Great Bliss

I’ve been meaning to write here, but it’s been a difficult time.

And that’s precisely why I should be writing here, writing anywhere, writing everywhere.

Great Bliss has been back-burnered over the past month or so as I attempt to find a place for Nicole and I to move to in Vermont.  We are heading there primarily for clean air and quality health care, as she is struggling with a terrible, horrible, miserable health condition.  We need a lack of pollution and therapeutic solutions.  Right now this isn’t anything you’d call living.

I love you, Nicole!

The era calls for hyper-simplicity, keeping track, and being grateful.  Along with deep sadness, I’m humbled and thankful.  And it’s making me realize that the music I recorded for GB #1 has all been a bit too convoluted.  I start layering and layering and adding subtle shifts and tangents and scraping the layers and scrapping and grappling and doublethinking, until STOP–where is the music?  I need to simplify the whole thing, and force myself to concoct one-string melodies, simple song structures–not worrying about all the repetition, not getting too fancy with syncopation and phasing.  This isn’t meant to be the most psychedelic of experiences, after all, and there is no harm in making a really really heartfelt, sweet, direct, and altogether easy release.  I’m not reinventing sound, so why not just enjoy making it?

I sat down and recorded some stuff on a 4-note wooden tongue drum last night, and it was surprisingly satisfying.  I’ve always been pretty bored by these drums, but Nicole’s dad gave me one last week, so I got myself to just play some repetitive bits on it, and listen to the quality of the notes and timbres.  One of my mallots is cracked, so it buzzes as I play.  When I start playing too many notes, I pull back.  When the rhythm speeds up, I bring it down.  After coming up with some ideas that I liked, I recorded them, and didn’t care about structure.  I may use it, or I may not, but it doesn’t really matter.  None of this does.  I’ll be happy to just have something done, whenever it’s meant to be done.  And for now, I’m happy to make something that doesn’t require too much worry.

After the drumming, I got up and went downtown to play with my saxophone duo, JMMJ (with Michael Jeffries, baritone player from Barnacled, Bellows, What Cheer? Brigade, etc.).  All improv, all intuitive, all there for the taking or leaving.  We huddled with the open crowd in a dark stairwell.  Afterward, someone said it was like being inside a good speaker.  We sweated, we cared about what we were doing.  The world moves on.

This is what we do.

I’ve been working a lot on #1, and realizing that this may really take me a while to get right.  I don’t want to just finish something for the sake of meeting an arbitrary deadline; I want to make a good record.  Something I’d like to listen to myself over and over again.  So, we’ll see when that happens!  Until then, I’m just plodding along and making plenty of mistakes every day.  Don’t we all.

I didn’t really know where this would take me, musically, as I feel pretty wide open, and don’t have any particular genre in mind, but it just hit me today that I’ve been in a vaguely Arthur Russell-esque realm.  Not the disco stuff, but his expansive solo work, which in some ways feels like the most solo of all solo music.  Very inward, but at the same time infinitely large.  There is so much going on in his cello-and-vocals material.  I guess it got under my skin a few years ago and stayed there, because I haven’t listened to him in quite some time.  Hmm.  Makes me really want to check out the recent documentary, Wild Combination.

Speaking of big influences, I recently found out that David S. Ware has been really ill with kidney failure, and is scheduled to get a transplant soon.  All the best of healing energy to him–the info thread on that is here.  I spent a lot of time listening to Ware’s tenor saxophone throughout the ’90s, and was really inspired by his transcendental, all-inclusive approach to composition.  He really helped me enter the world of saxophone playing, and witnessing his quartet live with William Parker, Susie Ibarra, and Matthew Shipp about ten years ago was as near as I’ll ever come to seeing the classic Coltrane quartet.  Incidentally, Ware released two records years ago called Great Bliss (volume one and volume two).  I only found that out after I settled on this name for my project, but it’s fitting after all.

Beings like Russell and Ware (and can’t forget Coltrane, since I summoned this holy ghost also) seem to have incessant vision, mixed with worldly skill, which is a most powerful combination.  Fulfillment of the thought/form continuum; nondual empty activity.

As for me, I’m no virtuoso, but I’ve got some scrappy spirit.  Luckily enough, I opt for the fully lo-fi life.

(title stolen from David Sedaris, with all chuckling respect and no rights reserved whatsoever)

It was graciously brought to my attention that the Comments section wasn’t working, even for people with Wordpress passwords (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is), so I’ve opened the floodgates.  Spam away, my friend.  Comments are now enabled on individual posts, but not static pages such as the “About” section.

I have received an overwhelming response via email, however, and this has been greatly encouraging.  Apparantly, some of what I’ve written has struck a chord with many of you.  I do hope that there can be some small point to what I’m embarking upon; if it can serve as any type of mirror or kindling for your own creative endeavors, then all the better.  I think you can get good kindling going with a mirror, actually.  But probably better off with your own magnifying glass.

