Friday Night Jam

Friday Night Jam

Nowick Gray

Cougar WebWorks VICTORIA, BC

Copyright © 2014 by Nowick Gray All rights reserved.

Published by: Cougar WebWorks www.CougarWebWorks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gray, Nowick, 1950-, author Friday night jam / Nowick Gray.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4995-6682-6 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-0-9811431-2-5 (epub) 1. Improvisation (Music)--Instruction and study. I. Title.

MT68.G782 2014

781.3'6

C2014-905267-7 C2014-905268-5

Friday Night Jam

Introduction (1996) During the last six years a number of the local neophyte drummers have attempted to breathe life into and out of that longer-lived institution, the Friday Night Jam. Haven of Elvis aficionados and Credence Clearwater hacks, Willie Nelson impersonators and would-be-Deadheads, the Friday Night Jam has lived by one rule: anything goes. Unfortunately for my taste, the “any” part of it sometimes gets lost in the Standards shuffle.

Which is to say, group improvisation is hard to do well. When it works, however, it’s dynamite, true inspiration, golden. It can even redeem the most tired of oldies, given an injection of altered lyrics, rhythms, and original solos.

The chronic problem at the Friday Night Jam has been to amalgamate the Afro-Latin drums and percussion with the western guitars, accordion, piano, harmonica, and their associated forms: primarily in the straight-ahead four-four

mold. The drummers generally want to lean the beat over to the offbeat, the syncopated, the reggae. Reggae has been a convenient meeting ground because the compromise is simply found in the regular upbeat. But more than that is the issue of a controlled, recognizable “song” versus an extended, authentic and moveable jam.

Group drum jam energy works best in waves, without restrictions of straightjacket lyrics, measures, predetermined chord changes. You can put it all together in a great package, if you’re Santana or Olatunji. For us amateurs, that challenge takes work and practice as a group, and these are not appropriate to the looser anarchy of the jam. Even the oft-attempted “Let’s take turns and go around the circle for starting something” is hard to maintain consistently in that venue. So success is left to chance, to who shows up and the mood they’re in, to the phase of the moon or the health of the crop or the status of one’s lovelife, to how many drums can support each other for the occasional detour down Africa lane. It’s all about listening, and sharing leadership, and these are qualities that don’t come to us easily or automatically.

The biggest obstacle in this culture comes from the worship of the guitar god. The lead guitar calls the shots: sets the melody and mood,

determines the volume (easily overpowering drums with a twist of the amp button, or requiring them to tone down, if there’s no amp, until the natural projective life goes out of them).

It’s true that rhythm is fundamental and so a single percussionist can take any song and shift its character, ruin it or drive it to new life. But in terms of group dynamics, the guitarist is generally preeminent, by default. Everyone looks to them for the next song, waits for them to retune, and depends on the structures that they have memorized and are offering as a wellfurnished boat for everyone to ride in. What the drummer offers is support: this is what is expected. For a drummer to share or take the lead is not expected or easily allowed. Conversely, it’s hard for other musicians used to taking lead melodic parts to learn to settle for supportive, truly rhythmic roles.

So lately the jam is in decline. Lately there haven’t been many drummers showing up, because when we do, we’re held back by the inertia of low energy, low volume, and low creativity. We, like the other musicians, are aging, or have a lot of distractions on our minds, or are afraid to boldly take the loose reins, or have simply given up trying—for now. But as always, it’s different every week. Who knows what

stranger or visitor will show up this time, or what random collection of hideaways will decide to come out and celebrate this full moon? When it fails it’s deadly dull, and a Friday night wasted.

But when it clicks, and moves into magic, there’s nothing like it in the world.

1991 September 23, 1991 Day after Fall Faire and I’m sitting here dull and reeling after a weekend full of the social whirl, performance Saturday afternoon, again at night by campfire, drums drums drums, the lesson being, this time, again, to listen, to tone down enough perhaps if that’s what it takes to listen, to converse. This lesson arose in the jam on the first good song after the long instrumental, and Walkin came in with the lyric again, and I interrupted in the next half line with an inane idea for a title. Peter had to say, “Too late, Nowick” and that killed the song. All right, it’s not a conversation, it’s a ceremony.

Music, like life, is a learning in social relations, interactions. Sometimes it’s complicated, or I care too much, or try too hard, or find it a difficult sport. I do better at the individual sports, I always found; does that imply playing as a drum soloist?

No, the best is when the teamwork, the laughter, the ceremony clicks.

1992 January 4, 1992 The drums played beyond performance anxiety on New Year’s Eve because the appreciative dancers were eating it up, and the band was grooving, and I was feeling good. To find again, get in touch with the inner voice, the voice that needs to speak. Not plodding, muted, dull and lifeless, bored and sick of life, but determined to share what is of worth, what is experienced in the social impulse of shared stories and mutual energy, having to do with selfconfidence and feeling of acceptance, and thus freedom of self-expression. To accept the role of shaman to drum, to speak the incantations that will connect us. To be inspired and thus conspire with the sacred rhythms; to be a keeper of the rhythms, the tales, the songs. This is the responsibility, the joy of the artist.

On the one end, to invoke the muses and other helping spirits, and to placate the evil ones. On the other, to translate, to convey, to be the

medium and the vehicle between the visible and the unseen worlds, the living and the dead and unborn. To bridge the rainbow arch between people and nature, between people and their own inner nature, their destiny and origins. To honor the flow between the various worlds of experience, and the integrity of each.

January 17, 1992 Lars and Jane and I arrived with the “heavy artillery,” me saying, “These guys’ll freak out when they see all these drums.” We started mellow, and worked into some good tunes together, except I blew it with “Black Magic Woman” when I got the mike in my hand, going off-key and low-energy and pointing into the amp for wild feedback. Finally Peter attempted a slow, swinging “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” on the organ, but Lars and William and Dick and I kept rocking along with some driving rock beat long after Peter sat slumped inert at the keyboard; on and on we drove until my hands were tired and sore, and finally as he sat there still I said, “Well Peter, did we destroy your song?” And he said, “Totally.” So we sat speechless for a while, and he got up and took out his guitar and sat on the washtub and played a few mellow acoustic

tunes, no accompaniment except a little of Dick on the piano, and Lars finally a bit on the conga, and I got up and moved to a seat against the far wall, brooding, and Jane looked like she was ready to leave, and I started to pack up too; William meanwhile sitting off on an opposite bench cool and professionally unruffled, and finally saying, “Aw, don’t let Willie Nelson there scare you off.” Okay, man. See you guys again.

February 12, 1992 First annual 24-hour drum jam. One rule: Keep the beat going.

We arrived at the hall, called in the four directions, chanted, beat the steady 210 of the shaman’s drum, Michael and Walkin and Jane and Rowena and I, and a guy from New Denver: gettin in the mood. Then began a good rolling rock in the forming circle, with a jazz beat offset

by Ken. Julie, Lars, Doug all showed up and joined.

From there, a pastiche, a roller coaster, a trading of percussion toys, a sharing of drums, ongoing beat. Peter and Michael show up, go like crazy. Later, Julie and Jane with Peter, Doug and New Denver, cohesive and driving.

Sometimes it didn’t always work. During the most high-energy jamming, as between Michael

and me, or me on the good djembe and Nigel on the yew, I’d be self-centered, loud and improvisational. Julie and Nigel later would say they’d look for the quietest drum, to play to that; or that the loud stuff was overbearing, impenetrable, lost on a jag. Lars remarked that traditionally African drummers didn’t play free of the forms until age 30, after fifteen years of practice. “Yeah,” I replied, “but we’ve been listening to jazz for twenty years.”

Miles Davis said, “There are no mistakes.”

Walkin said, “It’s all good.”

Into the night, the evening and night.

Michael lays down, Julie and I take it up. Me on the big bass, her on the djembe, steady, slow, and powerful. Michael says, “That was the best music I’ve heard in Argenta.” I say, “That’s what I thought hearing you guys play when I lay down to sleep.”

Of course I didn’t sleep.

When we lay out in the circle on the mats and benches, we took rattles and shakers in our hands, to keep the beat. At one point only I was up, with the sticks. Then New Denver relieved me, and he took up the slow bass djembe.

Toward morning we made strong black coffee and got into some grooved jamming, alternating

with slow breathers. At one sparse point Doug said, “It feels like some Buddhist colony.”

Okay, I thought, and once more set up a sustained 210 on the yew drum, chanting Om with New Denver beside me, Doug cross-legged on the mat opposite. Jane nearby; Julie wandering, Lars and Michael gone, Ken asleep or out. It took off—the rolling drumstick beats, the billowing group voice.

Nigel walked in, dumbstruck. Later he said, “It felt like a church, a sacred space. You guys were egoless, totally spaced out. You’d gotten rid of everything, burned it all away.” He took over the driving force on the yew drum, eyes closed and grooving from then on, the last four hours. “I figured you’d need the energy boost by then.”

When it’s over, we drift outside in the sun on bright morning snow. And the ravens pick it up and carry it on: quork, a quork-quork... qu-qu-ququ-quork...

July 24, 1992 Big warm-up party jam, with ginseng, brandy and pot, till midnight when X arrives stoned on mushrooms and with pot brownie to share morsels of, energy for more music and talk in Third World Stone Age limited lingo words without connectors:

truth... you... everyone... always... why... why... when... ah, yes, when... now?... all time... no time... world to shit... them... ripped off... garbage... in mind?... whose... beautiful teeth... yours... good looking you... you fuck other women?

“No,” I answer, “past... not any more... different life now... happy.”

Sept. 7, 1992 Fine debacle of a music politics on Saturday.

Nigel having said show up to play, and put a poster on the board with the same message.

Richard arrives and sets up on stage; William lurking beside, then up with the keyboard. But then John steps in and says we can play off to the side; Michael concurs, “Yeah we’re gonna play for an hour and see what happens after that,” and Nigel caps it off with, “It’s just gonna be the four of us. The guy wants to turn the canned music on after that.”

I’m resigned to it, Richard dismantles, William bullheaded stays to play. Good for him, Gary says later. Okay fine.

Boring old rock and roll, it turned out, uninspiring for dancing, listening, or playing. A wave of karma rolling out, said Richard the next day. Michael, the next night, apologizes and

profusely disavows any role in the strictures on personnel, then or in the future. John mentions a lukewarm apology to me, “Sorry about what happened.” Nigel remarks how pissed off he was that the DJ pulled the plug on his voice mike halfway through the last number.

Hmmm, I wonder who the real culprit is?

Willing to give these the benefit of the doubt and blame the DJ, or the wedding organizers whoever they may be, it still smacks of a turnabout and power trip...

That’s okay, I still got my guitar (Hendrix).

I told Michael that the experience sealed it for me: I was through with rock and roll. I told John that I realized I didn’t want to play that kind of music anyway; instead I accepted the responsibility to get together an act that could play the kind of music I liked. Lars, Richard, Julie were on same wavelength, at least. Michael and Nigel say so too. Peter? Hank? Jane? What about Dick P. and Dick K.? William?

