Who needs a reason?

I was asked why I like/love music (the question was asked in Spanish, so the difference between a simple affection and something more is a bit obscure). I didn't know how to respond and tentatively said "I don't know".

I realized that I never sat down and weighed the pros and cons of music. I've never thought that such and such are really awesome about music, and thats why I like it. It never occurred to me that I needed to rationalize my love for music music. I have had a completely irrational affection for music, and I never knew it. Startling.

The questioner said she was sad for me. I wondered why it was so bad to love something without needing to justify why you love it. Isn't irrational love the most true form of love? Personal gain is necessarily neglected because you don't care why something is good or bad. To be selfish you need to know what something can do for you.

In somewhat of a crude example, I explained to one of my friends, "If the perfect girl, the coolest chick you ever saw, walked by, you wouldn't need to rationalize why you would do anything for her." You wouldn't have a checklist of 40 yes or no questions that determined perfection. She just would be perfect.

And music is the same way? You hear it, instantly arrive at the conclusion of perfection and love it?

Inconsequently, you would later learn that she wasn't perfect, and in the true high school style would fall into a loving dismay of her where your knowledge of her every fault would be impeccable, which oddly comes out of a confused type of love of her in which you meditate on her every apparent weakness. But maybe that isn't so tangential. Is music perfect? Classical music clearly reveals that there is always a better playing possible. Listen to this crecendo (0:30 and after especially). I always want more here. No orchestra could have enough instruments in it or play loud enough to deliver a sufficiently huge wall of sound. And if they could play loud enough, they wouldn't be soft enough. It will never be perfect.

But how foolish does this sound in the context of logic? If man only has two natures, the senses and the intellect, and you disregard the intellect, you love something with only half of your ability. Music can be the most pleasing thing to your ears, eyes, ext. but that makes you no better than an animal. The intellect is what makes man better than the animal, right? But I have to think that my love for music is a bit higher love than a dog's love of food.

Maybe I will come upon a proper explanation of my (ir)rational love of music one day. I set out to find out why I love music, and was going to make a big list of why I do, but I can't. Everything is jumbled in my mind. Nothing is coherent in my mind, which is probably apparent in the disheveled form of this post. I'm like a half-witted Aquinas. I can come up with great contrasting arguments, but I'm not logical enough to deliver the whole package.


So that is a long way of saying, "Yes, I have no idea why I love music, and I am content in that." No se porque me gusta la musica, pero no me importa.

Popular Name?

Music in Minneapolis is at it's best this week.

You could have caught the lovely Sophie Milman @ The Dakota. Sadly I missed it. I have been waiting for a while to go to one of her shows and ask her if she knows how to write out a chart. And when she says "yes" I will ask her to marry me. Seriously. And she sings! (Proof #1, #2, #3 and #4). And she has to be smart... continuing the trend of being perfect.

Friday - Dosh @ The Triple Rock Social Club
or The Good, The Bad, and The Funky @ Famous Dave's in Calhoun Square

Saturday - Michael Quinn and The Burbon Kings @ The Shamrock Bar
or Nachito Herrera @ The Dakota

Sunday - Big Bad Voodo Daddy @ Orchestra Hall

Thursday - Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto @ Orchestra Hall

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I loved the St. Catherine line in the lyrics until I did some research and realized I was ignorant of the other 4 Saint Catherines.

Examination by Evening's light (but not as happy as that Stella song)

In order to have a general platform to start with, I believe these lyrics are about your purpose in the world. The author of the lyrics serves as a moral conscience, leading the subject away from a life of material "happiness" and into a world of true happiness. In the author's mind you can't be happy with a huge house, a nice car, a good job, all the respect in the world and all the money you could never spend. I think the Ivan Ilyich character in Tolstoy's novel serves as a great representation of what the author is steering the subject away from.


