Swingo ergo sum.

tuirgin: I watched Branford Marsalis and his band do Coltrane's A Love Supreme. From the time it started I was weepy. I was literally choking back sobs and had that clenched throat thing going—I was sucking it back because my dad was watching it with me. I had to do that throughout the whole 50 minutes.

tuirgin: Branford ain't Coltrane, but he did a fine, fine job of it.

tuirgin: I want to watch it again with an empty house so I can crank it up, close my eyes and let it all flood through me.

shishno2: Wow!

shishno2: Jazz really says something to you.

tuirgin:

I was at the top of the Grand Hotel in Chicago (on tour 1987) listening to 'a Love Supreme' and learning the lesson of a lifetime. Earlier i had been watching televangelists remake God in their own image: tiny, petty and greedy. I knew from my earliest memories that the world was winding in a direction away from love, and I too was caught in it's drag.

There is so much wickedness in this world but beauty is our consolation prize ….. the beauty of john Coltrane's reedy voice, it's whispers, it's knowingness, it's sly sexuality, it's praise of creation.

And so Coltrane began to make sense to me.

I left the music on repeat and I stayed awake listening to a man facing God with the gift of his music.

—Bono

tuirgin: shishno2: jazz really says something to you

tuirgin: That piece does.

tuirgin: I don't know how to put it. Hyperbole, but I had the thought that if I could live inside that song I'd find salvation. Like I said, hyperbole, but it speaks towards what I really mean.

tuirgin: Santana's silly sentence keeps drifting through my mind: His tone truly puts demons on a leash.

tuirgin: More Santana:

When you hear this second kind of Coltrane music, the only way you can describe it is the way you would describe Machu Picchu in the Andes mountains. It's a whole other level of high consciousness that causes the slicksters and the hipsters and anyone else to say, Hey, this is not coming from an intellectual trip or some dude trying to show off.

When he starts a solo with his saxophone, it actually sounds like his heart is made out of light, and it is coming out of the horn; the horn is rumbling, and all of the keys are shooting off light.

Coltrane has come the closest to connecting the alpha to the omega through sound.

tuirgin: It sounds ridiculous. But to me it seems damned close to ridiculous truth.

shishno2: I'll burn a cd tomorrow of Coltrane.

tuirgin: heh

shishno2: But I don't speak the language, so I dunno if I'll reverb the way you do.

tuirgin: I asked my dad what he thought. He said, I liked it…I didn't know what I was listening to, but I liked it.

tuirgin: I said, Knowing doesn't matter.

tuirgin: I didn't have the big response to it the first time I listened to it. I liked it, but wondered just what the fuss was, but as I kept listening to it I began to hear it. It went from my ears to my heart. But it took a lot of listens and time and my own searching

shishno2: Like me and tarkovsky, but thru eyes.

tuirgin: Yeah. That's exactly it. It's nearly impossible to talk about what T means. But if you're open to it emotionally it will work it's way into you and devastate you and put you back together again. Catharsis.

shishno2: Yeah. It just is, when you open up the right way.

tuirgin: Yeah.

tuirgin: Coltrane, like a lot of jazz musicians had the habit of showing up at the studio having no clue what he'd put down on tape. He'd compose the songs in the hallways of the studio and take it in and play it.

tuirgin: But A Love Supreme, he went into a room in the upstairs of his house. Locked himself in. His wife would bring food up and make sure he ate something, but nobody went and bothered him—nobody saw him for like a week.

tuirgin: Finally he comes down—his wife, Alice, says, "Like Moses comin' off the mountain," and he tells her that for the first time ever he has all the music. It's done. It was delivered, as it were, in one week-long sitting.

shishno2: Wow!

tuirgin: He took it to the studio and didn't rehearse it with his band—he told them what to play and they played it. They had no idea. No idea that this was a prayer in 4 movements

tuirgin: I just downloaded the only live concert he played of Love Supreme. In the intereviews Branford brings it up to Alice Coltrane and says he was shocked when he heard it because no one but Coltrane knew what he was doing.

tuirgin: The drummer didn't know when to come in, the pianist, the bass player—they couldn't remember it. And he goes on to say, the level of players they were, had they played it even twice they'd have had it memorized. But they didn't.

tuirgin: Which makes the recording all that much more remarkable.

tuirgin: Sorry…going off. :D

shishno2: Nah, that kind of going on I can handle. :)

shishno2: It's not knowing the names of people or anything about them that gets distracting. But art is a fun listen.

tuirgin: The thing with jazz is that though there's a ton of people to know about, at the same time they're all inter-related. They all knew each other and played with each other. So, I'm finding that learning the names of one quartet then hearing about another that shared a player, and then another and another.

tuirgin: It's a big web and it feels like a small world.

shishno2: Just like hollywood, sorta.

tuirgin: Not my scene, so I don't really know. Take your word for it.

tuirgin: Something that has been on my mind…let me see if I can figure out how to relate it…

shishno2: k

tuirgin: Ok…you know how you find a piece of music or art or whatever and you like it, and you read about the artist and they totally blow—drug addled, or a mean S.O.B. or this or that—and it's a bit of a disappointment?

shishno2: Like when I found out Grace Kelly slept with half of hollywood?

tuirgin: That's starting to turn around for me, somehow. I'm beginning to be more and more interested in the lives of all these messed up people. They made beautiful music, but they had really screwed up lives.