I’ve yet to work on the record today, but it’s brewing.  I might also go to the RISD Museum to visit the Buddha.

Been working on the record, and coming up with some stuff I really like.  It’s amazing how long I need to steep in a song, play back and play back until it’s in the marrow, then realize what to do next.  Or, more often, what to trash.  Hours fly by very swiftly.

But afterwards it’s not quite possible to step away from the process entirely.  I forget I’m making dinner, and instead hear how the spatula relates to what I recorded earlier.  I start to blend every sound together, and lose sense of the present moment altogether.  It’s a little bit scary sometimes.  The zone of musicmaking can become an all-encompassing psychic realm.

Sometimes when I’m meditating, my mind will drift to musical ideas, and I become spirited away to the point where there is nothing at all other than imaginary sound.  The mind often drifts in meditation, of course, but not even strong emotions are capable of overtaking me as much as a melody can.  I’ll realize I’ve been composing in my head, and have to pull myself back to the present with a great deal of effort.

I think it’s important to ride the line, and follow the inspiration while also maintaining wider awareness.  These ideas and sounds are always out/in there to tap into, so it’s good to be skillful about how I jump in.  I aim to live a balanced life, so I don’t have the luxury to always drop everything and “follow the muse.”  Many great artists simply follow the inspiration, no matter what the costs, and it works for some of them, I’m sure.  However, I want to be as good at listening to a friend who needs my help as I am to my own imagination.

So, in some ways it goes back to the issue of timing.  Live a life where you can set up some good quality time to let yourself create, and go for it.  There will be some seriously blurry lines between different areas of life, but in many ways that’s just the point of living.  This is fucking Earth, after all.  Samsara in a jar.

It’s far too easy to lose track of myself, and get derailed from plans I set out to accomplish.  Even (or especially?) plans that seem particularly important.  I suspect there is an element of intimidation that I experience when facing a new project such as this.  Feeling eaten up in the vast expanse of the unknown emptiness that has yet to manifest?  Anyone?  For whatever reason, I didn’t approach the guitar today.

This type of pattern used to drag on for long periods with me, but luckily I don’t really put up with it as well any more.  As the years go by, I realize that my time left on earth grows shorter, and there is simply no reason to not spend my remaining moments on what matters most.  Throughout the day, I try to remember to repeatedly ask myself, “what are my choices right now?”, and choose carefully.

Scheduling ahead of time helps, as it helps to provide guidelines.  The collective energy of a band is a useful catalyst to produce music, of course, but as I’m doing this by my lonesome, setting “band practice” feels a little artificial.  However, I need to instill this type form if this is going to really get off the ground.  I have a lot going on in my life right now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t set at least a solid hour to work on Great Bliss every day.  If I can meditate for an hour a day, I can write for an hour a day.  It’s just a matter of deciding which hour … or two half-hours.

I’ve given a little bit of thought to the big-picture timing too, and I think it would ultimately be great to produce quarterly editions.  Seasonal.  I even have release dates in mind: March 12, June 10, September 8, and December 6.  Well, the race is on if I’m going to pull that off.  I’ll start by shooting for June 10 as the release date for #1, and see how it goes.

Ok, the first “real” post here.  I feel like I’ve been waiting for years to get this project off the ground.  And now it is beginning to take actual form.  Maybe it’s a little bit backwards to get the website started before the first edition of Great Bliss is actually finished, but it’s providing some inspiration, and establishing some context for my creative process.  I feel that it will be very useful to have this ongoing blog format as I navigate the strange turns of this project.  I plan to do a lot of different things with it over the coming years, and you will be able to follow it all here.

I updated the “about” page to the right, for a little bit more info.  Although it’s purposely vague, because I’m not really sure where this is all going to take me.  All I know is that there is a hell of a lot of fire music inside of me, that needs to find a way into the light.  I have been confused for a long time about where to put the bulk of my creative effort (music?  writing?  snapshots?), and I have done a lot in an uncommited, piecemeal fashion up to this point.  In the last few years I’ve played a bunch of shows around Providence, written some words, started and quit a grad program in English, put out some records (most recently the Barnacled record on ESP-Disk’), but have been waiting to find something to really throw myself into.  A couple months ago it hit me like a … you have to make a series of objects, under one name, that follows your true inspirations over time, wherever that may lead. I knew that the first edition would be a CD, but beyond that, I had no clue.

So lately I’ve been brushing up on recording skills and coming up with music for Great Bliss #1, as I contemplate the form that the project will take as a whole.  The house is clean and ready to be a studio.  My closet is emptied to make room for supplies and stock.  In the past two days I’ve acquired a typewriter and a sewing machine.  There are no excuses left in the world for me to not step forward and put myself into the shit.

Uh, I set up this site, so I think I should write something.  But I don’t have time right now.