Improvisation, some of its details, consciousness and a people I love catching myself and not taking the obvious route—flirting with how easily the imitation between improvisors can flourish. Going into that for an instant but then no, backing out into something which will in no way change its course due to someone else, though, in some ways almost hinting like it could. Raising awareness through a value of musical material... initiating decisive melodic movements... (I remember when John McLellan really first started putting this stuff into words around me, and how it really took hold—some things he said which really got inside of me when we first began seriously playing together in 2004. We were listening back to a trio performance of our's, and he was playing something, right, and the music went a different direction, and so I followed, and went with him. And okay, so we stopped the recording. “Okay…okay…” he said. “I don’t ever want to do something like that again… do something which makes you change what you’re going for. Please tell me if I am… what I’m doing wrong…If there’s something you want to talk about, please, let’s. But we just can’t do that.” He became very sensitive on the whole matter. It was really on the crux of things. He felt like I was losing the potential of my idea by letting what he was doing affect me—which in a sense was this sort of misunderstood perception on my behalf of how one should treat the situation… how others want you to be, etc. Which in itself is of course a very deep emotional scheme to be operating on. It makes me wonder what happened to McLellan in a non-explicitly-musical situation that made this awareness first come out, and why that should exist, or function. Sometimes it can be the wrong time to do too much of this thinking on one’s music—but then finding this balance between doing that consciousness and not—but then, yes, then there can be this slight inner conflict between those two things, which is a very fine, detailed emotional friction. And so I think about all this a little while music-making, and now after, when it’s obvious how in the music things took a different direction because of what the other was doing, but then immediately using that to go further into our own places, abandoning the other… of course… but hearing that other layer, though, yes, remaining alone, truly, in the end. Feeling how apart one really is. The lone purpose of one’s life and the search…) I really like all that… actually toying with that… because it rides such a thin line. Because really, the music could actually be quite awful if you’re with the wrong artists. It’s on the outskirts of different modes of playing. But it will always be cool, riding this honest material which lives on the edge, as if it shouldn’t be done or something, but so that’s why we’re doing it, but it’s not being “done,” etc… But then, these other influences on one another come out—by the non-pitch assertive elements, such as dynamics and texture in the sound—how that creates a different mode of development, when these values then start to dissolve, which opens up a whole other realm of development, where it’s not pitch-related, but then it is, because we hear pitches in air, but then it gets into the graphic thing, where it’s the amount of what we’re hearing, not the what of it. It’s like deciding whether we a) want to explore the outward-bound affect an object has on its surroundings, b) the surface of the object, or c) the particle natures, and mass of the object. Now, it’s right there, at that point where we start to really think visually, because we’re thinking about these amounts of things. Man confronts his symbols. It feels so good—it’s so unmaterialistic then. We aren’t just going with what’s given to us. We don’t want to just reach for the most easily reachable lines, you know. We don’t simply want to just accept the fortune cookie... We want to explore all the mind’s virtuosic associations, such as in dreaming. In fact, I’m taken now back to an old dream I had years ago, where I was unable to breathe the air everyone else could. I could only pull from the solid objects around me and had to go from one thing to the next that way…. Okay, not the most relaxing dream, but there really are times that while improvising, old dreams, sometimes very old, come back to me in bits and pieces. It’s as if through the music I’ve followed a certain deep string of thought and feeling back to a kind of arrangement in visuals I had let go of while dreaming, during day or middle of night. It’s so good to be able to talk about all this, especially as all the ideas come so unpredictably, yet with such a connectedness. It’s especially intense in duet form with someone else, really looking under the microscope. That’s so important. When we’re doing this, we want to play differently, not just to play differently, but because of who we happen to be making music with, and changing because of them, letting them affect us, and then in turn wanting to affect them. For a sensitive audience that can be an especially key element to their understanding of our music. That spontaneous honesty of experience is spiritually direct and immediate, and most of all, inclusive, in the now, taking everyone for the ride with you. It’s then that a listener—an observer outside from the actual making of the music—begins to reflect on their own life, and what they can do as a spiritual individual to have this feeling of freedom and loving power. [see Trungpa]. This is such an opening experience for everyone, such an exploration. This is so important. It’s also so rare. February 10 and 11, 2007