Swing=mc2: when Coltrane smoked a bowl with Einstein (fiction)

 

Swing=mc2

 Einstein stepped out of the stage door into the alley next to the nightclub. The band was breaking before the final set of the night.  Einstein put his pipe in his mouth and patted himself down searching for his lighter.

A match scratched in the still air burst into flame and Einstein leaned his pipe into it, thanking a young black man for the light.

“You’re welcome, Professor Einstein.” said the young man, who was standing next to a tenor saxophone case in the alley.

“Ah, I’m found out!” Einstein sighed with good humor.

“I’m sorry, it isn’t every day that I can light the pipe of a genius.” said the young musician.

“Oh, well.” Einstein said, being sincerely humble. “Genius is nothing special. I think there are more geniuses among us than people realize. Most of them are wasted because they are not recognized and nurtured. Others have bad luck, a few, like me have had good luck…mostly.”

“My name’s John Coltrane.” said the young musician.  “I play tenor saxophone, and I also smoke a pipe.” Trane pulled out his own pipe and lit it casually. Einstein took his pipe out of his mouth and sniffed the air.

“Your tobacco smells like hashish!” said Einstein.

“I’m sorry. I’ll put it out.” said Coltrane moving to dispose of his smoke.

“No!” said Einstein a little too loudly, “I would like to try it!”

“Uh, sir, it’s marijuana, not hashish.”

“I’ve had reefer. Give me pinch of it. I like hashish better though.”

Gravity took Coltrane’s pipe out as his jaw dropped. After an awkward pause, they both laughed.

So, Einstein and John Coltrane smoked out during the break of the Lionel Hampton show.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Coltrane hesitantly, “where and when did you try reefer?”

Einstein looked as if he was remembering something in a moment of cannabinoid imagery. Then he snapped out of it and said, “Pardon me, I was just thinking about the alliteration of “where and when.”

“Spacetime.” Said Coltrane in slow motion. He thought of something funny and said, “Didn’t you discover that where and when are the same thing?”

They both laughed more than they would have without the smoke.

“To answer your question, I had reefer years ago in Europe. I met Louis Armstrong there.”

“Understood.” said Coltrane and they both laughed again.

 “Are you in the band?” asked Einstein.

“Yes, briefly. I’m filling in for a sick friend.” Coltrane looked around and asked, “Are you here by yourself Professor?”

“No, I came with Benny Goodman and Bela Bartok to meet Peggy Lee.”

Coltrane choked a little as he gulped at the names in Professor’s entourage.

“Impressive company I know. You know I play a little fiddle. Bartok and Benny came over to play a piece with me, but I didn’t like it. Bartok’s music is too difficult and too modern for me, but I do like most jazz. I find improvisation thrilling.”

Coltrane pinched himself. He realized that he had an opportunity to talk to one of the greatest minds of the century.

“I’m happy that you know about jazz, sir,” said Coltrane, “but I want to ask you about Gravity and Light and Time.”

“For that we’ll need to walk. And I’ll need another pinch of your smoke.”

Einstein and Coltrane walked off during the break at the Lionel Hampton show. Bartok, Benny Goodman, and Peggy Lee were upset that they had lost the great man, not seeing where he went.

Now, believe it or not…. this is where it gets interesting.

“Where did you try your first marijuana, if I may ask?” Said Einstein.

Coltrane thought a moment and said, “I bought it from Chano Pozo, a Cuban player Dizzy brought here from Cuba. He was later gunned down. I felt bad that it might have been an angry customer or another dealer.”

“Well, that was not your fault. What was he doing when he was shot?” Einstein exhaled a piney puff in the cold air.

“Legend has it that he was playing his tune “Manteca” on a juke box just after the record was released. That’s what Dizzy told me was the story going around.” Coltrane wanted to change the subject, but he couldn’t think of how to ask his question about energy and matter being the same thing.

Einstein broke the silence and said, “It must be thrilling to be able to improvise. You know all the great classical composers could improvise. “

“I knew Bach and Beethoven were famous for it, and Mozart too.”

“Exactly. Did you have any formal music training?”

“Not so much, but I was given the chance to play with musicians better than me and I learned most everything from them. I met some of them in the Navy band. I listened to Charlie Parker and Lester Young and tried to figure out what they were doing.” Coltrane stopped himself, thinking that he was talking too much when he had a chance to listen to Albert fucking Einstein.

“Can I ask you one more question about marijuana?” the professor said breaking the brief silence.