"Listen up lovely / hear what the evening sees in you / lilacs and land mines"

"Hear what the evening sees in you". Firstly, sight is absolutely essential to a life of material goods. How can you possibly choose the most beautiful house if you cannot see? And how could you possibly envy your neighbor's more beautiful house if you could not see? Knowledge, love of God, love of neighbor... all of those things don't require sight. The author doesn't ask that "lovely" look, see, watch... no. He asks her to listen. Secondly, humans cannot see in the evening. So "evening" must be something extra-human. By asking "lovely" to listen the author is asking her to take a step back from material life and to listen to a different world, a divine world.

You will never see God while you are on earth. You can have faith in him, knowledge of him, and love him, but you will never see him. You have to listen to him, and abandon your sight. "Listen up lovely / hear what the evening sees in you". How wonderful would it be to hear something that no human could ever tell you? But you have to listen, not see because you can't see the evening. And to listen you have to step back from your material life.

And of course what does the evening see? It sees lilacs and land mines. You will notice picture of each. One is beautiful and one is not. With the obvious out of the way: everybody is a bit evil and a bit lovely. The moment you think that you are not evil God will convince you that you are in fact evil, just as Evening tells Lovely that it sees land mines in her. A land mine is latent evil that hasn't yet exposed itself, but it will one day unless great effort is taken to destroy it. Sin is the same way. Temptation will always be latent in your soul unless you undergo great efforts to destroy every trace of sin left in you. So Evening sees both love of God and sin in Lovely.

There is more to the "lilacs and land mines" line. Think of a seed. You plant it in the ground, and it disappears, and a beautiful flower sprouts. The seed is no longer there, but the flower produces more seeds. That first seed dies so that other seeds can live. Lilacs are also associated with the color purple, which is a color or royalty. The lilac then embodies a royal self-sacrifice, and out of this comes beauty and life. Just like Jesus. He royally sacrificed himself, and out of it comes the forgiveness of sin (i.e. evil), and a world without evil is inherently beautiful and lively.

The land mine conjures up different ideas. You plant it in the ground just like you do a seed, but you put it in the ground in a sneaky, underhanded way. There is no hope of more life coming from this type of seed. The only thing born from a land mine is further strife. All human life around it dies. Sounds like John 1:7: "but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin [evil]."


More to come.

"Call It Clear" Lyrics

There was a day when I was a depressed youth going through a crisis that brought about maturity, and one of the great things about that crisis was that I discovered how awesome music was and discarded a life in favor of music. And one of the things I was especially attracted to at the time was lyrics. I have since started listening to jazz bands more than rock bands. Jazz lyrics are amazing, as are rock lyrics. The following lyrics are from a "rock" band I came to through David King's connection to jazz; Halloween, Alaska is a rock band consisting (during this album) of James Diers, Ev Olcott, Matt Friesen and David King. The lyrics are as follows:

Listen up lovely
And hear what the evening sees in you
Lilacs and landmines

You count on your fingers
Pitches you ought to be and soon
Just let them call you

Why do you think you're here?

Trouble the backseat
Worry the windshield with that face
What couldn't you have?

Head of St. Catherine
Hearts that will run to meet you
Were only volunteers my dear

Why do you think we're here?
Is that why the call it clear?

I reckon I'd say some sometimes
My delicate slip of sunshine
You can die
If you decide

I will put my interpretation of these lyrics into several posts over the next few days.

Christian Theology

Jazz culture is a secular place, which is unfortunate. America is a secular place. I'm not smart enough to figure out what America's problems are, but this man is. Think about this:

And yet St. Augustine's saying is so clearly true, that 'material goods, unlike those of the spirit, cannot belong wholly and simultaneously to more than one person.' The same house, the same land, cannot belong completely to several people at once, nor the same territory to several nations. And herein lies the reason of that unhappy conflict of interests which arises from the feverish quest of these earthly possessions.

