ask to sit in with groups around town.
Month 5-6 – Start to do gigs with jazz groups as a sideman
Month 7-on – Make a nice demo CD. Go out and actively seek out gigs for my group
1-year – make an album
Maybe I can shoot for that schedule and see what happens. One of the cool things about switching to organ from bass is that if someone wants to hire a bass player, an organist can also fill that role.
Wow, it’s been a while!
You get what you pay for folks. I guess that means that my blog gets stuck on the back burner when my life is a little busy. I’d like to tell you about my week, and then tell you a little about my future plans.
Two nights ago, I went out with a bunch of friends to the Kiosk on 116 street. We hung out there just talking and telling stories until they closed. After that, four of us went to midtown and hung for another 2 hours! It was a legendary hang, and I’m so thankful to Paul Carlon for hooking it up. I’ll definitely remember that one.
On June 1, the tenant at our place in Carrboro moved out. The next day, the construction company came to start working on the kitchen. We are also getting the floors refinished, and the whole apartment repainted. To me, it seems totally unreal. Have you ever had a moment where you thought about someone you knew years ago, and said “That person, right now, is probably eating dinner” or something, and tried to picture it? My brain has a weird disconnect between what is happening here and now, and what’s happening far away unobserved. It’s impossible for me to visualize the apartment, which I haven’t even seen for 10 years, undergoing this crazy construction. I guess if someone told me the world was flat, I’d believe that, too.
I’ve stepped up my exercising quite a bit. Now I’ve been running from home, around the park, and back each day, pushing Jessica in the stroller. It’s about 4.5 miles total. I was running for about 1.5 miles each day, then my friend Larisa inspired me to take the plunge and do the park. One thing I found out, is that if you can run for 15 minutes, then 45 minutes is really not that hard. Only difference is that you get really really hungry later! I’m trying to get rid of my ‘baby gut’, which I’ve put on in the last year or so taking care of baby and not exercising enough.
Another thing I’m really excited about is that my friend Matt Brandau moved to town a couple of days ago! I’m still trying to figure out what kind of gigs he wants to do, then I’m gonna hook him up big time with gigs. He’s turning over a bunch of bass students in Carrboro to me.
I have two main musical goals for when I get to North Carolina. Of course my main thing is to take care of Jessica and Truffles, make sure bills get paid on time, etc. But personally, I want to:
1. Play organ gigs. Jazz/Funk stuff mainly, where organ plays the bass line. I feel like I’m getting to the point where I could hold my own at a jam session, so I’ll probably start there and work my way up.
2. Blogging/Recording/Producing. I have an idea for a zero-overhead music company where I record stuff myself and promote independent music I love on the internet. The idea is evolving slowly. I just feel like I want to unravel the full potential of my musical experience in a way that just ‘playing gigs’ won’t allow.
Whew, that’s a lot of typing.
The baby is jumpin’!
I’m into the final week of taking care of baby Jessica by myself. Nancy is leaving Hunter College on Friday, and is going to be a stay-at-home mom from that point on. There are rumors of some part-time work for her, but it will be a much smaller commitment.
For several months, I’ve been taking care of Baby Jessica on my own during weekdays. It’s been a crazy, difficult job. It’s not the type of thing which leaves you proud and fulfilled — more often than not I end the week feeling like I’ve been a horrible dad.
However, as I posted before, I set the bar low for my fatherhood. If, at, the end of the day, Jessica 1. didn’t get hurt, and 2. didn’t go hungry, then the day was a success. By those criteria, I’ve been totally nailin’ it.
There are two major question marks in our lives right now. The first is:
1. How the heck are we going to get organized to move in the next 4 weeks? Nancy is way ahead of me on this, so I’ll just fall in line and take orders from her.
The second is: What the heck am I going to be doing in Chapel Hill? One thing that I know for sure is that I’m going to be teaching some lessons. The other big thing is that I’m going to be playing the organ.
