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1984 – George Orwell

I know, everybody has already read this one, or knows what it’s about anyway. But its dark and gripping and magnificent. Not to mention prescient.

Complications – Atul Gawande

Dr. Gawande, practicing surgeon and MacArthur Fellow, is spectacularly insightful. The ability he has to dissect an issue from many perspectives and reveal its complexities is perfectly suited to the subject matter, a series of essays on uncertainty and ethical gray areas in the field of medicine. Though the comparatively black-and-white view I had of the field before I read this book was comforting, his admirably humble, exploratory voice edged me reluctantly further and further into reality, as messy as it is. And, with dramatic case examples and exciting anecdotes, these essays are not dry and academic at all – this is a page-turner!

Etudes – Aseem Kaul

Probably no one has heard of this one. My mother picked it up in a bookstore in India, based solely on the back cover (a series of fake reviews forms a conversation – actually an argument about the classification of the book). It turned out to be unique and fascinating. PhD candidate at the Wharton School of UPenn, Kaul debuts his first work of fiction after being published as a poet. Though you could call it fiction and not poetry, this collection blends the lines between the two. Each”etude” is almost an experiment in form: most are very short, characters often don’t have names, and somehow every little word seems to matter more than in most prose. Definitely recommended if you can find it.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J.K. Rowling

I re-read these. These aren’t my favorite books in the world, but I do love them, and I think they have some nice moral lessons for kids. I grew up around the same time as Harry Potter when the books were coming out, so this was a nostalgia trip for me. Not to mention they are some of the most gripping books I have ever read!

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

I re-read this, too. What a fantastic adventure! As you can see, I was on a bit of a children’s literature spree. But I definitely don’t think I understood all of this book when I was reading it in Middle School – the language is much more advanced than other novels I see young people reading. Somehow, however, it’s filled with a humor exactly like that of an old man telling a story to his grandchildren around a fire.

Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones – Quincy Jones

Q has been one of the most amazing people in the music industry for the last 50 years. I can’t list the names of stars and icons he was involved with because it would take up 50 entries in this blog. So I’ll mention just mention two. Quincy Jones allots some space in his book to Michael Jackson, which might be of interest in the wake of his tragic death. Also, as a jazz trumpet player, myself, I was touched by the chapter Quincy Jones included about trumpeter Clifford Brown, and the tour they did together in Lionel Hampton’s band. Q is individualistic, honest, and grateful – he never hesitates to thank those who helped him along the way. An inspiring book by an inspiring man.

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families – Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch illuminates the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, its causes, and its aftermath. Gourevitch quotes Plato in the book: “Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, ‘There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle.’” If, like Leontius, you have to look, this book is for you. Actually, even if you would rather not look, too bad. You have to read it too. This book is required reading for everyone.

The Shadow of the Sun – Ryszard Kapuscinski

About the author: “Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932. During four decades of reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa, he befriended Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and Patrice Lumumba. He witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. His books have been translated into nineteen languages. He died in 2007.”

Better – Atul Gawande

A sequel to Complications (though they don’t have to be read in any particular order), Better is themed around the constant endeavor for excellence in medicine. This one is an inspiring book that implores its readers to become a “positive deviant” and not be contented with mediocrity, especially in fields where lives hang in the balance. Read both books.

Click HERE to read his post first.

And here is the conversation – It’s long, but I think it reads fast…

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AG: How are you?

CL: I’m doing well. Finally wrote a new blog entry. You?

AG: Oh cool, let me check it out

CL: OK. Have you written anything lately?

AG: Unfortunately no – thanks for reminding. I’ll do something tonight! (hopefully)

CL: Yay! Well let me know when you do.

AG: Wow – again I’m struck by the beauty of your prose.

CL: Hmm. Thanks! I appreciate that…considering how good yours is.

AG: Hahaha, thanks. I agree completely with your post – I wonder how our ears get emotionally conditioned? Do you think the connection between music and other forms (commercials, movies, radio shows, or even just the lyrics) has to do with it?

CL: Hmmm…I think so.

AG: But how did they do it before movies, commercials, etc? How much is inborn?

CL: Well, I think the way the western harmonic system evolved over the years, it just came to be that certain things had certain connotations. I don’t think any of its inborn. Like, if you were to play a minor key song to an Indonesian native, he might think it sounds happy.

AG: Definitely. I’m sure words are a lot more emotive and vague than we take them to be, too.

CL: Yes.

AG: Have you heard of Gertrude Stein?

CL: Hmmmm, no i haven’t. Who’s that?

AG: She’s this poet who kind of made “cubist” poetry. She took words just for their connotations and not their direct meanings, and lined them up in unconventional ways

CL: Oh! You told me about this! That’s amazing…

AG: I’m not sure if I “get” her or if I like her, but I think similarly, the work probably means many things to many people. Oh, I did?