On the other hand, as St. Augustine often reminds us, the same spiritual treasure can belong in its entirety to all men, and at the same time to each, without any disturbance of peace between them. Indeed, the more there are to enjoy them in common the more completely do we possess them. The same truth, the same virtue, the same God, can belong to us all in like manner, and yet none of us embarrasses his fellow-possessors. Such are the inexhaustible riches of the spirit that they can be the property of all and yet satisfy the desires of each. Indeed, only then do we possess a truth completely when we teach it to others, when we make others share our contemplation; only then do we truly love a virtue when we wish others to love it also; only then do we wholly love God when we desire to make Him loved by all. Give money away, or spend it, and it is no longer yours. But give God to others, and you possess Him more fully for yourself...

This truth, so simple and yet so sublime, gives rise to an illuminating principle: it is whereas material goods, the more they are sought for their own sake, tend to cause disunion among men, spiritual goods unite men more closely in proportion as they are more greatly loved. This principle helps us to appreciate how necessary is the interior life; and incidentally it virtually contains the solution of the social question and of the economic crisis which afflicts the world today [1938]...

The profoundest truths of all, and the most vital, are in fact those elementary verities which, through long meditation and deep thought, have become the norm of our lives; those truths, in other words, which are the object of our habitual contemplation.

God is now showing men what a great mistake they make when they try to do without Him, when they regard earthly enjoyment as their highest good, and thus reverse the whole scale of values, or, as the ancient philosophers put it, the subordination of ends. As though in the hope of compensating for the poor quality of earthly goods, men are striving to increase their quantity; they are trying to produce as much as possible in the order of material enjoyment. They are constructing machinery with the object of increasing production at a greater profit. This is the ultimate objective. But what is the consequence? The surplus cannot be disposed of; it is wasted, and unemployment is the result. The worker starves in enforced idleness while others die of surfeit. The present state of the world is called a crisis. But in fact it is more than a crisis; it is a condition of affairs which, if men only had eyes to see, ought to be revealing; it ought to show men that they have sought their last end where it is not to be found, in earthly enjoyment - instead of God. They are seeking happiness in an abundance of material possessions which are incapable of giving it; possessions which sow discord among those that seek them, and a greater discord according as they are sought with greater avidity.

Do what you will with these material goods: share them out equally, make them the common property of all. It will be no remedy for the evil; for, so long as earthly possessions retain their nature and man retains the nature which is his, he will never find his happiness in them.

"The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life (Formerly: The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life" by Fr. Reginald Gerrigou-Lagrange

He says that God is now showing us the mistake that seeking fulfillment in material goods causes. This is not a radical Christian's concept. Read Euripides plays (prior to Christianity). In "The Bacchae" a mother ends up killing her son, leaves the country, and the grandfather of the family and his wife end up as snakes, all for not honoring Dionysus. Oddly enough that family sought fulfillment in, you guessed it, in fame, fortune and material goods.

Highschool Story #1

I was goofing around with hokey blues patterns today when I suddenly remembered a school dance I attended sophomore year. Dances were a sort of mandatory social acceptance ritual. I would have spent my Saturday doing something different, but while I had no problem being a bit different, I didn't want to be rejected by all of me peers.

I was asked to assemble a band to play in the entrance way, as a sort of warm up band for the swing band that would play the whole dance. I said yes, and ended up playing for about 5 kids. I suppose having an instrument in your mouth is productive whatever you are doing.

We played "Autumn Leaves" in a trio setting: sax, piano and drums. The drum set had heads that were taped together, and I think the cymbals were pieces of sheet metal discarded in a scrap yard. The piano was the only piano the school would let us use: the only piano they didn't care if it was destroyed. But it worked for the trio, so who cared what anyone else thought about how our set up looked.

We played, were told to shut up and went downstairs and danced. The swing band was captivating. I didn't dance much that evening, but rather stood in aw, watching every move the musicians made. I was interested in how they could still fool around with advanced harmony and keep people dancing. I thought the 7b9 made you sound like late Coltrane, and the most you could get away with for people to dance was a bebop scale. I learned I was wrong. This probably further diluted my mind into thinking avant guard jazz sounded better to the general public than it does: story #2 to come soon.