I guess I’m at the point in my organ playing where it would be really good for me to have some jam sessions and possibly some gigs. So I guess that’s what I’ll do in North Carolina– drag my organ around to jam sessions and try to get my ‘live’ playing chops together.
Drum roll… It’s here, folks!!
I’m excited to announce that I’ve survived the first wave of organ practicing burnout! I had a tough week last week, including three days in the studio, plus about 5 gigs, and organ lesson, and Nancy’s 40th birthday party.
Boy, did I ever get burned out on music and life!
No problem, though. Sensing a crisis ahead, yesterday I gave myself a ‘get-out-of-jail-for-free’ card– I took a day off from practicing and exercising. I did have a gig that afternoon, but it was very fun and I made it through without cracking.
I feel refreshed, and today I woke up at 5:15 again and gave it the old college try. They say that music is like a spiral, in that for a while you will feel great and inspired, then you will go through sucky times too. The trick for me is to realize that the sucky times are transitory and good times lie ahead.
In the middle of all of this activity, I recorded a great new album with the McCarron Brothers, and also a great Uke record with The Trio of J. Walter Hawkes. I’m really proud of both of these. Also, I was able to help Nancy with her party, and it was great.
What happens next?
Now that Nancy has told everyone at work that we are moving to NC, I guess it’s okay to discuss it here on the blog.
I never thought that moving would be easy, but for me the move to Carrboro is like flying into a gray cloud. On this side of the cloud, I have a great family and a cool apartment in Brooklyn, and tons of great musician friends and great gigs.
Then, I fly into the gray cloud. When I emerge on the other side, suddenly I live in a different state, with different friends, and different gigs (same great family!), different food stores, etc. It’s hard for me to imagine that now when I hang out with someone that I know, and we part ways and say goodnight, that it may be the last time I ever see that person. So I end up subconsciously thinking to myself “When we fly into that crazy gray cloud, everything will be taken care of. I’ll just have new friends, and I won’t miss the old ones.” Sometimes I even tell myself that it’s fine to move away, because I can come and visit NYC anytime I want.
In reality though, I know that when we arrive in Carrboro, I’ll have to start from scratch and build a life that I’m happy with and proud of. I can’t go back to doing the same things I did when I lived there from 1972-2000, because ten years of NYC has made me a completely different person.
There’s no doubt that I’ll miss my musician friends from New York, but I’ll have to work on building relationships with North Carolina musicians which support and inspire the musician that I have become. Probably the main difference from before is that I may not do the random restaurant ‘Jazz Gig’ that used to be my staple years ago.
Obviously, I’m married with a daughter and a doggie now, so I need to be a great husband, and an inspirational father too.
In one respect, the move to NC will be perfect for me, because I’m just struggling now to get up to speed with the organ, and I can probably get started gigging with it pretty soon once we get back. Also, I’m hoping to use my musical knowledge to help produce music, and start an internet-based music company.
From this side of the grey cloud though, it’s difficult to predict what’s on the other side
How to keep the fire burning!
When I get interested in something new, give me about 3 months and it will fizzle out. You could say I have a 3 month attention span- it applies to everything without fail!
So if I’m doing something I really want to do for the rest of my life, how do I catapault myself past the three-month wall? Let me tell you what’s happening.
At the beginning of the year, I started to resume taking organ lessons. The only consistent daily practice time I would get is if I woke up at 5:15 in the morning, and practiced an hour with headphones on.
For the first couple of months, I was extremely diligent. Each week, I would tape record my organ lesson, and listen to it the next day making special note of all the stuff I learned, and how I sounded. Each morning I would wake up way before the sun came up, record myself practicing for an hour, and then listen to the recording later in the day and critique my playing.
Then, about the beginning of April or so, I found that I got less interested in recording myself and listening back to the recordings. I was also more likely to sleep in a bit and maybe start practicing at 6am. At that hour, there is a lot of stuff going on in the house with everybody waking up, and it’s distracting. The practicing is not as effective.
