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Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Friday, August 23, 2013

LIGHTNING GROK BLOSSOM

Thoughts I had tonight while contemplating,
"What makes a drummers different from each other
and different from computers?"

OK there are infinite number of patterns possible.
So even if you were to play your entire life for 24 hours a day
you would be lacking thoroughness almost one hundred percent.
In other words James Tate's "The Oblivion Ha-Ha."

This is one possible antidote to ego-driven virtuosity.
Speed and complexity can be sad and kinda pitiful
if the delivery is too earnest
or if light speed is forgotten for a bit.

This is where dimensionality comes in.
Conquering seems to happen by staying where you are
rather than strong-arming  knowledge
into an attainable intellectual realm like what zoos do to animals,
that infinite lust; water-bottle-wielding mirage chasers.

Knowledge needs to be grokked
at the level of silent intuitive action
while letting go of ownership.
Dropping through and into infinite knowledge
cross referenced through the rainbow-origin
of all emotional states and spiritual illuminations,
(Milford Graves talks about playing different emotions
on different limbs: feeling-polymeters)
That center of the wheel omniscience.
Time Itself blah blah blah.

But in addition to knowledge
there is context, timing of delivery,
stand up comedy rhythms.
Harold Bloom, to paraphrase,
said the common denominator of all bad poetry
is that it is too sincere.
This is a naivete of context.

Aka your spilled milk is funny
if there is a meteor about to land on you.

Aka Brubeck's "Take Five" would be thrilled
to cross dress as a waltz for a night.

Aka the intelligence to quote "Stars Wars"
in "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

OK so there is vocabulary
and then there is poetry and fucking magic.

Awareness, sensibility, and fearless intuition
make infinity applicable instead of useless.

These are what allow your whole voice to blossom
toward the tangible. Lightning and thunder etc.


Below is the video where Professor Graves
talk about different emotions on different limbs.

















Sunday, August 18, 2013

Music Education

I had a revelation this morning. As I am writing a blog about drumming I think a lot about music education. I was thinking about the majority of instructional drum videos out there. So many of them are the equivalent of a writing teacher coming into class and saying,

Good morning class. How many of you want to be the best speller you can be? It takes practice. Here is how you spell "Apple." A P P L E. Now once you have figured that out let's see if we can spell "conformity."

It's subversive to be poetic. It cuts against knowledge itself towards the supreme darkness of Being. New words, new spellings, and the whole gamut of human life from suffering to emergence into the light. We need to empower musicians to rise above vocabulary, spelling, and recitation, and into the field of the terror and joy of innovation and romance with sound.