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.
My Day
Every day, I view my day a success if Baby Jessica didn’t get hurt and didn’t go hungry. By those criteria, my day was a success! I should end there!
But of course I won’t, because life’s little ups and downs have a way of exhausting me. I was so exhausted today, that by the time Nancy came home, I was just sitting on a stool in the kitchen, holding Jessica, listening to internet radio, and hoping that Jessica wouldn’t cry before Nancy came home to take over.
What happened today? It was a perfect storm of ups and downs seemingly designed just to wear me out.
Here’s a rundown:
5:45ish – woke up and practiced for an hour.
7:30 – Took Truffles to her day care. Felt bad about it because I wanted to pay attention to Truffles.
8:25 – Got home from my run late, made Nancy late for work and felt bad about it.
9:00 – Got Jessica down for a nap after ‘wrestle’ playing for about 20 minutes. Felt cool about that one.
10:00 – Fed Jessica, and began to worry if I was giving her enough variety, or just feeding her what she loves so mealtime would be easy. On retrospect, the meal was fine and well-balanced
11:00 – Cleaned up around the house while I let Jessica crawl around. Felt bad about not actively playing with her.
12:00 – Did more brainstorming about record label-type thing I want to do. Got excited about that. Started thinking about writing some stuff for a book that a friend and I are talking about doing. Got excited about that. Was thinking about how much I love the strings on my bass as well. Also, played ‘peek a boo’ with Jessica and made her laugh a lot.
1:00 – Went to the dry cleaner’s. Realized that I had been calling this woman by the wrong name for about a year now. I said “Hey Julie!” and she said “It’s Amy!” and she didn’t look pleased. I don’t know why, but I felt awful about calling her the wrong name.
2:00 – Tried to get Jessica to take a nap, but she was thirsty and crying. By the time I gave her a bottle, it was too late and she missed her nap. She was cranky for the rest of the day.
3:30 – Hung laundry and ignored Jessica in her jumper. Talked to Keith on the phone, and let her stay in the jumper for a while longer, while wishing I could be playing with her.
I guess that’s enough. After typing all that I can see that the things that upset me are that I felt like I was dissing people. I guess there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything I want to do, so I feel bad about stuff I can’t do! I’ll work on that.
Love it when something clicks
In my lesson this week, Nate was showing me how to look at chord voicings as several ‘voices’ that can move as you want them too. I guess before I was just seeing voicings as ‘I gotta play the 1,3,5,7 in some way shape or form’ or something like that. Anyways, for me it opened up a lot of possibilities.
This morning I was messing around during my 5-6am practice with different chord voicings, and I felt so free with it that it seemed like I could play anything and it would work on some level, even chord voicings that seem wacky.
I’m happy about this, because playing chords has always seemed so mysterious and difficult, and now it’s beginning to click. Another cool thing we talked about is working some small solo lines in here and there among the comping that I do. Nate told me to view the soloing as an extension of the comping, not really as a whole separate entity. I’ve found that this is absolutely true, as a few well-placed ’solo’ notes as part of a comping line can sound great as a solo, as well as make the comping sound a lot more interesting.
Other stuff. Baby Jessica ate a good lunch today of yams, broccoli, carrots, and spaghetti. Now we’re lying down for an afternoon nap and she’s fading fast.
Also, I made the switch over to steel strings on my upright bass last week, and I guess I’m really enjoying them. The strings I’m using now are Spirocore Mediums a/k/a Mittels a/k/a Orchestras a/k/a Sprocore Reds. It took a bit of research to figure out that all of them are talking about the same thing.
I had been having breakage and unraveling problems with the Velvet Animas I’ve had for the past year. So I wanted an extremely durable, and pretty heavy and stiff string. The main thing is that I didn’t always want to be afraid that a string was about to break or unravel during a recording.
Anyways, the spirocores are great, but it has taken me a couple weeks to get ‘em booming on my instrument. My hands just had to get used to them I reckon. They sound really good now, but I really miss the midrange punch of the Animas. Maybe I’ll use these for a year or two, and then switch back. Animas are pretty doggone expensive to be so fragile, though.
It’s going, I guess.
Hanging out here in Chapel Hill with my Mom, the baby, and Truffles. Nancy is at the beach with some of her friends from high school, so I’m just walking Truffles, holding the baby, and hanging out with Mom.
I played a jazz gig last night with Kevin Van Sant on guitar and Dave Finucane on tenor sax. It was fun. Since my upright bass is in New York, I used my Musicman Stingray bass. It’s kind of tough to get a good jazz tone out of it. The action was pretty high because of the change in the season, so I decided not to adjust it. After about a set, I suddenly remembered something about this bass: when playing fingerstyle, I roll a bit of treble off, and boost both the midrange and bass knobs a little bit. I’ve owned three different Stingray basses, and I’ve had to do that same thing every time.
Today I went to Kevin Van Sant’s house for a little jam session. He has an awesome Hammond RT-3 organ that I just love to play. I gotta hand it to Kevin – he’s always happy to have me over to jam on his Hammond, even when I was just starting to play. I’ve been playing for a little over a year now, and the going is still rough. However, this time at least I didn’t screw up bad enough to make a train wreck; at least I kept the form and held the tempos steady.
