Essays-Thoughts

Man I've been working on the tune Beautiful Friendship and it's kicking my ass. The melody, and the phrasing feel really unique to me. And I'm trying to play the tune right down the middle and it's really really hard.

I'm finding I have to kind of study all the spaces in the tune so I can play the melody right. Next the tune's second A doesn't resolve which is a little unusual. And sometimes I want to resolve it just like the last A!

I think Joe Locke talked about creating your masterpiece or chipping away at it in one of his lessons.

I think we should always be creating our masterpieces, that is playing something where we're creating a final product of some sort. If you're not doing that, then I don't know how you're going to grow.

Hi Tony,

I've been thinking about the problem of the amount of labor it takes to run this site, and it occurred to me that we could probably help you out with some of the non-vibes-playing aspects of maintaining things. I don't know where your main time sinks are, but if they could be broken up into discrete, unrelated chunks, then the members could volunteer to do the tasks for you.

So I'm messing around with Woody n You and I'm having trouble getting ideas. This melody is different from many others I play. So I'm trying to think about 4 mallets and what I'd do. Wasn't making much progress.

But my cat is dying, and I've taught her to talk to me. So she started talking to me and I brought her down (basement) (feeling sad) and sat there with her and was petting her and talking to her, and she was replying. Then I gave her my good chair and went and worked on Elio Villafranca's music for a bit, and then I came back to Woody n You and everything was different.

www.vibesworkshop.com welcomes Joe Locke. Joe says hello and gives some thoughts on his playing.

Hi All,

There's been a great discussion on a thread started by Steve Shapiro on the future of the music business (see check this out). I've been enjoying that quite a bit, but I'm worried that it's a bit too esoteric for most of the people here. So I'd like to start another thread about concrete steps working musicians can take in the new environment to optimize their chances of making a decent living.

Today I was running an errand at lunch that took me off of my normal beaten path and past Alan Dawson's old neighborhood in Lexington, MA. That started some reminiscing that I thought would be good to share.

One of my favorite therapists, partly because she was cute and a large part because she was GREAT, taught me a big thing about music.

I remembered it today on my walk. I used to(still do a little) take all my problems and NOT solve them and then wrap them up into one big global problem. We used to unwrap them together. It was a great experience to see all your problems unraveled and then to realize that if you solved a bunch of them this big huge problem would usually go away. Which ones I used to ask her, should I solve. She'd say any of them.

Over the last few days, Tony and I have exchanged several emails discussing several CD’s we both grew up with, including two of Gary’s that are currently out of print – Easy As Pie and Picture This. And as one might imagine, one idea leads to another and eventually there are a bunch of theories that beg for clarification. Among those are the inner workings of ECM Records.

Twitter is one of those web apps where it's kind of hard to find some meaning and usefulness. I always feel a little vain when I Tweet. But I recently found a good use for it especially if you don't mind sifting through some stuff.

Put in Coltrane or Milt or Hindemith (like I did) in the search box and search through this gigantic database of 140 character tweets (as they say). I found out some websites, some great cds and a few facts about Hindemith.

I'm starting to think that it's a really great tool for getting info.