Salutations From The Land Of Cows

A fellow on Talkbass was bashing Jazz.  This was my response.

Jazz is a rich and subtle art. At it’s best it is an interplay of time melody and harmony with relation to a standard form that creates on the spot composition that is different each and every time it is performed. It is best enjoyed at the moment of performance in the room where it happens. Many listen and have no understanding. It requires quite a bit of energy to listen at the level where the musicians are trying to communicate. It has taken me decades of listening to Jazz to begin to appreciate the complexity of what I’m hearing.

If you wish more understanding continue to listen and study. If not you can return to it later in life and perhaps see things you can’t at the moment. There are several fellows that work with me ages 16, 20, 26, 50. We are all musicians and all hear Jazz differently. Admittedly the youngest of those have no patience with it and the oldest of us at times stop working for moments when caught up with the sublime.

Take it or leave it as you choose. To diss it as ego driven selfishness is to miss all the good stuff. While I’m sure you will find ego driven stuff in there, you will also find the depth of the human soul in all its power, frailty, ugliness and beauty, revealed moment by moment as the players work around each other in reference to this often silent structure swimming underneath.

The bass player’s role in Jazz is exactly what he makes it. No more, no less. If you are a metronome and that’s it, I’d get bored too. I suggest a bass player listen and practice enough that they can transcend their role and speak clearly with their instrument in a conversation of equal weight with their playing partners. The subtle dance is to understand the form, understand the role and then dance around both with whatever feeling is in you at the moment. It is in those moments you will be truly connected to the muse.

I am working a lifetime to achieve this and will never do it as well as I’d like. When I look back in the mirror from whence I came I can see the growth and it’s reflection in my life around me.

Thats how it is for me.

Being a lifelong Baseball fan I confess a bias toward it rather than other sports. It’s pace, weather, history and mere presence permeates my 45 years. It reminds me of spring and the shedding of the dark cold of winter. Opening day, when all teams are equal and everything is possible, Baseball and life looks promising, full of hope and excitement for what is to come.

In the heat of the summer it’s slow pace is relaxing and comforting. It drops my blood preasure. I love to have it on the Radio or TV even when I’m doing something else. Days at the park watching, eating dogs, and chatting with whomever I’m there with is a childlike comfort like the smell of warm tar on the playground.

Slow. The Game is a building crescendo across 3 or 4 hours. Everyone takes their time, yet everything that happens, happens quickly. Moments of glory dashed by disaster and then back again. The season is a slow graceful Marathon played out across the backdrop of a too short summer. It seems to last forever but is over before you know it.

In Baseball you always lose. The batter makes an out 3/4 of the time. The best of teams loose half their games. Every team but one looses by the end of the year. Its a constant reminder that life isn’t fair and things rarely work out the way you want them too. Yet somehow it doesn’t really matter. Disappointment is part of the fabric of it.

Baseball taught me that its the moment that matters. It’s the history that gives weight to the moment you’re in. You see the players, know their history. You see the game and know it’s history. Everything gets rich played out against 100 years of what has come before. Yet at that game at that moment it’s what’s happening now that’s important. At that moment anything is possible. Anyone can come up the winner. The “game of inches” can turn on one of the 200 pitches in the game.

Runner on 3rd, bottom of the 9th, pitching team up by one run. Full count. One pitch and a home run could win the game for the Home team. One pitch and a strikeout means the Visitors go home a winner. It took 4 hours to get there and that one moment makes all the difference.

Even though you lose, it’s still beautiful and its still fun. It taught me that even though there is somebody better and you’ll not be as good as you want this year, it’s still worth doing. It’s the doing that matters. When my Favorite teams won it all, the Reds in ‘75, ‘76, ‘90. The Indians coming close in ‘95 and ‘97, the victory was fun but quick and bittersweet. The result is fleeting and transient.

Winning is not the substance of Baseball. Even if you win it all this year come springtime it’s back to the loosing again. Soon the winning is a memory and you are settled back into the familiar pace of the slow loosing marathon that comes to a close with the onset of the cold and the ice and snow and the enveloping malise of Winter.

It is then we are left only with the perrenial hope that next year, come spring, everything is even again and all things are possible.

My father turns 82 this year if he makes it to July 31. He probably won’t. He’s got Cancerous tumors in his lungs, on his Hip joints and in his rear end. He is deteriorating quickly. He does not plan on treating it, just making himself comfortable and medicating pain.

I’ll write more on this later, including some kind of tribute to his life.

My mother died from Cancer 2 years ago. It seems to soon for him to go now.

The juxtaposition of Vincent’s new life and my Father’s ending is profound, beautiful and sad.

I’ve been tinkering with the Uncletoad Bass Stuff page.  It’s become my musical biography. I keep finding fotos and adding them as well as fleshing out the dialog. Soon I’ll add some MP3 links as well.

Check it out as I continue to update the detail.

I’m amazed how much stuff is there that I just gloss over.

I’m getting old.

Slept in the car all the way to Cleveburg. Very nice. Long day for him with lots of visitors and partying. He was the trooper and did very well considering how much time he was up.

And now his first night out of the house since coming home from the hospital.

Pics coming soon.

Update: overall not a bad trip.  He was in a good mood most of the time.  Fell off the wagon on the way home, wailing into the driveway.  Regardless for the most part it was a breeze.

They tell you this but you really don’t know what they mean until you get there. It all starts at birth. Usually that’s an all day all night affair. I think I was up for at least 30 hours. But then you’ve got this baby that needs to eat every couple hours. Relentlessly. It’s a marathon of sleeplessness. You may get 3 or 4 hours of sleep but rarely consecutive. This goes on for MONTHS. Good thing they are cute, otherwise they’d all be dead before they started talking.

Lotsa folks checking out the little guy. I’ll post a ton more pics as I have time to upload them. Witty captions will come as I think of them. If you haven’t found it yet its:

Baby V Photo Extravaganza!

Here we are now, posted live on the World Wide Web.  Coming attractions page links to the Maneri Family foto gallery.  Conversations about goings on.  Commentary on foolishness.

Feel free to dissent.

Seems like an appropriate first post on the blog. The intention here is to waste your time by allowing you to peer into the mind and life of this sick twisted pup. Tread carefully. I intend to bore, insult, amuse, and create as my whim provides.

Good luck. May the fart be with you.