1993 January 9, 1993 Morning after great jam. I will call it: Just Jam, or Animal Nature.

In order of appearance: Lars, John, me, Phil, Julie: two mouth harps, electric bass, drum and percussion.

Phil waxing poetic on the evolving point of the cosmos, here and now, thinking, playing music, herb consciousness, all of us here ready and waiting for the Aries tiger to come claws out to wake us up to say, Oh, yeah, right, that’s what’s happening, it’s the spirit of the sixties coming back cycling around again, Jim Morrison and Led Zeppelin doing acid in a Toronto apartment 1968, or with sixty natives in Alert Bay playing on a hollowed cedar log with maple sticks so that everybody, even the RCMP and 80-year-olds, were up dancing.

Lars spent New Year’s Eve in Dubois, Idaho in a blizzard in a rundown 1930s motel, a cowboy in a pickup truck waving with a salute saying,

“Howdy.” One TV station that night aired a show about making African drums, dance, music: the same video Nashira has currently from her homeschooling correspondence course.

Like Phil says, it’s all coming back to the beat.

We’re warming up for next month.

It’s all happening now, Mr. Zepp.

It will keep the perfect time if we are relaxed enough to feel into it, get into the groove of the all-becoming, through us in cosmic unfolding now here in the awareness boom of our own making and consciousness-keeping: circles of celebration, our sacred duty to carry on, act out in the street theatre of the us and now, the who are we today and tomorrow: to wipe the old memories out where useless, so as to free up disk space for the more creative functioning of programs yet to be heard. Carrying on the energy of youth, of what’s alive today, even with the rhythms of ancient times, cutting through the buzz and blare of advertising unconsciousness, pap and blather obscuring who we are together in the ongoing beat of the keys of right now, who are you, what’s going now and let’s get to it: jamming, of course, into the night if that’s what it takes, universal language music. Fatala says: beyond spiritual politics.

Market news and other diversions.

Animal dreams, rising sun.

Outside today, feeling nothing of the 10degrees cold because I’m relaxed and therefore warm, beaming into the fresh sun of a sky rich in blues and fir-green, bright with the mounded buttocks and breasts of snow and shadow, a brilliant overlay of starpatterned jewels, a cosmos apparent in film before the eyes, shimmering on an invisible blanket over the blanket of white snow, while, like part of the overall symphony, crystals fly horizontal in shimmering sheets, passing flocks darting by dissipating in the updraft breeze, another elusive shower sweeping down from stirring branches, it’s the energy constant that keeps the music going, the stirring in the branches, the keeping of the beat, the sand shaking or the bass skin pounding, rockin and a rainin...

I want to hold too the clear consciousness of clarity and space and time enough for all, of social fabric in music which is metaphorical for all of us relating, ritual the form by which to recognize it, all in the sacred circle dancing, carrying the rock, drinking the potion of our life, sacred fluid together in veins interlinked, consciousness behind the shifting scenes, it’s all a kind of body, a common or linked consciousness behind the shifting scenes of our life interactions, our

separate bodies merely limbs and organs and cells of the moving animal that is our human and of course, larger living and nonorganic life, the earth our body, the earth our consciousness. I want to remember this sense of unity and harmony, I almost say purpose but purpose being mostly in the awareness itself, of what this beast is and to appreciate the wonder of its working. To see in this way, the art in everything, the art of everything, that it’s all an ongoing jam, a huge street theatre, we’re playing parts even when we’re unconscious of it, or partially aware, or forgetful, vindictive, and other ways obscuredmind human, which after all is the game we’ve chosen, at some level, to play. All a large computerlike draft, us the players in the unseen program, all the more wondrous because we do have the chance, anytime we wake up to the moment, to enter the programming level and modify, customize, add wrinkles to the brainfold rules, shades of meaning to the patterns, embellishments on the mother beat.

This is visionary: hard to maintain against the play of personality, the separateness of our voices when we talk and write and explore to the utmost our personal and individual opinions and variations. Again the music metaphor is relevant, for the secret of harmonizing these individual

understandings is to play together: to allow with tolerance and yet resonance the separate strands to color the tone of the whole, to weave into the hybrid code. To blend the obscurities of rhythmic variation into the common ongoing underlying pulse... pulse... pulse... of our common body which is the sacramental understanding of human unity, love. If this is cosmic purpose in any literal or anthropomorphic sense, so be it. If only symbolic in that way through our own imaginings, that’s as well. It’s the tone of the interactions and spirit of our lives together that counts in either case, and if it be prophetic to state it thus, so be that too.

January 15, 1993 It’s Friday again, it’s snowing, Lillian Allen is rappin and rockin in my skull, and I’m sitting down to work. I’m inspired by virtual reality, holographic theory, psychoactive politics, and ceremonialism. Looking to go to town to buy a drum. Good, good... my blood is secretly boiling for the next hot jam, the all-night ritual. It’s the space that counts, the spirit, the mood, the energy that sweeps along.

January 23, 1993 A special time—alternating chosen obsessions.

A best ever jam last night, second in a row to 4 a.m. after one to 2, and after two harps a bass and two drums, and ten people last week, this week fifteen: Phil, John, Walkin, Dick, Gail, Lars, Richard, Michael, Peter, Nigel, Michel, Julie, me, Nathan, Rowena. New heights of drum performance as well as total music energy experience and connection. Many peaks, and everything from African jazz to “BeBop a Looda� worked. Pointers from Michel today.

Once more a sense of all things possible, and thresholds crossed. Still room for learning, improvement; but the encouragement is there.

Bad news and good news. Not in static state except for human condition and character makeup, but in dynamic evolution, continuing relative progress.

January 24, 1993 A long chat with Michel yesterday on drumming and jamming: the need to be more out there, present, expressive, not flat and holding back, but dynamic: moving in and out of the rhythmic base, with others supporting and being supported: taking and giving space for solos: jazz

practice. Controlling beats and striking clearly; keeping it together whether on the base or taking off. Keeping the central pulse and the other’s place in mind at all times. Using accents: but using them for controlled effect; not getting lost with them.

At the same time, he was affirming about the potential, the power, the magic, the talent that was there.

I feel a letdown now of personal criticism after feeling so incredibly high from the performance, necessary I guess as balance. Part of the vicissitudes of ego inflation and deflation. The bad news along with the good.

Revelation during meditation: that taking off on rhythms is analogous to drifting away from breath attention, the centered pulse of nothought, while meditating. Similarly, my life seems to be composed of alternating states of obsession in the rounds of baseball, writing, music and reading, and daily chores, not often enough returning to the central place: contentment, breathing, centering, appreciating, slowing down in the real sense of connectedness and nonactivity. Robert Bly says, “We are leaving our time now� to go to the sacred space of timelessness. This happens back and forth, relative to the movement; as in the jam,

remarking to Lars: “We are entering our time now.” Shifting gears, altering states.

January 30, 1993 The time of the full black moon. Scattered rhythms walking, four horses galloping together.

Modes of communication shared. Blake, Jesus and the saints and angels of the ages, watching, waiting on the street corners with the recently dead. Meeting, saying haven’t we met somewhere before? Tiger coming down from the mountain, walking through the village. The log is beaten, the barrels sawn to calculated gradations to produce a harmonic convergence of all sounds, all possible tracks around the web of light to cause it to shine brightly and to burn off the shadow memories of the past. Keeping the golden bridge open, and the small tunnel under the river. Meeting on the other side—is this individual understanding or collective awakening? We produce a purpose of present happiness: going naked together through the garden.

This is music, what we see in one another, standing before the fall; the avalanche is frozen in mid-motion, outside the picture window. We walk around inside, cleansed and getting ready, milling around, while it waits for us to say the word. Will we get around to it, the white and

formless tiger outside with its unfocused eye upon us? The tiger is us. Its eye is nowhere, and everywhere. Our eyes are but facets of its insect intelligence, memory equaling gravity, light equaling thought as it travels seemingly on a road going somewhere, but the where is here, coming back around. This is the “Burnt Norton” of the New Age upon us now, the Mediatatio of the present soul, its time come round: You surround me with ears breathing I hold you out in a widening ring Closing down dark in a sacred circle I draw one growing thing The high sky of the blowing world Shrinks to a spinning blue Reverie corrals a billion souls Chanting the one word, “You” Is this escape or capture?

My thumbs remember trees My fingers point to blossoms We walk inside these old, deep woods toward new springs In the end is the beginning. Adam in his myth comes to the new time, the time for reborning.

The knowledge now is contained in the sphere: to which all memory makes reference, pulled to the center, holding around the starlike presence of the whole. In our case, awakening earth, we can posit a manifestation of our thought: so we sow, in projection, in creation, in new dreaming, travels to lands that walk beside ours. No need to kill, though we still die. No need for unnecessary suffering: only that it is necessary to suffer. Partial truths cohere inside the sphere, and when they seem to depart, the vision must enlarge to see the wider layers that otherwise swallow the visionary line of sight. So there is no real sight outward: only a version of what it is like the long way round. Or: beam directly up or down, the hotkey to the past or future, the elevator of time working at light speed to bring awareness to and from the all. To create new metasynapses in the global brain: beaming across the gulfs of left and right, life and death, good and evil, separate and whole.

Throbbing in the wingbeat pulse of fluttering reality, hummingbirds of creation all.

Molecules, star systems, electric rails humming. All of these particles, swarming together down the great river of: call it the all, the becoming, the being in motion. Energy, a number, quality and dimension, tag labels of a hundred and sixty-seven tongues. Reducible at any node to

the code key reference, one through twelve, the triads and quartet linkages tying down the relations, each numerological sequence reflecting a principle of affinity, of bonding to show distinct qualities and as a way of entering the various states available to us. If this goes nowhere visible it is still along the tunnel, begun at birth and before. Womb entry, tomb egress, paths of glory and paths of stone. We walk, lightly shouldering our load for the day, the provisions for a near future. Monkish relations and nonrelations, howling in the wilderness, quiet assention of what goes down. Tomorrow, yesterday, today. In this dreaming the breath rolls, universal in its beat. The language gleams outward, and in, holographic union achieved before it is even attempted. In the fields of play: at work in the subcells of the directed and in the skating surfaces of the directionless. It all coheres because it is of the same universe. In this way more is possible. All is psychosinging, polyrhythm of the whole. All the notes however dissonant and patternless, all the conversations and revelations and interviews and soundbites chattering, the wordspeak monkeys hanging from the eaves, all cohere in the jungle to come. There is a garden waiting, under the snow of our white time. There is an earth dreaming us.

The collective verities come home to roost. The music they/we cluck all the livelong night can stop at any time, or keep going: it’s all the same to the cat outside eyeing the black full moon.

These nights and conversations do comprise a glimmering, a shimmering resonance with what’s being described around and about the brainpan electric these days: Maya where have you gone, to wait for us coming? How do we contact you now?

