Thecla . . . When I worked for a Lobbyist in DC, I saw how the system really works. At the time, I thought...if people really knew how the political machine works, they would be sick.
36 mins · Like
Ray Jozwiak . . . Tell me more, Thecla. Tell ALL OF US MORE! We need to be sick. . . sick and tired enough to ACT. Vote appropriately. Don't be buffalo-ed into thinking you 'wasted' your vote. You MUST vote your heart and your conscience or nothing will ever change! It won't happen in this election. Or the next. Or for a LONG time. BUT it has to start SOMEWHERE!! Let it start with us.
6 hrs · Like · 1
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
. . . in June and sweet perfume
Have been used in a million love songs
But it doesn't belong in a song about you
Many is the time I want to tell you that I love you
I tried so hard to write it down in oh so many different ways
But feeling is the easy part
The telling is hard
Words don't mean anything until you try to
Speak from inside of your heart
We'll be together
We'll be together
We'll be together for a very long time
I can't remember the rest of the lyrics and was too lazy to consult the archives, but the music is here for you to hear. I purposely began this song with a corny cliche when I started writing and marketing pop songs and was told by all the 'songwriting experts' to avoid corny cliches.
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
That "A" word, atheist, always scared me as a child. I always felt sorry for people who did not believe in my 'God'. But I guess I have to accept that if you don't believe in a 'theistic' invasive god, you MUST be an "A-THEIST". So be it. Maybe that's what I am. So where do these type-"A" people find hope? . . . many places . . .
(from http://ragingrev.com/2010/03/regarding-hope-the-atheists-view/)
". . . People give me hope daily. Sometimes people take some of my hope away, but when we make progress toward a brighter future it is renewed. When we do good things to one another or fight for causes we deem just, I am overwhelmed by hope. When one of us spends his or her life’s work on developing cures for diseases and cancers it gives me hope that we care about one another, and that if we keep doing so eventually we’ll get to our next step toward a society that can be considered appropriate.
I have a hope that one day our species will find a way to cope with the problems of life without a need for religion and that also one day there will be social justice for all people. I have hope that at some point in the near future that technology will be developed that can provide nutritious food for all people and that we will use that technology to actually feed people. In the idea that our prejudices and our failures will one day be forgotten. . . "
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
du·o
[doo-oh, dyoo-oh] Show IPA
noun, plural du·os.
1.
Music. duet.
2.
two persons commonly associated with each other; couple.
3.
two animals or objects of the same sort; two things ordinarily placed or found together; a pair: a duo of lovebirds.
Origin:
1580–90; < Italian < Latin: two
Dictionary.com Unabridged
duo-
a combining form meaning “two,” used in the formation of compound words: duologue.
Origin:
combining form of Greek dýo, Latin duo two
. . . and the famous (at least half) cello/piano duo of . . .
Pachem-Up(Pachelbel's Canon)
performed by YoYo Ma and Ray Jozwiak
(via the magic of digital technology and the competition created by
indabamusic.com several years ago)
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
. . . in the name of humor. Purportedly Sonny Rollins' own words. . . possibly. . . but undoubtedly re-arranged . . .
(from http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words)
I started playing the saxophone when I was thirteen years old. There
were some other kids on my block who had taken it up, and I thought that
it might be fun. I later learned that these guys’ parents had forced
them into it.
* * *
The saxophone sounds
horrible. Like a scared pig. I never learned the names of most of the
other instruments, but they all sound awful, too. Drums are O.K.,
because sometimes they’ll drown out the other stuff, but it’s all pretty
bad. Jazz
might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with. The band starts a
song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play
whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns
noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the
audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.
Sometimes we would run through the same song over and over again to see if anybody noticed. If someone did, I don’t care.
* * *
There
was this one time, in 1953 or 1954, when a few guys and I had just
finished our last set at Club Carousel, and we were about to pack it in
when in walked Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. We must have jammed
together for five more hours, right through sunrise. That was the worst
day of my life.
* * *
We always dressed
real sharp: pin-stripe suits, porkpie hats, silk ties. As if to conceal
the fact that we were spending all our time playing jazz in some
basement. I remember Dexter Gordon was doing a gig at the 3
Deuces, and at one point he leaned into the microphone and said, “I
could sell this suit and this saxophone and get far away from here.” The
crowd laughed.
* * *
I really don’t know why
I keep doing this. Inertia, I guess. Once you get stuck in a rut, it’s
difficult to pull yourself out, even if you hate every minute of it.
Maybe I’m just a coward. If I could do it all over again, I’d probably be an accountant or a process server. They make good money.
* * *
Once
I played the Montreux Jazz Festival, in Switzerland, with Miles Davis. I
walked in on him smoking cigarettes and staring at his horn for what
must have been fifteen minutes, like it was a poisonous snake and he
wasn’t sure if it was dead. Finally Miles stood up, turned to his band,
and said, “All right, let’s get through this, and then we’ll go to the
airport.” He looked like he was about to cry.
* * *
I
released fifty-odd albums, wrote hundreds of songs, and played on God
knows how many session dates. Some of my recordings are in the Library
of Congress. That’s idiotic. They ought to burn that building to the
ground. I hate music. I wasted my life.
. . . in proper order. . . they sound more like this . . .
(from http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/sony-rollins-the-colossus-20130819)When I visited Sonny Rollins at his home in Germantown, New York, a semi-hardscrabble hamlet 100 miles up the Hudson River, the 82-year-old jazzman they call the Saxophone Colossus was doing his laundry. "Oh, man, come on in, man," Sonny said in his reedy, slightly high-pitched voice as he stuck his head out the back door of the modest house, blood-orange skullcap on his kingly, lantern-jawed head. Jumble of shirts fresh from the dryer in his arms, he led me through the cluttered kitchen to a sitting room. "Be with you in a minute," he said with a sigh.
