Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Working for Old Men

I am working on two translation projects now: another novel by Aharon Appelfeld and a personal essay about religion by Zvi Luz.  Aharon is approaching the age of eighty, and Zvi has passed it.  Both men are enviably clear-minded and active, busy and engaged in life.
I'm half a generation younger than these gentlemen, much closer to old age, if I make it, than to youth.  Working for vigorous older people like Appelfeld and Luz helps reconcile me to the prospect of aging and gives me hope that when I reach their age, I'll still have the energy and commitment to think hard and create.
These authors have been through a lot during their lives, and they have been pondering the serious and deep issues of the human condition for a long time.  Aharon has been an author for fifty years or more, writing about the fate of individuals who are caught, tragically, in vast historical convulsions. 
Zvi was a professor of literature during a long career and has devoted much thought to the connection between traditional Jewish literary sources and modern Hebrew literature.  In the essay I'm working on, he seeks to clarify his ideas and set them in order.
I like working with people who old and more experienced than I am, and I sometimes wonder how much I can learn from a much younger person, which is not to say that I reject the insight and intelligence of young writers out of hand.  Since I've outlived Shakespeare, as well as a host of other literary geniuses, that would mean that I should stop reading them - an absurd idea.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

By Heart and by Ear

I'm still digesting the experience I had of playing a 3 night gig last week.  A friend of ours took this video of us playing "Softly as a Morning Sunrise," and I'm pretty satisfied with the way it sounds (not with the quality of the recording).
That's a song that I know by heart, backward and forward, and you may notice that the music stand in front of me is empty.  When I soloed, I knew just where I was in the song, and I could hear the relationship between what I was playing and the tune and the chords.  But most of the time, even though I know a song pretty well, I'm afraid to play it without the notes in front of me, and I know that's a deficit in my playing.  It means I'm using my eyes to keep my place in the song instead of using my ears.
By now I know a lot of songs by heart, and the expression is extremely apt.  My unwillingness to trust my heart, as it were, and play the songs without the written music in front of my eyes, is holding me back musically.  My dependence on my eyes cuts my ears off from my heart, and my playing is intellectual rather than emotional and natural.
What's strange to me is that when I play a song that I do know well by heart, like "Embraceable You" or "It's Only a Paper Moon," if I've started to play the song from the written notes, I find it almost impossible to tear my eyes away from the music and launch myself into playing it by ear.  I have to learn to trust my heart and my ears.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Another Night at the Craft Fair - the Challenge of Thinking in Music

The second evening of playing went even better than the first one.  I was more relaxed, but I was still playing with the intensity that comes when you play in public.
Improvising music is one of the most challenging activities I know of, and I'm not sure it gets easier as you improve at it.  Obviously some aspects of it do get easier.  You know the songs better, so you don't have to make an effort to remember them.  You gain in confidence, so you have more control over what you're doing.  You develop familiarity with chord patterns and rhythms, so you're not baffled by a half-diminished chord or a minor major seventh.  But the closer you are to mastery, the more you demand of yourself.
In the beginning, when I was struggling to improvise at all, I was glad when I just managed to follow the harmonies and begin and end on time.  I still get lost occasionally, but usually I know where I am in the song, and I'm working on playing interesting riffs, coherent solos that build, giving variety to my playing - so things aren't really any easier.  On the contrary.  It's harder for me to satisfy myself.
In some moods I think that it's too bad I came to this rather late in life.  If I'd learned as many songs and known as much about jazz when I was a teenager, I'd be struggling less now.  On the other hand, it's amazing that in my late sixties I can do musical things that I couldn't imagine doing ten years ago.  It's important to grow at any age.
Playing a fast-moving sport like tennis, hockey, basketball, or soccer probably demands concentration of a similar kind, though, never having been much of an athlete, I'm only guessing.
What it takes is thinking in the language of music as you play, the way you think in a language as you speak. 
A few years ago I took a course in musical cognition at the Hebrew University, and I got a lot out of it, though I think I barely scratched the surface.  I know that there are people with high musical aptitude, the way there are people with high mathematical or verbal aptitude, who hear, retain, and imagine more than ordinary people.  My own musical aptitude is high enough, I guess, for me to imagine what it would be like to have the extraordinary musical gifts of a great musician, and that's a positive thing.  But when, for example, I read about Shostakovich, sitting down and writing out the score of a symphony that he'd composed in his mind, without trying anything out at the keyboard, I am infinitely humbled.
The intensity of improvising in public (not that there was ever a big crowd listening to us) for a couple of hours last night took me a little closer to the state of musical awareness that a truly gifted musician has.  I could barely sleep last night.  Music kept running through my head, the tunes we had played, and musical ideas of my own.  The intense attention I needed while we were playing stimulated my brain.
Ordinarily I hear music without listening to it as carefully as I do when I'm playing.  Maybe it's a defense mechanism: if I always listened to music that carefully, I would be overwhelmed by it, and I can't really afford to be overwhelmed by it.  There are so many other demands on my life.  But I welcome occasions like these, which give me a glimpse of a higher musical plane.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Am I Good Enough to Play for People?

