In Transit

Nights like these are always too predictable for my taste. They follow this ridiculous pattern. Step one is always me putting the lights off, convinced that I’m tired and about to slip into a long and restful sleep – and the last step, is almost always, me putting the lights back on and messing around the computer. In the middle, there’s a whole lot of lying around, a whole lot of twiddling with the air-conditioner and a whole lot of thinking about junk. 

Sometimes it’s significant too though - Maybe I'll think about my approach to jazz, my lack of discipline towards a practice-schedule. Picking up all the slack - with my masters, my japanese, with my friends. Direction Direction Direction and right, The works.

Sometimes, I figure I should cut the whole routine short. Forget all the thinking between the last and first steps – but at that rate. I never know when I’ll get any sleep at all. Looking through the family tree, it seems my maternal side is responsible. A whole line of stressed out, wound up, wake-up-at-the-whisper-of-their-name sleepers. I always think of those horror movies, where a guy (okay, it’s usually a girl) is asleep and the ghost/demon/whatever at hand whispers their name from inside their head and they just wake straight upright out of bed, with this gasp. 

It’s funny though, when I was a kid, I slept through all the major (relatively) earthquakes that happened in India. I remember this one time, when I was about 8 or 9. The walls cracked but my sleep didn’t budge. I was carried outdoors and brought back in and then told next morning of the events that transpired. Kids at school were losing the plot the next morning and I was clueless. One time, when I must've been 6 - robbers broke into my parents' old house and stole all the air-conditioners on the ground floor. Slept-right-through-it. 

Things started twisting somewhere around the time I was 15. Hm Hm Hm. The first girl I ever got close to, was a true to the bone insomniac. The kind that I’m grateful I’m still not. The kind you can’t figure out. And what you can’t figure out is what’s keeping them from keeling over and offing it.

In any case, I was young and determined – additionally because I thought it was so cool - I told her I was an insomniac too. Ofcourse, telling is simply never enough. Ha.

Fast forward more than six years. I’m really not an insomniac at all. And now - I’m inherently put off by people who love to say they are. Like many others, I’m like a self-saboteur of sleep.

I guess i do a lot of things, I wouldn’t do during the day. I end up browsing wikipaedia a lot. Google a lot of stuff I might be a little or a lot curious about. Look up jazz videos or documentaries on youtube, read weblogs, check out places I want to go on holiday, browse through comics – endless list. Clicking Curiosity to its Conclusion.

 The last thing I try do though, is get on facebook. Things can spiral out of control and you end up with an urge to figure out whether people you know, are having more fun than you are – and it’s not a hard thing for them to accomplish when you’re up at 3 am on facebook.

Conclusively speaking though : One of my favourite things to do sometimes, is to dig up stuff I did from really long ago. Tonight I found something real fun I did in San Francisco, way before I was in college. I went on it alone - when I was twelve or thirteen. My 22 year old gut still tightens like it was yesterday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlMvqmrvasc

Check it out.

(picture borrowed with love: jack by sspider baby)

“Feel the city breakin’ and everbody’s shakin’”

 - said Barry Gibb, falsetto - front man for the Bee Gees, who I don’t really like – but I dig their vibe sometimes. Not to mention i've stolen their lyric and thrown it into an ocean of out-of-context-edness. Be that as it may, I don’t really need to talk about the uncanny literal appropriateness of this line. Welcome to New Delhi 2o1o.

Some one who I used to know a long time ago, once told me that one of our more overt inheritances from the British, involved the capacity to talk (read : bitch) about the weather. Not to ‘mention’ it, but to actively engage in conversation about it. How the weather is today, how it was yesterday – and at times, how it was the year before and the one before that. It happens all the time.

Personally speaking, on principle, I try my best to avoid talking about it. If 

the weather’s great, you’ll probably notice, even if you’ve been indoors all day. People are just a lot less edgy and a lot less aggressive. I’ll pay the weather gods the occasional one line homage sometimes, but when people spend more than five minutes on it, it usually reflects on the dismal state of.. well, things to talk about.

My family, who love talking about the weather, have managed to carve out a new niche’ for themselves. They like talking about the traffic more. I partake in this family activity – armed with an unmatched ferocity and over 80,000 km on my odometer. The Moon is approximately 38,000km away. I have driven to the f***ing Moon and Back.

