In an “up” moment

Hey guys,

In order to balance out the last entry, from earlier today, I thought I’d do a post towards in an “up” mood. First of all, I feel a lot clearer about my direction this year. Unfortunately, I will be poor, but I am a student again, so it’s ok, and I’ll be subsidized by Centerlink, (with a bit of luck). My goals for the year are:

• Obtain my GradDip in Teaching (Secondary) from Victoria Uni. I’m enrolled so it’s pretty much going to happen.
• Start a trio. My line up is crystallising, so it’s pretty much happening.
• Go on a tour with said trio. It’s possible we could go around Australia, or maybe to New Zealand. I also plan to involve the trio in several jazz festivals, and of course get some gigs around Melbourne.
• Produce an album of high quality, and hopefully get a distribution deal with an small independent record company in Australia. It would be ideal to get this done before going on tour, so we could sell them on tour (or give them away) and spread the band name.
• Continue my development on saxophone, and also on clarinet and flute.
• Receive a grant towards a professional vacation to New York in 2011.

So, as you see, there’s a lot do to!

Any questions?

-JC

A new post

Hey gang,

I’ve been reluctant to post on how I am, simply because it’s not very positive at all. It’s genuinely frightening. I’ve been questioning my whole existence, my life, my goals, my aspiration, my likelihood of achieving what I originally set out to do, my self worth, how  I define my self worth, my FINANCES, and unfortunately for me, my future finances, based on nothing but my fears. I am in a terrible place. Always, as soon as I wake up, my heart sinks in my stomach, and I can only equate the dreadful feeling with when you know there’s a big test on today, or something like that, but it’s not a test, it’s my whole life that I’m worried about. I’m stressed and anxious and sick and tired. I haven’t slept properly in weeks. I haven’t genuinely felt happy for more than a few precious moments in the last couple of weeks, and sadly, it’s only ever based around an acheivment, never just happiness in “being”. I don’t know what I want anymore. I could probably be a great jazz musician, but it’s kind of lost some of it’s appeal, because I’ve freaked out about money. The scariest thing is that as I type this, and re-read it, it sounds stupid, but I can’t help but feel how I feel. I just want it to go away. I just want to go back to my ultra-focused, ultra-determined, normal self. I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. The current cloud’s is the fact that I have almost literally SHAT myself and sort of looked really hard into areas of weakness in my path towards a successful career, and more importantly, made steps towards strengthening those areas of weakness. My contacts, self-promotion, teaching and educating and media. I’ve gained more contacts, begun to formulate ideas and contacts towards an album and perhaps a set at a significant jazz festival. I’ve looked into what needs to be done, and started to do it, like I always do. It’s just a bit scary, because this can’t be fixed instantly. It takes time. I still have moments every day of feeling really low, and probably will for a few months, until there are signs of improvement in my life. In the meantime, I’m going to do what I do best, and write lists and tick things off. I thank you, my friends, for being here for me. I’ve never really felt worse, and I really appreciate any time that we spend together.

The Imperfect Art

The Imperfect Art, by Ted Gioia, is a fantastic read for anyone who is curious about some of the internal philosophical battles that jazz faces. However, the book is so well written that much of it’s contentions can be applied to other art forms. He talks about things such as principles of aethetics, the listener (which could be applied to the beholder or consumer of any art), and many other topics, but one of my favourite chapters is about boredom and jazz. One of his points is that, unfortunately for jazz, the very thing that gives it an excitement and energy rarely found in any other artform- improvisation- is also it’s undoing. Because it is built on improvisation, jazz is doomed to rely on the in-the-moment inspiration of a musician, and so will most likely, 9 times out of 10 be boring. He goes into detail about what makes boring art, and really, it’s obvious when you think about it. Either it’s got not enough content to it, to engage and stimulate us; or it has too much. He continues:

In point of fact, jazz and especially modern jazz may be best veiwed as the exact opposite of those schools of art- primitivism, minimalism, and others- which reduce the content of art. Modern jazz may well exemplify a sharply contrasting sensibility: it may offer the listener too much content, too much variety, too much flux and change. Frederic Turner, summarizing the reserach done by the Werner reimers Stiftung study group on the biological foundation of aesthetics, has described precisely these two extremes:

Much of our work has showed that experimental human subjects show a crude preference – which we had no choice to regard as the raw material of aesthetic judgement- for perceptual experiences which met and fully engaged the sensitivities and capacities of the various senses. That is, they were neither so simple as to bore the nervuos system, nor so complex as to overload it.