Or do we acknowledge your groundwork, your earthworks, and ride upon your bones respectfully to the church of your imagining: they be crying on the altar, and rockin in the aisles about now.

In reading, to have collected all the necessary materials for a thrust forward into the outer atmosphere of earth-consciousness. In music, to have broken past the barrier to the drum; and past barriers of expectation, performance criteria, needfulness of form: to the openness of becoming together. In relationship, to accept and appreciate the grounding energy, the simplicity and contentment of family and close personal contact, frequency sharing. Resonance within and between these tracks of being.

February 1, 1993 Monday, a new month today. I have a new drum. At this point I’m ready for more experience: a workshop with Olatunji maybe this summer, other travel, publishing, achieving states of happiness in everyday life. Is this yuppieism?

Could be. Phil says keep the planet in mind, the suffering of others. Phil the bodhisattva. To relieve suffering... how? Rinpoche says by teaching enlightenment.

Awareness, selfknowledge. How to be naked in the garden together. How to be. To be.

Michel has input on the drumming practice: listen. Play out there. That is, loud and clear, but together: on the rhythm, connected to the common beat.

A series of late night jams, 2:30, 4:30, 4:30, 3:30.

With five, ten, fifteen, six players. All good, all different. Is it going anywhere? Does it matter? It goes... around. The sphere holds all the variations together. It’s a music of physics, not of railroads.

It’s horses galloping together.

I plan, get excited. Run into people randomly in Nelson, tell them to come: the Quebecois woman, the New Denver guy, Lucy, Michael and Rowin. A slew of people from the Slocan coming, Ken with a trap set. It could be good. Sylvan with

his big bass. Jack with big bass drum? Tell him, at least.

The search for common pattern, consensus, harmony, the holding force. The ongoing, moving force, allowing freedom within its gentle boundaries. Not dogmatic, not rigid, not unchanging. But dynamic, weaving, changing and evolving together, with continuity of tradition and resonance of each to the other. This is political, literally on the level of teaching form.

How to be as a group, how to play together.

Synergy.

And I care about the quality of the experience for others. Why? Because it is a group experience, and I am not happy if all are not. Back to consensus model, politics. Musical democracy.

Sylvan: You can tell a lot about a person, playing music with them.

The comfort of many people playing drums: all are welcome, even me. Some are better, some worse. It doesn’t matter. The tribal mentality. All have a part to play, even if we’re not all virtuoso soloists. All can contribute, and enjoy the fruits of participation.

I want to show off, and enjoy the experience.

This is natural ego, living. Plunging boldly into the thick of life.

February 2, 1993 Drumming group yesterday, all five of us: Sylvan, Jane, Lars, Julie, and me; also Sheila, and Bronwyn. We had some good high spots, and for me some disappointments: uninspiring solo, dull roar of everyone playing, not really listening to the quieter ones. However there were those few bright moments, high-speed and high-energy runs. The new drum is slick and fast, has clear distinct tones amid the roar without overpowering others.

I am human, limited, fallible, and I can accept that. My powers are not godlike but finite. I am mortal and subject to pain and suffering. I partake of the human, the earthly condition. I have cosmic understanding and partake of the infinite wonder and joy and power of creation, of all creation; yet also my feet are clay (aluminum, mylar; wood and skin). I have a partner and a child, a stomach and an ego, an asshole and a place of disappointment and dejection. All of this is as it should be, life on earth. We work with that, tuning the strings of catgut or steel to sing the harmonics of the whole.

February 4, 1993 Another day gone, another day closer to the beat: and yet it reaches back, to the beginning.

This week I haven’t done as much rhythm practice as I had expected. But my consciousness has been there, my intention and my heart journey. In this spirit, it’s all part of the music, it’s all music. Rhythm, parts, ensemble with other people and elements of my life. The stacking of firewood, smoking of hams. The fixing of hydro, mopping of pantry floor, washing of dishes. The time spent with Nashira. In the African sensibility, the occasion and social context plays its part in the music. The dancers, the listeners. The meaning of the occasion. The taking care of details: the wordtalk; the walk; the rhythms of sleep and waking. The dreaming, the daydreams.

The affirmations. The sweat. Release into body understanding. The form practice too. The floating into and with the beat.

The taping and reading, seeping into consciousness. From now on it goes. It does not stop. It’s the merging of the individual and body and hand consciousness with the ensemble and the larger ensemble of reality. And so I continue . . .

February 5, 1993 Last day, the day has come. Am I making too much of this, setting myself up for disappointment?

I learned much from Chernoff, finishing last night and this morning. Crammed also on AfroLatin rhythms, and circle philosophies.

From Chernoff, the movement from technical virtuosity to social context, to placement in pattern. The ethical and social dimensions of music taking primacy over individual performance standards: the latter having a place determined by sensitivity to the whole, the sense of the deeper movement of the music, and of the dynamic connection of that with the ongoing appreciation of those not playing. With the whole.

It is holographic, not enclosed. It opens to resonance with the whole, live responsiveness to the situation. And so I flow with the food preparations, packing, getting ready, making love, doing the dishes, typing...

In the meantime, the streams are collecting in, now, as in the beginning of Woodstock. The Rajneesh meditation tape in the background is the soundtrack for this live movie in the making, this even of our creation, and the media can do what it will or not, that’s another part of the world and not the central concern, which is the spirit of the time and place and the gathering of us who choose to come, resonating in speech and movement of every moment, in the whole. Parts responsive, ever open and responsive, answering

in kind, from individual expression and offering.

Mutual respect, gentleness, coolness of spirit and warmness of heart. Thus the old men dance, thus they play. They guide the changes smoothly, sweetly.

February 9, 1993 My theory is that language is by nature an illusion giving a semblance of reality, like the bodily senses. So that to be truthful it is better to use fiction, which claims only to present a parallel to reality, an image, not an accurate overlay. In this way I am truer by constructing worlds of image and thought with the written word, the texts and patterns of art.

And yet in explaining all this to Sarah, I could use clear thinking and language to approximate the concept which I believe in. This is perhaps the key: to translate what is true for me, given a common understanding between us. Some ground for mutual truth, communication.

Between is language, vocabulary and style: stories, metaphors, connections, a spiel of revelation. As with Phil, whose expression is a visual art form that expresses well his understanding. All people have an ability to speak their own minds, and to some extent

individual variations, interpretations of a common reality.

In this way we can, like musicians, talk together, even echo thoughts or play a common beat, with individual tone expressions or timing variations. The more interesting music is not to all drum the same beat (though this is the way, perhaps, for the tribal Amerindian) but to drum around the same hidden beat, in the way of the African ego. The European ego takes yet another form, which is the display of individual virtuosity supported by the hierarchical organization of the band or orchestra.

February 21, 1993 Jam in Banff A hot urban “male” funky rock bassline energy with Doug flying and Maria at the controls filing, weaving invisible threads, two drum sets full tilt and high volume bass against eggcarton foam walls, “songs of the blue sarcophagus” (long and a little too narrow), hymns to Aphrodite and Tristessa, D minor fugues and a high-end break from Yves or Andy, and Nick wired into headphones wild on the drums at the end.

Off to the Rundle afterwards, after prospect lookout on Banff Springs castle like two bull elk

pissing, a step away from death. In the Rundle with coffee and hot chocolate and crinkle fries and Chiko the Chinese sage saying fortunes for everyone but me, moody. (I dream later that night, an old man slices at the young maiden in black with my boots, for the $5 Indian bracelet on her wrist that Chiko just gave her). In the shop window, “Roots” in white letters. Traffic goes by, oblivious. No one has spoken of the actual jam, except Maria, and later, Doug’s friend. But they’re cold to people; they do it through music. Yet, it is a present thing, always present. Communication through word and rhythm and melody, turning in, back in later through work, evaluation of tapes, conversed replays, rehashed miscues, setting up bridges. Breaking down walls.

Bringing it home to what the elders say, where the sparks fly. Bringing it forward in new knowledge, networking, not for happiness but deeper satisfaction, needs fulfilled, pushing edges forward together, into new realms of nowness, together I say not just personal visions and studio time, but somehow in the right now face to face what is there to lose but the fear of going there, or failing?

February 27, 1993 After another in a long almost unbroken line of great jams last night, ten people again, Peter running with me and taking it out there. A new universe every week, out of the blue sarcophagus.

Getting beyond the need to stay uniform, varying the beat within a constancy. This is the struggle: a roller coaster running and swaying back and forth from teetering on one rail to teetering on the other, especially on one song where we hit the Coltrane standard of everyone together on a different beat. We got there with that one, me on the shaky tambourine drone because it’s not the individual virtuosity that is telling, but the interplay and tension between the rhythms; the place where the interest more than melodic is rhythmic-harmonic: that is, the harmony of the rhythms.

Increasing evolutionary understanding and growth. Again, I say progressive.

Power at the corners of the mandala, strength up the middle. Fantasies of recording, going somewhere with it.

The dream of altered state going into music, a spirituality then. And the dream of bringing the music to that point: a workable energizing tenperson true jam. Who says we can’t? It can work

every time because there is an overriding philosophy or underpinning which says that it can happen, and it proceeds from that basis. The rhythm is the fabric that holds it together: I learned this in Music 83 and the lesson continues to be proven... beyond all expectations. We can create anything together. Our lack of skill is transparent when we first try to get off the ground with it, feeling our way, verging on the cone of power. Then it takes off and we fly: new spaces never before heard or conceived off. To get past the personal anxiety of holding a beat to let it go sometimes and throw it in the court, and the response of having it picked up, to come back to: that is a current happening that is starting to work. Listening to music is helpful along the way to understand how these spaces and macro rhythms can be structured, can flow together.

We’re missing William’s liquid mediator, the synthesizer and electric organ.

Evolution, personal and communal: this is the energy running through the core of the mandala, the line of self and community, with family close beside. As in the music, I’m increasing my focus, understanding and appreciation of the primacy of the group experience. However, I’m skipping the political angle per se for the moment, the revisioning workshop going on today, because it

is in those personal expression realms that I most enjoyably, directly and engagingly participate in community life. Community in the abstract is meaningless but takes on life with shared enjoyable activity: thus the music.

Family time is more valuable to me when I am whole in the other ways, not hemmed in by too many chores, easing off on self-pressure to flow with the human connection. It works well this week with Nashira time building, the block mode of scheduling more effective than an hour a day of this or that. This works with music practice too, with more accomplished in five hours of group practice than in ten of solo: though if I did both, it might really take off.

