I've had a surprising amount of fun writing these last two jazz history papers. The assignment is to write a 5-7 page biography about some important jazz musician. It's one of those things that I detest the thought of, but once I get started and actually sit down and do the work, I get really wrapped up in it. It turns out that there is a wealth of inspiration to be found in learning about the lives of past musicians. Because they are musicians, I find I can relate to them more than I had been expecting, since I am myself an up-and-coming musician, dealing with issues that musicians all have to face: how to balance your life; how to get jobs; how to have rewarding performing experiences without getting too stressed out; and ultimately, how to be a creator of music instead of just a copier.
Sonny Rollins was a jazz saxophonist from New York. What was cool about him was that he had to be in this particular zone whenever he performed, where he would let everything go and let the music speak through him. (To some extent, this is what every performer has to do.) If he didn't happen to have the right inspiration that day, the performace would be a dud, because he refused to play pre-prepared cliches. Always seeking new sources of inspiration and always striving to improve his already astounding technique, he took several sabbaticals from the jazz scene. The first time he withdrew for two years in order to practice and experiment without the pressures of performing every night. The second time he went to India and studied I guess Hinduism or Buddhism. He was a very neat guy. I loved reading the biography written about him by Eric Nisenson.
Arturo Sandoval is inspirational because of his bravery and devotion to what he believed was right. Not only was he an excellent trumpter player, but he was from Cuba, born in 1949, and lived under Castro and communist rule until 1990 when he finally managed to escape with his family while on a tour around Europe performing with Dizzy Gillespie. It's such an exciting story that they made a whole movie about it: For Love or Country. That's who I wrote about last night.
Both these guys are still alive and kicking.
It makes me curious as to what other wealth of biographical material there is out there. Maybe it would be worth exploring more this summer. It's sort of like getting to know a huge variety of people without necessarily meeting them, and it gives you ideas for what to do with your own life.
I admit there is something to be said for being forced to do things you didn't think you wanted to do. Still, freedom will be better.
Countdown to the end of institutionalized schooling... 1 week.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Sunday, April 23, 2006
...hello ...again
It's hard to come back after being gone for so long. I don't really know how to start. What do you say to someone you've abandoned for two months and now want to get back together with? I did quite a bit of abandoning this semester, in the heat of the busyness. I abandoned the blogspot. I abandoned tae kwon do. I abandoned friends. In fact, the older I get, the more people and activities I abandon along the way, just because I can't do everything and keep up with everyone.
That sounds pessimistic, but really I was doing an amazing amount of stuff in the interrim. I suddenly buckled down and got more serious about music than ever. In short, I did a whole lot of practicing, recording, performing, traveling, and auditioning, driven by a record amount of consistent motivation and inspiration. Now that my senior recital is over, things are significantly calmer. I mean, I still am doing a concert with Kanye West on Monday, playing in Catherine Stark's recital, accompanying Anne for the entire Tzigane violin concerto (all on harp), playing Salome as a duet with Colleen, and learning the entire Bernstein Chichester Psalms for orch rep. I'm not sure why that necessarily feels calmer, but I guess it says something about how the rest of my semester has been.
In a matter of weeks, classes will be over and I will graduate from college. I'm starting to think about what moving out of this apartment and saying goodbye to everybody is going to entail. I've already been thinking about the future. My family is moving back to Illinois. This time they'll be living up north, in St. Charles. I'm going to live with them for the summer, help them move in, and decorate my new bedroom (finally I get to paint my walls!). After a good, long, break then I'm going to move to France. Yes, seriously, I'm going to be living in Paris, attending a conservatory where I'll be studying harp with Isabelle Perrin. I have all these plans for not only improving as a harpist, but learning French, learning how to better communicate in general, finally having some time to pursue my own education in history and reading and writing, practicing photography around Paris, and otherwise escaping the American school system.
