ugh, its been too long

sorry folks, i just really have been short on words lately.

however, today is a very beautiful day and i'm chillin' with stevie ray. stevie is always an inspiration. now i have my issues with double trouble, i really am not sold on the ability of the rhythm section but they're not bad... and they stay out of stevie's way. also, no matter who is in stevie's rhythm section its like da vinci collaborating with another professional painter on a work...

so here's the deal with stevie, as i see him. he's convincing. i don't listen to him run across a dozen notes in a split second and think its amazing for the same reason i do when nuno bettencourt does the same, when nuno does it it sounds great but it kind of stops there, when stevie does it he communicates whatever he's feeling. somehow every note matters... it matters when he plays fast, it matters when he plays slow. almost with no regard to how fast or slow he's actually playing. because every note matters.

my extraordinarily talented hero of the jazz world, dan mccarthy, once took me into a club in williamsburg to listen to a jazz band. it sounded to me like a scored classical piece by modern artist trying to communicate rectangles through circles, so perfectly jazz but so tragically not musical that the forefathers of jazz would be utterly repulsed by the pretension and pointlessness of the exploration. dan turned to me and said, 'this is horrible'. i told him i agreed but asked him, as he is the music sage, why he had thought so. he responded, 'i know everything they are doing, i hear the whole thing before they drop it, its fake, its phony, its what some people perceive as jazz, but its not music'.

i think its interesting what people appropriate as music and good music. its about pushing boundaries (ie radiohead) its about moving forward and developing, but the heartbreaking reality is that too often people lose the importance of how much a note is worth, and how carefully they should be spent. i love stevie ray because he spent a lot of notes, but he spent them well. about as perfectly as the count of monte cristo spent his fortune on the destruction of the count de morcerf.