I do not need to write philosophy. I need to write philosophy. Philosophy has its own way of writing itself in a form that hides it, clothing for the soul, the body of thought. These obscurantisms are like the constantly changing rhythm, going to new places, unexplored frontiers, rather than staying home. I am an explorer in all ways: each moment, word, day, year, jam... is a new universe. This is the theory that carries on. Tomorrow, different. What is pleasing in this: to think, to hear? To feel the flow of it, onrolling. To roll with it. To float and swim in those waves. To become one with the

movement. Of thought and writing, these are of a kind with music. To play with other souls and currents of thought in this way. To dance with them, on to where we go together, our footsteps finding the way. To bring new light into the feet, not just the eyes. To broaden the doors of perception past clichÊs of expression and represented thought, to new sky. To pull new lyrics out of the depths, to bring them on. The jam will grow. It will take a balance of free expression, sometimes humbling and sobering, yet freeing in the context of control and discipline. A balance of these two forces, entropy and organization, matter and energy, gravitation and centrifugal force: it’s what makes the world go round. To take for my guiding principle the universal, physical one of apparent linear motion that really forms small and large circles of orbit: not fixed but also onrushing, so that the traces left in space are a spiral. To take for my metaphysical truths the meanings afforded by physical truths and patterns. To use as thought models the values of the subhuman realms, survival and work, relaxation and oneness, excitement and energization, merging and exploding, traveling through stasis.

The still center of the turning world. Laying on the paint. Improvising live, on stage, lines

from somewhere. Psychomusic. It’s really happening now. Freeing the creative dragons from their media-forged chains, the prerecorded songs, except as templates to grow new culture on. Recording all of this thought, creating it as it goes, and for what: not to hold on to, but to use as a springboard to new consciousness. In this it not only records the way but also plows. A sharp twoedged blade of spirit moving, turning up black earth to the light of day. To inspect the creatures of the underworld thus exposed. To send some of the luckier spores out of that grave world forever to other stars.

Philosophy... or art. The distinctions perish like daffodils in a killing frost. One image brings them all crystalizing like cast-off snakeskin into the museum of time, so that they and everything can be seen for what they, we all are. Creatures of form, thus of imagination. Because it is apparent form that is the imagined world. The real world is invisible to the human eye. Form is a convention created by our interpretive senses. They need something to entertain them, so they create it.

This is not literally true, evolutionarily speaking. *** Now what to do, at play in the fields of the Lord: free to create, or ruminate, play a game or

sing, work at an intellectual task or mime an artist... be true to myself. Meaning what, when the self is evolving forward into freedom?

This is a riff that comes unbidden: those wild animals of possibility roaming through consciousness and caught to hold and display through these barwords, for the world to see. A wild animal hunt in which all are subject to extinction, yet all are immortal. The concepts are fluid, the boundaries of form unfixed. Because we/I have the power of the universe creator, the power to say this is or isn’t, and has thus and so a shape or size or other chosen characteristic. In this homage to the Lord of life I say I am a humble hunter, asking permission to bring down and to table the flesh of gods. Later I will pay dues of work direction, planned and focused form, blueprint for visible construction that may stand up to weather, public scrutiny, time fatigue, interested minds and wandering souls in search of nourishment. My responsibility in service, to help the focus collective to hold what is a refreshing sight. As in the jams, to take a part in moving the rock.

Titles for band, jams, albums, songs: Moving the Rock Just Jam Animal Nature

Dreaming Angels Cowboys Against Extinction Weaning Our Devil The Trance Edging Max The Verge Counting Sheep, Backwards Future Inside Out Clamdigging in Paradise Preoccupations of the Chosen Many Rare Birds in Cages Politically Canceled Wilderness in Oils The In And Out Of It Rainbow Train Counting Down Dawn Apples and Evergreens The Jesus Stomp The Existentialist Rhumba Songs of the Blue Sarcophagus Changing Planes in Midair A Thousand Reasons Tantrums of the Undead Magic in Numbers Process Makeup Gearbox Breakdown Telling it Like it Was How We Got There

Chants of the Sleeping Army An Ounce of Dread I Was a Turquoise Changeling Lost and in Love The Breathing Night Funk the Courthouse Sinners at the Well If I can write something, rhymed or not, for any of these, I can start to get into singing/chanting/rapping them. The voice can be free, and the missing inner dimension. Bring the singing in whole and the others will go. The singer sets the tone. I need a melody perhaps, or a rhythm with each. But not necessarily. This is Doug’s trip, but in my style. There is a movement out there. This is rap, ska, what’s happening.

There is a freeing movement of expression, of exploration, of self-indulgence but with group support, group-tempered. The shared experience of creating art. Creating art, not just performing, but group creation. This is the unique and worldshattering message of the jam. We are at an edge of world and human culture. The possibilities, implications are not self-serving or self-gratifying only, not little platitudes of stroking comfort: but a vision and analysis of who we are in fullest potential and what we represent and are part of as aware and fully acting beings. Carrying

forward what with life’s energy we have inherited, and bringing it forward not in stale rehash but creatively remixed (Pound: “Make it new”) fashion. And there is the more integrating, synesthetic form of merger, of group consciousness, group creation, process turned to magical ends.

Listening, responding, moving with each other and the entity that makes itself available to us. This is a transcendental form we’re breaching, that pulls us past our struggling individual parts to ride the whole animal. To tour the wild universe, riding together to parts hitherto unknown. To do this not in abstract and solipsistic thought, but out there on stage together: and wider, with dancers. To give up the limitations of personality that come up along the way, to the purpose and spirit of the whole. Also, to take some of those personal risks for the sake of new vision shared: and sacrifice both in that sense and in the reverse sense, of holding back and supporting others to do that too. Not to encourage the staid and laid back, however, except as a relaxer: and that’s fine, too; homage to the old folks at home, the golden oldies and hymns of the past.

It’s a new kind of music, that’s what I’m getting at: and also a new kind of politics,

socializing, way of being in community. That works both literally and as a model of how to interrelate, communicate and evolve together: both in the bounds of an individual song, in the movement of a jam session from one plane to another, and in the macro development of the practice from week to week, year to year. There is a magical and organic, not simply chaotic and random, process at work here. A thread of getting used to each other, even when the exact definition of personnel changes in the details from time to time. This new music is roots-based, African and shamanic, rock and folk, jazz and blues, Celtic and Slavic, it is all music together. Blending all possible forms into a pleasing whole; all instruments, types of voicing and lyrics, modern also urban funk and reggae, soul wails and psycho-psychedelic, bringing it all together 28 pages or 2.8, just so it says it and says it again and keeps on playing. It’s a new music and as such a reflection and also a motivating seed force in a new world birthing. Group consciousness in action, work and play together in joyous spirit of release and common understanding, taking care of needs of each other as we may become sensitive that way, not the steamroller to hell but the swan boat of natural movement: we are a part of the whole, and it is not practiced riffs but

honed readiness that will bring us into that place, and through it to discover what is beyond, and beyond, and beyond. For why else would we bother traveling, if not to see what we may see? *** Still I go on, to move this rock of forty-two years a little to read the moss that’s grown there.

To comb the lichen-encrusted surface for traces of spores and to fingerprint them for color-spectra planets of origin, to decode the messages they’re singing to us. It’s a poem singing along the silver wires of thought between those spores and me, from their progenitors or between them and me. I converse with those spores because of the way the grass turns green tomorrow, or next month. It rides all night, and this day is night somewhere, why not here?

Jam anytime, honey jam. Words of madness, of magic, of timeless dreaming, come to me now in this hour of empty rhetoric; steep my boiled ears in the brine of kindness not normally understood but now curdling formless in the milk of generation. The entity has gone now, the birds fled south. The grass still slumbers, beaten brown and holding time damp, clouded, mysteriously uncombed and forgotten. Not to worry about the fuckups, by the way, it’s not all grace. There are

missed spots, other realms of metaphor, mechanical messes, treeplanting trips to trip on, slash to burn. Fires to rage through the world.

Reptiles to reckon with, starships burning.

Wrecks on the ocean floor, starfish-driven now.

Sharks prowling, greeneyed and soulless. A killer at work somewhere, now. Pain and wasted time, childbirth and disease, maimed limbs and dashed expectations. The time rolls around and the globe smiles on, or suffocates, depending on the aspect chosen, the color on the brush. Spiders walking, spinning, biting down. The other side of life, death of this beauty and loss of its children.

Tragedy for those who choose crying.

Abandonment of the jewels and retribution in ashes and mud. Bark bruised; sap running into the earth. Volcanoes rising. Continents crashing, stars blowing up in our faces. A new race of dinosaurs, chasing the old into the galleries. The door slams shut. The shovel scrapes dirt, hits wood. A sound is made, another. The music begins again.

March 6, 1993 Great bursts of revelation from reading Yatri, Talbot and McKenna. Especially Yatri, the sense of, it’s okay not to be in that pure realm, because

I’m on earth to do it here, to apply the truths of the transcendent, to enjoy the time here and make the best of it, to incorporate spirit in body and spacetime. Also to keep the light in mind, mind in light: the dual movement, out/in, in/out, not just the paragate, go-beyond movement. Incarnation, reincarnation, like breathing.

The jam was perfect for this lesson, in its imperfection, its plodding frustration, its acceptance of our limitations. Yet with faith in the process, we (Dick, Walkin and me) were able finally to break through the underlying gross layers and move out into the celestial spaces.

Some of the earlier stuff with Julie, and Peter and John worked well along the way.

I have a new patience for daily chores, for social stagnation, for our weaknesses as individual people. Because we all have talents and riches to appreciate as well. “Welcome to the Jam,” I tell Sarah as she’s talking of anxieties before facilitating the Co-op AGM; and when I explain in this way, she answers, “Welcome to Love.”

Yet I have more resolution also to work on the technical level to improve the music, both personally and for the group. Through practice, and learning songs.

*** More on that jam: it was like, you can’t force it to be great, or together, or in a groove. If the energy isn’t there, if people are tired, or sick, or not ready, or there’s no bass... on the other hand, with patience and faith, it did get there: where the heart’s desire needed it to go, in that unpreconceived form, to that unexplored place.

At play in the fields of the Lord.

Also, to have the physical skills honed beforehand, and enough sleep under the belt, can only help. Also expectation of success, along with the openness to whatever happens: other people’s types of music, a bad time for whatever reason, a good time in an unexpected direction or aspect.

This time wasn’t so great personally as a performer, expect for the usual few high spots interspersed among the sitouts, the plodding onebeats, the predictable dronebeats, the predictable tangential flying outs. I learned some valuable things by playing softer, hearing the accordion for instance, and in the end letting Dick come out even further on piano keyboard. Also room for some better, more sustained improv singing on mike; supporting Walkin by holding mike for him while he improv’d, in contrast to boycotting his solo standards. And standing out in the road for a final hour’s gab with Walkin and

Dick, down to earth this time in contrast to the usual rap with Phil. This time jokes: “Flowers don’t harm the ozone if they’re grown in dogshit”... and talk of earning a living by growing dried flowers... raising mules and donkeys in heat. Earlier Walkin’s saga of crossdressing in the badnews biker bar in San Jose, stumbling on a Texas shorthorn in a pasture in the night high on mushrooms, being chased around in circles, grabbing it by the horns...