CL: Yes i think so…in that book you read that described poets’ styles? [this is Sleeping on the Wing, a compilation by Kenneth Koch]

AG: Oh yeah I still have that! I guess I did…So if you surrender to the fact that people may never hear your music the way you do, and you can’t control if they like it or not, you have to make what pleases you and HOPE that it pleases others?

CL: Yep. But i think that effective communication of “emotion” as a aggregate entity is one of the most important things. I mean we’ve all heard recordings where all you can say to describe the emotional content in a few words is, “wow he plays with a lot of emotion.”

AG: Yeah! Just like when lots of critics misunderstood Coltrane’s music to be angry! They could feel the intense emotion, but felt a different one than he did

CL: Yes. From what i hear he wasn’t angry at all. I hear he was a very quiet, modest guy.

AG: But it definitely communicated “emotion”

CL: Yes

AG: That’s ironic that there could be such vastly different reactions to the same vibrations.

CL: Yes, but i think it all relates to what it reminds you of personally.

AG: You ever wonder about how knowing the life story of artists affects how you hear their work? You can hear “personality” in someone’s sound but how much of that is just what you previously read was his personality? And if you find out that he had a completely different one? What would someone think of Miles hearing just his music and knowing nothing else?

CL: Yes. Hmmm…It’s an interesting question…

AG: And if you hear intense spirituality and love in a piece you later found was written by a Nazi sympathizer?

CL: Hmmmmm

AG: Can you separate art and artist?

CL: I think so. Again, it all goes back to just communicating “emotion” – what we do with it is our prerogative. Of course you can’t really judge a person’s personality by his music. But you can interpret aspects of it superficially. Like: “playful” or “quick-thinking.” Maybe a person’s personality comes through in his playing in those ways.

AG: Even when it doesn’t in other situations.

CL: Yes. But again, without knowing the person, its our prerogative. We may be right or wrong, and really, is there right or wrong when it comes to personality? Or just opinion?

AG: For example, I think Miles played very selflessly, or at least, I interpret it that way, but he certainly didn’t act selfless when he took credit for others tunes, or when he harshly criticized rival musicians.

CL: Yes – exactly.

AG: But his art is selfless, and in a weird way, it’s not really his. Because it belongs to the Miles of the exact moment he made it, and that’s not the same Miles.

CL: Hmmm…Perhaps this could be your next blog post? You have a lot of very insightful thoughts on it. I’d love to read about what you have to say…and i agree totally.

AG: I should just post this conversation.

[THE CREATURE BECOMES SELF-AWARE!!!!!]

CL: Hahahah

AG: I’m serious. We should say a lot of stupid stuff now, too.

CL: Censor out everything i said that sounds stupid – which is basically everything i said. Replace it with “like”. Replace “I think so” with “Christian Li.” I am of the opinion that it is so.

AG: like like Christian Li like like

CL: hahah…balls!

AG: farts!

CL: Intravenous injections are cool!

AG: And…that’s the blog post!

CL: Wooo!!!!!

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Here are a couple further comments if you made it this far:

-Words of wisdom from my trumpet teacher John Worley: “You are who you are in the moment.” I interpret this to mean that, as everything is constantly changing and impermanent, in each successive moment we are actually different people, just as in each moment a river is a different river.

-Though I am guilty of occasionally judging music by its “background story” or my prior knowledge about the artist, I support the idea of separation between the two. One of the heroes of this ethic is humanitarian and world-class conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who in 2001 led performances of works by Richard Wagner in Jerusalem. Wagner was an Anti-Semite, who’s works were later appropriated by Nazi Germany, and had become taboo in the Jewish state of Israel since the Holocaust. Barenboim , Jewish himself, said, “Wagner, the person, is absolutely appalling, despicable, and, in a way, very difficult to put together with the music he wrote, which so often has exactly the opposite kind of feelings … noble, generous, etc.”

Thanks for reading. I plan to blog more regularly, so check back soon – and I’ll try not to trouble readers with NOVELS like this post.

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On one of his recent albums, Wayne covers an old ballad called “Smilin’ Through”, by Arthur Penn, which was featured in a movie (and two remakes) of the same name.
First listen to the original version.
Then listen to Wayne’s version (with Danilo Perez (p), John Patitucci (b), Brian Blade (d))

Knowing the original version can be like an anchor. Wayne’s quartet is extremely spontaneous, drifting in and out of songs, blurring the line between pre-composed and improvised music, so it is often easy to get lost.

Wayne cues the song (this is a live performance) with the chorus – the “eye’s o’ blue come..” It is a major triad downwards, then the second degree. In solfege this would be Sol Mi Do Re. Remember this phrase; the quartet uses it as a motif to develop.

