Steve Nash, Anna's, More Bonds, Yoshi's hangs and a Slight Angle To The Universe

It’s been a while, so thanks for your patience, you who are avid blog-followers. Have heard some good music, played some and even written a bit more since the last entry. The big news here is the avid family investment in the Phoenix/Lakers series. Steve Nash to me is the epitome of the ultimate team player, so it is tough to see, as of this writing, the Lakers handling the Suns. Also fascinating to watch Kobe Bryant make the instantaneous transformation from the most egocentric and selfish player in the game to a wonderful conductor of Phil Jackson’s offense. Makes me wonder what Jackson said to him to make the transformation possible.

Anna’s continues to be a wonderful weekly event, and many friends and musical acquaintances have already fallen by to listen and sometimes play. It is the real deal – a jazz club meant for listening and the friendly, music-loving staff makes for a nice night out for all. The group (Susan, Shifflett, Bulkley and yours truly) are starting to get into some very cool terrain, and when Jeff Marrs subs, we get into that East Coast egg-scrambling I know and love. Also, John Stowell has joined us a couple of times now and that is always a treat. I can’t think of a guitar player I enjoy listening to more.

Speaking of acclaimed guitar players, my friend Andre Bush invited me to join him for a day baseball game recently, and the experience, great seats in the hot sun, a lyrical and bucolic vibe, were all very very pleasant. The big moment of drama came when Barry (nothing has been proven) Bonds limped to the plate as a pinch hitter in the 9th, 2 out, and hit a game-tying home run. I am still not a fan of baseball, finding the pace tedious and soporific, but that was a nice bit of theater for sure.

Hung a few nights back with James Genus and Uri Caine after the Dave Douglas gig at Yoshi’s. Always great to see James, a friend with whom I go back almost 20 years. Hard to believe, but he is now a Dad, so we talked about the astonishing changes he is experiencing that way. Uri Caine was also a cool hang. He is a very fun, wry and thoughtful man, so we had an excellent time. Needless to say, James remains maybe my favorite bassist and Uri sounds wonderful on the Rhodes. I would love to hear him on acoustic. Always good to see Clarence Penn, a true magician on the drums, and Dave D and Donny McCaslin played with real command, passion and authority on Dave’s challenging, shape-shifting material.

The other noteworthy music I have heard since last posting was the Scofield quartet with Eddie Henderson, Bill Stewart and Dennis Irwin. Eddie is, in me humble opinion, the best living jazz trumpet player, mixing perfect 8ths, sterling note choice, drama and soul. It was gratifying that he remembered my playing fondly from the time we gigged with Sylvia Cuenca, and he and I both expressed a desire to reconnect musically. Bill Stewart is a truly innovative and exciting drummer, and I appreciated that he didn’t feel the need to always obfuscate the underlying pulse during his solos, something that is a bit of a disease among some younger drummers.

Other than that, we have rented a house in LA for Carla’s one woman show, Wedding Singer Blues, and rented our place out, so quite an adventure is in store the next few months, as the household, complete with dogs, heads to LaLaland. As the saying goes, more will be revealed, so stay tuned to this space! Here is an excellent parody by Paul Hipp based on I Am The Walrus . You can hear it at http://decider.cf.huffingtonpost.com

Lastly, speaking of lyrics, I heard a beautiful quote from E.M. Forster and somehow this set of lyrics came out. Not sure what it all means, but it just rolled out, and sometimes we need to trust our intuition. It is called Slight Angle To The Universe:

At a slight angle to the universe
With head askew like the jack of spades
A smile at once demure and perverse
He uses his thin grin to charm the maids

At a slight incline and very still
He salts his wounds with rueful tears
He never stumbles but he will
And waits for the letter that never appears

At a slight advantage he slips, he trips
And falls ever upward to brighter nights
Balancing a drink that he never sips
It helps him miss the tourist sights

At a slight denial he takes no offense
But soothes the waters with pearl grey words
No need, it’s only common sense
To share your dinner with the birds

At a slight angle to the stars and moons
He bids adieu to the friends he knew
And buries each last one in satin ruins
Well after all, wouldn’t you?