April 15, 1993 Friday night jam, waylaying myself toward the derelict fringe (“No, man, the cutting edge!”)—Peter and William—before going in. A mistake, though it proved a great jam in the end (despite a rough vocal on “Fire on the Mountain” and a really botched try of “Jammin” to a promising blues jam begun by Peter... Lost my composure then, back to little boy blue; recovered however and later had a smoke with Peter on the porch and we came back in and he served up “All Along the Watchtower” to raves of “best ever”...

A good one-of-a-kind group: John K. sans hair and beard (I recognized him only by the harp), Michael from Nelson, Gorm around 11:30, Julie around midnight, Peter, William, Walkin, Al, Gail, Lars, Richard, Dick. But I stayed an hour too late,

the last hour marginal anyway but for one worthy song.

Lessons: from previous week, learned not to get caught in the endless variations but to be more steady, with more assertive one-time leads returning to basics. This time: warm up playing before smoke, and then easy on it, to stay comfortable; forget the fear. Also, re. Julie, Lars, and others: listen more, modulate volume to blend into whole sound, that’s the best. When everybody is heard, and my own part is unobtrusive yet contributing—there, and yet, as if not there—especially on minor percussive/timekeeping.

Haunted all week by that local version of “All Along the Watchtower.”

June 8, 1993 A little retrospective after a rare week off, usual high/low session the week before with Lars, Julie, Richard, Walkin, in which I thought I heard some comment by Richard about my dominating the play, and later a joke in the form of a heavy metal name for us, “Overlord and the Underlings.” I laughed aloud before I realized the barbed jibe, and heard finally a comment to Walkin, “Wait’ll he has his coffee.” Afterwards I

approached Richard and said, “How did it go for you tonight?”

“Oh, all right I guess. It had its moments.”

Someone else: “Oh, Richie didn’t have a religious experience?”

Richard: “A little bit of satori... “ Me: “That’s why we’re all here, right?...

Anyway, somehow I imagined you were having a hard time with it.”

“Me? Oh, I don’t think so. If you don’t reach satori it’s nobody’s fault but your own.”

I was left to ponder that one. Later in the truck home Julie said she’d heard nothing of the comments I mentioned, felt the music was great, my playing was fine. But she pointed out there might be an element of competition among some of us sometimes, naturally as artists.

Reading Bob Moses later was helpful to focus on some bad habits: flitting from one rhythmic feel to another, or playing with a soloist like “both trying to get in the same end of a canoe” rather than staying with the internal hearing and providing the structural support.

June 10, 1993 After volleyball, talks with Lars about jam and competition, my fatal mistake trying to tape

Gabrielle Roth for him (taping over the original instead), and thoughts today about imperfection.

Not so much an issue of competition with others as with oneself, limitations, the spirituality of imperfection. Am I caught in the Western, egocentric model anyway, where Alzheimer’s effectively ends purposeful life by consignment to a mental Third World of subsistence rather than growth?

I posit one model of purpose, being a process of improvement, growth and learning, cultural advancement on an individual as well as group level. Striving, with desire for, ultimately, spiritual perfection, complete transmutation of physical essence to metaphysical understanding and achievement, awareness of completion.

All this available in the meantime in love.

Also in momentary plateaus of smaller achievements, relative perfections, stages of advancement. Yet these highs feed the whole cycle which also produces lows. How to tap into the process yet retain an equanimity of nonattachment? The question, to bring it full circle, I discussed to no conclusion with David, who had brought me the Roth tape. There is a lesson here symbolized by that tape, I guess, which I botched trying to hurry while finishing manuscript corrections to get to volleyball.

Now, this apprehension of unity, this aesthetic sensibility put into some kind of recognizable form, as here, represents a kind of perfection or completeness.

Enjoy the highs as available; learn past the lows. Use the lows as object lessons to advance both to greater achievement potentials, and to a distancing sense of equanimity. This is what life is all about, so go for it, get into it: the groove. There is the beat to get back on, the group pulse, merger with the greater whole. Individual perfections are meaningless out of this context anyway.

Here is a resolution of the two models. To enhance the expression of the common experience. To trade and share opportunities to shine the light we share. Even in the “individual” art of writing: to express the common truth. Not to “show off” for the sake of individual aggrandizement, but for expression of natural exuberance as it spontaneously manifests through the individual. Thus it’s not so much the extent or type of expression per se which is at issue, but the intent, motivation, tone-coloring, underlying theme or rhythm which is crucial.

June 28, 1993 In Friday’s softball tournament I go 3 for 4 at bat, and we win 15–12. The Friday night jam is

great fun, at the time. Saturday’s tape tells a different tale; and I’m wasted from the 10:30 p.m. coffee and 3:30 a.m. wine and little sleep for today’s game. At bat I go 0 for 3, leaving five stranded, in a 14–12 loss. undated, 1993 Am I only a lowlife at heart, son of a horseplayer, devotee of baseball, local jammer at the hall with the boys of a Friday night? Now Henry, Jack, I hear you callin. Walt, Percy, Edgar in the wings, warming up. Tipping the bottle, Patrick and Trevor, shufflin cards. Hold on, I’m comin.

I know everything, I know nothing: the song of the mystic. I know I’m capable of everything, up to a point: the same point or level in everything I do. What I don’t do, I probably could, up to the same level. Know thyself: and what do I know, but myself?

Style, personality is all. Form is all: because it is secondary, an individually distinguishing substance clothing the spirit that is common to everyone. “Humanity is ONE SPIRIT,” the paper at my window proclaims. So useless to bother with in detail, except as we might be reminded to honor that truth, when we forget and start carping or harping at our ego’s behest. So let’s

enjoy the positive differentiation of our separate little selves, and make the jam together by which to join multiplicity back into unity. That is the mystical search, as in lovemaking, and other forms of aesthetic and spiritual communion, or physical through accident or orchestrated form, as in sports or random encounters touched by spirituality.

I know myself and what I want to say and like to talk about and what I am capable of creating and sustaining and where I want to put energy: so on these paths I will walk and continue to explore, not trying to out-Emerson Emerson or out-anyone-else anyone else, but to honor these influences and sharings of spirit-cum-personality coloring and be unafraid to express the fullness of my own particular spectrum; being also unafraid to use forms of expression I receive from others.

I don’t know what life has in store for me. I don’t know how I will perform in health, or arts, or relationship; or how I will sleep tonight. I don’t know, I don’t know. It feels good in some ways to say that; like Sarah, last night, saying of the philosophers, let them fight it out, I’ll wait till I’m eighty-five and ready to die and see what I know then. In the meantime, why bother?

I am with the utmost reverence (to the strains of Barking Pumpkins in my ears, thanks Frank)

contemplating the sacredness of the moment in motion, the eaves of splendorous time mounting to eternity...

Oh come now; nothing is that reverential. I am here in morning time reliving in a thought the hours of tossing and turning last night before sleep, the realm of lying in state, the brain at rest and yet in movement while the body’s normal activity state is suspended... I am nevertheless at your disposal. This sickness of aimlessness can be turned around to march in the right direction, if one be so disposed. The difference between genius and lassitude: harnessed energy?

Submission to the unconscious currents of whim?

All language fails. Each sentence leads to another and might, at some more propitious time, be sanctified or scythed or both at once. What does it matter, in the face of the Upanishads, the Vedas and the Tao Te Ching? Very little; yet here I am to say my obeisance. To renew the pact. To illustrate with a picture from my dream: an old dodge, a ‘49 truck body cut and placed on a newer frame from a Plymouth car. Brain rot today is rather abstemious; so let it go, until another day. I am sorry. Come again, please. Now I am going to wash my nails; sweep the porch; air the curtains. I am on my way to buy lunch at the delicatessen. I step on a dead cat inadvertently, I assure you. Hi,

Samuel. Wake up, out of that can, now, will you?

Join your voice to mine. I’m on my way to Frankie’s, later on. Come over for a jam, hey?

September 1993 Wondering how I did at the jam, if I turned people off with tuneless singing or self-conscious drumming; yearning for positive self-image, praise and strokes, good dancing, basking in public appreciation and fellow feedback... as if the music groove itself was not good enough!

September 16, 1993 Nashira’s birthday today. I awake at six, get up at six-thirty, make coffee and walk down the driveway, slowly. Halfway, a squirrel skitters up a tree, halts as I pass. But I stop. It scolds me as I look pointedly at it. I scold back, jamming. The scolding proceeds, back and forth, each varying tempo a bit on impulse, call and response. The air is thick with dying leaves, damp earth, end of baseball season. Clouds hang thick around the ridges and peaks. The fence stands nearly complete, apples near ready for the plucking.

Cucumbers hang beside me in their vines of tan leaves, waiting.

September 19, 1993 The Death of the Friday Night Jam Nigel is there, plus Scott, Walkin, Dick, Richard. How you doin, I say to him. Good, he says. And you. Good, I say. Well, that’s settled, he says. The others go out for a smoke. I play on Richard’s conga with Scott on bongos, rockin till the others come in and sit to wait and see what happens. A slow, slow Walkin song; a token instrumental bop jam; then “Bad Moon Rising,” and I help Scott roll in the piano; but halfway through “Me and Bobby McGee” and I’m gone, for good.

Peter arrived as I drove away; and Lars, I heard, later for a couple of hours of boredom.

Saturday up in glorious fall color and sky to Meadow Mountain lake for fishing with Nashira and Nyle and Sarah, corn and fish feast with Lars for supper and hatched plans for a band, our kind of music, by invitation: Julie, Scott, Dick on keyboards, Richard.

September 24, 1993 The jam is dead. (Long live the new band.)

I become bored with conventionality. I must be original in style; otherwise, I might as well play rhythms for Elvis Starbuck. Isn’t that better than nothing? No. I’ll go my own way, find

creative alternatives within myself and with help of others. The important thing is to trust the positive nature of the creative impulse. A way that rings true to everything that is central for me.

Nothing forced except the discipline of doing it.

Taking it dead serious and also with a grain of salt. For this the timeless of night, of winter, is especially conducive.

October 25, 1993 I went to the jam Friday night, late, thinking they might have needed me, or that I might be missing something hot, though I didn’t really feel great, or gung ho about playing. They were in a pretty good groove all right, a pretty tight circle.

Jay and Ellen dancing, Scott on the piano and djembe, Michael and Peter working out, Lars and Richard and Walkin... but it seemed like a closed circle. I made some tentative efforts, got into a slow blues groove at one point that killed the dancing, a nice reggae number led by Scott singing, and a good rocker and a Michael standard. But then Michael switched to bass. The drummers couldn’t get off the ground. Julie arrived. I couldn’t get out of myself, into the music. Peter packed up and left. Michael followed. I tried a couple little beats on the conga and gave up, myself.

The moral of the story, if you don’t give it your all, don’t bother. One person holding back energy can drag down the whole group (just as, conversely the previous week, I felt primed and ready and the whole thing took off, Michael agreed, best ever).