Then after a vamp, Wayne states the melody on tenor, but over a Gb minor vamp (the relative minor) dressing the original nostalgic major key tune in dreamy, mysterious feeling. After a reharmonized section of the melody, they are back in the vamp for the chorus, and they continue the vamp while Danilo toys with the rhythm, suggesting different meters.

Soon drums and bass drop out, and Wayne and Danilo improvise together. Listening closely, one will notice that they are both manipulating the same motif, moving it around the dorian mode, weaving it in and out of improvisation. Sometimes, they play it upside down or out of order. They haven’t left the chorus! To end their duet they play the same motif (triad downwards) in minor, three times insistently.

After Danilo takes a moment to play a interlude, Wayne states the melody again, but this time in major key (C major specifically), in rubato, on his soprano, and accompanied by quickly changing advanced harmony instead of a vamp on one chord. When the bass comes in, it is arco, as opposed to the original 3/4 groove. The second statement is pretty much the exact opposite of the first.

When it comes time for the chorus, the song suddenly bursts into a deep funk groove over the relative minor (now A minor) while Wayne launches off the melody into an energetic solo. This solo, too, is deeply connected to the melody. The motif shows up everywhere in his solo. He weaves it into his lines, uses it to make sequences, and distorts the intervals but keeps the contour, often playing “Sol Mi Do Me”. Finally he ends his solo with the motif, and when Danilo provides him with an ambiguous voicing (lacking the third), Wayne takes the opportunity to modulate to the parallel major key. After Danilo toys with the final motif, they play a beautiful ending sequence, and the song is done.

Throughout the song, by taking the melody through lots of distant keys, both major and minor, and lots of style changes, Wayne keeps the piece cohesive with his use of motivic development. His solos and Danilo’s accompaniment never stray far from the melody, but are disguised enough to never seem repetitive.

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The second discovery I made is a fun twist Wayne Shorter improvised on live performance of “All of You” with Miles Davis’s quintet. Watch it here.

Again, to “get it”, a listener needs to have a little background. Miles’ original version of “All of You” with John Coltrane and his first great quintet has a much more straightforward statement of the melody, which is important to understand Wayne’s solo. Listen to it here.

A couple things to consider while watching the old version with Trane: first, listen to how at the end each solo, and after the last head, there is a vamp (ii / V / iii / VI ). The band repeats those chords and the soloist ends with a break for the next soloist. Miles characteristically ends his solos on this tune with “La Fa Ti Sol Do”. Secondly, the rhythm section is in a two-feel (emphasizing two main beats each measure) for the head and Miles’ solo, and they switch to a four-feel (emphasizing all four beats) for the other solos. The second quintet’s version pretty much keeps the arrangement intact, but with a determination to confound expectations and remain spontaneous. Lastly, A listener should also take note of measures 25-28 of the melody, or 0:36 to 0:40 on the Youtube video. This part of the melody is what sets Wayne on his flight of fantasy in the other version.

Fast forward nine years to the version with Wayne. At the end of a couple choruses of improvisation, Wayne quotes the melody to signal the approaching vamp. He uses the rhythm and intervals of the melody, but he plays it a minor third up. It still fits in the chords, and he uses a sequence to get him to the beginning of the vamp. These two together, the melody and the sequence, produce the dorian scale, often used by the raucous rhythm ‘n’ blues sax players of the ’50′s. It must have stirred some memory of hearing that style during his youth. Whatever was going on in his mind, he decides to repeat the idea and elaborate on it, and soon the members in the band catch on. Drummer Tony Williams lays a heavy backbeat on 2 and 4, and pianist Herbie Hancock starts repeating a grooving rhythm with a simple bluesy voicing. Suddenly the band jumps back 15 years and rocks out, gaining intensity until Wayne signs out by hollering Miles’ phrase of choice, “La Fa Ti Sol Do”

What I find most impressive in this solo is not the sudden, and in my opinion hilarious, style change – anyone with a responsive rhythm section could do that – but the fact that the melody of the tune carried him there. It was an astoundingly creative development of a motif from the melody, and, by transforming the traditional vamp at the end of the solo, an extremely unexpected take on the Miles’ standardized arrangement of the tune.

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I am blown away with how tight and structured Wayne’s improvisation is, and simultaneously how loose it can seem and feel. Wayne must be constantly thinking of the melody and developing its themes during his improvisations, but he manages to do so in a disguised way, and in a way that is open to sudden plot twists and dynamic changes. He is not merely “blowing over changes.” In “Smilin’ Through”, he doesn’t merely think, “OK, now I am in a funk groove, so I’ll pull out my A minor funk licks.” And in All of You, he doesn’t think “What is the hippest stuff I can play over the ii-V’s in this vamp?”

