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LATIN MUZZY
I noticed the guy early on. Looked like a skinnier, slightly more Latin version of Muzzy. Later I saw him with his wife. They were sitting in front of us. He was drinking water using a cup and straw. Sometimes his wife would hold the cup for him. When he ate, his fork shook. It was a chore. I knew that drill. I’d seen it over and over with my father in law. The gig was going alright, a “society” scene. The leader was calling his usual repertoire of easy going good times, play nice for the nice people songs. He called “Sweet Caroline’". There are some tunes that get played over and over again. "New York New York" is one of them. "Wagon Wheel" is another. "Sweet Caroline" is one I find especially tiresome. I thought of Muzzy again, “Sometimes ya just gotta play the gig and hope like hell nobody you know walks in”. As soon as the song starts the Latin guy and his wife get up. With difficulty. She holds him and he prompts her to the dance floor. They begin to dance. They clearly know how. I think they are Latin dancers from back in the day. His hands are shaking badly on her back. His feet are sure. They dance gracefully. She is smiling at him. He looks at her, but I think the disease that robbed him of control of his hands has also robbed him of the ability to smile. His eyes though, his eyes are glowing. She looks at him radiantly, with love. I begin to cry, in awe of what I am seeing. I feel ashamed at having taken this gig for granted. Later on I get to play a cha cha cha for them. It's an honor.
6/19/16
"Tommy"
I wrote "TOMMY" as a mentor text for a 6th grade class to practice the QCPCE strategy
“Here we go again”. Tommy looked at the clock. 6:30 AM. AM! “Man, that’s early!” thought Tommy. He rolled himself out of bed and tried to remember where the bathroom was in the new apartment. He and his dad had only moved in the night before last, just in time for Tommy to start the school year with everybody else for a change. Usually these moves happened in the middle of December, or May, or some other equally inconvenient time. Every time his dad got a new job, there was a move. Just the two of them, going a hundred miles, or across the country. Tommy’s dad had a good job, troubleshooter for a big communications company. There wasn’t ever any shortage of money. They always had a nice place, his dad always got a nice company car and sometimes there was a housekeeper. That really didn’t help Tommy at school though. In fact, sometimes it hurt. The kids often saw him as “that new rich kid” and either tried to compete with him, showing off their phones and clothes, or they ignored him, and waited for him to mess something up. Some of the kids tried to play him, sensing that there might be some money. They thought he might be a lonely rich kid desperate enough to buy friends. Tommy had seen enough in his fourteen years to realize that for some of these kids, SOMEBODY had to buy them food sometimes, or get them to the mall. He knew that not everybody had things as good money-wise as he did. He kind of looked for those kids. Nevertheless, Tommy knew that his first day at school would be trouble. It almost always was.
In his 1992 book, Music and the Mind, Anthony Storr quotes John Blacking, “Human attitudes and specifically human ways of thinking about the world are the results of dance and song” (p24). I think Blacking got it half right. The relationship between the two is a recursive, self referential phenomena. Life informs art and art informs life.Music is an expression of mood, or struggle. The raga and the jazz composition, the fugue and the polyphonic cycles of the gamelan all are reminiscent/symbolic of the mathematical expansion of plants and populations, trees and ideas, of life itself. A seed is formed through a mystery of creation. It is nurtured by energy, by thought. It develops into a fully formed composition. Whether the seed is an image in the mind, an engineering concept, a tone row or a raga, if the seed is developed properly, with grace and passion, the viewer, client, or listener is transported to a place that is in harmony with that initial mystery of creation.
Duke Ellington asks: “What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world” (Ellington)
Works Cited
Storr, Anthony. (1992) Music and the mind, New York: Free Press
Christmas 1967 or 1966
Probably the Christmas of 1967, maybe 1966…I’d been bugging my parents for a drumset for a while. I liked Jane, Jane liked Micky Dolenz, Mickey played drums, so, using the irrefutable logic of an 8 year old, if I played drums Jane would like me. Didn’t work out that way, but that’s not the story I want to tell. I had been playing on a set I’d made myself. That contraption of coffee cans and sheet metal lived right in the basement of our apartment building. Christmas morning comes and there is a red sparkle Stewart snare drum on a stand with attached cymbal sitting in the living room. My father had been in the hospital for a few days, but they let him come home for Christmas. He’d had surgery, couldn’t move around much, and was clearly in pain now that I think about it. He let me bang away on that drum for hours at a time. The man never complained, just kind of smiled.