Bach would have approved

This is very possibly the greatest bass line in the history of popular music. In my "Jif & the Choosy Mothers" (horn band) days, I transcribed an entire set's worth of Motown horn parts and bass lines. It was a stone education.

Ladies & gentlemen, I give you the great, great Wilton Felder:



Selah (and a h/t to my great teacher, Larry "Guitar" Baeder).

The 'Rents have Arrived

Summer must be over: the parents have arrived: overdressed, overcoiffed, driving oversized gas-guzzling cars with out-of-zip-code plates the wrong way on campus roads, buying cheap university-brand knockoff hoodies and ball-caps for their offspring, who are hidden behind Paris Hilton sunglasses and tremulous posturing bravado. The parents look simultaneously possessive and petulant, simultaneously irked that they're not in control of their offspring's situation anymore and scared that they've done an inadequate job of preparing those offspring to take over their own lives.

In Texas, where privilege runs high and a sense of consequences is nil, the quicker the parents leave the better: because it means we can start doing the job of maturing their children which they themselves omitted to complete. Sheesh!

Little bit of Hieland hyperbole, right here

Bill Millin, who piped them ashore at Swords Beach, has died.


He went in with the Special Service Brigade near Caen on D-Day., and in the nightmare of that horrific kill-zone, Lord Lovat, the hereditary chieftain of the Frasers asked him to play. Millin was willing, but cited War Office regulations, which forbade thus exposing pipers as targets. The Fraser replied "Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”

He played "Highland Laddie," up and down the beach that day. Later, German gunners who had him their sights said they didn't shoot “because they thought I was crazy.”

No. He wasn't crazy. That's not what they call it, back where I--and the MacGregors and Orrs, the Roundheads and Tories, before me--come from.

I often wonder if the rich men in quiet offices, the demagogues screeching over loudspeakers or Twitter accounts, hundreds or thousands of miles from the firing line, ever consider how little they deserve the courage of the men and women who go into battle.

Aw haw hey, Private. Go well.

Effort = value

From a post about exploiting social networking, the following a jackpot:

• Do good work. Create a good product, have great customer service, etc.
• Listen. What is being said about you is as important, if not more than, what you are saying about you.
• Care. In social media channels where conversations are more intimate, people can really tell if you are paying lip service or paying attention.
• Add value. What you bring to the conversations and communities better be relevant, thoughtful, and of real use to the community members (friends, fans, followers).
• Be real. Authentic, transparent, honest — you know the drill, but are you doing it?

Not a bad set of rules for any work.

Give thanks and praise: Beryl Marriott

A damned shame. Beryl Marriott was one of the greatest English-style ceilidh-band pianists. She gave Dave Swarbrick his first fiddle gigs, and she ruled on his great solo discs Swarbrick and Smiddyburn.

We owe her a lot.

Great moments from The Wire

...as if any moments from the The Wire weren't great ones, but still:

I love that the smartest police on the whole team, Clark Peters's masterful Lester Freamon, has the most diverse drinking habits: from one show to another he drinks Jameson, Guinness (in the nitrogen bottle, thereby confirming that Lester knows an American pour sucks), and Red Stripe (Jamaica).

The point is that Lester is the best police on the team because he pays attention to details and never loses patience or gives up. If you can't pay attention to your beer you probably can't pay attention to a wiretap either.

Nice touch.

"Engaged and Integrated Scholar"

Requested responses to university Provost's "Engaged and Integrated Scholars" series feature. Surprising how much more honest you can be when you've got tenure:

1. What is your research objective/interest(s)?

Interests:
American and African-American Music, 20th Century Music, Irish traditional music and other folk musics and cultures, improvisation, music and politics, performance practice, historical performance.
Objectives:
To do work as a research scholar which enriches historical understanding, empowers communities, and overcomes cultural boundaries.

2. How do you feel your research impacts the globe?

In my research, I am a proponent of Patrick Geddes's dictum to "Think globally, but act locally". I believe scholars should recognize wider impact and responsibility for their work, not only within their own disciplines, but also as part of wider research communities and, indeed, as part of all communities worldwide. Because my own work is especially engaged with the histories of marginalized, colonized, ostracized, and working-class musics, it also engages issues of politics, race, class, and power and I am particularly aware of my responsibilities in these areas.

