2012 IN REVIEW – JUNE: When nothing else makes sense to me, there is music and sharing it with others in a myriad of constructive contexts. I am sure everyone has something like that in their lives too. So, when I realized that life didn’t end after I turned 30 a couple of decades ago, it was a good thing and life actually keeps getting better. Well, the last week in June validated this fact once again. I discovered myself as an artist and composer. I finally have come to that genuine point of understanding how music actually works and I finally understand what I want to say through music. And, a variety of cool things centered in music keep intersecting with my path. Like, I was asked to speak to a group of people in Kansas City about jazz music. They were sincerely interested and enjoyed all of the minutia that seems to thrill me to no end about all aspects of jazz – its inherent art, its heroic personal triumphs of people over human nature and just the positive vibe of it. Jazz is the soundtrack of the United States – not rock, pop, country or R&B. I was 4 years old in 1959 and remember noticing jazz for the first time as it played through the intercom system at the airport hotel we stayed at on the Air Force base enroute to my dad’s assignment in Europe. Our US society was not equal then and the music reflected the outrage and stupidity over this fact in a dignified way. Think about 1959 in jazz music for a moment:
- Dave Brubeck – Time Out (Columbia)
- Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic)
- John Coltrane – Giant Steps (Atlantic)
- Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (Columbia)
- Johnny Hodges and Duke Ellington – Back to Back: Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges Play the Blues (Verve)
- Milt Jackson and John Coltrane – Bags & Trane (Atlantic)
- Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (Columbia)
- Art Pepper – Art Pepper + Eleven – Modern Jazz Classics (Contemporary/OJC)
- Horace Silver – “Blowin’ the Blues Away," Finger Poppin’” (Blue Note)
- Cannonball Adderley & John Coltrane – “Quintet in Chicago” (Polygram)