Such research is of particular relevance to music, and serves to validate the similar conclusions of early writers on the subject, for example Leonard Meyer, whose seminal book Emotion and Meaning in Music demonstrated for all music, from the humblest nursery song to the most ambitious opera, balanced these two same extremes. On the one hand music uses repetition to create expectations on the part of the listener, but on the other hand it destroys these same expectations by employing false cadences, unexpected modulations, shifts in tone, and other similar devices. For Meyer, the binary opposition between the creation and frustration of expectation is at the root of our emotional reactions to music. From this perspective, music that has either too much or too little content is, put simply, bad music. It fails to engage it’s audience either by frustrating them through its incoherence of by boring them to tears.

Many contemporary works of art err on the side of boredom- their creators aim for an exemplary purification which requires a narrowing of scope and a diminution of content. …Jazz during the modern period, in contrast, has come to represent something much different- it is music packed with content, it hums with constant activity. As such, it pushes the listener towards the limits of his ability to process and comprehend what he is hearing. Very few works of music- perhaps a Bach fugue or concerto- offer a melody line as complex as a bebop improvisation; and, like, the Bach composition, the bebop solo has the potential to use this abundance and variety to good measure. …Yet this approach to music, by its very nature, also risks achieving another, less satisfying result. By overwhelming the listener with too much variety, it risks losing him entirely. Modern jazz, at its worst, creates another type of boredom, one in which the listener has ceased to care about the music and where it is going.

Victor Borge

Fainting whilst asleep

I’ve never really been a fainter. I remember when mum used to faint for various reasons, and I would always laugh. I’d seen my own blood, and other’s without so much as a touch of dizziness. But as of the last few years I’ve been fainting occasionally.  But Sunday night is the first time I’ve ever heard of someone fainting in their sleep, and it happened to me at around 5:30am (monday morning really).

At first it seems ludicrous to faint in your sleep. I mean, how can you tell? Don’t you lose consciousness when you faint? And then, aren’t you unconscious when you sleep? I guess I’m using the term “faint” slightly loosely. If I was standing, and awake and active during the day when it happened, then I probably would’ve tried to combat it and made it worse, resulting in fainting, or needing to lie down. But I already was lying down. So I really got severely dizzy, my blood pressure plummeted, was disoriented (when I woke up) and experienced a momentary complete loss of motor control. So what happened?

I was dreaming.

In my dream, I turned left off the Princes Highway, onto a looping road that takes you around onto Pakington Street. I’d just turned left onto Pako at the Telegraph Hotel (below).

It was night, completely dark, but for street and car lights. I was alone in my car. Once I’d turned left, it suddenly wasn’t Pako, but instead a random residential street, with high gum trees everywhere, like what you might expect to find in Clifton Springs or somewhere like that. Frustrated at how I somehow missed the turn onto Pako, I did a U-turn to try and backtrack my way to find it. I was speeding and stressed, and confused at where I was because of the dark and the unexpected nature of my miscalculation. Anyway, where ever I was had all the bendy winding streets of Grovedale or Leopold and I was quickly lost.

I kept doing U-turns and speeding to try and get out of this labyrinth. In the end, for some reason, whilst doing a U-turn I sped completely out of control and started to spin and spin, like there was grease on the road or something. Suddenly, the car was floating and then before I knew it I’d woken up in my room and I was floating too! I was right above my bed, floating and spinning like I was possessed, but I couldn’t feel anything, and I couldn’t move. I thought to myself Is this what it’s like to be possessed, then? I remained like that for maybe 10 or 15 seconds, which seemed forever, breathing out of my nose and spinning above my bed, until I finally could open my eyes.

What my eyes beheld calmed me down a little. I could make out the murky shapes of my room in darkness, my piano, my desk chair, the dim light on the walls and ceiling, and they weren’t moving. Which meant, neither was I. After a short moment, I managed to raise my right arm slightly. I suddenly realised what that dizzy feeling was, what it felt like, where I’d felt it before. It was exactly like fainting. The same spinningesque dizziness, the loss of control and the disorientation, they were all what I suffered when I had fainted previously.

After a while, whilst lying there reflecting on what the hell had just happened to me, I tried again to move my arms, and was successful, relaxed, and then fell quickly back to sleep.

-JC

Hmmm

Celebrities that I’ve been told I look like:

Robert Pattinson

I get told I look like him the most, but I think that’s because he’s the most circulated at the moment.