At volleyball Sunday, I thought I did feel ready. During the game I mused about how it didn’t matter anyway, maybe, because it’s competitive, not cooperative, it’s everyone for himself. Then my energy faltered and I got discouraged, along with everyone else on my team, about the poor play of a new player, Cory, a dumpy woman who couldn’t do much of anything, and that discouragement rubbed off on the other team as well, so that the whole thing pretty much ended up a bust.

And so I’m supposed to let the sweetheart sing, but she only sings the blues.

November 7, 1993 A day of mourning the death of the jam (again). Why? Walkin sings, prophetically, give it everything you got, give it your best shot, and still I hold back, withdraw as Lars says, waiting for another outlet to focus my energies.

It’s no big problem, only my problem if I make it one. No remedy but to remedy it, to go on into the great and small time and space and... no, not fuller, but even emptier of personal accomplishment and aggrandizement and identity. L’homme sans qualites, my tag. All things and no thing. All roles and no role. All skills and no skill. That is my path. One I tread like the line between the light and darkness. The line between genius and madness, elation and depression, immersion and detachment, absorption and boredom. It’s a trick of the mental and emotional and spiritual body, to float free yet attached to the body of this world.

The work whether social or aesthetic is carried forward in subterranean motion, the spirits nudged forward on their path of destiny in this costume, this time around. I go forward to new light, riding the winds of motion. New gladness, shedding old skins of lives lived to their various ends of incompletion. Ready for the new incarnation as of the moment. This philosophy my byword, my guiding light.

November 9, 1993 I am afraid that I cannot live up to others’ or my own expectations. That I am not competent enough, and therefore not worthy, not

worthwhile. Alone, I have only my own expectations to meet. Given enough time I can work up to it. With others, the passage of my time is marked, I am accountable for my accomplishments, I check in and compare myself, and I come up short. Maybe I project onto others my own high standards of expectation, and feel inadequate, judged poorly. With such an attitude I’m bound to fail: jam evidence.

So what can I change?

I can realize that others don’t actually have such high expectations or harsh judgment of me.

That on the contrary, others are pleased by what I can do and think well of me. Or, even it they do have high hopes for me, I have the ability to live up to high standards of achievement; that my talents are, if not grandiosely excellent, at least competent and adequate and worthy. I should just do the best that I can and not worry about the rest. Sure, objectivity and self-evaluation are useful, along with receptivity to feedback from others. I should take it all objectively and without paranoia or ego attachment.

I take heart from the image of strength within, gentleness and adaptability without: “this is the way of achievement.” It characterizes my life, and my “Quaker” image to others. With this kind of self-concept in mind, I can refine my interactions

with others: not being all yielding and gentle, nor being rigid and brittle; but soft on the outside, firm on the inside. A good model for jamming: the strong central pulse; interesting variations with it.

And for my basic life activities: to have a strong core of purpose, but being able to work with it in my fullness of life in a flexible way.

November 11, 1993 Lars phoned and told me about the jam at Richard’s 50th—which I had chosen to skip— and it all came crashing back again. “The best music ever with that group,” is how he put it. I told Lars I couldn’t jam anymore for a while, at least, because it just wasn’t working for me. All this just as music is taking off in several directions: but is it? And is it coincidence that it is now I need to withdraw? How much of this is a pattern for me of withdrawing from group involvement, and how much of that is justified as truly inadequate for me, as contrasted with ones where I just don’t cut it or am afraid I don’t. It’s only the latter category that I want to weed out.

It’s important to have the perspective of “Good Times and Bad Times.” Most of the times we had were good. My expectations were for perfection of understanding and thus were shot down. This is useful knowledge. I can be glad of

the negative influences as they drive me each time to look for perfection in creative ways only I can accomplish: yet not at the eventual and total exclusion of all social activity because, like politics, it is “imperfect.” So are we all, even in our individual artistic productions. Sociability teaches well-rounded tolerance and likewise selfforgiveness.

One thing I wonder about is my contribution to team chemistry. Am I a winner, a loser, a motivator, a leader? Sports results, like jam results, are mixed. I’m somewhere in the middle, as I am with my social skills in general. Maybe that’s a source of frustration. That is, in some areas (academic, athletic, aesthetic) I’m at least above average. But in the social realm perhaps only midrange or lower (with a broad range, anyway). So I have a self-concept or image based on one set of criteria that breaks down or is undercut in the use of other criteria. Hence my attraction to my working class jobs in California: real people, basic social skills. A levelling process of the other inflated criteria. (“Everybody has a heart; let’s play sandbox,” sings Youssou n Dour).

At least I can realize from this discussion that I’m not in the great scheme of things, inept: but just competent, and a bit deflated as a result from my own grandiosity. This is ultimately healthy, the

grace of Lars’ phone call a reality check on my isolated mountain-climbing. Just do it, forget the elevator shoes.

One thing comes in clear: it’s not enough simply to feel competence or self-confidence with my own worthiness in the cosmos, or in my partner’s eyes. I also seem to a need a nurturing social context in which I feel worthy in my participation. What I have to offer has to work beyond the level of self-confidence to affirmation and positive feedback from the group. I realize in looking at group members in detail that I’m intimidated or suffer from inferiority feelings, pecking order stuff, from certain people, just as a matter of personality. It’s not all a matter of talent.

More a matter of personal style, personality, coolness. X is a loner but still projects an arrogant, critical air. Y is pretty mellow but hairtrigger sensitive. Z too seems moody: so (like me!) I get the feeling I can’t take risks.

I realize that music (like sports) has been a prop for me these last few years, like social drinking or smoking; but really it’s just another form of social communication both directly and in the broader context of the musical setting. I’m really no better off that way than verbally. Still I long for the grail of the music magic, group

process glorified and lifted (at its best) to the status of art.

Musicians can be, like writers, good at their art while inept at ordinary social interchange. In this I need to recognize mutual tolerance and support, along with the real element of social interaction on the level of scene context. And in the pursuit of good music, it will help to pay some homage to the pedestrian pieces as well as to the virtuoso jazz and funk masterpieces of inspiration and individual and collective spontaneous fluid genius in the group mind passing before us. I need to regain the perspective of spiritual event and homage; also of sport; of conversation; of worship, work and play. If I am rededicated and choose this tribe in full nakedness of initiated humility and pride of group spirit, it may yet work out.

Yet I can be circumspect, mindful of personal needs and directions, and of fateful changes as they come, and of balance in my other life needs, and maybe just come every other week; or stop smoking, depending on what works; or forget the jam and go play at Henk’s; or just drum solo... it’s still a fluid work in progress.

November 14, 1993 B. B. King is totally himself, in fullest expression. That’s the genius. We see all of him, nothing held back. Like Jimi Hendrix. It’s the courage that gets us, that awes us, to see what’s possible when a man of genius (and great talent could be the word, too) lets it all show, gives the great gift of all of himself.

Put everything into it. Risk everything. Trust the process, the product. Let it happen. Do it. Do it. Do it.

December 7, 1993 Jam to Santana Milagro with the high energy and the snow falling down random scattered actually quite gentle flakes and Nashira says how can you type so fast, I say by practice and she says no, I mean how can you think of what to write so fast, and I say the faster you type, the faster you have to think to keep up with it, see the mind is jamming with the fingers are jamming with the music, this a new art form perhaps, it’s kind of like music but there’s no audience to hear both, though there could be, it could be totally orchestrated and recorded to keep the sequence, cues for keeping on the beat, lyrics even for the

instrumental solos and long jams, I’m just the amanuensis of the bardo world, of the chthonic gods speaking, I’ll stay up here and watch the farm from the depths, in case of any eventuality like the breaking loose of the geldings from their corral of otherwise pedantic horseflesh, insidious in their inertial dependence on the japes of stableboys and the servants of Kali who wake only occasionally from their lethargic stupor to feed the poor creatures, who then become manic in their greed, mob the poor boy and send him back to the nabobs in the manor crying: “Natty needs an orthopedic specialist, he’s limping.” As if this weren’t enough for the already swamped overseer of duties pastoral, the querulous clerk of affairs proceeds to reprimand our heroic rapscallion of a dutiful Sistine artist of horsedung, quoting the Talmud and throwing caution to the proverbial and ubiquitous winds, invokes the vernal wombat spirits to come and chastise our xenophobic countrymen in the guise of one soul, stableboy named Hart. His yellow eyes dim; he closes the lids halfway and intones the mantra he’s learned in his dreams from the thousandyear-old Zen master . . .

1994 August 13, 1994 Another pitfall: bringing unfilled expectations and ambitions from other musical or nonmusical venues to the Friday night experience, inappropriately. It’s a cosmic learning crucible, teaching necessary unattachment to specific goals even musical. Certainly improvements can be worked for, or realized by simple advice: Listen to each other.

It’s a process of letting go of ego, image, value judgment, permanence, well-defined goals. It’s also a place where you find out who your friends are. To experience intimacy and separation, and the resulting emotions. To let go, and to welcome in: people as well as musical inspirations. In the end, those who continue to work and play well together, to stick with and support each other, to have patience for extending give and take, stay longer. Peter left early: then Nigel; but Julie, Lars, Hans, Dick and Walkin stayed with it, with me, and in the end it was just Walkin and me.

“It’s not a matter of bad or good,” Walkin said.

“It’s all good.”

“But what do you do with feelings that it’s not good, especially when they come from other people? How can you still feel that it’s all good?”

He pondered this awhile. “Why not?” he finally said.

We ended up on the road outside talking about trucks, tires. The jam, I’d expressed to him in the basement, is like another woman. It’s easy to get tempted into sexual fantasies with an attractive woman, even when you know you have a stable relationship with someone and you’re not going to pursue anything else. Like bringing to the jam these fantasies that it’s going to go somewhere—like where?—to performance, recording, stardom, riches... the perfect relationship just over the horizon? Get real.

As for putting myself, my emotions, out to these people, my quasi-friends, it’s a little scary and also presumptuous of me, but what the hell, it’s a little more genuine in the way of friendship than these alien beings showing up for a silent weird starship trip each Friday night, and going back away into the night none the wiser but for the music. On the other hand, there’s some value in that approach, too, as compared to overanalysis and heart-on-sleeve antics.

August 17, 1994 . . . and yet tonight I’ll dream again, of Laura or another, and another, and another... and none of them will be satisfied with me in the end, because I’ll be driven to go on; changing the rhythm to yet another variation; leaving the structure to others and refusing to take my own responsibility for holding it up for the sake of the common music made possible only by this consensus.

August 22, 1994 When playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” not to alter the fundamental rhythmic structure; or, to vary but then to return; or to transform the one song totally, but not to do it to on every song played. A lesson, as music usually is, for the structural, behavioral patterns of one’s life.

Control and freedom each allowing the other, for overall balance.

Total control being repetitious and boring.

Total freedom being chaotic, uncommunicative.

Freedom in the context of a controlled structure, offering interest, variety, a spirit of play and creative energy, yet responsible and responsive to the integrity of the whole piece and whole ensemble. Control or repeating elements in a

mostly free piece, offering purchase, familiarity, a place to engage the listeners’ attention.