3. Where do you get your inspiration?

I am inspired by my own teachers and predecessors, within and beyond the field of musicology, who have modeled for me the combination of rigor, curiosity, insight, sensitivity, and work-ethic which I strive to realize in my own work. My own teachers J. Peter Burkholder, Austin Caswell, Thomas J Mathiesen, Thomas Binkley, and Richard Bauman were giant intellects and inspirations. Beyond musicology, I am inspired by the poetics of Gary Snyder and Peter Mathiessen, the spiritual insights of Dainin Katagiri Roshi and Thomas Merton, and the stunning beauty and emotional depth I have found in many different forms of traditional music. As Bob Dylan said, "traditional music will teach you everything you need to know to live. If you let it."

4. What type(s) of service projects do you enjoy doing?

I am acutely aware of the unusual privilege I enjoy as a a white, male, tenured, heterosexual college professor. That privilege--though hard-earned and many years in coming--obligates me to work to help others. I donate my time writing, teaching, playing, and speaking as much as I possibly can. Possibly the most gratifying service projects of all are those in which, through teaching, I am privileged to help people become participants in the creation of their own artistic lives.

5. What projects are you currently working on?

My primary current research project is a large-scale scholarly monograph on the earliest roots of blackface minstrelsy, the early 19th century street idiom which synthesized African-American and Anglo-Celtic styles to create the first great American popular music. I am also heavily involved in expanding the range and visibility of the work done by my own Vernacular Music Center, and the activities of the Celtic Ensemble, a unique ensemble among North American music conservatory programs.

6. What advice do you have for new faculty members on balancing all of the components of an integrated scholar into their careers (academics, research, service)?

Although I would certainly not think of myself as exemplifying effective integration of al these elements--I am acutely aware of my own limitations and inefficiencies--I have found the following dicta to be practical and useful:

• Cultivate the ability to concentrate closely in short bursts of time. Available time for one's own research is never sufficiently great and it is always prone to interruption; therefore, it is important to be able to muster concentration in shorter bursts.
• Related to the above: identify those patterns in your calendar and schedule in which your concentration is best and most suited for certain types of activities, and protect those times for your own work. I get up at 4:30AM, six days a week, for this reason.
• Develop a physical and a spiritual discipline. Do something outdoors and something physical every day. I bicycle, garden, do yoga and martial arts.
• Invest effort not only in your own work, but also in communicating and collaborating with colleagues, making sure that they know what you are working on. Work a little bit harder and be a little bit friendlier--this pays large dividends.

7. Lastly, please provide us with some background information to help people get to know you. What is your official title, educational background and hometown?

I am Associate Professor of Musicology; I serve as Chair of Musicology, director of the Vernacular Music Center, and director of the Celtic Ensemble. I hold a BA (Music) from the University of Massachusetts, and a Master's in Music (Jazz Studies) and Ph.D. in Musicology, from Indiana University. I was born on the north shore of Massachusetts, in a small town called Marblehead (home of the painting The Spirit of '76), but have lived, worked, and played music in Cambridge MA, Manhattan, Chicago, and New Orleans, as well. My wife Dharmonia (also professor of Musicology at the university) and I lived in southern Indiana for 12 years, and here in Lubbock since 2000, but my heart is still in the foothills and seashores of northern New England.

Music is magic

Every kind of awesome. These folks have been married sixty-two years.



All created and uncreated phenomena arise, flourish, and pass away. But love endures.

Gone beyond

My mother died in March. At the time, the exigencies of dealing with her deterioration (48 hour trip to New England, return to Lubbock, only to have her decease 2 days later), the memorial service and accompanying family complexities, a hellacious semester with multiple personnel and budgetary melt-downs, and my own crisis-moment tendency to go into emergency-coping mode, meant that I didn't do much conscious mourning.

I was moved by the open sorrow expressed by my siblings, especially by my brothers--two remarkable, admirable men--and their spouses, which quartet had been primarily responsible for her care in the wake of my step-father's death last summer, and her subsequent and very swift descent into Alzheimer's. I could weep for them, and their sorrow--but not so much for her.

But, as I said to another friend at the time, "my relationship with my mother was sort of classically fucked-up", and it was--mostly due to the absolutely horrific legacy of family dysfunction to which both my parents were subjected as children. My mother was too unhappy, too damaged, to be an especially effective parent, despite the fact that she manifestly loved her kids. And she fucked me over, over and over again, in the area of my vocation to music. There are reasons I was in therapy for 12 years, and she--and the legacy of my monstrous grandmother--were two major ones.

Here's my own brief articulation, from eight years ago:

These Wooded Hills

These wooded hills and rocky shores
are the
memory of my childhood;

whipped by salt Atlantic waves,
traced by crumbling dry stone walls;
marked by cowshit and the cry of gulls,

gouged by retreating glaciers of a last Ice Age;
and the faint whispering voices
of old wars, old words, old violence, old victories.

Granite, oak, slate, and pine;
topsoil's topography ripped away,

leaving the bones.