“What is it?”

“If I have a good idea while intoxicated on marijuana, am I likely to forget it?” asked Albert fucking Einstein.

Suddenly, the young jazz musician wondered if the pot he shared with the professor might cause the world’s greatest mind to forget a vital thought that might change our view of the universe… again!

“I keep this pad on me, to write down ideas I have when I’m on the road” said Coltrane, “Its’s mostly chord sequences and motifs. I have my own shorthand that I use, the way you would write down formulas.”

“So, have you discovered your E=mc2 yet?” asked Einstein, with a twinkle in both eyes.

Coltrane laughed nervously and then said, “You know more about music than I know about physics, so you might understand this.

Coltrane rifled through his notepad. He showed Einstein this:

 

“The outer ring has a whole tone scale starting from C; the inner one starting on B. The arrangement of the rings is such that movement from one "main" pitch to the next results in the cycle of fourths, or fifths, depending on which direction you go. I wanted to make a set of chord changes in three keys that are equidistant. divide the octave into 3 equal parts, for example in the key of C, the other tonic centers would Ab, and E.” Coltrane, who had begun speaking more rapidly, suddenly remembered who he was talking to and said, “I’m sorry, this is probably boring you.”

“Not at all. I dislike set theory though, and that is what you are doing intuitively. You are just using musical symbols instead of mathematical symbols.” said Einstein after an exhale. “I have a feeling you will find your E=mc2 soon.”

Coltrane beamed. He felt anointed, the way he had felt when Dizzy, Miles or Monk had asked him to join their bands, or when he felt the Holy Spirit move him in church as a child. After another pause filled with walking, smoking and thinking, Coltrane asked Einstein the question that had prompted the walk and the smoke.

“ If Time is the fourth dimension, and space the other three, then spacetime would contain all of time, as well as all the space in the universe. All of space is present in the now. Does that mean that all of time exists at once? Is that a really stupid question.”

Einstein chuckled. “Not at all. It is one my colleague Gödel asks me. You are still doing set theory, which is also his area of research. I don’t have an answer, but Gödel says the only way to resolve the quantum physics with general relativity is if time didn’t exist! “

Coltrane’s mind reeled. “I don’t know anything about quantum physics,”

Einstein laughed, “No one does. I must tell you, I don’t like speaking English so much, and since you are a musician, I would like to hear you speak in that language.”

Coltrane stopped in his tracks. “Do you want me to play for you?”

Einstein said, “Why not? This city is noisy, why not drown it out with some music May I sit on your grip… your instrument case?”

Coltrane hesitated then moved quickly to open his case and assemble his tenor saxophone. When he was ready to play, he said, “I am just going to improvise something. Is that alright or do you have a request?”

Einstein muttered in German and then said, “I want you to play spacetime.”

“Someday maybe,” said Coltrane and he blew the most beautiful melody he could, probably something like "Naima", “Welcome” or “After the Rain.”

Einstein applauded, stood and said, “That was wonderful. We should get back now.”

Coltrane looked at his watch. “I’ve blown this gig already. I’ll walk you back though. Hampton will explode if I come back so late.”

“I’m sorry if I have lost you a job young man.” Said Einstein with genuine concern in his tone.

“It is not a problem. I was just subbing for my friend Sonny. Hamp can’t really fire me because I’m not in his band.”

“Well,” said Einstein and they walked in silence, back through the alley to the club where the Hampton band was in the middle of their second set.

“It has been a pleasure.” Said Einstein.

“Thank you for…this.” Said Coltrane.

“I should thank you. You have inspired me. I have a new idea.  Taking your advice, I will write down on a napkin or something.”

Coltrane tore a page out of his notebook and gave it to Einstein along with a pen. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you forgetting it.”

They both laughed and said goodbye. Einstein went back to his friends Benny Goodman, Bela Bartok and Peggy Lee, with the melody Coltrane had improvised in the alley, still playing in his enormous brain.

Coltrane walked to the subway thinking about how no one would believe him if he told this story.

CADENZA

    After the club had closed, a busboy found a torn-off sheet of paper, scribbled with mathematical symbols. Just out of curiosity he kept it.  The next night, he showed it to several of his friends. When he learned that Einstein had been in the club, he realized he might have something the great man needed, or that would be valuable like an autograph, although of course, Einstein didn't sign it.  The famous physicist did not return to find it. It hung in a frame backstage at the club for many years before someone stole it. No one had copied it or taken a photo of the scrap paper that may have been a key to the Unified Theory of Everything. Or it could be nothing, Einstein could have left it not absent-mindedly, but because it wasn't worth remembering. Or, he might have forgotten it completely and struggled for the rest of his life to remember what it was, especially on the rare occasion when he smoked a bowl or heard a saxophonist playing something rhapsodic and powerful.