Another jam metaphor: making love, how it’s different every time. Lots of other parallels, too: listening, with touch. Taking turns. Riding waves of inspiration together. Joining spirits together as one. The core of creation, ongoing.

September 27, 1994 Fall Faire full of drumming: Thursday night, introducing the big drum, and having good drumming around the circle with William, Richard, Julie, Jane, Louisa. Friday a performance to a very sparse crowd and no dancers except Ellen and Pippa; a dress rehearsal of sorts. The end of Lamba fell apart, the other pieces were okay but a little rough. The set with Jane and Megan for Ellen’s dancers went wonderfully, though only a third or fourth dancer emerged from the tipi womb to daylight.

Friday night, the Night of the Living Jam: multigroupings passing through from neohip hempsters on drums, to William’s symphonic sound system, to the Michael and Peter show, to Jesse and Ryel and Aaron, to the hard core jazz beat drummers at the end; Mara energizing the whole affair with shakers and rattles and smiles

and tales of operating a Montreal cafe featuring Bob Dylan and others in the late sixties.

Saturday Julie and I again suffered from performance fever. Lamba this time had a rough beginning; I settled into a good groove by the end, but then stumbled to the break when Lars leaned over to me and said, “Six minutes.”

Alpha’s rhythm also was rough, breaking apart in part B when I fell off my attempts at the fourth variation. The tempo was just too fast and I couldn’t catch onto it. We started in again and again I tried it unsuccessfully, but the group maintained and I found an easier part instead.

Aconcon and Triple Overtime were fine for me but now Julie took the turn of losing her way.

Finally, Koukou worked, with Michel standing in to solo; we did it quite fast and it worked well.

But Michel complained there wasn’t really space for the solo, so we did Aconcon again for him to join. Again, however, Lars blew a whistle for a break to higher speed, and I took it for an end signal and broke it off—too bad. After a bit of a break we got into an impromptu Fanga with Richard and Jonathan, and Michel on the big drum, and Dee shaking and starting to sing. That was hot, with Michel throwing in breaks to go again. I managed the sequence of Fanga parts

pretty well back and forth, sitting on the ground with another guy’s ashiko.

Square dance time rolled around and as usual, I found myself out by the fire stoned with the ranks of youth along the firelit benches, playing a low lone drum to accompany William hunkered over a snarly good rhythm guitar groove, new cowboy style. Later he manned the Indian yells at the big bass drum, while I inserted Afro-offbeat bass notes at the other side of the fire. There were some real fine dance grooves along the way, with the transient youth rank and file sometimes bouncing and sometimes wandering off into the darkness, sometimes passing glowing joints (William complaining, “Someone’s getting high; everyone’s gettin high but the band”). Louisa noted we were all playing on one side, and should form a circle. A few of us moved over— Michel, me, and a third guy playing my drum. At one point, after the Indian chants, I noticed he was gone. Looked around for my drum and it, too, was gone. Asked Michel and he said the guy had just kind of backed away, still playing... . and gone off into the night.

I looked all around the circle a couple more times and then was convinced the thief was gone for good. Went around the far perimeter of the circle, out to the road, heard Jean say a couple of

vehicles had already passed her going out, and basically gave up, other than considering calling the RCMP. Figured, while wandering the empty field, that my abortive music career had been fated to end quickly. But then Julie showed up saying, “I think I’ve found your drum.” It had appeared again on the opposite side of the circle, beside a yellow plastic chair. *** While selling tickets for supper, I quipped to Julie, “So when are we gonna get some therapy together?”

“Huh? Oh, well, I just had a good talk with Dee and she gave me all kinds of good advice about what to do about nervousness up there. To begin with when you’re nervous it’s because you think everyone’s looking at you and the first thing to realize is they’re not. It’s just a big ego trip.

Plus, when you’re feeling like that, all the energy is coming in toward you. You’re making it happen that way. The thing to do is turn it around and send the energy out. To be giving energy to what’s happening.”

Like Olatunji says, Service.

Other insights I had afterward: feeling yucky about seeing myself perform poorly, as through other’s eyes I realized that was just a projection,

an imaginary one. People could also have experienced the opposite, as some actually said.

But even more importantly, as Walkin says, there’s no need for a good/bad judgment (about music, or about personal evaluation); it’s just what is. Self-acceptance. Yes, there is a place for objective evaluation, learning from past to future.

But objective is the key word: not feeling yucky; or rather, making use of a transitory yucky feeling for evaluative purposes but then moving on, not taking it on as a stuck personal judgment of unworthiness. *** So, what are some things I learned from the weekend’s music?

I was more comfortable with some rhythm parts than some lead parts (Koukou, Aconcon, Alpha, vs. Lamba, Alpha variations.)

I was comfortable with my own lead part on Triple O. The solo drum part for Ellen’s dancers, or Fanga with Michel and Dee, worked fine because I felt less in spotlight of public scrutiny at the time; none of that artificial, hyperconscious pressure not to screw up. Of course the irony is that the greater the pressure, the greater the chances of screwup.

The whole group was, Michel thought, “tentative” in our playing, until we really got underway in a groove.

It takes a high degree of social tact to feel the place for monotony or variation around, say, the drum circle fire. Also the most exciting possibilities of all for high-energy event, fed by the spontaneous uniqueness of the moment.

Higher energy yet would have been appropriate, as with the building energy of Lamba; the performance encore with Michel and Aconcon, when Lars blew the whistle and I stopped, instead of gearing it up higher; or with the Fanga jam after Dee telling Michel she wanted to do a singing call and response.

Working on tightness is good but not with the price of perfection anxiety. Though the temptation is that it can pay off—the all-or-nothing gamble.

The possibility is that performance anxiety can be overcome psychologically or by building experience, and not just the easy way of avoiding it by external changes of form or format (such as by not performing). Another tip would have been to practice in that spot. Or to imagine the socalled crowd as just friends and relatives (which they were), or the music as background, as Ellen appreciated it. Or tapping into the “cool green place inside” (Body and Soul); or the woods

behind my house. Or, Julie’s other solution, the golden vertical thread of centering energy...

November 24, 1994 No Present There is no present.

All is past and future, the one becoming the other.

Consciousness is a vector of acceptance.

To Be > To Become And not to freeze there in the new become, but to keep on becoming.

It’s the jam theory of reality and of awareness and of being.

The present is a useful illusion of presence in time: of self-solidity in space.

Just as concreteness, in words or sense perception, is a useful illusion by which to maintain the entertainment of the body.

I see the concreteness of what has been, by which to jump forward; or, by which to define what is coming.

This can be a curse, or a useful foundation: it is up to the judging free will to decide that, not to let the pattern drag down. But to use it to build on: deer trail blazed by droppings.

As in any religion, this focus is the same as a one-god. A point of consciousness. Most posit the

present, the all-present. They gather the past and the future into the now. That is a useful illusion. I would rather empty the present of the past and future, of self and world, of any meaning or time at all.

Why? Because to dwell in the present is to be stuck.

To be more than vegetable is to move. That is our animal nature, to move in space. To be human is to move in time. Following thought, forward, to new awareness. By building up awarenesses as they come: perceptions, idea links, flashes of light: building up, or sensing and letting fly by. There is no letting: they fly by.

To be human is to move in time. Is this mantra stuck? It’s part of a spiral. Human time is spiral, cyclical and ongoing. We are not part of the animal zoo, the caged pacing, if we choose not to be. If we choose to become other, if I (and I do) choose to let newness of experience enter freely at all times. Not to build my own cage of thought or even religion, even this one: this, too, will be temporary, a season of ideas.

Let us move on.

There is no letting; we move.

There is no we; it moves.

There is no it, only moving.

There is nothing to move, only movement.

There is no time, only timing.

No presence, only continuity, change, growth, spiraling life energy cascading into new space with new forms, new exchanges and interaction.

Words are only words. Yet they are useful, to move the mind forward. Not in themselves, but little thought vehicles, individual and linked like express trains on errands of consciousness, buzzing in a hive of understanding.

Why is this valuable?

Because otherwise it is easy to become mired in the dripping honey, the cells of wax.

December 16, 1994 Jammin Shammin Dance The hall is abuzz with the throngs of the youth come to see the big band from faraway Spokane, yet the band is cool with cigarettes on the outside deck, drums at the ready, cookies proffered by our furry host. The scene is alive, and we eat, and we dance, and the beat travels through the spine, surrounds us and spins us on and on . . .

Plain and white the ceiling, unadorned the paneled walls. A simple, unfinished plywood floor. Shapeless, really, made for basketball. Nice cedar doors in front, which Phyllis the local watercolor artist found in the nick of time from the second-hand store. Lighting by Ray of Flash Landing fame, yet nothing special for this night.

Simple white, though they did bring a strobe for the special effects.

On this occasion, a particularly desirable mix of funky beat and ready folks, primed to start dancing and not stop until the music was over. A song written even for us: “for the Kootenay ancestors.” The hall took no notice. It held us, provided shelter. We shook the rafters, the joists and windows. The sound meter went off the scale, so they turned it down a little. It’s not so much what is seen, a whirl of color and motion.

It’s the music, what goes on inside.

They shook us, they drove us to dancing distraction. We hopped and bopped, with the African drums beating up a bitchin jamaican heat.

We drove into it, into the blessed night. The walls of the hall shook right out, the roof and floor bounced, full of blessed bodies shaking.

We bought it all, got down good and funky.

It’s the drums, y’see, the African drums, they got that reggae beat all beat, pumped with sound so

you’re up and down and all around, jitterbugging no matter what, or a slow walk from the juice bar.

Dancing, slithering to the imperturbable beat, jammin with the shaman.

Sherry especially, with her tan collection of African tomtoms, giving an irresistible icing to the cakewalk underpinning provided by the organist, the regular drum set, the bass and her new hubby, the lead guitar. At the break they sat together so chummy smoking on the front deck, digesting the wicked cookie laid on them as well as on a half dozen others of us lucky fools.

We had the dance to beat all dances, here at our own little hall.

1995 February 4, 1995 Last night, best jam high ever: a new plateau.

Blossoming on drum while Nigel does likewise with voice, and the group with organic sound: “Singing Trees.” Jacob, Scott, Peter, Lars, Walkin, Richard, Dick, Nigel; and Jan watching, dancing.

A high-energy tight group effort totally with it on every note, “My Generation.”

This a heartfelt song for us old men. It began in an interesting way. Peter had suggested the drummers lead one, so we tried a samba-based jam, which kind of moved around all loose and unformed. I said at the end of it, “Give us another chance; we’ll do a tight samba rhythm and keep it together this time.” Meanwhile Walkin had started “My Generation” on the other side, the first few notes. I cleared with him to do our samba first, or possibly we could work it out with his vocals and chords.