For years now I have been playing almost every week with an Israeli pianist named Ra'anan (the name, not all that common, means "fresh").  We mainly play for our own enjoyment, working on songs for quite a while, playing them in different tempi and rhythms.  We have played at parties now and then, and prepared programs and played them at informal concerts.  But I know that we're not all that good, compared to professional musicians.  Last summer we played in a couple of restaurants, and they didn't ask us to come back.  We were too loud!
Through a friend of his wife's, Ra'anan got us invited to play at the Jerusalem Craft Fair, which has been going on for the past week or so.  The Craft Fair is a major event, drawing thousands of visitors, and there are four entertainment venues, including a major outdoor stage where the top singers perform.  Ra'anan and I were asked to play in the most inconspicuous of those venues, in an alley that goes between artists' studios, the only part of the Craft Fair that's permanent.
We located a drummer in our age range, a retired gentleman named Moshe who has gone back to music after a career in business, and we rehearsed intensely for a couple of weeks, meeting at Moshe's house during the few hours at noon when he knows that his neighbors won't mind hearing him pound on his drums.
The rehearsals weren't all that encouraging.  Ra'anan was very edgy and intense, and Moshe wasn't used to playing with us.  But after a couple of weeks we were at least listening to each other.  However, I recorded a couple of our sessions and didn't like what I heard.  My own playing was weak and mechanical.  There are so many excellent saxophone players around, why should anyone listen to me?
I became extremely nervous as the day of our performance approached.  Meanwhile, our gig was extended from two nights to three, which also didn't please me.  One night would have been fun, two nights became a kind of responsibility, but three nights turned the engagement into work!  Rather than being enthusiastic, I was apprehensive.
We had our debut last night, and it went so much better than I expected, that I'm amazed.
We prepared about 30 songs and figured out simple arrangements for them.  We mixed standards like "A Foggy Day in London Town" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me" with a few Israeli songs by Sasha Argov, Matti Caspi, and Yoni Rechter.  We played for about two-and a half hours, total, and people stopped to listen to us and even applauded.It often happens that I play better for an audience than I do by myself or in private, just with other musicians.  Once I'm up there on the bandstand with a horn, there's nowhere to hide, so I let myself go and play.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Our Record Player

Some things drag on and on.  Finding a turntable so that we could play all our old LPs was pretty low priority, and after everything was supposedly in place, we still couldn't do it.  Our amplifier doesn't have an input for turntables, so we had to buy a pre-amplifier, and the one we got had a terrible hum.  But yesterday, at last, I installed a new pre-amplifier, and the hum is almost inaudible.  To celebrate we put on an old mono [!] LP that I have had for years: Arthur Grumiaux playing the Bach unaccompanied violin partitas.
I thought, while listening: if I were a Musician (I am a musician, but not anywhere near the level I mean when I use the term "Musician" with a capital 'M'), and I could play a work like the Bach partitas with the beauty and depth that Grumiaux brought to his performance, I don't think I'd ever want to do anything else. 
I feel something similar about the Miles Davis record of "Kind of Blue."  Once you've played that way, where do you have to go as a musician?  I still have the LP, but I played it so much when I was young, that I doubt that it has any life in its grooves.



Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Fear of Dogs and Religious Faith

This morning, as I often do, I took our dog Kipper, who is neither large nor ferocious, to the hill near our house that somehow got the name of Bible Hill.  I let him wander around while I sit with a notebook and write about what's on my mind.  I was there at about 7:15.  The breeze was cool, and I had a lot to confide to the pages of my journal.
A few minutes after my arrival, a heavy Haredi woman and four large daughters lumbered up to the hill, saw the dog, and hesitated.  I assured them, the dog doesn't attack, he's my dog, you have nothing to worry about.  They proceeded, and, indeed, the dog had no interest in them.  He never got closer than fifty meters, though he did look in their direction. 
Before they had gone a third of the way on top of the hill, fear overwhelmed the girls, and they retreated, leaving the hill and its wonderful view of the Old City to us.
I was sorry that my dog spoiled their little outing, but I'm not responsible for their irrational fear of dogs. 
On the way home, I thought of what I should have said to them: "Do you think that God will let you be attacked by a dog?  Don't you have faith that He will protect you?  You obviously only believe in a God who punishes, not one who protects."  But by the time I thought of that, the women and her daughters had left Bible Hill, and so had Kipper and I.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Incendies - Important Film

Last night we went to see Incendies at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and were deeply moved. Viewers who don't live in the Middle East would definitely get involved in the human (melo)drama of Canadian twins of Lebanese descent who discover the tragic truth about their origins. For people living very close to Lebanon - indeed I spent four or five months in Lebanon during the 1980s as an Israeli soldier - the film has more than human interest. I'm not sure whether an uninformed viewer would know the difference between Christian and Muslim Arabs, between Lebanese nationalists and Palestinian refugees, and so on. But my wife and I and everyone else in the Israeli audience did.
The film ends up by expressing the hope that love can overcome the painful past and the hatred that motivated so much killing. That might be possible in Canada, but it didn't seem as if the Lebanese Christian women, whom the young heroine met in her search for her family's past, were ready for reconciliation.
Seeing the brutality of the civil war in Lebanon on the screen, I wondered how the people of that country can bear the burden of the past, how they can avoid harboring deep resentment, that could only break out in violence whenever public order breaks down again.
Certainly a film like that doesn't leave me very hopeful about the possibility of reaching a stable and long-lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm afraid there's too much bad blood in our past.
But the issue of "bad blood" is not only a problem here in Israel-Palestine. The world is sodden with bad blood in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Iraq, in Algeria, in so many places that it's pointless to try to mention them. Just think how long it has taken to overcome the rift between north and south in the United States. After 150 years, has the wound truly healed? Reconciliation is no easy project.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Prayer for the Sick - Hard to be Happy

