Consider mind and its contents as being of the past—its thoughts being of the past in improvisation—drawing one’s ideas largely from imitations or the memory of emulations—that largely people improvise their thoughts in chunks, blocks of memory drawn from imitation and emulation. But what helps, to get out of this pastness of the mind, this blockiness, is to taste, to find, to feel on one’s instrument the flow of a different kind of improvisations, like one used to do when learning jazz, to feel the physicality—what it’s like to hold and propel this person’s motion through ideas and sound through improvisation. A lot of people stay with that. They feel they’ve acquired enough at this point and just basically work with the same handful of material for the rest of their life. But I think that now, one of the things which could really help (because we won’t forget what jazz has given us. It's okay to move on, to grow...), is by playing through composers’ improvisations (compositions), where they actually put more (okay, it’s hard to say “more” but) thought into what they were doing. You know, putting it down on paper. If you play through an instrumental part from, say, a chamber, orchestral or solo piece by someone—Stravinsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Shostakovich, Carter, Strauss, Schubert—that these people’s ideas, what they chose to put on paper, those long-form improvisations, these are all improvisations, whether it’s a piano sonata or whatever, it’s an improvisation, but just more sculpted because it went on to paper. They’ve erased, they’ve stacked. But with improvisations which aren’t written down, its greatest moments are when it’s of the moment, not this pastness. And so by reading and embodying in yourself, your body, these other composers’ written-down improvisations—when you’re putting, say, a violin part to something else, transferring such an amazing mind’s work and choice, transforming that on to another instrument—it is/you are then eliminating divisions, combining more. So there is a way then when devoting oneself to improvising more freely, not written down, to have felt and worked through years of searching and exploring on your own with the most wonderful records of these pieces, extracting from scores, feeling how small things play a part in bigger pictures orchestrationally, to really feel what that’s like inside of there, these other worlds—to then draw on that kind of experience in improvisation, because in outside life we can’t expect to have the opportunity to actually play one of these parts with other string players, or within an orchestra, or whatever it is. If we can get the right recording, the score, and in some ways make the piece more our “own”—if we can provide ourselves with this experience to feel and hear music more fully—we will have it to draw from in situations that need it so badly. Like one of a jazz instrumentation—to get outside of the box when the music needs it most—to improvise in a stream of these strung together experiences which can’t always come from jazz or that mentality of distances between ideas, how much space is being filled when one keeps playing something in a “solo,” as the featured voice, guiding it. But now, feeling different spaces and lengths and melodies, and really Hearing! Not going through the motions, these blocks of emulations. But rounding everything off, in a flow, a nowness that comes from really hearing in the moment. Really hearing, and composing! Hearing because it’s all containing the values that we’ve absorbed because they were for us, from others’ music which stood out to us and made such an impression. We know that, if spontaneously, in a stream, with a tremendous amount of other things, with a spontaneous energy, a public event, with witnesses, an audience, a collaborative effort, with a group, we’re spurred on even more. There’s even more “on the line,” so to speak. It’s just riding this wave. And you’re doing this with other people, and it’s something they need so much. Other musicians need to snap out of it. They need to start hearing again, like the old forgotten masters were hearing. It follows an unpredictable line and direction that’s only about the moment—that moment’s truest potential. To be anything! To be a tremendous amount of something or very little of something. It’s unmaterialistic. Improvisers act so materialistic with their ideas, trying to make things impressive, getting carried away! Now when you really hear and experience a piece, one which has so much patience to it, maturity, you then want that every time, or if there’s no patience, that even that’s right, but everything becomes right because the awareness is so vast and clear. To feel of the moment, to be through with this pastness, this trap of the mind and ego. Once we have acquired the technique—it’s different for everyone, everyone requires different techniques—we go beyond, beyond the past, beyond one’s personal “successes” into something which is only beautiful. And that’s the greatest accomplishment, because it’s not even an accomplishment, it never ends. It’s so light and playful. It doesn’t carry the burden of material value, because it’s outside of anything, it’s not yet present in the world, and it’s free from any classification. And