So I set the beat with the d g d g D - D g - g d g D - D - pattern and kept it going pretty

consistently with appropriate variations during the song, and some solo embellishments here and there that threatened to chop up on me but I rode the energy wave through them and held the pulse down steady while Nigel wailed and all joined in hot and fast and earnest and bold. *** This morning on awakening Sarah said, “You’re glowing,” as I looked at her and out the window, with the fresh sunny air and the blue sky and the awakening trees with the energy of the peak experience and the samba in my blood still racing smooth and cool, and then I got up and made coffee and put on the Who with their original version and made pancakes with strawberry jam and peaches and maple syrup, and heated water for a shower.

Last night I walked down the long trail through the starry woods stopping frequently for gazes upward and outward in the dark thinking about Lao Tse, Buddha and Christ: the poet, the philosopher and yesman, whatever that means.

And the trees whispered to me, singing, “We are the long drums.”

February 5, 1995 Day of the Long Drum Much personal stuff arising around responsibility as a participant for peak experience of the group—a difficult challenge, when also holding the intention of growing as individuals, stretching personal limits of creative expression.

I felt some of the tensions as ego issues involving the hot young drummers, the blond guy with dreadlocks, and the darker guy with a scarf. When they stopped playing, was it my fault, their frustration; or just tired hands, or running out of ideas, or dancers stopping . . .

Louisa remarked, “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Not content with group grooves, droning steady trance beat, I need to add personal expression, to push it away from commonality.

And encourage others to do likewise, of course; but there’s the challenge of progressive music, jazz or polyrhythms, to honor the central pulse; to play it or around it so others can still feel it and tap in.

On the positive side, some really great positive times drumming, singing. And even dancing I could feel the controlling power of personal creative expression to affect the group chi.

Nashira and Bronwyn danced, Rowin a lot, Pippa and Ellen, Gary and Corol, Rachel and Carol, others. A hot scene at times.

Someone jammed a whiskbroom in the heater vent, destroying the thermostat probably.

Back to positives. Real fast riffs, soloing off each other, good fast group grooves where it goes beyond the rails of thought to open to spontaneous spirit. To feel good about progress, for instance, from last year. The risk of drugs to push or transcend normal limits: scary, uncomfortable, and yielding unexpected results.

A mixed blessing, needing care and respect and control.

Julie evaluating, same as always, mixed: “too much racing energy of the herd.� Her creativity released in space, vs. mine in speed. Hers in playing with space, mine with color of tonal emphasis over a background of sound.

Evaluating my own contribution, I wonder, did it enhance or hinder the group experience?

Some of both. As we all are subject to, conscious or not, by contributing more or less, by supporting or distracting or dragging down, or whatever our personal form of attention-getting might be: sabotage, anger, meekness, conformity, display, chaos; or order, beauty, sadness,

excitement; every emotional quality available to the music.

“Forget your sadness, and dance.”

Yet even the dance can control.

When in that space of superconsciousness of personal power, to use it wisely yet somehow unself-consciously, releasing control to creative spirit. To flow with it not willfully, but with intentional opening. A tricky balance, aweful to behold.

I put myself on the line to go further, to take us to new places. And, with balance, to step back for others to take a turn too; lots of that. I can keep it steady, innocuous yet live—but when really live, it has to be more. We have to be more than group robots—a group of fully realized individuals. The “My Generation” song of Friday night was in that category, group completion through heights of collective/personal expression.

Really, the issue is to get out of the way and let real creativity take over... like political leaders, in Caldicott’s phrase (or was it her quote of Eisenhower?). It takes being sensitive, committed to the group, still willing to take responsible risks, soloing with the pulse, and playing what you started with or what the others are keeping up.

In a moment of honesty, I realize an unconscious motivation for the repeated failings.

Maybe I can’t accept my self-image as competent, good, well-liked, proficient, inspiring, and so feel compelled to sabotage my own performance with failures. Then I can retreat into my childish role as a nobody, loathed and scorned and left out. The question of marijuana is secondary: it only amplifies and reveals the real underlying problem.

Do I lapse into father failure that way?

Or see it as the one escape from my sober mother?

Hugh Elliott from the neighboring house didn’t sleep, appeared at the door when it was over and remarked: “The real Africans from the jungle would have been horrified to hear what was passing for rhythm.” *** Changes, this year: To have pushed the limits, and beyond, of personal capabilities, conventional boundaries of music, rhythm, form, sleep and group functioning.

To be awake to needs for better communication, listening, sharing of leadership, giving of ego talents and accepting gifts from others.

To be aware of needs for greater personal closeness and heart connection.

To realize that shortcomings have value in pointing the way to further growth.

To appreciate, despite shortcomings, the growth of potential, talent, energy, and participation, relative to past years.

To have realized a plateau jump in the event in dancing, community members present, voicing, instrumentation (percussion, digeridoo, flutes and clarinet), outside participation, youth participation (local and outside), laid-back organization, range of emotional charge, technical virtuosity, range of musical styles.

Inspiration to carry forward the spirit of the drums, the ongoing beat, these lessons and growths and potentials, forward into every area of my life and toward the next long drum, next year, that much further ahead. To focus conscious intent and opening, twins of creation.

February 7, 1995 I see: ranks of throbbing dancers, bouncing forward in unison, to the beat we’re keeping: Duncan, Axel, David and Jay, me on the shaker for this last piece in six-eight time. My hands are in trance to keep the subtle motion steady, the chickle net ticking against the hard round gourd,

tapped up against my hand, down against my leg, alternating on the up and down beat feel because it’s a two motion in the three feel, going Up down up Down up down Up down up Down up down in a pattern of twelve: emphasizing sometimes the one of every other bar of six. The others are playing a steady three on conga, a beat that began earlier with a different combination, Duncan on shaker while I was playing drum with a D d G d g D or steady three; then when Duncan went to djembe I took the opportunity for my turn on shaker.

Jay put up a counterpoint with a timbale-like stickwork on my old Egyptian doumbek and his djembe; others were steady and rolling with some good solos on top from Duncan. The dancers kept coming, ranks of six or three across, bouncing forward, arms outstretched and down, pelvis thrust forward, chests undulating. Toward the drummers, supplicating, offering praises. All heads steady, eyes open and blank into the trance of the steady pulse. Bare feet on the shiny floor, a wall of mirror behind me. Faint smell of floor wax and honest sweat. Rigid with discipline, yet breathing into a relaxed, repetitive drone on the shaker, as I warmed to its insistent chackaka chackaka chackaka chackaka... legs bent slightly at the knees, leaning to my left to play on left

hand and leg with the shekere in my right hand, across the drum still dangling, totemlike around my waist, a silent beacon in the call to the dancers hopping forward with their feet planted in unison, heads nodding, mine going too, sometimes sideways as if saying no, counter to the rhythm and really saying yes, yes, keep coming.

I see Jane, Giselle, Tamasine, Jennifer, and men and women I don’t know. There’re no favorites here, no weirdness before or after.

“You might have to dance, if it doesn’t work with the drumming,” Tamasine had told me at the start. “Since you haven’t been here. Maybe get Duncan or Jay to show you something simple, and let those guys do the overlaying.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think I’ll be able to play something to fit in.”

But Duncan and Jay had no preconceived notions of what to play; they let me wing it just as they were doing, whatever sounded good as a basic accompaniment to the movement of the dance: something in four, or something in six.

Actually I was the one to point out that we needed a six rhythm for a move Tamasine demonstrated with the count, One Two Three Four One Two Three Four, after we started with a rhythm that didn’t work, in four. But I did make

an effort to stay steady and basic, and the discipline was helpful in maintaining the consistency of each piece, with occasional minor variation, and others coming in and out around it.

Once the initial rhythm was demonstrated, I’d pick it up and keep it, and the others would play around more with it. The result was, by the end, “a really hot session.”

February 18, 1995 I almost didn’t go, but after a little rest in bed realized I wasn’t actually sleeping. I almost flipped a coin but went with my intuitive decision arrived at standing still a few moments in the living room, while Sarah drew cartoons of “The Circle and Square Dances” and “The Creation of the World in Eight Stages.”

Anyway, I did go and it looked bad and I almost left when by 9:30 there was still only Dick, Scott, and Dan from Cooper Creek. The rest had been invited to a party for Beam’s brother Franz who was leaving the next day for Switzerland. I never met him; he showed up later drunk talking to Jan by the kitchen counter. Also later, a digeridoo. Anyway, a classic jam with good cohesive driving energy and balance.

Highlight was a good rhumba beat.

Nigel: voice, kazoo, tambourine.

Peter: lead guitar Nowick: djembe, junjun, yew drum, congas and percussion Richard: congas, djembe and percussion Jesse bass Jacob: piano, flute, pennywhistle, bamboo sax Scott: trumpet, electrified acoustic guitar Walkin: harmonica, percussion, acoustic guitar, voice Dick: accordion Jay, Susan, Betty’s cousin, Beam, Jan: dancers February 23, 1995 Jay Lamb’s tips, via Jonathan: A groove expands: but instead of letting it dissipate, ride it back down to the simple core again, and go to the other side of that, what happens next.

How do you decide, then, as a group, when to end it?

Telepathically.

This gets back to “the Real People” of the Australian desert, and their mind-reading.

March 31, 1995 Jam Liner Notes I know nothing and everything. It’s all up to the movement, the flow of the moment, the jam to determine, because in the steady-state universe the big bang is everlasting, that original energy is onward impelling, and the hands and brain cells simply respond; and if I speak of nothing else but the all and nothing, the that and the this with nothing recognizable in between, there’s always the TV, novels, philosophy, crazy art, metafiction or meditation to fill in the rest. What’s the issue, where’s the rub? Let us face facts. Not irrelevant facts of my dreams or fancies removed from the present moment, descriptions of the Buddha even or of his admirers and minor spirit replicates, but of the now and the now to come. The not-concrete for a change, the not-showing, but the all-telling, the cerebral reality of this moment, the abstract network of thought that is more concrete in its way than all the showy show that we call the rest of the world—let’s take a break from all that and contemplate the now, the moving now of the mind in its moment, the meditation joined together and articulated together and thus shared. Let us speak of it not in reticence or shame or negligent duty, but out of a wonder and

respect, for it carries us to ride with it in harmony, with its music and to its tempo as it runs me, that energy not that I make, but that makes me... not far, but near. Every one of these elements in concert, working and playing together as a binding skein, a woven maypole ribbon-dance coming around to the pole that stands in the center.

About the Author Nowick Gray continued his study and practice of West African and Afro-Latin rhythms, instruments and styles, becoming an accomplished performer and teacher, while never losing the love of improvised music in eclectic combinations. He has produced three volumes of instructional rhythm studies, Roots Jam, with accompanying audio tracks, and a set of free djembe lessons available on YouTube. He still enjoys jamming whenever possible with the improvisational band Strange Moon.

To connect further, go to: http://djemberhythms.com http://nowickgray.com http://cougarwebworks.com/discography.htm http://strangemoon.homestead.com