 

 

Twenty Kinds of Emptiness

Translated from the Dharma Samgraha: An Ancient Collection of Buddhist Sanskrit Terms

     There are twenty emptinesses, they are:

Internal emptiness,

external emptiness,

internal and external emptiness,

emptiness of emptiness,

great emptiness,

ultimate emptiness,

emptiness of the conditioned,

emptiness of the unconditioned,

endless emptiness,

emptiness of the extremes,

emptiness without beginning or end,

natural emptiness,

emptiness of all things,

marked emptiness,

unmarked emptiness,

emptiness of existence,

emptiness of non-existence,

emptiness of self-existence,

emptiness of the self-existence of existence,

and emptiness of other-existence.

 

Krazy Kat: The Finnegans Wake of Comic Strips

 The strange portmanteau patois and punny, creative spelling in Krazy Kat sometimes seems as impenetrable as Finnegans Wake, which is probably a coincidence of two geniuses working in similar territory. It is possible that Joyce read Krazy Kat at Gertrude Stein's house.  FW was published as a book four years after this strip came out, although Herriman could have read early drafts published as “Work in Progress.”

 Instead of telling, I will show you, but you have to stick with me.

Let's decode Krazy Kat for July 25, 1936 Sunday page.

This one has many classical references as well as details about famous performers from nineteenth century entertainment and theatre. So, knowing a little about both areas I had a leg up. I also actually read Finnegans Wake in a Sacramento group and in a seminar with Hazard Adams at UW, so when I make comparisons, remember they are at least credible.

The Wake is the dream of the patriarch HCE, this the dream of the similarly clueless Offisa’ Pup.

 

Following the comic is a gloss like the ones for Finnegans Wake.

 Skeleton Key to Offisa Pup’s Dream

“Regular, the romin - insulting the kottage injins”

The start of this extract begins with a reference to Marcus Atilius Regulus, the Roman who defeated the Carthaginians in a naval battle at Cape Ecnomus during the first Punic War.

“Hoikillitz tossin the big bed bull”

The seventh labour of Hercules, wrestling the Cretan Bull.

“Etlitz jugglin' a lot of woils”

Would be Atlas juggling a lot of worlds. Atlas was a Titan condemned to hold up the heavens, but is also credited by some sources with the creation of the first celestial sphere. A celestial sphere in this context maps the constellations on the outside of a sphere, resulting in a mirror image of the constellations as seen from Earth. This is the object that Atlas is typically depicted holding, not a globe of the earth. Hence he is juggling the many worlds of the celestial bodies.

“Ajex knoggin' the lightnin' around”

This appears to refer to:

Ajax of Oileus (after his father, Oileus), or Ajax the Lesser, because he was not the equal of the Telamonian Ajax In the sack of Troy. This is the Ajax who violated Cassandra at the altar of Athena, and Athena caused him to be shipwrecked on the way home. Poseidon saved him, but Ajax, boasting of his own power, defied the lightning to strike him down and was instantly struck by it. Other versions of the story say that he stole the Palladium and that later Poseidon destroyed him for blasphemy. "

It actually seems that most versions of the tale I can find don’t talk about him being killed by lightning. The phrase ‘Ajax defied the lightning’ seems to have had great currency at one time, but I’ve not identified a source, though it was used by PG Wodehouse in Summer Lightning. The earliest use of the phrase I can find is in a book from 1845 ‘Will Watch: The Bold Smuggler: A Tale of the Coast : the Narrative Founded on Fact, and Characters Drawn from Life. Where it is linked to Ajax, son of Telamon rather than Ajax, son of Oileus:

“When Ajax, the son of Telamon, whom Homer sometimes “likeneth unto a ass,” and you, good reader, have, without a doubt, seen worthily represented by the merry Andrew Ducrow, in his Hippodramatic exhibition at the foot of Westminster bridge, on the Surrey shore of the River Thames – we say, when Ajax defied the lightning, he would never have been such a fool had he known anything about he principles of electricity; for he would have then known that the lightning, properly treated, was a harmless well-conducted body enough.’ “

“Horachel”

may be a reference to Horatius Cocles who

defended the Pons Sublicius from the invading army of Etruscan King Lars Porsena of Clusium in the late 6th century BC, during the war between Rome and Clusium, as immortalised in the narrative poem 'Horatius at the Bridge' Some sources also note that the nickname 'Cocles' indicates a one-eyed man, or cyclops.