it’s okay. It’s okay to let go, to be yourself. When some people are dying they tell them “it’s okay, you can go, you can let go,” because they resist until the very end, at death itself when it’s time, they resist and fight it, which is the mind’s/the ego’s nature, to fight that, to fight letting go. But you have to let go. And sometimes it takes time to reach that point to where you can let go, or not. Some people are really ready to die, and in that sense, they’re so deep into the belief of their purpose, their individuality, that they’re ready to die. They’re ready to let ideas die, or to even die physically. One can be okay with death in one’s ideas, to not get hung-up and attached to the ideas, but to let die and let go. And to let go in sound, in music, is a very emotional thing! You’re pulling things out from your soul and superimposing it on the given atmosphere. So it’s not out there yet, it’s not present in the world! And so it’s like we’re planting something in the atmosphere—something that grows—we’re planting as a Creator—we’re making something which is born and will die. And that’s a tremendous thing. A very emotional thing, and it becomes difficult to not make a big deal out of it, to not try hard. Because we care so much, and at this point in our lives we want it so badly because we want to give it to people so badly. So many people need this, and it becomes almost a burden, when you’ve got this and so many don’t. It become like a burden because you know it can take so little for them to just really see what’s going on, what’s happening in their lives, why they aren’t giving this spiritual creativity and infinity to themselves, this realization, why they can’t experience this right now, this freedom, this complete individuality. And it’s hard not to be able to make a big deal out of that, because this world is in such catastrophe. There’s such an attention disorder. It takes so little. This is for anyone… They just need to let the patterns of the mind stop, getting ahead of itself, of reality, the mind being of past, drawing from past experiences expecting those, hoping, assuming things before they’ve happened, and that needs to be stopped. One needs to be open-minded. To be patient. To sit and to see what happens. Just a little is needed. Like with improvisation now, the importance of imitating things which can’t be imitated, and in a situation which certainly doesn’t expect it, in a group of other instrumentalists, a conventional setting, a jazz instrumentation. To hear images. Bend ideas. Cut open. The grain of paper things could be written on. Smelling it. Biting the ink. Cutting one’s lip on the pitch. Ripping open into hallucination. Beginning it, but not really. The whole thing is very dream-like, but loose, and trying things, and hearing things again like it’s for the first time, because it’s so honest and about what you’re really hearing. You have no doubt because you’re drawing from such an infinitely deep well of ideas. Everything will string together differently every time. Drawing from that. Hearing again. Not going through the motions. Catching yourself when you feel that, when you start to hear this! But going into something which is of the moment that you feel the silence needs. Contributing to silence. Taking a journey. It could be simply sitting along a shore, turning a rock over, feeling how cold it is, how it smells from that distance to your face, seeing the life submerge into the wet brown sand beneath it. Or taking a late afternoon walk back into the hills behind the home where you were raised, somehow retracing very old steps which lead you to your pre-school again for the first time in 25 years. But taking a journey. Small or large, they’re both just as beautiful. We as humans in this world, we’re like specks of dust! Particles! If you looked to the earth from a distant planet and observed the way we’re reacting and interacting, the motions and combinations that are occurring here, the attractions of energies, it’d look like for us here peering into a microscope and seeing things going crazy, on a little cell, a plate of glass, bacteria, these things having their experiences. So when it’s that natural, when it’s small or if it’s large, it doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters. “Achievements” and “Material” are what “matters.” True, we need certain things to survive—food, shelter, clothing—but aside from these three things (and clothing of course not always being necessary) the rest is up to us. And if we choose something, we must do it fully to understand it. Those who feel simply at one with whatever it is, are at peace, well so be it. But most aren’t. Most aren’t at peace with what they’re doing completely and feel very unsure about their decisions and don’t feel this Passion and uniqueness of life, this rare opportunity. LIFE IS SUCH A RARE OPPORTUNITY. We must go into this as deeply and passionately as we can. This rare opportunity… and the importance of growth, and change. Understanding one’s style, yes, but growing, expanding it, giving it new awareness every day, how we perceive sound, to hear further, to hear more, to hear so much! So much that will never be there for anyone else, that’s only there for you, that only you’re hearing… January 8, 2008