Then, I found myself rationalizing that I would wait to the afternoon to practice a couple times a week. This is not nearly as effective as getting up and hittin’ it first thing in the morning.
Then, a couple of days ago, I said screw it, I’m too tired to practice. I skipped a day. Alright, you may think, after a few months, why not take a day off? It’s not that bad I guess, but for me, it’s a slippery slope in to lazyness. When you first decide that it’s okay to skip a day of practicing, you’re opening a can of worms that should have stay shut.
(To my credit, I practiced twice as much the next day to make up for lost time. I’m not going to beat myself up about it, just wanted to make a note of it)
I had my lesson last night, and it’s going to be a long time until my next lesson. At 5:20 this morning, as I was walking the doggie, I thought about giving myself a day off from practicing, exercising, and all my good-boy stuff. It seemed like it would be a great idea just to pop back in bed for another hour and start off the day refreshed.
How do you fight the little devil on your shoulder telling you to relax, take time off? After all, it’s not such a bad idea.
I think ultimately in this life, I have to answer to myself. Nobody cares if I practice at 5 am, or go running, or do 50 pushups in the morning. Those are things I’ve chosen to do because I want to be the best person I can be – and I have decided that I just can’t afford to let myself down again like I did a million times in the past.
For the rest of my life, I want to be proud and assured about the person I am.
Learnin’ how to learn
Perhaps the title of this post should be ‘relearning how to learn’ or ‘relearning how to think straight’.
A few years ago, I realized that my thinking and learning was pretty dysfunctional and kinda stuck in a rut. I think this is mainly due to public schools and the university environment that I came up in academically.
I believe that in public schools, teachers have to devise a way to teach stuff so that everyone in the class can hopefully learn it. Then there are a few ’slow’ students who have trouble learning the information, because perhaps their talents lie more with music or art or something- for some reason or another, the style of learning where there is a teacher in front of 25 students doesn’t work for everyone.
I consider myself mentally sound, and easily able to learn stuff and retain stuff. Yet, every day before I went to school I had a stomachache and a feeling of doom. Why wasn’t I THRILLED to be going to school and learning?
The reason is that school didn’t work for me. Specifically, what didn’t work is having to learn stuff I wasn’t interested in, then remember it for a test a week later. Then, if you don’t remember the stuff, you fail. Of course I’m simplifying here!
The fact that I spent my first 21 years learning this way is already sort of crappy. But what’s worse is that I took that style of learning into my adult life as a blueprint for the world. I felt that failure was always around the corner. Every decision was crucial, and there was absolutely no room for intuition or going on a gut feeling.
Also carried over from school is the feeling of a hierarchy or order among people. For instance, maybe somebody can play bass faster and more technically than me, and I would think they are a higher or better person. Or someone would be chosen to do a gig over me, and it was like a failure in Gym class to be picked for a basketball team because I’m clumsy and awkward.
As I mature, I’m finding that my thoughts are like a river. Currents may go this way and that, and it is really bad to try to stop the flow or redirect the river in an unnatural way. What this means in practical terms is that I may hear a song while shopping in the drug store, then two years later I can play it on bass at a gig. (rather than having to learn the song note for note from sheet music, then stressing out about whether I’m going to mess it up at a show). I’ve learned that music is not like an exam in school, and as long as you put love and enthusiasm behind it, it’s gonna sound good.
Also, I was horrible at history all through school. But now, I may pick up a book on Thomas Jefferson and read it voraciously and enjoy the heck out of it. Probably because I’m choosing to read it on my own, and I’ve finally reached a point in my life where that kind of person is really interesting to me.
Another element of my new style of thinking is to always be open to the possibility that you are going to succeed. If I’m trying something new, I’m going to do it with the confidence that I’m probably going to do it right — nail it! That’s a lot different than when I used to do stuff timidly, and nervous that I might mess it up. Probably the best example of this is when I’m on stage with a jazz group, and someone suggests that we play a song that I’ve never played before. I just say ‘OK, let’s do it’. I rarely ever say that I’d rather not try the song.