“Cyklops destroyin' the tutty-nine dumb dimmins

I’d guess that ‘dimmins’ are demons, this is supported by a paper by Dr Taimi Olsen in 2008 where they state:

“Krazy, acting like Jack Dempsey, falls into the role of a street-smart guy and uses boxing slang (“K.O.” for knock-out) and casual Northern speech (‘regla” for “regular” and “golla” for “golly”)—and an immigrant reference (“knock it for a goulash”). He (she is not very feminine in this cartoon!) brags that he is a battling demon or “bettling dimmin.”

I remain in the dark as to the significance of there being 39 of them, or any particular tale of Roman Mythology that relates demons to cyclopes.

I suspect that it may be related to Polyphemus; Odysseus fools him with the aid of strong wine, hence Pupp's response 'Skol', a toast. However that still doesn't get us to 39 demons.

In Roman mythology the cyclopes forge Jupiter's thunderbolts.

“Jupita darin' the tunda bolds”

Jupiter was obviously the God of Thunder. ‘Daring the thunderbolts’ I would read as his having (per the OED) the ‘boldness or courage’ [to hurl] his thunderbolts.

However, looking at the letter substitutions employed in Krazy Kat's speech, it may be that we aren't looking at 'daring' at all. Looking within the same sentence, we have the word 'bolds' for 'bolts'. Substituting 't' for 'd' in 'darin' gives us 'tarin' which could, in Krazy Kat's idiolect represent 'tearing', which is a recognised description of one of the sounds that thunder makes. 

OMG! Just like in Finnegans Wake ( which was published  four years after this comic) a thunderword!

Energy from a lightning channel heats the air to around 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the air to rapidly expand, creating a sound wave known as thunder. The stepped leader causes the initial tearing sound

A snapping or tearing sound before the main thunder is caused by a failed leader, a streamer of positive charge going up from the ground.

So we could be expected to understand 'Jupiter tearing the thunderbolts', but I'm not 100% convinced by this argument myself.

Nobil - movillis - killosis

Taking some hints from this book Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form which invites us into a

"mental recitation of these often mystifying spellings in order to hear what actual words stand behind the wretched phonics of “movillis -stipenditz-killotzil”...’

which I eventually decoded as ‘marvellous -stupendous -colossal”, suggesting that the phrase would be ‘noble - marvellous-colossus’.

---

So. That quote back in the Ajax section, which rumbled on with a dozen of more commas and didn't seem to add a great deal? It turns out that that was the key to unlocking this whole list of allusions and why Krazy Kat is calling them out as they do.

Merry old Andrew Ducrow performed an act called ‘The Living Statue or Model of Antiques’ during which he assumed‘various poses including several that imitated Hercules battling the Nemean Lion’(Wyke 1997b:53-54) This knowledge leads us to a body-builder named Eugene Sandow!

Sandow’s act did not consist of any marvels of strength. Instead, covered in plaster dust, he struck a number of poses in imitation of classical statuary. A number of famous works such as the “Dying Gaul” were evoked, but the most famous imitation, and the one that became his trademark, was his imitation of the Farnese Hercules. His identification with the hero became so strong that in May 1894 he even reprised Hercules’ first labor and wrestled a lion in San Francisco, admittedly a lion muzzled and wearing leather mittens!! (Blanshard 2005:151-156).’

Sandow became a huge sensation! We studied him in Vaudeville seminar!

Photographs of him striking his various poses circulated widely. He even appeared in primitive film. In 1894, he visited Thomas Edison in his studio in New jersey and a short kinetoscope film of Sandow flexing was produced for distribution in ‘Kinetoscopic Parlors’ throughout the country. This was the first time that Hercules became a mass media phenomenon.

Sandow inspired numerous imitators and it was not long before there were dozens of young Herculeses snapping at the heels of Sandow and wanting to steal his lion-skin mantle. This was a world-wide phenomenon. Originally from Germany, Sandow had devoted followers in Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia and the United States. The fashion for displays of muscular poses in imitation of statuary proved to be so popular that in September 1901 in the Royal Albert Hall the world’s first body-building competition was staged.’