Bush, Judas, Barry Bonds and Monty Python

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
- William Hazlitt

So now I get it - W est le roi, et le roi est le mot! Talk about apres-moi le deluge! Damn, so the homeland security dude gets busted for child porn, NSA wiretappers are carte blanche invited into the central hub of the corporate telecommunications giants, Gonzales says whomever Bush wants to tap he can, and if he leaks it's good, even if he lies through his teeth and says he'll get those who lie. To recap, lies about WMD, lies about when he decided to go to war, lies about torture and rendition, illegally wiretaps, blows katrina like a motherfucker, and leaks classified material to bring down Joe Wilson. Can you spell impeachment? I can. Why will no one give this dude a blow job, as the saying goes?

Meanwhile, Barry Bonds, a thoroughly unlikeable soul, kind of a Moussaoui as a self-character witness, is being pilloried throughout the land for something there is little doubt many of his peers were also doing. (Mark Grace says 1/2 his team was juicing when he played for it, goes to show the droids won't make a bad team good since he played on the Cubs). How can you take away Bonds' records? It is some kind of tragedy, but no crime, and you are telling me all those pitchers weren't juicing too? Yeah, like 43 year-olds are all of a sudden going to add 7 miles an hour to their fastballs. I also can't believe that I am writing this much about baseball - maybe it's the utter disgust at the Warriors 3 month swoon...

Lastly, they have found the gospel of Judas. Does any of this strike you as ludicrous? The Christian establishment vigorously asserts that this is a false gospel. Like the others, written 40 years after he "died", and ripped whole cloth from the religion of Mithra, weren't? That there IS ESSENTIALLY NOT ONE REFERENCE TO HISTORICAL JESUS in any Christian documents of the first century, or ANY DOCUMENTS from the time he was supposed to be alive? That all we have is badly translated copies of copies of copies, with all the elisions and misprints and marginalia (guttenberg was 14 centuries off), and the fact that the gospels all disagree with each other on key points, such as the details of the resurrection? and THAT is the unerring word of God? My God (to coin a phrase) how can we have such unbelievably situational rules of evidence? I talked with someone the other day, schooled by nuns for 8 years as a Catholic, who HAD NEVER HEARD THAT THE LAST SUPPER WAS A PASSOVER SEDER. The Catholic church has a very hard time dealing with the fact that its God of the gospels was a rabbi (assuming he was a was). Makes the endemic anti-semitism of the first 1950 years a little harder to sell. Here's a good challenge for all of you. Piece together a coherent account of what happened on easter Sunday where the four gospels don't contradict each other. Start with whether the ghosts went into Bethlehem, or was it Jerusalem? Let me know how you do. For those who are curious as to the (gasp) question as to whether a historical Jesus even existed, check this out: as hands are wrung as to the authenticity and significance of the gospel of Judas, we might want to explore the obvious larger question about Jesus, so here is an intriguing and pretty even-handed link for you all to peruse:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcno.htm

Why am I so fascinated with this? Well, as you may recall from an earlier blog, the Big Bang is an inexplicable mystery of the most profound scientific and spiritual dimensions. We are one of an estimated 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets, in a universe that developed from a subatomic particle to something beyond all imaginable size in less time than it takes for Bush to spin another lie. It beggars our imaginations, and we know a helluva lot more than did the supersitious primitive civilizations that created the myths we still use to kill, subjugate and legislate with. I believe the mystery of the infinite is awe-inspiring, and have zero interest in the mundane myths offered for the most humbling unanswerables one can (not even) imagine.

Besides, in my tiny corner of the universe, the Warriors are still lame and Coltrane still makes my heart sing.

As Monty Python would say:

"Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour
That's orbiting at 90 miles a second, so it's reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, of a galaxy we call the Milky Way"

"Our Galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars, it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side
It bulges in the middle,16,000 lightyears thick but out by us it's just 3,000 lightyears wide
We're 30,000 lightyears from galactic central point, we go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe"

"The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure how amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space coz there's bugger all down here on Earth"