I’d like to end this post with a quote from Francois Rabbath’s Nouvelle Technique De La Contrabasse:
“The Word Difficult. We learn to play an instrument because we have chosen it and because we want to derive pleasure from it. The idea of difficulty must therefore not be instilled into a student, since later he will overcome this. To play a wrong note, when learning, is not a serious mistake. The chief thing, when learning, is to be able to obtain a sound from the instrument with happiness, with pleasure. When a child learns to walk, we know he will fall down until the day he succeeds. The same goes for the musician: if we forbid him to play a wrong note, making him repeat the passage until it is correct, he becomes paralysed and will always make the same mistake. He must be allowed to play naturally, and made to understand that the most important thing is to express himself by playing the notes without stiffness. The musical instrument is presented to future musicians haled with difficulty. Everything is difficult: the holding of the bow, the holding of the instrument, music, etc.
The word ‘difficult’ is passed on from generation to generation. Its power is so radical that, from the outset, the player is oppressed by a fear that he drags behind him all his life like a ball and chain, making any natural approach to the instrument impossible for him. We can add to this reluctance on the part of most teachers to help technique to progress: a wall of concrete a hundred metres thick is automatically created; it can only be breached by striking the word ‘difficult’ from the vocabulary.
I hope that this tutor will prove to you that what you cannot do today, you will do tomorrow.
F.R.”
Hardcore Part 1
Why would a jazz musician like myself be influenced by hardcore music and culture? The older I get, the more I feel like my values are falling in line with some of the most hardcore dudes out there. When you think of ‘hardcore’, I believe most people conjure up images of loud guitars, shattered beer bottles, drunken fist-fights, and drug abuse. And also a certain look; perhaps purple mohawk, studded eyelids and motorcycle jackets or something. I don’t really know, maybe I’m just judging by my own personal bias.
What I’m finding out is that I’m redefining my idea of hardcore because I’ve read a lot recently about musicians and artist that I look up to. For instance, I found a book on the street by Henry Rollins called ‘See A Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die’ that I can only describe as the most hardcore thing I’ve ever read in my life. It’s a collection of poems and essays and other stuff from a 2-year time from 1991-1992 as Henry was on the road almost constantly doing speaking engagements and Rollins Band tour dates. I won’t spoil the book for you, but suffice it to say that you and I are lazy pieces of poop compared to this guy.
I got to thinking about how many thoughts I’ve repressed and ideas I’ve abandoned as stupid over the years. Perhaps I’m afraid of failing. Maybe I’m afraid that exploring these ideas would take a lot of work. What would Henry Rollins say?
“My first inclination was to say you’re a pathetic fucking loser. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: Deep down inside I’m as soft as an 8-week-old kitten and as lazy as a tree sloth. In a perfect world I would sleep 14 hours a day and be a total wastoid. However, I was cursed with being born with the most intense-looking face in the history of mankind. When my parents showed people my baby pictures, they’d tremble in fear. They knew I was destined to be an Army drill sergeant or a homicidal maniac. Or a crazed punk-rock singer. Or a hyper-agitated dude who rants on stages and on your TV screen for hours on end. When you have a perma-scowl like this, you can’t just be a bum. So I forced myself to be productive. I trained my body and mind hard—27 hours a day, 428 days a year. You know when I sleep? From 1 a.m. to 1:15 a.m. You know what I did this morning? I bench-pressed 500 pounds for three hours. Then I came up with a screed about how shitty Nickelback and Harry Potter books are. Then I read a 900-page biography of Ché Guevara. Then I wrote 12 poems. Are they any good? Fuck no. But I did it. And maybe the 12 poems I’ll write tomorrow will be good. Anyway, I did all that before 5 a.m. In the past year I’ve traveled to every country on earth, and when I ran out of countries I invented a few more and traveled to them, too.” (Philadelphia Weekly, March 9, 2010)
Ok then. Let’s all get off our asses and do something.