The popularity of “antiquity” in the theatrical, literary and educational worlds of the nineteenth century extended even to exhibitions of strength and horsemanship. The strongmen who performed in the nineteenth century were referred to as “Kings of Force” and were often provided with stage names such as Hercules, Romulus, Remus or Cyclops. They carried the classicizing attributes of animal skins and a club or were set in some form of classical scenario such as a “Roman” spectacle, replete with lions, elephants and gladiators. Equestrian programs incorporated circus artists with well developed physiques who rode around the ring in skintight fleshings and posed on horseback in attitudes drawn from classical or pseudoclassical statuary. Criers gave each pose a title, such as “Ajax Defying the Lightining” or “The Fighting and Dying Gladiator”

Therefore I propose the theory that Krazy Kat is not just making educated classical allusions as he identifies these figures from antiquity, he is playing the role of ‘Crier’ as though the ongoing fight is a series of strongman poses as put on by performers such as Ducrow and Sandow.

Given that this takes place in Officer Pupp's dream, it presumably indicates Pupp's desire to be seen as a perfect masculine specimen by Krazy Kat.

As a final thought, Officer Pupp's responses to Krazy Kat's identification of poses do seem to be related to the classical allusions, though I can't quite pin them all down. Quince has been identified as being the Golden Apples that Hercules had to steal in his eleventh Labour, Skol is a toast which may tie to a drunken Polyphemus and "cave cannam," ( canem-beware of the dog) may be a reference to Atlas' daughter, Maera, who was the nymph of the Dog Star. "Shis Kebbab" highlights the skewering of the challengers from the Etruscan army by Horatius and his two sidekicks.

 More soon on Krazy Kat and George Herriman.

 

Longfellow's Italian Chops- or America's first translator of Dante- the whole Comedy!

    I have been waiting for someone to ask me about translations of Dante.  I have been reading Dante in the dual language edition by John D. Sinclair. Sinclair's PROSE translation is more of a scholarly crib, but there is a great poetic translation by an American Italian professor that is in the Public Domain:

H. W. Longfellow succeeded in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s lines with a close, sometimes awkwardly literal translation that allows the Tuscan to shine through the English, as though this “foreign” veneer were merely a protective layer added over the still-visible source.

The critic Walter Benjamin wrote that a great translation calls our attention to a work’s original language even when we don’t speak that foreign tongue. Such extreme faithfulness can make the language of the translation feel unnatural—as though the source were shaping the translation into its own alien image. Longfellow’s English indeed comes across as Italianate: in surrendering to the letter and spirit of Dante’s Tuscan, he loses the quirks and perks of his mother tongue. For example, he translates Dante’s beautifully compact Paradiso 2.7

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;

with an equally concise and evocative

The sea I sail has never yet been passed:

Emulating Dante’s talent for internal rhymes laced with hypnotic sonic patterns, Longfellow expertly repeats the s’s to give his line a sinuous, propulsive feel, which is exactly what Dante aims for in his line, as he gestures toward the originality and joy of embarking on the final leg of a divinely sanctioned journey. Thus, Longfellow demonstrates the scholarly chops necessary to convey Dante’s encyclopedic learning, and the poetic talent needed to reproduce the sound and spirit—the respiro, breath—of the original Tuscan.

But Longfellow’s English can sound “flowery” to our contemporary ears. And it’s hard enough to read Dante without throwing in the additional challenge of 19th-century poetic diction.

But still, it remains one of the greatest feats of poetic translation in English.

JAZZ IS MY RELIGION

            I think I can honestly say that learning to play jazz piano saved my life.  In my deepest depressions, Jazz gave me something bigger than myself to hold onto. One of the positive things I think religion gives some people is a feeling of humble gratitude that helps them keep going when everything else in life turns to shit. This is how I feel about Jazz after many years of being more to less deeply involved in studying it and playing it. But I suppose the way in which jazz is most like a religion for me is in the certainty and sense of purpose it gives. I am certain that it is a good thing to learn another Ellington or Monk composition, as I imagine some Christians seem certain about praying or reading the Bible. When in doubt about what to do, I know that studying jazz and practicing to play it are things worth doing.

    While one could claim that deity-oriented religions are obviously doing a lot better than Jazz at surviving, it seems obvious to me that all music can make a greater contribution to human survival and well-being than the accumulative effect of most religions, which survive partly through psychic intimidation, such as the threat of eternal damnation. This brings me to a major difference between religion and devotion to Jazz. While religious dogma is often harmful to both believers and persecuted non-believers, Jazz dogma is only harmful to jazz musicians. The music can’t hurt you, but struggling to play it can. If you don’t know the blues when you start, you know them soon enough.