However, it's not all about the future, because I've learned and changed so much this semester. I'm a completely different person, with a completely different outlook, than I was when I first started writing this blog over winter break. I guess that's actually part of the reason why I didn't write so much. Because I was trying out new ways of thinking about things, I needed to let things simmer in my mind without being forced to take on a form as concrete as a sentence or a paragraph. One of my goals for this summer is to learn how to communicate some of these things I've been thinking about. I need to capture them before their vividness fades.
Today, after waking up for an AHS chapter meeting, I cleaned my room, balanced my checkbook, tallied up everybody's grocery receipts, took care of all the forms for commencement, and then got completely engrossed in a huge project entirely unrelated to school which involved sorting through a lot of pictures. Speaking of things that aren't school-related, I've also recently been reading this great book called "A Short History of the World" by J. M. Roberts. It's an excellent overview of world history, done with intelligence and sensitivity. I'm going to do it right this time: beginning to end, filling in all the gaps in my knowledge. I'm supplementing by printing out maps of the areas that I'm reading about and looking up unfamiliar terms on wikipedia. Yeah, the jazz history paper will get done, but it'll have to be another cram job, just like the previous two, because it's not something I care enough about to want to spend more time on than I have to.
To conclude my day of freedom, I now go to bed at 3am, happily thwarting the necessity of going to bed at a reasonable time.
That sounds pessimistic, but really I was doing an amazing amount of stuff in the interrim. I suddenly buckled down and got more serious about music than ever. In short, I did a whole lot of practicing, recording, performing, traveling, and auditioning, driven by a record amount of consistent motivation and inspiration. Now that my senior recital is over, things are significantly calmer. I mean, I still am doing a concert with Kanye West on Monday, playing in Catherine Stark's recital, accompanying Anne for the entire Tzigane violin concerto (all on harp), playing Salome as a duet with Colleen, and learning the entire Bernstein Chichester Psalms for orch rep. I'm not sure why that necessarily feels calmer, but I guess it says something about how the rest of my semester has been.
In a matter of weeks, classes will be over and I will graduate from college. I'm starting to think about what moving out of this apartment and saying goodbye to everybody is going to entail. I've already been thinking about the future. My family is moving back to Illinois. This time they'll be living up north, in St. Charles. I'm going to live with them for the summer, help them move in, and decorate my new bedroom (finally I get to paint my walls!). After a good, long, break then I'm going to move to France. Yes, seriously, I'm going to be living in Paris, attending a conservatory where I'll be studying harp with Isabelle Perrin. I have all these plans for not only improving as a harpist, but learning French, learning how to better communicate in general, finally having some time to pursue my own education in history and reading and writing, practicing photography around Paris, and otherwise escaping the American school system.
However, it's not all about the future, because I've learned and changed so much this semester. I'm a completely different person, with a completely different outlook, than I was when I first started writing this blog over winter break. I guess that's actually part of the reason why I didn't write so much. Because I was trying out new ways of thinking about things, I needed to let things simmer in my mind without being forced to take on a form as concrete as a sentence or a paragraph. One of my goals for this summer is to learn how to communicate some of these things I've been thinking about. I need to capture them before their vividness fades.
Today, after waking up for an AHS chapter meeting, I cleaned my room, balanced my checkbook, tallied up everybody's grocery receipts, took care of all the forms for commencement, and then got completely engrossed in a huge project entirely unrelated to school which involved sorting through a lot of pictures. Speaking of things that aren't school-related, I've also recently been reading this great book called "A Short History of the World" by J. M. Roberts. It's an excellent overview of world history, done with intelligence and sensitivity. I'm going to do it right this time: beginning to end, filling in all the gaps in my knowledge. I'm supplementing by printing out maps of the areas that I'm reading about and looking up unfamiliar terms on wikipedia. Yeah, the jazz history paper will get done, but it'll have to be another cram job, just like the previous two, because it's not something I care enough about to want to spend more time on than I have to.
To conclude my day of freedom, I now go to bed at 3am, happily thwarting the necessity of going to bed at a reasonable time.
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