Assorted thoughts on art and music

More about Ducky. I pull up on my bike to my old co-op and Ducky is there! She sees me and puts her snout under the gate, barking and whimpering in excitement. Two pedestrians are concerned, and then they see that I know the dog, and they say, “oh it’s your dog! that’s why!” Ducky and I hang out in the porch, and then I say, “walk?” and she bounds in excitement to the front door, ready to harness-up and go on another adventure.
Playing instruments.
- The hardest part of playing the saxophone is invisible to most observers. The breath, the enlarging of the throat, and the curvedness of the tongue all serve to create a fuller, warmer, richer sound, which is different for each note and turn in phrase. In playing saxophone, I feel connected to the sound in a particular way, because of the feeling of being part of the pipe itself, in a way that I can hear my body vibrate along with the instrument.
- In hearing the plucking of guitar strings – in particular, the moments between chords – you can hear the fingers slide around the strings, and hear the notes softly bend into harmony. Sometimes I pluck the open string of my guitar and put my ear close to the hollow opening and listen till the sound melts into the air around me.
Leon and I were recently driving back from a friend’s place and in the car decided re-listened to the jazz album we recorded together in Taiwan. The album was the perfect length to take us from downtown San Francisco up over the Golden Gate Bridge, then across the Richmond Bridge, and then back to Berkeley. There are many instructive things about listening to a recording: you notice your weak spots (like reading through old writing), but also the moments that really stand out (like a knock out sentence). On Leon’s solo in The Days of Wine and Roses I cranked up the volume and he said sheepishly, “why did it suddenly get so loud!” The album, beautifully, is like a frozen moment in time. In listening to it, I recalled that marathon day (a Sunday in May 2023) when we recorded it, and the numerous Saturday morning jams that went before; and the jubilant moment after, when the four of us and Vincent, our producer, sat in a studio and listened to all the recordings with surround sound (and for the first time, I saw Etienne and Noe speak French). When I hear the music we made, it’s like listening to an old friend’s voice on the phone and remembering times from long ago.
How do I improvise? Ben Goldberg, my college jazz professor, said something about shapes that made it click for me. Before, I would play noodly solos, runs of scales and arpeggios without any form or structure. Ben said to first take an idea, like a two or three note motif, then play with it. Play it again, play it faster, slow, upside-down, shift it around the register. Take another idea, and mix them together. In this way, you are really “playing” music. Somehow this concept really clicked for me specifically in class when we listened to this recording of Limehouse Blues with Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. In the words of Ben, “some downbeats last a lifetime.”

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