    While it has brought great joy into my life, Jazz also asks for sacrifice. Like being a monk or a missionary, being a jazz musician is not very lucrative, and even those musicians who make a living at it spent many years not making a living at it. Even very good jazz musicians become so frustrated that they “lose faith” get day jobs and at least temporarily become bitter about the struggle. But jazz has always drawn me back, much to the dismay of certain people who thought my career as a writer or scholar was sacrificed to almighty Jazz.

     Now for some testifying. In 1976 I was 19 and going through my “beat” period, writing poetry, reading William S. Burroughs and Kerouac novels, hanging out with jazz musicians and trying to learn to play piano.  Sensing that I needed a journey of some kind on which to contemplate my future, I took a Greyhound bus across the country. Looking back on it now I realize the idea and the energy to do such a thing coincided with a hypomanic episode I didn’t know I was having.  It was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Walden Pond but it included my first trip to New York City and Boston.            

    One of my most vivid memories from that journey took place somewhere in the Harvard/Cambridge area on a Sunday afternoon.  I must have come down hard from the hypomania and was falling into another un-comprehended depression. I was down and almost broke abut still social enough to feel lonely so I went to a place where a local jazz group was playing.  As soon as I heard them joyously launch into Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone” I was lifted up, out of my loneliness, out of my anxiety and depression. They were not overtly technical musicians, but they meant what they played, and they were swinging mightily. The 50-something black man playing tenor saxophone winked at my 19 year old white suburban self as if he knew that I knew what he had been “talking about” in his solo. Musicians can always spot other musicians in the audience. They listen closer when you play the good stuff.

    Sitting there in historic Boston, in our bicentennial year, contemplating how the music I most loved had the stain of slavery on it, I had an epiphany. Jazz came from the very people America enslaved. The least I could do was learn how to play this music, this gift freely given by the most wronged Americans. This was not a conversion experience. I had already been converted to Jazz and was still in that sophomoric phase of jazz snobbery in which I actively made fun of pop music. But that Sunday at the jam session when I was far from home,  I was developing a kind of faith, a faith that learning to play Jazz was worth living for. It didn’t matter if I became famous or at the top of the field or successful financially at it, I just wanted to get good enough someday to sit in with those guys in that bar in Boston. I was in church that Sunday, not because a great jazz musician was playing, but precisely because it was just an afternoon jam session of local players. 

     In all the jazz writing I have read, both criticism and history, there is little mention of the fact that the majority of jazz activity that goes on is not professional. Though we can only put rough numbers to this local jazz scene, we can be sure that in bulk it vastly outweighs the big-time arena in any terms: number of players, number of gigs played, and even number of audience members if we count school programs and the total number of local fans attending across the country. Ultimately, jazz is alive because of this local scene and not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This is my church, and it is a much more diverse community than most congregations.

From the musicians I met early on in my own local jazz community I somehow got the idea that not only should a player strive for technique and knowledge, but to develop a voice, to play “like yourself,” which really means that improvising within this paradoxical “tradition of innovation” is a way of finding yourself. Playing like yourself means being musically honest, a transcendent Mecca that you face toward every time you play.  In this sense, it is like prayer. It becomes like meditation when you are free of intruding thoughts and are playing and listening to everyone else’s playing in present time. Those “being in the flow” moments don’t happen that often to most players. It is a kind of ecstatic state that you want to return to, and you can’t find it by playing the same thing you played when you experienced it before. Most musicians will tell you that after a good improvisation they don’t really remember what they played. It is not what they played that leads back to that transcendent state; the only way back is forward, trying to have ideas and be musical in present time with as little conscious deliberation as one has when carrying on a conversation with a close friend, or testifying in your own church.

I am not sure that my appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement, a release of good neurotransmitters and invaluable friendships. In giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as an undiagnosed Bipolar II person. As such, jazz saved my life. Broke and lonely at the end of a hypomanic trip across the country with almost no sleep for days, I might have fallen into an abyss of depression that I could not crawl out of. Instead, I had something larger than myself to live for, and while my faith in Jazz has wavered over the decades since, I have never forgotten where my church is and I have always returned.

And I got better than “good enough” to play with those guys in that bar in Boston on a Sunday afternoon in 1976. I even play like myself at times.