444 karma · joined August 26, 2016
From the thread:
Jamil Nasser told me (re: Dan's interview and the junkie question); when the band went on the road, Blakey stocked up with dope ahead of time. So the typical situation was - they are in some town, middle of nowhere; everybody is strung out and desperate. So Blakey says, 'let me go out and see what I can find' - he comes back with the stuff he already had, marks it up about 10 times, says, 'well, this was all I could get but it's pretty expensive." He takes their "share" out of the gig money, they go home with nothing, he takes all the cash.
Alternatively, you could always get him drum lessons. This is the meat and potatoes of what a good drum teacher would cover.
You are correct that keeping time (what an engineer would call "maintaining a common time base between transmitter and receiver") is necessary to play together with other musicians. But what musicians would call "feel" is what an engineer would call "phase modulation" -- whether a note is ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat; and by how much. Especially in Black American music (jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and a bunch of pop that's been influenced by those styles), there is a lot of crucial information there beyond what is conveyed in the "gridded" rhythms that are conveyed in Western musical notation. If you are not aware of this, you will still have problems playing with other musicians. From personal experience, it is anxiety-inducing to play with musicians who are ignorant of their beat placement and as a consequence have what an engineer would call "jitter" -- their timekeeping is correct on average, but on each given beat, they might be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind. You can play with a metronome for ages and never realize you're doing this wrong, as you're not consistently rushing or dragging, you're just inconsistent.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4deSYYzffM by Cab Calloway
Or the lyrics before the solo break in Zappa's "Zomby Woof".
> Interviewer: What’s it take to make a great trumpet player?
> Dizzy Gillespie: (long pause) Well, the first thing is to be a master shit detector. Detect what is valid and what is not.
And to the well-known Feynman quote:
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
What Monk is getting at is that when you're woodshedding (practicing by yourself) and trying to build up your playing and improvisation, you have to be your own critic a lot of the time. Are you really playing something hip, or are you playing something corny? Are you swinging? Are you making the chord changes? Are your time and intonation as good as you think? Amongst all the other musicians you hear, live and recorded, are you selecting the influences that are really going to build your playing in the way you want? If you're coming up with ideas on your own, are they really fresh and valid, or are they just the first thing that came to your mind?
Works great, and the guard keeps you from pushing it in too far and damaging your eardrum.
Pat also tells a similar story about meeting Joe Pesci backstage and knowing him only from movies until Joe tells him, "I can tell you what you used to drink at Smalls' Paradise in the '60s". Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niUwDegpYyo
Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
It used to be an 8/10 or a 9/10 when I moved here, but professional musicians have been priced out. Now it's people with day gigs, music students at UT, and people who bought while it was more affordable and locked in their cost of living.
For the poor? See https://itep.org/whopays/ -- we have the second most inequitable tax system in the nation, where the poor pay the highest effective rate. We also have no expanded Medicaid, so the rate of uninsured is twice the national average. The State of Texas blocked Austin's sick leave ordinance (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/05/texas-supreme-court-...). All this affects women and minorities disproportionately -- we're above the national average for maternal mortality, and non-white women are at disproportionate risk above that.
There's a lot of political stuff that this guy glosses over because it doesn't affect him as a white male Christian. The "traditional gender roles" thing, for one. With our governor and the 5th Circuit eager to send anything and everything regressive up to our 6-3 SCOTUS, my lesbian neighbors are worried about things as basic as their marriage. The University of Austin he cites approvingly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin) is a right-wing project set up explicitly to be "anti-woke". And the heartbeat bill he cites as something that people can just disagree about has no exception for rape or incest, something that 75+ percent of people in Texas support. The government has moved to the right of the median Texan, and with the gerrymandered districts and no ballot initiative, it is not really democratically accountable to the voters.
And Texas is 45th in percentage of public land, definitely not a 7/10. With the growth in the Austin area, the hikes and water features that are nearby are always crowded, and you have to reserve campsites months out at state parks. If this dude went hunting, he more than likely paid to hunt on somebody else's land, something I never had to do when I lived in NC or VA.