November 7ths

11/7/1914

Wittgenstein longing for the company of a decent person because "here I am surrounded by indecency".

 

11/7/1978

(Keith Haring Journals)

"Everything in this notebook is subject to change. When I re-read an idea two or three days later, sometimes (usually) I have a more defined, altered, or more simple version of the original idea, or a new interpretation of the idea, or a totally new idea that develops as a result of the first one. This book contains thoughts that are spontaneous. Every day I think differently, re-evaluate old ideas, and express my ideas in different terms."

[11/7/2024: This is exactly how I’m working on the Songdays: I quickly capture a riff idea emerging from the rhythms of language, but after that, everything is subject to change. The text and the music is still “wet”].

11/7/2007
            
Went to a lecture by environmental/industrial photographer Edward Burtynsky. He spent months in China taking large-format shots of coal mines, Three Gorges Dam, huge factories, etc., and documented what is happening in China now. His images are huge and disturbing and give the viewer a sense of urgency about the looming environmental debacle in progress there. He said the Chinese are actually doing more to build sustainable cities because they realize the catastrophic implications.

This work is not purely documentary, but cameras just do this very well naturally, without having to categorize it as such. Unlike painting which reworks reality over long periods, the camera gets it in a few seconds. The difference with Burtynsky is that the work is engineered as architecture, with research, planning, and construction done from the blueprint of an idea.

11/7/2011            

The Napster phenomenon essentially smashed the music industry—and all the aspirations and dreams that kept the idea alive. 

[11/7/2025: Everything in modern life has gradually eroded since 1999, just when the oldest Millennials were my age when I first started playing music in 1977. And now those people are in their mid-40s. It boggles the mind on how trashed our world is, but that’s modernity, and we take the bad with the good. I still love music for the benefit of my mind and soul. So that’s what the Millennials will have to find at some point. I wonder what that is? They know better than I do. It was whatever they’re nostalgic for from 1988, 1997, 2008…Our nostalgias are different: I’m not particularly nostalgic for 2008 or after]. 

11/7/2022

My Dad seldom talked about the war. That’s because it was a traumatic memory, even though he wasn’t in battle. 

[My father in Masstricht in 1944. Remember we were fighting fascism then?]

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/7/2021 
            
Watched a performance of Pat Martino who just died last week. It was a duet with a piano player on a standard. A friend commented that he didn’t think that it was substantive—he was just playing scales and it didn’t seem to have any form at all. I made the counterargument that younger metal players just play fast arpeggios. It’s not compositional. But he argued that it is compositional and improvisation in the sense that it looks like it’s improvisation. That kind of playing is almost scored. It’s practiced over and over again. It’s essentially a cadenza. Cadenzas don’t exist in jazz but they do in pop, rock, and metal. Both styles have their roots in classical, but different roots.
            
[11/7/2024: When we say something or someone has “roots” we tend to think it’s just a few branches, but roots are huge entangled networks. They are ‘fungible” in the sense that you can’t separate one root from another. One or two roots might be from the classical tree, a few others from the jazz tree, but they still look like any old root.] 

11/7/2024

11/7/2025

I am a terrible neo-classicist. You can't do a "neo" well if the place you came from never really had any substance. I was always somewhat of a classical music carpet-bagger. I'm a died-in-the-wool progger or jazz-fusionist who practiced Bach Cello Suites for a bit, then wrote a few string quartets that a 4 year-old could write in the 19th century. 

*** 

A good drummer can be irreplaceable if their way of playing makes the music unique in some way. Drum machines never really replaced drummers in the 80s per se because they were simply another option—or “convenience” for simple beats that would bore a drummer—and then the drummer would be freed up to play another instrument. AI is yet another option for such conveniences.

Perhaps people are afraid to use AI because they haven’t found a way to reconcile the whole “man-machine” phenomenon that started in the late 70s with Kraftwerk, yet was quickly embraced as a viable way to make pop music. The bigger issue now is the that entire bands are replaceable. What can’t be replaced is the drummer, or any musician, who can play in the moment with a unique style—which is what jazz drummers excel at. 

Audio Summary (Podcast)