Toby Maguire

I guess I have similar lines around my eyes?Anyway, I’ve heard this a few times.

Brendan Fraser

It’s usually older women that have told me I look like this guy. And it’s only happened twice.

James Franco

I’ve been told I look like this guy a few times. I’m not really sure if the people who said so were on drugs though.

I think it’s worth mentioning that these four guys don’t look anything alike. Also, while I choose to take being told I resemble these celebrities as a compliment, usually they’re said to me as a matter of fact, with indifference. And, it’s always said by women.

Curious.

-JC

Pixar is just awesome

Acquired tastes

I think that one of the better things about life, in fact one of the only things worth doing, is broadening your preferred tastes. This might sound strange coming from someone who has ripped out his car antennae. But I still hold it to be true, it’s just that I take my time with new things. I am slow at it, discriminatory, critical and cynical about the new, but that still doesn’t detract from my enjoyment when something does come along that I genuinely enjoy, be that witnessing a sport I’ve never seen, eating a new food, hearing a new song, or whatever. Many of my favourite things now a days, types of music, particular foods, for example, have usually been acquired through a slow period of getting used to the “thing”, and then really exploring it. I don’t really like change, and so I have to acquire my tastes over a period of time. Anything new, is usually rebuffed initially and then accepted and then perhaps even enjoyed. Radiohead. Olives. Nothing I like, I like lightly. One of the advantages of this initial critical outlook, is that I am actually used to being challenged, especially when it comes to new art.

One thing I’ve noticed about society in general, is that most people are not used to be challenged by art. Most people take (to use my own medium, music) a new song and judge it very quickly, and indeed most songs are made in this way, to be judged quickly, to be digested quickly. “Radio mixes” clip songs of length and of anything that might be construed as unusual and intimidating; singers are carefully marketed to be only slightly different to the last big star, a comfortable development in the right direction (if  they are a development at all); the themes of their music all lowest-common-denominator, easily approachable from someone from any walk of life,  and all sung about thousands of times before. There are exceptions, but I’m just stating my general observations.

Eventually, adult tastes on food mature and broaden, tastes such as bitterness and sourness become palatable, textures, colours and shapes initially repulsive begin to be looked at anew. Fast food, the food equivalent of the mass-market pop star, instantly gratifying, uniform, consistent and altogether unchallenging, is of course everywhere and very successful. It appeals to our child like, immature tastes, sugar and salt, bright colours and smiles. It’s no coincidence that when drunk we feel like gorging on Macca’s. Yet , despite this, more sophisticated restaurants offer a wide variety of cuisine and culinary options, and continue to thrive, as a whole. Why then, does the “higher” arts world seem abandoned by society? The average person knows how to “gut” a prawn, but who understands the principles behind ballet?

I beleive most of humanity has much to gain by applying a similar level of application and effort to aquire the tastes of many foods, to the many types of art.

Making contacts

Tedious? Phoney? Unnecessary, if you’ve actually got talent? An intergral part of being a successful artist? “How the world works”? I’m still not convinced about “making contacts”. I’m not convinced it’s necessary, and I’m not convinced it’s unnecessary. I think, in the end, your artistic vision and ability will speak for itself, but how is a musician supposed to realise that vision without contacts, as music is such a collaborative medium. It’s one thing for Van Gogh to be in solitude 99% of the time and create arguably amongst the worlds best art works (although he didn’t sell one in his life time), but how is a musician, who relies primary on interaction with other musicians to create, supposed to “go it alone”? Short answer: he’s not. Also, speaking of Van Gogh, as I said, he sold not one painting in his life, and I do want to sell my product. My main beef with making contacts, is that it seems to me that people put it in place of actually being good at your craft. I’ve never had any trouble getting gigs, finding great musicians, and being able to “make contacts”, but I couldn’t stand it, as a rule. Until, the other day, I realised something. I found that by treating it as something other than simply forming a relationship on which I could feed like a parasite, then I could tolerate it. I treated it as making a friend. It’s fun to get together with dudes you don’t know and play. It’s fun to create music. It’s fun to have gigs. It’s fun to have the support of the community, and it’s fulfulling. So. I’ve decided to change my perspective on “making contacts” and that sort of thing, and to veiw it as not only broadening my own world, but as a chance to contribute to the world in which I live. I mean, I have stuff to offer as well, and people will find that out in time. I want to contribute, and I can’t do it alone. No one can. So, I’m still going to focus very inwardly for a good portion of the day, but now I’m also going to go out and meet people.

-JC

Holy Hand Grenade