While I’m on the subject of Kevin, I was thinking about when I first started playing bass about 19 years ago, and Kevin was one of the few people who consistently wanted to get together and jam with me, no matter how horrible I sounded. We learned literally hundreds of songs together. Now that I’m a beginner on a totally new instrument, it’s not surprising at all that he’s nurturing and encouraging me patiently, giving me a chance to learn by screwing up over and over. Today he told me ‘A lot of keyboard players come over and have a hard time adjusting to the Hammond. You’re coming over here and playing it, and you’re not even a keyboard player, it’s a totally new instrument to you’. I couldn’t help but feel proud of myself.
I’ve been really lucky because there are a few people that I play with, who have played with me through all of the different phases of my musical development, because for some reason they like me. One person that pops into mind is J. Walter Hawkes. I’ve been a member of Walter’s band for probably 10 years now, ever since I was a young lad fresh from NC who could barely play a note. Make no mistake; Walter had a choice of many different bass players to play with, and he chose crappy old me. Now that I feel like I’m able to take care of business a lot better on the bass, it makes a lot more sense for me to play with him. But that’s an incredible friend who would give me so much support and so much time to develop as a player.
Tarheels – Exercise – A day at home
UNC lost in the final game of the NIT tonight. It was a hard game to watch. We looked terrible, then we looked great! Then we looked terrible again. I’m just glad that Carolina got a little tournament action. Nancy went to the semi-final and final game. It was also cool to know that UNC was playing here in NYC.
I stayed at home today with baby and doggie from about 9am to 10:30pm. That’s a pretty long day to take care of everything, non-stop. I did pretty well, though – nobody starved to death, Truffles got to walk outside regularly. Jessica got fed and got a nap. We walked all the way around the park, and I got her bathed, fed, and asleep at a decent hour. I guess that qualifies me as a pretty good dad, even though there was a nagging feeling that if I was paying attention to baby, I was ignoring doggie too much, and vice versa. What can you do about that, though? It was a pretty good day.
Oh yeah, I had a pretty awesome lunch today too — collard greens and tater-tots! Then a mid-afternoon snack of homemade beans and franks that Nancy made last night featuring tofu hot dogs.
I had promised myself that I would start exercising on today on April 1, and I made good on that promise. In the morning after practicing for an hour and walking Truffles for about a half hour, I went for a 15-minute run. I know that sounds wimpy, but it kinda kicked my butt and I felt creaky and sore while running.
Also I had read somewhere about a local newscaster guy (forgot his name) who did 1000 push-ups a week. That seemed like a ton of pushups, and I got inspired. For the last few days, I have been debating how many pushups I want to do, because I don’t want to set a goal that’s to hard to reach. I finally decided that 80 per day would be alright.
So, this morning while the tater tots and greens were cookin’ I did 20 pushups. That went fine. Then, after lunch, I did 15 more, and it was pretty hard. I reasoned to myself that if each hour I dropped down and did 10 push-ups, the remaining 55 would be a piece of cake.
Well let me tell you, at 9pm I just did the last 10 push-ups and I’m pretty sore. Anyways, I feel great because I set a goal and did what I promised… hopefully I can keep it up.
I can look at today and be satisfied. Practiced music for hour and a half, went running and did push-ups, walked the park for 2 hours, made a cool meal, watched Carolina game, played a game of chess online and almost didn’t lose, got the baby asleep in her crib, and posted to the blog. Rock that.
Listening to yourself
Tonight I went to the Douglass St. Musicians Collective to see Tony Romano and Michel Gentile play a set. Those guys are fantastic together. Half of the music they played was completely improvised on the spot, and it was unbelievable. Can’t wait for the next one.
When I got home, I started to listen to my practice tape for the day. Each day when I practice organ, I record it on a digital tape recorder so I can listen later and take notes.
It’s really thrilling to listen to the tape, because you never know what you are going to here. Often, my playing sounds completely different than I remembered. Today, I played a ‘brazilian warm-up’ exercise that i’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks: half notes in the bass line, and right hand comping. In the right hand, I’m treating the upper and lower manuals kind of like a high – pitched and low-pitched drum. Then every once in a while, I’ll toss in a few measures of soloing.
The point of doing this warm-up exercise is to push the limits of my ability. In Nate’s words, “You want to sound terrible playing it” because you are pushing yourself beyond what you can play.
Lo and behold, when listening back to it, it’s not too bad! The coolest part of it is that all of the elements of a jazz group are present: the bass, the chordal instrument, the percussion (with the upper/lower manual drum ideas), and the soloist – all being played on a single instrument. I’m surprised that I can do it at all.
Of course, each time you learn one thing on the organ, it just opens a window of possibility through which you can see a million other things you need to learn. (Unlike bass, where you just thump quarter notes all day and try not to fall asleep 
Heaven 17 – Penthouse and Pavement
You may be surprised to learn that I’ve been completely obsessed with the album Penthouse and Pavement for the last four months. It was recorded in 1981, and was pretty much banned from the radio because of its scathing political lyrics.
