First of all, it’s been incredibly rainy the last week. It rained the entire weekend starting Friday afternoon thru Sunday night, alot of the time sustained heavy downpour. The pond in the neighbor’s yard is in effect, and there’s still puddles everywhere. I left a wheelbarrow outside over the weekend, and now it’s full of a good six inches of water. Needless to say I didn’t get any yardwork done, and the lawn is getting desperate for it’s first mowing.
We went to a party on Long Island on Saturday; Jeannie’s cousin’s daughter’s first communion. It was great to see everyone on that side of the family, especially since we missed the family Christmas party this year due to having covid. A bunch of us ended up hanging out in the party tent in the backyard long after things had begun winding down. It took over an hour to say goodbye to everybody.
I’ve been reading alot lately. First was a book on the Italian Renaissance, focusing on sculpture, architecture and painting, the whole historic and cultural context, and the threads of development among the various famous masters.
Next was a book called The World in Six Songs by Dan Levitin, a famous music brain science writer. I used to work with Dan back in the ’90’s at Interval Research, and has a story in his book about the psychic research going on there to make a point about how hard it can be to design as study to produce verifiable claims in the social sciences. That was fun, I’d forgotten all about the psychics there, and it inspired my to dig out an old song I wrote from those days call Paul Allen’s Limo Driver. Anyway the book was really interesting, all about the purpose of music in terms of its origins in human evolution, and the different roles it plays for individual people and human society.
Then it was a book about the famous John Coltrane album A Love Supreme. Everything you could want to know about the record, its writing, recording, and various reissues. Of course it had alot on John Coltrane himself and his various phases of musical exploration and development, his relationships with Miles and Monk, and the coming together of the classic quartet that was the group for the record. This led me into a deep dive into listening to Coltrane, which is something I hadn’t done in a while. After all this time, it’s still a challenge to grok his later stuff. In addition to A Love Supreme, I listened to Crescent, Ascension, and Live at the Village Vanguard, and with one of my favorites The Gentle Side Of. For all his high energy playing in all keys at once, he sure could shift gears and deliver a killer ballad.