So I was pretty damned grateful when Dharmonia wrote this, which expressed pure, open, Bodhisattva mourning for Bobby Smith Thomas in a way couldn't. And then I could weep for her:

While driving to a funeral

Bobby is gone, gone, gone beyond
Gate gate paragate
Parasamgate bodhi svaha
Her son at the wheel driving east
Rain is lashing at the windshield,
spraying up from the passing trucks
and while thinking of how we pass
from life into death, around us
life continues its circus
in the sheeting rain, driving wind
Massachusetts bumper stickers:
Obama is still President,
My Other Car is still a Broom,
Jesus Saves and the Yankees still suck
This my home state, and now, and now
One last journey to the North Shore
At least for reasons tied to blood
And bone, and the love of this man
And the others who share that blood

And how strangely appropriate
The blinding rain and shrieking wind
To sagas stories and plot lines
To complicated webs of past,
To layers of pride and of doubt
To all the love and the anger
Kneaded into the famous bread
And those who came to adulthood
In the eye of this hurricane
Each making their own peace with her
She was not my mother, and yes
I saw the complicated side
But I loved her for bringing him
Into the world in the first place,
And for what she wanted to be,
And for the things she tried to be,
And was, when clarity could cut
Through what had been handed to her.
A friend of mine once said to me
“One can be a difficult parent
And still be a great friend,” and
She was that to me, and it is
A terrible thing to witness
A heart beating in the shambles
That Alzheimer’s leaves in its wake--
So you will understand, when I
Saw the ashes mixed with earth, why
I spoke the mantra “gone beyond”

Gate gate paragate
Parasamgate bodhi svaha

the doorless doors of the Pure Land
do not require us to bring
All of our Stuff along with us
No eyes no ears no nose no mouth
No junk no faults no garbage, but
Just the cloudless blue sky of mind.

I am grateful that I have such loving people in my life. I need them.

Gassho.

My hero, Gary Snyder

I hope, when the time comes for me to die, that I will have lived a life this valuable:



Gassho.

Growin' 'em meself

Boomer-aged Bay Area English Country Dance teacher, to Dr Coyote, after I walked into the Dallas traditional dance group's Country Dance weekend with 14 young'uns in tow, all of whom could sing, dance, play, and focus like demons:

Where on earth did you get these great kids, you wonderful man?!?

Dr Coyote:

Aw, hell...I just grow 'em in cold frames.

Damned proud of my guys.

The greatest television ever made

All praise to The Sopranos, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Corner, Six Feet Under, etc, etc,

but this is what demonstrates what that incredible idiom can accomplish:

Jiggity-jig, one more once

Slowly digging out here. For a Spring "Break", there sure has been a hell of a lot of eventuality in the past 7 days. Got back from a family affair on Wednesday, leaving for Dallas with a van-load of students today. Where exactly was the "week off", again?

"Aw, c'mon, we're not all named Paddy, y'know..."

Beannachtai la feile Padraig, ya feckin' eedjits!

Beyond burnout, but worth it

Battlefield Band rocked the house. Not only fantastic virtuosos, with an incredible, high-energy, and off-the-cuff hilarious stage show, but also easy-going, friendly gentlemen--the antithesis of prima donnas. I'll have a post for another day on the things that having been road musician in your own past tell you the visiting road musicians might want, or not want, to deal with--and how that helps improve the hospitality you can figure out to offer.

Gig dropped at 8pm, they played the last note--joined by the TTU Set-Dancers and your numble narrator--at around 10:30pm. Sold over 100 CDs, which was fantastic news in terms of the bottom line, but deferred escaping the building.

Back to our crib 11:30pm, for an after-party that stretched toward 3am. Fantastic crack with the lads, introduction and re-introductions that crossed decades between meetings (nice to see The General and Alan Reid get re-acquainted, after a good 25 years). Around 3:15am, boot 'em out the door, so we can spend an hour cleaning so Taiyo doesn't have to do it, and then leave for the airport around 4am, to check in for the 5:15 crack o' dawn flight.

Connections in Houston and Chi, arrive Hartford to be met by Dharmonia's mom. Quick trip up the Mass Pike, and now crashing big-time.

Helluva lot of events in precisely the past 24 hours.

Aw haw hey!

Battlefield Band in the LBK hizzouse.

Titanic.

digital gratitude

I absolutely flippin love dropbox.com. And my feelings for code-slinging computer-superstar student assistants ain't far behind. Thank you Glen Hunt!

Van Jones goes after Glenn Beck, Beck pees himself with fear...