While I wasn't watching the band I was talking to the other two musicians in the trio. Still having a drum set and piano set up practically demanded that we play for a bit. So as the rest of the school is dancing, us 3 nerds (and I use that term with great admiration) are thinking "what should we play?" We decided on a blues (none of us had yet to learn enough songs to all know a standard from memory). The drummer (who actually is a bass player) suggested a lick to base the blues around; one that the students might be able to relate to, maybe. "Oh yeah" I said, and my elementary ears said "that's just a minor 7 chord with the major 6 stuck in isn't it?". "No no, it is a major 7 chord" I was told. And the better half of the dance I spent thinking "is that major or minor? Summertime is a descending major third... so acceding major third sounds like this....."

I soon yielded to the bass player, who has much better ears than I ever will. A teacher brought down his trombone from his class room, and soon we were jamming. The professional band was packing up and leaving, and noted our playing. The school exited, oblivious to what was happening so loudly right in front of them. They probably had bigger things on their mind, like how hot so and so was in her dress, or why so and so didn't dance with them. Par for the course in high school.

But us three musicians rejected that mold, then, and many times in high school. For me the motto "music, not maidens", which was so expertly coined by my dad (all be it I think there was a bit of a mocking, disappointed tone to the phrase) rang in my head. For others a complete rejection of popular culture yielded religious gains (devout catholicism was not foreign to our school, unlike so many other schools). Either way the trio rejected popular culture that night.

If ever there was any doubt that jazz musicians are a bit different from the rest of their peers, Michael Lewis, an underrated saxophonist, once said "when you devote your life to one thing, you are bound to be a bit weird."

High School Kids

It is amazing what high school kids can do.



One of my major problems with the exulted child prodigy is that many times they cannot play with any emotion. They can whip through a Chopin Etude, but they couldn't make the first movement of Beethoven's C# Sonata interesting to save their life (or for that matter the other two movements, or for that matter, the Chopin Etude). And at age 6 you are amazed their hands can manage that octave, but when they grow up and play in that chunky style, you are naive to not recognize their playing for what it is.

The choir captivates me. Pitch, dynamics, phrasing. All spot on. Wish it was a better recording.

My Girlfriends Ex-Boy Friend

Musicians are assholes

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Reply to: comm-527602065@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-01-03, 5:10PM PST


Ya you heard me right!!!! . My girl left me for a dam drummer today, and he is ugly. she met him at a bar that he played at last night . he is just going to use her like you all do and then dump her with a STD. I have a real job , a nice car and I am romantic, and a very nice guy with a real job So I just want you all to know that I am going to spread the word about you Musicians. SO take your drum sticks and guitar picks and put them in your ASS

• Location: HELL
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 527602065

Self-Applause

I was in the lobby of the Mexican hotel playing cards one night, when another guest brought his guitar down to join a group of 5 or 6 others. The unmusical lobby looked with disgust wondering why somebody would pollute the noise of their lobby with music. "You could never do that in America. How inconciderate!"

I appreciated the music. A quiet guitar accompanied the Spanish song. Walking the streets of Mexico you can come upon renegade musicians who, no lie, strum one chord and sing a song. Punk rock has more interesting chord changes. But these guys were a different bunch. They had sat around and sang songs like this before. They might have been business partners, commonly staying in the same hotel for a few nights.

The songs were sung in Spanish, and of the 4 songs I heard, the lyrics all dealt with love. When they finished the song, the group members who didn't sing the song would clap, and those who did would exchange a "nice job" and soon another song started.

It resembled the "jam session" so familiar to the jazz life. It was impromptu, there was no sheet music because they all knew the songs, and they played purely for their own enjoyment. If somebody else liked it, all the better. And at the end of the song they had that feeling of "yeah" that comes after a good song.

While I was sitting enjoying the music one of my companions chuckled saying "you know your not good when you have to applaud your own music". I felt disgusted immediately, but then it all became apparent to me, and I responded "sometimes you have to applaud your own music".

Recognize it, jazz musicians?