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Paris…and sorry I missed Berlin

View from our flat for the weekWow, wow, wow! So happy to be in Paris and have the opportunity not only to play music for people, but to stay in my cousin’s amazing apartment here. I’m looking at the Eiffel Tower as I sit on the balcony at a red table, in a red chair. It’s just unbelievably gorgeous. And when we arrived, after Franni showed us the lay of the land, we walked around the corner to a farmers market where we bought the fresh strawberries I’m eating now. We also had a turkish lunch and picked up groceries for our dinner.

We’ve been in three countries now in two weeks. Eight days in London where I felt like I had such a nice connection with new people at the shows and really loved seeing friends Merideth & Ella, Julian & Wendy, Drusilla, Tina, Bei & Greg, Fiona, Steve and Richard & Andy – who booked me for gigs – and their teams, who always make me feel like returning family. I’m so lucky!

As I write..Then we went to Berlin and stayed with the US Ambassador to Germany and his family. They actually gave us a guest house to ourselves and treated us to amazing meals and the love of family with their three daughters. Adrianne has taught them for years and we’ve produced recordings for all three. They’re a talented and spirited bunch. And yes, I got to ride in a bulletproof car in a motorcade. And I got to see the amazing David Bowie exhibition with special stuff added specific to the time spent there recording Heroes and Low that wasn’t in the Victoria & Albert exhibition. But what was most interesting was to get the feeling of Berlin without the wall. I grew up with the Cold War heavy on in the Reagan 80s and only went to Berlin before the wall fell. It’s amazing to think that it’s been more than 24 years since the Wall fell. Some of you reading might never have considered it at all when thinking of global politics at all. But it seemed a thing that would never budge. I remember being in love with Eastern Bloc writers like Milan Kundera who talked so much about how those hungering for free expression were able to do so under the watchful eye of “communist” governments. (See the film “The Lives of Others” for another glimpse of that feeling.) So it was moving to be able to walk over the brick lines in parts of the city where the wall once stood. I could go on, and maybe will sometime about the people I met and their stories now and then.

But now, I’m going to enjoy Paris a little. Or take a nap…

Life is good.

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We’re in London!

LAXIt’s been lemonade so far. Our flight was delayed, we had time for Real Food Daily right there in LAX — then our connecting flight was redirected to the gate next to our quick connection. The redirection caused confusion that kept us on the plane longer than expected to deplane, then our connection was delayed, so we got sushi in Dallas before getting back in the air. We got lost trying to find a cafe where we were to meet Adrianne’s brother, then ended up at an even better place for Lebanese food as we dashed in from the pouring rain and lightning. We were expecting a continuation of the hot summer they’ve been having here in London, instead we got a double rainbow.

Double Rainbow in Maida Vale

 

Today, I’ll meet my friend Merideth whom I’ve known for a couple decades now and we’ll go with her daughter to see a Bill Viola exhibition at St. Paul’s and a Matisse exhibition across the Millennium Bridge at the Tate, in the neighborhood where we’ve stayed the past two visits. And hopefully I’ll get to jam a little bit with her daughter, with whom I haven’t played since she was in the single digits!

Tomorrow, I’ll play at the 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street in Central London, which as I said in my previous post holds a special place for me as it was one of the first streets I visited in London so many years ago. Thursday is the Drawingroom in Chesham, and I’m looking forward the bucolic beauty heading out there, the great vibes of the space, and the English breakfast in the morning! Then the weekend is for connecting with dear friends that feel like family.

I’m feeling very lucky as I sit here up too early in a jet lagged mellow listening to Gilbertos Samba trying to keep quiet, as I smile, looking forward to three weeks of celebrating a lifetime of connections and new friends in beautiful cities and countryside.

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You mean your name isn’t First Name?

Oh, technology! As I was preparing my newsletter for my trip to Europe, the mailing server crashed and I couldn’t finish updating before the message went out. Sorry about that.

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MLK Day Thoughts

I’m enjoying a quiet King holiday, loving the space to be quiet, but also feeling compelled to share or contribute to the powerful reminder of King’s work that this day provides. I’m a natural introvert who believes strongly in community, so some days I stay home to recharge so that I can engage more completely when I return. This is my attempt to do both.

I used to love to open my Tao Te Ching at any page and see how whatever was on the page would relate to my life and if there was something I could do about it. Of course, you can do that with any source and King is a great place to start. These short quotes below are an abbreviated source of inspiration points. They don’t all completely relate to each other, but it’s where I went starting with the “If you can’t fly…” *

Happy New Year to you all! May you have deep explorations and loving conversations, which lead us all to the better world that King imagined.

Love and peace,

J


King, and more…

“If you can’t fly, run, if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., Spelman College, April 10, 1960. (http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/founders-day-address)*

“There is always the danger that we will become more concerned about making a living than making a life- that we will not keep that line of division between life and one’s livelihood.” Ibid.

“Love is creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. When men rise to live on this level, they come to see all men as children of the almighty God, and they can look in the eyes of the opponent and love him in spite of his evil deed.” Ibid.