Between rehearsals, swimming and just commuting between the places I lived, live sometimes and am going to live (I’m not shitting you), I end spending a lot of time in the car. It being 

my one constant stop – I end up stocking it up with things I need. Everything from a toothbrush – to spare cables for instruments, to instruments themselves and even a full formal get up. Top to bottom. You get the idea, a lot of time in the car and a lot of time in traffic.

I know there are a lot of people like me, who get stuck in traffic and they’re not on the verge of snapping (or blogging about it) – but  I think it’s less about the cars as such – and more about what you see when you’re in traffic.

There was this great twilight zone episode, from a long time ago. It’s based in an American suburb during what is supposed to be the peak of the cold war. It’s like a loose rendition of the three little pigs. The most conscientious one, builds a good bomb shelter, while the other pigs, basically tell him he’s an idiot and they laze around. Only difference being, there isn’t a wolf – there’s a bomb scare. And instead of being pigs with blown down houses of straw and stone, there are neighours who in a desperation to save their own lives, start tearing down the bomb shelter – and turn into malicious nutjobs.

Moral of the story, people are monsters – who barely need an excuse. Mob mentality/rioting culture/survival of the ‘I’/different names for the same game.

I digress though, the reason why traffic in Delhi bugs me, is because you see hints of the same thing on the road. There isn’t any love or compassion.(well, I don’t really go driving looking for love and compassion). For the record though, I love smiling at people in the other cars. It freaks the daylights out of people.

The thing is: With every guy who cuts you off, or doesn’t give you room to pass when that special car infront of you breaks down; every dude who blinds you shitless with his beams and every sadistic psycho who keeps trying to push you off the road into that cement mixer – there’s just this looming idea of what we’d be ready to do to each other when that big piece of shit heads for that conveniently placed fan.

 

But hey man, It’s a great time to listen to the Offspring!

 

J

"When you compose music, you discover a side of yourself you never knew existed." - Bill Evans

For a lot of people out there, whether they are Jazz musicians, composers, or enthusiasts – the album ‘Kind of Blue’, by Miles Davis – is a definitive milestone. It is so, both in the larger sense of jazz music itself – and for a lot of musicians I know, including myself - a source of clarity, pleasure and overwhelming knowledge. For many, the music of the album has become synonymous with what the sound of Jazz is in itself.

The album was recorded in 1959 and was essentially a revolution. The breakthrough came in the form of a reply to the current trend of Jazz music existing at the time. The latter, called hard-bop/bop, was characterized by fast tempos and a Lot of chord changes – think very busy fingers and very busy improvisation. (Believe me, it’s a great genre of music and it forms a major chunk of what I do with Drift. But man, it’s hard – and I don’t even really solo.)

Kind of blue, one the other hand, was categorized as Modal jazz. It made immense room for improvisation by removing excessive chord changes and breaking them down to a simple few – opening the sound up and simplifying the process immensely. The first track on the record stuck to only two chords. D and E^b.

(This doesn’t change the fact, for people like me, that a lot of space can be a puzzling thing.)

Kind of Blue was my first jazz album and was presented to me somewhere around my first year of college. The vibe - and it was all about the vibe - and the sound of the album was something I had been searching for, for a long time but had no idea where to find. The brief flirtations that the mainstream media brought of jazz, were mostly in the form of background scores in movies. And in cartoons – like Tom and Jerry.

The opening track, called ‘So What’, starts with bass and piano playing a unison intro followed by the melody on bass.  It is hard to find some one who has not heard this track yet or will not recognize this theme (Second only to Take Five – Dave Brubeck).  The melody is followed by the crash of a cymbal and the bass breaking into what I know recognize, is a pulse from a rhythm section, so steady, I could only hope to imitate it.

Looking back at it, that track and that bassist (Paul Chambers) made me want to pick up the bass and really just learn how to Do That. I needed to be able to Do That. It didn’t matter where I’d find a double bass and it didn’t matter how I’d find a band. 

Needless to say, it’s been a few years since then: basses and bands have come and gone; but with every jazz musician I work with, every record that I listen to and every track that I play on my instrument – the hidden complexity behind doing that becomes more amplified and much more apparent.

 I still haven’t figured it out and the songs on the album sound different to me every month – if not every week. And that collective ‘feel’, isn’t just about thinking bass, it’s thinking rhythm section and feeling a whole band – a bunch of people all playing the same game and thinking the same thing.

Thinking together with an intense awareness of yourself and everybody else. If that isn’t zen-like, I don’t know what is.