Constant connection to the melody redeems the jazz musician for his treatment of songs with improvisation – for master jazz musicians, the melody is no longer just the vehicle, to be played and discarded. Rather, it becomes the emotional architecture of the song. Wayne’s arrangement and improvisation in “Smilin’ Through” took the most important words in the lyrics and played them through a wide spectrum of meanings, and his spontaneous style change in “All of You” was almost a parody of the song that stemmed entirely from the shape of its melodic line.

As a musician myself, I want to emulate Wayne Shorter, not only by treating improvisations as elaborations on the melody (a tradition dating back to Louis Armstrong), but also (as a result of that) remaining in the emotional architecture of the song throughout its entirety. This is an aesthetic natural to other styles. Once you enter a Beatles song, you are in its unique world until the song finishes – they don’t pause to let you hear some hip licks that George Harrison learned that day!  The power of remaining true to the melody connects Wayne Shorter to the entire jazz tradition, and is one of the reasons why his music is able to reach out and touch us all so deeply. Thank you Wayne.

Here is a paradox I have been wrestling with for some time now: how do you take the Universe into account and still love a single person? How do you at once realize an individual’s absolute insignificance and his absolute significance? And not just know intellectually but comprehend at such a fundamental level that all of your actions are informed by your understanding?

Here’s how it started – consider the idea of completely selfless love. I think that the ordinary love that we all feel for others has a certain self-interest in it naturally. I love my sister more than I love another person’s, and I would be sadder if my sister died. We all see a little of ourselves in our family, our friends, and our lovers. Their actions reflect on us, and they (at least in part) define us, and we want to keep them in our lives. This is extremely basic and intuitive, but if true enlightenment was loving every person on the entire planet with all your heart, wouldn’t a perfect person be equally saddened by every person’s suffering? He would unconditionally love strangers, even those who hated him, criminals, racists, old, and young, in his town or 10,000 miles away. Would he be overwhelmed by sadness from everyone’s death and suffering? Or would he be completely insensitive, and numb?

If one accepts selfless love as an ideal, it can lead to some pretty strange dilemmas. For example, there is the famous biblical story of Abraham in which God orders him to sacrifice his son Isaac, whom Abraham had waited for years to conceive, and who was supposed to be the progenitor of a great nation. So total was Abraham’s love for God that, without questioning the purpose of the order, he silently brings his son to the forest and attempts to kill him, but is stopped by angels sent by God. Metaphorically, Abraham could be seen as a role model for people to emulate, both in the way he stoically accepts the Isaac’s inevitable death and in his singular love for God (it is, after all, a love story between Abraham and God).

But wait, how can Abraham be a good man? Isn’t his story twisted and repulsive? If he is enlightened in his love for God and in his comprehension of the insignificance of worldly and ephemeral things, does that mean he doesn’t love his son? Isn’t it horrible that he is no more hesitant to sacrifice his son than a lamb? Secularly, his love for God can be translated into a comprehension of the order of things, that inescapably his son will die, so it doesn’t matter if it is by his hand or Nature’s. God’s test is a judge of his attachment to impermanent things, be them his reputation, his marriage, his dream of a prosperous future nation, and most of all, his son. But how can a person who is so wanton of a killer, who feels they have nothing to lose, be admired?

But I actually think he is torn apart inside, not at all reckless, and that this story, to me, is about his struggle, his internal battle between his empathy for Isaac and his devotion to the divine order that says Isaac must die.

I want to understand (again, deep inside me) that another man’s life is just as important as my father’s or mine for that matter, and that in the biggest picture we are all collections of atoms that just tend to rearrange in certain self-replicating formations, but I don’t want that understanding to desensitize me to anyone’s death. I want to love my future spouse with all of my heart, but I want to understand that she and I will both be gone in the blink of an eye, and therefore cherish the present as much as I can. The struggle between those two opposites is natural, and, I think, necessary to be moral. Our actions should be founded in an unconditional love for all things, but we should also strive to see beyond the ephemeral, and I think being a good person is just doing the best you can to navigate those extremes.

Lets celebrate this day by emulating this great man’s love for all and his complete commitment to helping others!

Though I am thrilled to witness history tomorrow, I know that we are not even close to finishing the struggle for equality and ending human suffering.  We will all need a lot more of the Reverend’s spirit to make it through the hard times ahead.

Or listen to his album, a collaboration with Nine Inch Nails.

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The second person, Charlie Todd, is a mastermind prankster, who, with his “agents”, organizes and carries out “missions” in NYC for his group Improv Everywhere. Explore his website.

The missions are undeniably awesome, but the ethics of his actions are complicated. In one prank, “Best Gig Ever”, he gets 35 agents to pretend to be enthusiastic fans of a struggling rock band in order to give them an amazing concert. Unfortunately the band finds out the gig was staged a couple days later, and needless to say, it hits them hard. One of my favorite radio shows, This American Life, explores the issue here.

Have a wonderful New Years everyone!

-Akhil