August 13ths

8/13/1998            

East-End Art Fair at noon. Mostly a yawn except series of blue paintings by African artist. Said he did them because people were asking for blue paintings. They were sort of ironic because they depicted festive African scenes and the blue tint made them look more moody. 

Songday riff with a brass treatment:

8/13/2016

We hate ear worms, but they constitute the “encyclopedia of similarity” that we use to make comparisons. How often is our first response to something new “It reminds me of...”            

Somehow I got infected by an ear worm of Turning Japanese by The Vapors the other day out of nowhere. Then later on there was a song playing in a store that sounded just like it.

8/13/2018

Time spent practicing doesn’t necessarily equate with artistic merit. Most rock musicians throughout history only spent enough time to be as good as the musicians they admired, and some went beyond that and became cultural icons. What’s missing now might be soul, and a spiritual feeling in the music. You can’t practice that—you have to develop an inner life first.    

I think jazz is a music that is made better the more it is practiced and studied. Musicians who had an interest in jazz, or dabbled in it, usually became better musicians, as its roots are deeper. Classical influences have a similar effect. How often have we heard the superlative, “She was classically trained…”? Knowing how to read, how to play some piano, are all good things that take time. But I don’t see that people are doing it these days, at least not to the degree that we did in the 70s and 80s.