Incredible speech from Jones, who Beck character-assassinated right out of the White House "Green Jobs Initiative" post:

Jones instead had kind words for the Fox News host:

Last thing I want to say is this: To my fellow countryman, Mr. Glenn Beck. I see you, and I love you, brother. I love you, and you cannot do anything about it. I love you, and you cannot do anything about it. Let’s be one country! Let’s be one country! Let’s get the job done!

Beck won't be able to handle it--any more than a cockroach running from the light--but Jones has hit on the best possible way to hit back at the toxic opportunists and psychotic fanatics of the modern "conservative" movement. Or, to quote Gerrald Winstanley:

To conquer them with love, Stand up now, stand up now,
To conquer them with love, Stand up now
To conquer them with love, As it does you behoove
For He is King above, No power is like to love
Stand up now.

Gassho.

Wisdom is wisdom, the Dharma is the Dharma...

...whatever the forum.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, spiritual (and quasi-political) leader of the Tibetan people in exile after the Chinese invasion of 1950-51 (and captured most harrowingly in Martin Scorsese's mournful Kundun) has a remarkable ability to take the most banal questions in the most asinine, dumbed-down situations with the most predictable answers and turn them sufficiently on their head that he can elicit insight, even from Larry King.

Case in point:

King asks: "the American people want both trade with China and independence for Tibet; how can they resolve this contradiction?"

HHDL: "... Tibet does not want independence from China! We are a landlocked technologically backward country; we need China's help. No, we want autonomy and the preservation of Tibetan culture--but NOT independence."

Talk about redirecting energy from tired paths to those with new possibilities!

Remarkable. I am privileged beyond measure to have had the opportunity to take refuge vows with the man himself. The Vows are the vows, and the Dharma is the Dharma, no matter where, from or with whom.

But it damned sure is easier, as a fallible human, to stick to the Middle Path with a leader like that as inspiration and role-model.

Single-tasking

It has become all the fashion on the productivity blogs to bash multi-tasking, while at the same time, on the education blogs, self-consciously "progressive" types are bashing hidebound *resistance* to multi-tasking.. I think, however, that such trendy bashing proceeds from somewhat different critiques. On the productivity blogs, the critique is that multi-tasking, which is conventionally understood as "doing two or more things at the same time" (editing, talking on the telephone, monitoring social-networking feeds, etc, etc), actually erodes productivity--that the illusion is believing that either one of the tasks being performed simultaneously "to save time" is being executed as well as either could be executed sequentially.

For the edu-bloggers, the contrary argument--in terms of their contrasted clientele of students--is that 21st century youth (and in this I'm including anybody anywhere in any formalized educational system, age 5 to around age 26) spend nearly all of their waking hours multi-tasking anyway (cell phone, facebook updates, text messaging all occurring simultaneously with, oh, I don't know, operating an automobile, "studying" for a test, "taking notes" in a lecture) that it's artificial, probably uncomfortable, and certainly counter-productive to insist that they suddenly switch gears entirely and become one-pointed in their attention during the tasks that we think should be accomplished by mono-tasking.

Historically, in the K-12 world, as I understand it educators have finessed this by diagramming the durations of attention of which children are capable at various stages of cognitive development: 90 seconds at age 6, two-and-a-half minutes at age 10, and so on (the likely inaccuracy of my time estimates here revealing my embarrassing unfamiliarity with educational technique). This strikes me as an OK/not-bad solution to the existing situation--but not one that is really applicable for a college-age clientele who are supposed to be learning how to expand and focus their concentration, in terms of both topics and durations.

But I don't think the edubloggers quite have hold of the right of the stick either. There's an old saying back from all those years ago in the 1970s, "If you studied stoned, you better take the exam stoned." (Parenthetically, I can still say that, four decades later, I still see undergrad music kids operating from the same numb-skulled presumption--trumpet players never change) I don't hold with trendy parallel current view about multi-tasking's suitability. I think contemporary college students don't know how to concentrate and that part of our job is to teach them how.

On the other hand, people do sometimes comment on the work-load I carry, and/or the degree to which I can "multi-task," thinking of it as revealing higher-than-normative productivity. I don't happen to believe that--I'm crucially aware of what I could be producing and of the colossal degree to which I'm constantly falling short--but that repeated assertion has made me think about what it might be they think they're seeing. And I don't think it's multi-tasking; there's something else going on here.

What I think is being observed is something I learned years ago, as a survival skill, somewhere in the twelve years we were in graduate school, or maybe even before that when I went back to finish the aborted undergrad degree, or maybe even before that, when I was working as a bookstore night-manager, or restaurant cook, or framing carpenter. I learned that I was never going to have the number of hours, or the extended blocks of time, that would let me practice uninterruptedly as long as I wanted or in open-ended ways.

