Jazz should be much less about stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.
Be nice. (The world is a small town. )
The only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
Don't wait until you know who you are to get started.
Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored -- the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?
In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.
Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!
As The O. C. started up again, I started to feel myself potentially getting pulled away.