During the Shabbat morning service, we recite a prayer for the sick, a paradoxical prayer, in some ways, because on Shabbat you aren't actually supposed to ask God for anything. In typical Jewish fashion, we make a rule that is hard to obey (don't ask God for favors on days of rest) and then find a way of doing it anyhow.
In many synagogues, the rabbi or cantor reads a long list of people whose names were given to him earlier, and in other synagogues people come up to the prayer leader and whisper the name to him, so that he can say it out loud. This is a rather boring custom, and in our synagogue a woman recites a general prayer for the sick, and individuals silently recall the people whom they want to bless.
I have a lengthening list of people whose names I say to myself (I don't think anyone else is listening in on my thoughts) during that prayer. The list is shortened occasionally, when one of them passes away.
I remember Kathy G., who has been battling with Parkinson's disease for a decade or more, Andrea P. and Jean-Claude J., who both have multiple sclerosis, Philip H., who has such serious cancer that he doesn't know whether he will live for another year or just another month or two, and Eli S., who has been suffering from schizophrenia for at least twenty years. Now my wife reports that her friend Ziva is very ill with leukemia.
As we head for our late sixties, more and more of our friends and relatives are going to get sick and die, until it's our turn. So, although there are wonderful moments of joy in our life, on the balance, we can't say that we're happy.
Rejecting the moments of joy because the overall picture is so bleak would be like not turning on the heat in the winter, because it's so cold anyway.
Recently we saw a documentary about Jean-Claude, an avant-garde musician who has come to that through rock and roll and jazz. He suffers from his disease, and yet he manages to salvage moments of joy. The film is full of those moments, mainly when he's playing the bass. He accepts both the pain and the pleasure. He has no choice about the pain. It comes with his degenerative disease.
"Courage" is the wrong word for his attitude.
You could look through the thesaurus for a long time before you found the right one.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Down to the Bone - an Upsetting Film

If you ever want a clear demonstration of how drugs can ruin a person's life, this film is it. The main protagonists of this film are working class white drug addicts living in rural New York state, not stereotype people of color living in urban slums. As a result, the middle-class white viewer can't say to herself: it's not an issue that affects my kind of people.
Since I believe that the criminalization of drug abuse is a policy disaster, making the problem much worse that it would be if cocaine and narcotics were legal, but controlled somehow (I don't pretend to have a clear idea of the correct policy), this movie was a challenge to me. However, without making an issue of it, the movie also shows that some people can indulge in occasional, casual drug use without becoming dependent (at least in the case of cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol), while others become addicted. So I would say that addiction is the problem, not drugs per se.
I still believe that if the money that is currently spent on enforcement, plus the money that would be generated in tax revenue if selling drugs were legal, were spent on rehabilitation of the minority of drug users who become addicts, drugs would do less harm to society than they do today. But I know that drugs are far from benign.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Trivial Junk?

That's the stuff I wouldn't even want to share with myself!

Writing in Pen and Ink

A couple of years ago I threw away years and years of journals that I had been keeping, and I'm glad that I did it. Recently, though, I've begun writing in notebooks again, using a fountain pen. The act of writing satisfies me. I enjoy filling up the pages.
Will I ever read what I'm writing? I doubt it.
Will anyone ever be interested enough in me to read it?
Who cares.
The value of the writing is in the writing, even getting a bunch of trivial junk out of my mind by putting it down on paper.
Occasionally the germ of a poem has emerged on the pages of my notebook, or ideas that could be developed, if I had the urge to develop them.
What about a book called: "How to Expect the Unexpected?"
I rather assume that no one in the world is reading the stuff I put in this blog. It's kind of like keeping a journal and leaving the drawer unlocked, half hoping that someone will snoop around in it, but being careful not to put anything too revealing about other people into it.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Fingertips - a Surprising Discovery

My pottery teacher keeps telling me to use the tips of my fingers to control the clay, and not the flat pads, and I am making an effort to do that.
That effort led me to discover that I also use the pads of my fingers for typing on the computer keyboard, as I am now, and for playing saxophone. So I'm trying to change that, too, because using the tips rather than the pads gives you more control and sensitivity, but it's hard to unlearn a lifetime habit.
It makes me wonder why I developed that habit in the first place.
Very often, changing something very small, like consciously using your fingertips to type (which means curving your fingers rather than keeping your hands flat), can be the key to changing something bigger. Who knows where increased sensitivity and control of one's fingers can lead?