“All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. (mandela-better-man-not-bitter-man)

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” — Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” — bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In times of silence, times of quiet, you have time for introspection…if you stand up and do something you can really become someone, so this is what I do.” — Gil Scott-Heron, see the interview on youtube
 


 
* This quote, incidentally, wasn’t easily sourced. I began to think it might be one of those made true by the Internet attributions (like Nelson Mandela’s “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate / Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” which was actually said by Marianne Williamson). I found references to it in statements by the great Marian Wright-Edelman, quoting what she heard King say in 1960 at Spelman college, which led me to seeing the typewritten draft of the speech in the King archive. Check out that archive! It’s ridiculously rich!! thekingcenter.org/archive

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Posted in Blog, Gratitude

The Wrecking Crew

I just pledged to the Kickstarter campaign for a film called “The Wrecking Crew.” I saw a version a few years ago and loved it! It kind of felt like my LA life of seeking out musicians and hearing their stories. When people disparage Los Angeles, I always laugh because I know I get this: access to people who’ve been in the heart of shaping our culture just by proximity and a little curiosity. My father stoked this. He was a psychologist from Jackson, Mississippi, but he always kept an ear out for musicians he thought would inspire me and he could b.s. his way into about any backstage to facilitate a connection. The biggest coup was Stevie Wonder visiting us in Irvine when I was a little kid, but that’s a story for a different time. But it was meeting people like George Bohanon and engineer Cal Harris that kind of opened me up to the idea that people made music, worked hard and would generously share their experience and resources with you. It made creating music tangible – and these guys worked on “Let’s Get it On!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xs2kJn6PBE

Denny Tedesco started putting “The Wrecking Crew” together after his father, the great guitarist Tommy Tedesco, was diagnosed with terminal cancer to capture the stories of the musicians that played on so many of the classic records that came out of Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s. (For five straight years “The Wrecking Crew” were the players on the Grammy award winner for Record of the Year.) Like “The Funk Brothers” who played on the Motown hits, the musicians of “The Wrecking Crew” were the regional sound of pop music. The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Phil Spector, even Frank Sinatra and Simon & Garfunkel used “The Wrecking Crew.” It’s an awesome story and this film is like sitting down for an intimate conversation with the guys that were hustling from studio to studio humbly adding their expertise to music that’s become the fabric of the world’s cultural consciousness.

As a testament to the continuing value of the cultual product, it’s been stalled by licensing royalties. There’s so much cultural value in these musicians’ stories, that I’d really like to see it get a wide distribution.

Take a look and help if you can. (And if you join their mailing list, from their website, wreckingcrewfilm.com, you’ll find a thrilling collection of outtakes for music geeks!)

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Fly in Peace, Lou Reed


When I first met the legendary (Little) Jimmy Scott, I told him how I first saw him singing with Lou Reed on the “Magic and Loss” tour the day the LA Riots began. I told him how I’d only listened to that album once because every time I’d try again, I’d start to cry uncontrollably. I asked him how Lou could sing a song like “Harry’s Circumcision” in such a detached almost comic way. Jimmy looked at me directly in the eye, put his hand on my knee and said, “He doesn’t feel those things like us.”

Thank goodness for that. Whatever it was that Lou had, and it definitely made him sound like a jerk sometimes, it led him unflinchingly to a truth. One of my favorite Elvis Costello lines is, “The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark. It scares you witless. But in time you’ll see things clear and stark.” It seems Lou had no fear of darkness. And his stark portraits created a huge space for the listener’s empathy.

Howie Klein gave me a compilation that Sire Records was using to promote the upcoming “New York” album that started off with “Dirty Blvd.” then kicked into a retrospective beginning with “Heroin” by the Velvets. I was obsessed with it. I’d had the Velvet Underground Andy Warhol record and knew it was supposed to be great, but I never got it until I heard it all in context. Lou was the anti-baby-boomer. He took all the confusion of that generation and handled it introspectively. But he also kept in touch with the streets and the music that could transcend, if not on this plane, but further out. When I think of Lou I hear (one of his heroes) Dion sing, “Fly, fly, fly away” at the end of “Dirty Boulevard.” It’s one of the grittiest descriptions of New York imaginable, but the hope is still there in both music and lyric. Lou showed us the grit, but in that sober portrait, the transcendent always seemed possible.

Fly in peace.

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New beginnings

Just stepped out to take out the trash this evening and could feel autumn in the air. I know those of you who come from places other than Los Angeles may be giggling at this. But it’s true. Even the subtlest of changes can inspire the feeling of heart soaring possibility.

So this is where I start. My site is new. It feels fresher, cleaner. I get so much of my inspiration in the shower, I don’t know why exactly but since I upgraded to a ShowerHeadly shower set up, I can feel even more songs coming to me.

 

As a song changes from performance to performance, there may be changes, different riffs we’ll explore before the next site comes along (probably sooner than the four years it’s taken for this wholesale redesign to come about). But this is the foundation from which I hope to reach you for the next piece of time. Hopefully things will make you laugh, smile, breath and maybe get you off the web and into action occasionally (perhaps that includes coming to a show – Angelenos, there is one October 26 in Glendale at Left Coast). I’m hoping it will inspire me to interact more regularly with you in a place away from Facebook (though I’ll stay active there). And I’m hoping to bring more music and other musings to fire our senses. Life is good!

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"I See Everything" in Laurel Canyon

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Posted in Blog, Video

Put Music to Work (Free Song Download)

The best thing about creating music is that even when remuneration is slim, you can still give in abundance to help causes you support. This weekend there are two areas where I’m offering my support and encourage you to do so.

Hurricane Sandy Relief

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Posted in Blog, Music

Gil Scott-Heron Tribute Video

Read the song lyrics here. And read more about the show here.

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Posted in Blog, Video