For Sonny, certainly one of the greatest tenor-saxophone players in the history of the instrument invented by Adolphe Sax in 1841, and a key figure in jazz for more than half a century, it is a drag any time "the celestial Big Picture" is infringed upon by "the Little Picture," which the musician defines as "that day-to-day crap you have to put up with on this misbegotten planet.". . .
"That was my life back then – I thought it would always go on like that, never change," Sonny said. Now, on "the wrong side of 81," he could feel the metronome inside his head ticking away, each instant too precious to be squandered on the puny minutiae of the day-to-day.
For instance, only that week he'd spent nearly the entire morning down in the Big Apple, making an episode of The Simpsons. Sonny played a holographic image of himself that hovers, godlike, outside the bedroom window of perhaps his best-known mainstream musical disciple, Lisa Simpson. Sonny had three lines, which he dutifully repeated over and over again, coached by a voice on a speakerphone originating 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Later, Sonny said that taking all morning to produce a hologram visible only to a TV cartoon character was "kind of strange," especially for someone who'd managed to cut albums like Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus in a few short hours on a two-track machine located in Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack, New Jersey, studio.
"Technology, man," Sonny said with a shrug. "All this little stuff interrupts my chain of thought. Consequently, I haven't been able to properly practice my horn the way I have to," he said, emerging from the laundry room in a loose-fitting khaki shirt, a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, and thick white socks stuffed into open-toe leather slippers. "If I don't get to practice, work on my embouchure and scales, then I can't play correctly, and if I can't play correctly, I can't work out my ideas, and if I can't work out my ideas, then I go crazy." . . .
One of the great stories in the annals of jazz, or any other modern creative endeavor, Sonny's two-year "sabbatical," time spent practicing alone on the desolate, decrepit walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, remains the jazzman's emblematic moment. It was a radical move. After all, Sonny had already fronted groups that included Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach. Saxophone Colossus, recorded in 1956 and including all-time classic performances of "St. Thomas," "Strode Road," and "Blue 7," established him as a star.
Yet Sonny wasn't happy. "It wasn't like I was playing bad," he told me. "I just knew I could get better, that I had to get better."
The original plan had been to woodshed in his Grand Street apartment on the Lower East Side, but the lady next door had just had a baby, and he thought if he played too loud he'd give the child "bad ears." That's what led him to the bridge – 135 feet above the roiling East River, he could really let loose under the sky and the stars with the whole city laid out before him. Musicians all over town thought he was nuts. Why did he need all this practice? He was the best; wasn't that good enough? But those people didn't hear what Sonny heard. He was nothing but a glorified beginner, Sonny believed, a work in progress. There were places he needed to go. When he got there, that's when he'd come back.
Tell Sonny that the image of the brilliant jazzman seeker – the lone figure amid the chaotic howl of the city, blowing his horn in quest of a bit of sanity – has always been a source of personal inspiration and he will be touched by the comment. Mention that he's your favorite player, along with Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges, and he'll shake his head slowly. "To be put with those guys, wow. That's a real compliment." Go on to say that you always hummed "St. Thomas" for your children when they were tiny, and a few years later your daughters made you a birthday card with a handmade tinfoil saxophone in the middle of roughly drawn treble clefs along with the words Sonny Rollins, and the Colossus will begin to tear up. . .
"You mean, like you're going to play this music and the rivers are suddenly going to run backward?" I asked, trying to be funny. After all, he was already perhaps the greatest single improviser in the history of jazz. No one had his emotional range, the ability to one moment be riffing like a musical stand-up comedian and then, abruptly, be tearing your heart out with the abject blues of the human condition. What about that fabulous opening to Monk's "Misterioso"? How about that spectacular ending to "God Bless the Child"?
This made Sonny laugh. When Sonny laughs, you know it. He bends his neck back nearly 45 degrees, casts his eyes skyward, and his mouth becomes a widening circle. Ha-ha-ha, he goes, loudly, like howling at the moon, albeit with perfect breath control.
"Don't you see, that's exactly the point," Sonny chortled as he clamped his skullcap onto to his head. "Those notes you mention, those notes have already been blown."
. . . I'm sure the latter is much more accurate . . .
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
At first, the mere height of the buildings and the ambience those buildings created, as contrasted with green (not rural-lush) flat, expansive suburbs, was the most impressive feature of the city to my eyes. Granted, I lived no more than two blocks away from the city line, but this was ‘downtown’; the heart of the big city; the center of both cultural and business activities as well as (and it really is, these days, a business) medical and health professionals. The latter was precisely what brought me to the city on one of the earliest trips I took there in memory. It was a doctor visit for my mother, or my father (I can’t remember precisely which) although my feeble recollection does place my mother more prominently in the picture. It had then, as it does now, its own very specific aroma, look and feel which is both grimy and exotic at the same time. The very same attractively fascinating allure continued to taunt me many years later when my first ‘legit’, full-time employment was taken at a prominent, downtown location and I found myself spending increasingly larger amounts of time there.
Although I have spent the preponderance of my professional life making my livelihood in the city, I realized this very day, just how much of that original allure still has a hold upon me. The city has changed drastically in many areas in the interim, but just enough historical architecture remains to flood the mind and body with the thoughts and stimulations that I first experienced more than half a lifetime ago. I don’t often stop to contemplate it, as we fail to do with regards to most things we experience on a routine basis, but I find that ‘downtown’ still possesses a magical yet elusive quality that can both attract and appall at either separate or the very same time. These mysterious but desirable qualities do, and will always to my mind, make it a truly wonderful place.
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