When I was carpentering, I learned to get up at 4:30am and practice until I had to be at work at 7:30, because trying to practice chromatic approaches after a full day of framing houses, and a shower, was a recipe for falling asleep.

When I was cooking, I'd work double-shifts three days a week (14 hour days: 9am-11pm), so that more days were open for practicing. I'd get out of the restaurant at 11 and walk three miles home across town, trying to unwind enough so that I could sleep readily and get up early.

At the bookstore, I'd work 7-midnight, take a last train from Cambridge's Harvard Square, sprint for the last bus at Government Center in Lynn, and hope that bus in turn made a connection that would take me all the way up to my home town on the North Shore so I could walk only a couple of blocks to my friend Larry's house--if I didn't make that last connection, I'd walk 5 miles there. And get up early to practice.

Night-managing the guitar studio, I'd get up and get to the studio two or three hours before opening time, so I could have the place to myself, away from distractions or noisy apartment neighbors, and better concentrate on the practicing. I'd sit behind the desk once we opened up and play scales and patterns on the house acoustic guitars for hours upon end, driving everybody in the waiting room crazy, when Larry & I weren't playing Irish tunes on fiddle and mandolin and driving them crazier.

I taught myself to sight-read on the Brookline Green Line train heading to the Studio every morning and, late night, riding home at night. I still remember the workbook: an early edition of Clough's Chords, Keys, Scales, Intervals, and Triads.

When I went back to school, I'd read the 4th edition Grout Music History textbook on the Red Line to Dorchester, when I wasn't sitting there, book closed, practice piano fingerings (Stravinsky's Les Cinqs Doigts and Bartok's Mikrokosmos) on its spine.

One of the most amazing guitarists I've ever heard, Wisconsin's Jack Grassel, said to me, "if you work at home, keep the guitar out, on a stand, so if there's only a few minutes free, you don't have to waste time pulling it out of the case."

I'd sit there in the late-night Wednesday or sign-on Sunday shifts at the Bloomington public radio station, my throat raw and voice shot from screaming over the 9-piece horn band the night before, the mic shut off, and play Dave Baker's 101 Bebop Licks and 33 common-practice bebop heads in 22-minute increments while the LP's of Bruckner and Brahms spooled through their sides. I'd sit at the station's sole MS DOS desktop, which ran the AP ticker and was embedded in a wall of World War II surplus sound-gear about 5 feet off the ground, so I had to use a high stool, and transcribe classroom lecture notes onto floppy discs, with the on-air feed turned up loud so I could hear it.

I learned to carry along a primitive walkman everywhere, so I could block out ambient noise wherever I was. Studying for my doctoral exit exams, I had three huge 5-inch loose-leaf binders, one for each major topic area (Baroque, American, 20th century), so huge they wouldn't fit in a knapsack, so I strapped them all together with a martial-arts belt, and carried them everywhere.

Nowadays, I stand or fall on the hour-by-hour scheduling of the Outlook planner. I tell students asking at the end of class for a meeting time to please send me an email, because I can only guarantee that the time is available (and will be reserved) if I'm sitting there with the Outlook planner open.

I block out the week literally hour-by-hour, always making sure, as I've blogged before, that there's not only prep-time for each class or meeting, but also followup-time. As I've said, nowadays I'll write a followup note (kind of "minutes or "action-items") for every meeting: student, faculty, survey, or seminar class. It means that almost every hour of the week is locked-in, and for some people would "feel" terribly rigid, but for me it's actually liberating. Because I can be reasonably confident that there will be time to do everything that needs to be done within the constraints of the timetable on which they need to be done. But it has to happen right then, not later, and not optionally--it has to be right then.

And it can all go to hell, of course, if the inevitable unpredicted interruptions overwhelm the small chunks of time in the schedule allocated for them. These days, with a parent failing, also by the hour, it's particularly difficult to stay focused.

But it's particularly important, now, in the job I've held these past 10 years. Because now, the blocked-out hours and half-hours and quarter-hours are not only essential to getting my own work done, but absolutely essential to the viable progress of my students--especially graduate students--in their own life-plans. I spent 12 years in graduate school and I do have some grasp of how overwhelming every single hurdle can seem. What that means is that they have to believe that, meeting by meeting and semester-by-semester, I am totally locked-in, for that particular chunk of time together, on helping them every way I can, right there and right then.

It matters that I've learned, over the past 30 years, to single-task--to apply one-pointed attention--in the pursuit of my own long-term goals. It's even more important, now, that I apply that attention to the long-term goals and well-being of my students.