Conversation with a Jazz Guitarist about the Pursuit of Knowledge

David: what i'm trying to say is that I love your guitar playing

Lester: it needs work

David: play

Lester: yeah yeah everyday sight reading!

David: don't sacrifice your innocence at school. That's a goddamn command do all that stuff. but know that you already GOT IT. Improvement is a by product of giving up LOL

Lester: i don't have shit until im im legit

David: lol

Lester: nice

David: I 'm serious though accept the possibility that all your teachers and mentors know nothing

Lester: I know. Sight reading is where its at thuogh

David: it's your voice that is most important and Miles Davis
hehe

Lester: academically i feel behind but musically I feel further

David: that's what I'm trying to say there is no behind. Eliminate that thought now.
It will destroy you. This kid is not thinking man I have to work on sight reading i'm academically behind



work on sight reading as if you were this kid

Lester: sight reading works a really awesome part of your brain that helps everything!

David: I agree. I love sight reading. But it must be based in love and innocence and not motivated by only a lack.

Ressurrection of Drum Theory and Revelation

I got my ass kicked by my own blog. Which is why I abandoned it. It became this lukewarm cater job to the "universe." Total nonsense. I started drifting away from drumming and music towards some horrible universal.

This blog will resume and be much more focused on precise revelations and practical observations that I have in relationship to the art of listening and percussion. I also will not be addressing a third party,
rather it will be a documentation of my process that is purely self-reflection and is open to the public so that it may provide reinforcement and energy to the people who have chosen drumming as their livelihood and spiritual path.

Drum Theory and Revelation is now in session. Here's my latest drum solo that I recorded with my cellphone. I'm falling in love with low quality and junk, including my brand new muffler.

SOMETHING I WROTE FOR 88.1 KKJZ IN LA, I BELIEVE THE QUESTION WAS SOMETHING LIKE "WHAT DOES JAZZ MEAN TO YOU?" HAHA

It's tempting to start this paragraph with the word Jazz, but jazz survives its own annihilation. I think of jazz as the music that will be playing after the apocalypse. Classical music like that scene in the Titanic with the quartet playing as the ship is sinking, is the music being played during the apocalypse, but after the ego has been incinerated, what is left behind is a world of skeletons, gods and jazz. Embryonic in the dark altar in the heart of Africa jazz is bottled at the source where the universe is heard as one whole note. Jazz is the invocation and propagation of silence that binds all of us together back to a Higher Self. Jazz is freedom within imprisonment. Jazz is the volcano god whose muscle guts the hearts of people with the guts to unlearn everything they know, it's the dark feminine, the tornado, the against the grain of society power, aligned with the north star at all costs, worship of the terrifying moment stripped of all pretense, jazz is life and death, its firefighting, its wrestling the Marlin to ground zero, its a collision of planets, what a blessing we have created together, Africa, America, the whole universe of sound, truly I can see that the big bang, on the one, or the four if you're from New Orleans, is what started this amazing music.

ZANE MUSA QUARTET

It was electric! Zane Musa has the divine mischief and syncopation of Monk, on the saxophone. He's like the reverse of a forklift-roadkill-death of a squirrel, barbequed and unstruck by lightning out of a canoe on the Snake River in Wyoming. When he blows the molecules start doing their jobs better and people all over New York and Paris, snap up in bed in a cold sweat as he holds the tonic to bursting thresholds. I've been a fan of Zane's from Danny Masterson's Thursday night sessions at the Roosevelt in Hollywood. If you haven't heard Zane Musa then think of this as your new mission.

Back of Charlie O's coaster


Front of Charlie O's coaster

"DON'T BE FRIGHTENED TO DISPLAY YOUR TALENTS"

is an oblique strategy by Brian Eno. The Evangenitals recording engineer Tracy Chisholm has a deck of these in the studio. The Evangenitals, the Los Angeles band I play drums for, spent the whole weekend in the recording studio.

Because it was so ridiculously exciting and inspiring I thought I would share with you a revelation that I had about the recording process. When I thought about it deeper it really has to do with the creative process as a whole. Natalie Goldberg says in her incredible book WRITING DOWN THE BONES,

"First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash."

I remember hearing that Keruoac frowned upon revision and I found this in his biography at biblio.com:

"Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness. Kerouac's motto was 'first-thought=best thought'"

The power of first thought energy is absolutely crucial in EVERY ART FORM. My revelation was that fearless resilience is needed to go from, WHEN THE RECORDING LIGHT IS ON, being free, in fearless first thought rapture of the timeless zone to, WHEN YOU ARE HEARING PLAYBACK OF THE RECORDING, being brutally honest, objective and analytical. Then being able to switch between modes effortlessly and quickly with a SILENT EGO.

Many people develop a negative relationship with recording (making art) because they remain in their critical, analytical brain while they are creating. The critical brain annihilates first thought energy and the spontaneous joy of invention and cosmic mischief.

It is essential to be able to return to that PRIMAL and INNOCENT state when in the act of creation. This will free you from the fear of radiating your true and authentic self and the utterly terrifying depths of your latent talent.

SOMETHING TO HAUNT YOU

I have been corresponding with Joe LaBarbera about the MFA program at Cal Arts and also to solicit advice about teachers and concerts in the area. I made a list of all the stuff that I am eager to learn, jazz, afro-cuban, rudiments, brushes, hip-hop, sight reading, etc. The first thing that he wrote back was that I should learn piano in addition to my pursuits as a drummer. This is a guy who toured the world with Bill Evans. He is a serious jazz drummer and jazz historian.

Because this advice should be SERIOUSLY and SOBERLY considered by every drummer I am going to post another picture from my pilgrimage to NEW YORK. It is the world's first piano made by the guy who invented piano; Bortolomeo Cristofori. BE HAUNTED BY THIS IMAGE :)

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: THE KING

I'm on disk nine of the Ken Burns History of Jazz 10 DVD set. Even though it is a VERY mainstream slice of the highly dangerous and beautiful art form of jazz, one of the main things that I have taken from it is that Louis Armstrong is an American Bach. In the Court of King Oliver he is the successor of the throne. The improvisations and innovations of Armstrong spawned an entire art form, an entire way of understanding rhythm and melody. He practically invented the concept of a swing feel which is the basis of most of the music I love.

Louis Armstrong is widely misunderstood as just a mere entertainer because of his showbiz aesthetic yet in fact he is a Patriarch of Jazz, a complete virtuoso and innovator on the trumpet, and a musical force so huge I now refer to him as the fountain head, or the Holy Grail.

I was in New York last weekend and I made a point to make a pilgrimage to his house in Queens. It was a sad tourist trap that should be converted into a temple/shrine and upheld with silence and reverence and yet it was still amazing to stand in his den and pay homage to the founder of jazz, the real King of Swing.

Here is a photograph that I took of his doorway because I was not allowed to take pictures inside. I think it is an appropriate metaphor somehow :)