Raging lyrics, phat and raw synthesizers, booming 808 beats. And a complete lack of irony.
Not to mention the outrageous slap bass lines of John Wilson. Furthermore, the mind-scrambling diva Josie James. This just in: the lead singer’s chewing gum.
Black and White Cookies
I made these yesterday for our friend Olive’s first birthday party. The first time I tried a black and white cookie was in 1990, on a trip to upstate New York during the winter break of my freshman year in college. Now, 20 years later, I got around to making some. They tasted pretty good!
I tried to make them a few years ago, before Nancy and I were vegan. They didn’t turn out so great back then, so I’m not going to officially count that time.
I got the recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. Usually, black and white cookies are made with eggs, but I like this egg-less recipe even better.
Also, a little off topic, I’m excited that congress voted for the health care overhaul bill. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and read the entire bill online, so I’m curious about how much it will help me, Nancy, and baby Jessica.
I’m not sure how you would categorize my family’s economic status, but I’d say we’re solidly middle class. I remember about 15 years ago, it was easy to live on a musician’s salary. Now, it’s difficult, because food prices have skyrocketed, gasoline costs 3-4x what it did back then, and medical insurance has gotten completely ridiculous.
In terms of saving money on food and gas, it’s not hard to find ways to economize. But if your family has to have health insurance, and you don’t have a job that provides it, you have no choice but to bend over…
Hopefully, some government control over health insurance will give us a more affordable option.
What happened to the fire?
Sometimes I wonder why I can be driven and committed to something, only to give up on it a short while later. For example, in January I bought a cool pair of running shoes. The plan was to go running every day.
For the first five days I enjoyed it, then I stopped all of a sudden. Now I’m not the type of person to point a finger at myself and feel guilty, but I wonder why I can just stop doing something that is so positive. I believe it’s because I had no extra energy or time, and there is always such a long list of stuff to do that it’s hard to justify taking time for myself. Whenever I start to do any type of solitary exercise, I have to compensate by not spending as much time walking Truffles or cleaning up the apartment or cuddling the baby.
Even more tenuous is the daily practice routine. Ever since January, I’ve been getting up at 5:30am to practice keyboard for an hour or so. It’s been a fantastic habit for me to cultivate and it has done wonders for my musicianship and self-esteem. But it can seem pointless sometimes to wake up tired as hell and start playing. What am I doing it for? What’s my ultimate goal? Is playing organ really that important? Plus nobody is ever going to give you a pat on the back and say ‘good job’, your motivation has to come from within.
I think when you first realize that you really want to do something, like learn a new instrument, your mind tends to look at the final goal and think about how cool it will be. We know it will take work, but we don’t realize at the time how tedious and frustrating the work will be. Also, while we’re practicing, it’s difficult to see improvement from day to day, and it’s also likely that there will be times that we regress or take a step backwards. Or even worse, we may spend weeks practicing something that is completely wrong, and which you have to un-learn and correct.
So anyways, how do you keep the creative fire burning? The best way for me is to forget about anything discouraging that I’m thinking about at the time, and have faith in my original vision. In other words, just think back to how excited I was about learning something new, and assure myself that someday, I’ll feel the victorious feeling that I accomplished what I wanted to.
One day, I was walking in the park with Jessica and Truffles and I was feeling troubled because it seemed like I would never play as good as my organ teacher Ondrej. Then I realized that the only thing separating me and Ondrej is tons of practice time.
That made me feel so much better, because I know now that it’s only a matter of time before I can play well. It may take many years, I’ll get there.
Music & stuff
This morning I got to thinking about the music that made me who I am. There are moments in my life, where regardless of my age, I can remember when I first heard something and it is burned in my memory forever. I’d like to share some of these moments now, and in the future as I remember them, and just for fun, my approximate age at the time:
Age 5 – AM radio at my grandparents’ house: Gloria Gaynor/On The Radio
Age 6 – Over PA system at a swimming pool (before I could swim): Earth Wind & Fire/Gotta Get You Into My Life
Age 11 – on friend’s walkman at lunch – Quiet Riot/(not sure of the song)
Age 11 – on parent’s stereo – Earth, WInd & Fire/In The Stone, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young/Carry On – The Who/Pinball Wizard
Age 17 – on my walkman at UNC – a jazz mix tape that my friend Gabe gave me – Keith Jarrett/Falling In Love With Love, Hal Galper/A Foggy Day, Michel Camilo/Suite Sandrine. I gotta mention here that after hearing this tape, I saved up for a CD player and receiver, and started going to this used CD place in Chapel Hill, where used CD’s were $17(!) and most jazz CD’s were Japanese imports with no english writing on them.
OK I’m officially changing this topic to list a few of the first CD’s I ever bought. Used Miles Davis/Relaxin’ W/The Miles Davis Quintet, John Scofield/Loud Jazz, the Best of Billy Preston
Oh my God, this post is threatening to splinter off into about 200 different posts about music right now. Just posting this has gotten me excited about music again – hope it does the same for you.