l
Peter... I hope things are going well for you and your wife.
As well as can be expected; we are, as they say in our "Golden Years"; my older brother tells me "The only thing golden about them is the stains in our drawers!"
She has had 3 shoulder replacements, has back trouble, is in Stage 3 (moderate - and, thankfully, holding steady thus far) kidney failure, and She has had somewhere in the area of 100 TIAs, which have left Her in the very early stages of Vascular Cognitive Impairment. But She still thinks I'm wonderful (at least a fair percentage of the time.....), so things aren't too bad. And no comments about the VCI
leading to the "wonderful", please
As to me, there is a long and probably somewhat tedious thread elsewhere
in re my recent physical misadventures, so I won't bore you with all that; I'll just say that today I had surgery for carpal tunnel release & middle finger trigger finger release on my left hand, so....let's just say I won't be sitting up playing all night tonight. Hurts like a....well, it ain't fun. But, at some point in the not-too-distant future I
will be able to play all night. The CT had limited me to 10-15 minutes most days for a couple years (the day the doc & I first decided to do it was, as it turned out, the day before all elective surgeries were cancelled....), and with the TF coming along a few weeks ago, it was to the point where I couldn't play
at all (kind of hard to keep a rhythm going when your finger locks up then pops loose - quite painfully - as you try to change chords), and if I hadn't had the slicing done I never would have played again - which would have been no loss
whatsoever to the world of guitar, I assure you - but
disastrous for me.
When asked how I am, my 2 go-to answers are "Upringht and able to take nourishment", and "Older than dirt, but still above it".
lNot sure what you meant by "those who can actually DO it"...
In my experience, a large percentage of those who talk like David's respondent have never played a paying gig in their lives; their "jazz snobbery' is a compensation for their awareness of their various and sundry inadequacies. I have known a fair number of both professional and highly skilled amateur jazz cats; most of them have no such attitude toward other genres, and in fact
love both listening to and playing them.
....but anyway, here's a nice short biographical synopsis of Coltrane's life if you're interested. Coltrane was one of the most driven, searching, dedicated musicians the world has ever seen.
https://www.johncoltrane.com/biographyThanks for the link! I will check that out soon (insomnia leaves me glad for
anything to do late at night, let alone read about a musical genius). But, while 'Trane was
absolutely amazing, and quite knowledgeable, as far as I know he was
not, as David's correspondent implied, an academic; I seem to recall that he learned his stuff in a brief stint at community college, a spell in the Navy, and on stages.
As a capper, I will add two things:
First, far too much (not all, not even a lot - just
far too much) jazz is just unintelligible; it is the sonic equivalent of Abstract Impressionism - which I strongly suspect was mostly driven by a disdain for "hip, knowledgeable" critics and such: "Let's see how silly we can be before they'll admit they don't get it".
Second, we should consider the possibility that playing less complex forms well enough to make them interesting can be at least as hard as making the
more complex forms interesting (which should
not be construed as saying I'm abandoning the Dead for Kiss.......)
Peter