tuirgin: NO WAY!!!!

tuirgin: Damn.

shishno2: Yeah…I know. It was a big letdown.

tuirgin: No shit.

tuirgin: Anyway, there's something really affirmative to me in that these screwed up people were able to make beautiful music.

shishno2: I know what you mean though…

tuirgin: It's kind of like saying, look, we're all frail, fucked up people, and that doesn't matter—look at this, my art. And the art doesn't excuse the baseness of a person's life, but it's like it says that somewhere they still had a sense of God or their basic human nature, which is the image of God, at least in my terminology.

shishno2: Sort of like man looks at the outward appearance, but the lord looks at the heart.

tuirgin: Yeah.

shishno2: And what comes out is more important than what goes in when it comes to holiness.

tuirgin: If a really fucked up person can make one thing of beauty… that thing of beauty speaks to the reality that still exists inside him. It's not the thing of beauty that matters so much…but it's the thing which shows through to what's still there.

shishno2: Don't let that backslap you though…at least, recognize that beauty isn't just in really hard to play jazz prayers.

tuirgin: No, I know. It can be in the simplest thing. The whole art as religion thing is all wrong.

shishno2: :p I know…but it took me years to get that.

tuirgin: I'm beginning to understand why, whereas I "knew" it was wrong, but felt like it wasn't. It's not the art…it's the soul that made the art. Our true art is always the soul

…

tuirgin: A novice goes to a famous old monastery. And his father asks him what he wants to achieve: theosis, to see the glory of God, to become love. The father reaches back to his bookshelf and pulls out a novel of Dickens and hands it to him and says, Read this. You'll start here.

shishno2: Go figger.

tuirgin: The novice protests that this is Victorian, Western claptrap. The father says, Until you can love as such and such character loves, you'll not attain anything greater.

shishno2: Scrooge?

shishno2: :)

tuirgin: heh

tuirgin: Don't remember. I've heard the story several times with different features.

…

shishno2: It's too easy to pick one trait and bring yourself down to hell because it doesn't match up to some bar you've set and it's hard to keep an eye on your life as a whole and not the day to day.

tuirgin: totally

shishno2: They talk about seeing life through the eyes of eternity and say that it involves living in the moment. That's part of it, the open part. The other part is seeing all that was and will ever be, and a lot of that is already written in a book.

tuirgin: Yeah…I still like how Campbell described the eternal moment—the experience of the particular moment without a sense of time.

shishno2: I prefer Thomas Wolfe's all the walls that ever were as a description of the everlasting in a moment.

tuirgin: Yeah.

shishno2: It's not that this is a brick. It's that this is all bricks and all the bricks are a wall. But they're every wall.

tuirgin: eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower

shishno2: And the whole thing is one big multi-faceted something, and seeing your reflection in one facet is wrong. I'm pretty sure every life, when looked at through every facet, is complex and noble and nothing to be ashamed of.

tuirgin: I was listening to this new album. Not sure whether to call it jazz or R&B. But it's got singing. Really fine singing by this black (presumably) lady with a rich alto voice. The lyrics themselves are kinda… Well, they'd be really cheezy if it wasn't for her delivery.

tuirgin: Let me see if I can find the lyrics, though, because there was a part that really struck me

tuirgin: Damn…it's not popular enough to have the lyrics in a gazillion places…

shishno2: heh

tuirgin: It's a song called Raining on the Moon.

shishno2: k

shishno2: William Parker Quartet?

tuirgin: And it's a utopian piece, punctured by the chorus line, it's raining on the moon.

tuirgin: Yeah.

tuirgin: Anyway, it talks about the righting of all the wrongs in our country. And this one section talks about all the black, white, and yellow men that have been lynched being resurrected, and those that did the lynching apologizing profusely. And those lynched say that there's nothing to forgive.

tuirgin: And there's the allusion, you know not what you do, and it continues because if you did you'd be evil…and I know you're not evil. It was really powerful to me.

shishno2: It echoes one of our discussions.

tuirgin: It's talking about some of the worst shit that happened in our history, but people are so blind that they don't even know how wrong what they're doing is.

shishno2: About hell being here on earth, and the judgment being everyone going to their persecutors and forgiving them

tuirgin: Yeah. That convo is on my mind a lot…never totally leaves it, really.

…

shishno2: I watched this movie, The Weather Man, by myself last weekend. It's a downer, I don't really recommend it. But the main guy's dad dies and the movie ends pretty quick after that.

shishno2: The guy repeats what people said about his dad at the funeral, about how he was all these quality traits that the main guy wanted to be through his life, but as time went on he kept losing one, and then another, and another until he ended up who he was, and that was ok.

shishno2: and i was thinking to myself, Not really! I mean, yeah, acceptance is good, you are who you are, but the flick really gave me the desire to be good, noble, strong, faithful, all these things that the main guy wasn't, and looking at myself and seeing how i'm not those things in so many ways was depressing.

shishno2: I just remembered it.

tuirgin: Acceptance is the first step to progress…seeing ourselves how we really are. I guess that's what repentance is all about, and not wallowing in being "bad".

shishno2: Well, if you saw that you were bad, and stuck there, you'd become evil. Usually we realize we're bad and don't want to be bad anymore, though changing is harder.

shishno2: Being bad is easy: all you have to do is nothing.