I am no where near mastering the art. Maybe my friends are, though. Sometimes, when I play with Drift, on a really good night, during a really good track I’ll feel a sense of quiet and calm while playing – maybe that’s what it is. The drummer from my other band, called the Variety Hour, once said he almost had something like an out of body experience while playing with us at a gig – and it let him listen to our sound ‘together’, as opposed to just as a bassist, pianist and drummer. He changed the way he played after that. I’m due for one of those any time now : ) .

Anyway. Kind of blue is a never-ever compendium of knowledge for jazz musicians – teaching everything from melodic improvisation to just plain and solid control. The entire album was recorded in one go – in an overnight recording session in New York; where no one aside from Miles Davis (trumpet) and Bill Evans (pn.) had ever seen the music before. There was nothing like it before it came about – and these guys went ahead and played it like it had been stylistically present for years.

 It’s definitely something to appreciate – personally speaking, I have to run over charts more than twenty or thirty times (more), before I can get something steady cracking.

 The album has a whole bunch of great tracks on it. Tracks like: Blue and Green/Freddie Freeloader etc.

 Go Listen!

 

 

Don't forget, mate.

I really wish I had superpowers. I don’t know if I should say ‘really’ because it’s not exactly every day that I’m consumed by the inadequacies of being mortal, but sometimes, when I have way too much time, I day dream about it  - and I always pick flying. That’s what I want – no two ways about. I don’t want invisibility – I tried following that up once and it ended badly. Flying is where it is. Anyway - needless to say, I have made absolutely no progress on that issue whatsoever. So no super powers for me.

All is not lost though, for - what I do have, instead of superpowers (haha), is this painfully annoying but unsuspectingly helpful knack for remembering the tiniest details. I remember things that happened from when I was about three or four – right upto the things that happened a few days ago – and the things I remember, aren’t hazy. I remember what people said, what they wore (colours, logos, whatever), what I said and a lot of times, the stupid thing I did. They may as well have all happened yesterday 

I remember trying to learn how to swim in the bathtub of our old house – and I also remember running into a wall with a crazy straw in my mouth. It hurt. Like a Bitch. Anyway, you get the picture: special occassions, normal every days, parent-teacher meetings (I remember pretty much every year) – all this junk from school. It goes on.

I’m sure it’s easy to understand why this can be annoying. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. Some days are worse than others, usually days where I can’t really fall asleep and I’m lying in the dark or flipping pillows around to get that cool-side which never comes because the pillow’s already baked. The stuff just suggests itself to me and it does so, so aggressively.

Please don’t misconstrue, I’m not being haunted by my thoughts (we had a bunny rabbit for a week once, when I was a kid.) – most of the stuff in there is pretty amusing and a lot of times it borders on a feeling that makes you want to indulge further. Just to see what comes next. The problem is though, once you immerse yourself in the good stuff, there’s no stopping the bad stuff. Which isn’t particularly traumatic – but just irritating. Stuff like what teachers have said to me through school, the works.

It just annoys me that this stuff is even there. Sometimes I’m amazed at the scene I’ll reach in my mind. I would have started off by thinking of something that happened at rehearsal or at a gig – something silly with the bass -- and next thing I know, I’m in the third grade trying to figure out how the minute hand works on a clock. (true story). Whenever I feel that way, I always – without exception – think of the same thing. I don’t know how many people who might read this, have actually met me. But I have a pretty small head – and I really wonder how all this junk fits in.

It’s probably easier though, to figure why it has it’s upsides. If you’re in the mood and ready to make the effort, you can usually keep a conversation going for a while without much help. I’ve had a moreorless pleasantly eventful teenage-thru-coming-of-age-stage. I’ve been lucky enough to travel – I used to fly to the UK during my summer vacations till the time I was ten and after that it was the US right uptil a few years ago. After that I went and lived in Japan for about a year. Random people – Random parties – Cops – Robbers – Jazz –Blues. Whatever. Basically I’m Stocked and Good to Go.

People like hearing stories sometimes (Sometimes) – and unquestionably – it works best when the stories are about them. It’s crazy flattering on some level, I imagine.

Honestly though, I kinda like it when people remember things about me or tell me they saw something completely unrelated and it triggered and fired off a me-neuron.
I like the idea that I’m in other people’s heads. It does something between giving me a little kick and reaffirming my cosmic existence. Kind of a matrix-thing. J