In a sense, all murderers are lunatics. Killing is a not a sane reaction to the circumstances of life.
This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"
I've realized that a lot of people come to me because of what's called identity. In the sense of "he's like me" - more like identification. Identity is one of those nonsense words: it's been used so much it doesn't mean anything. As individuals, we don't want to stay the same; identity means sameness, and we don't want to be the same, we want to keep changing, we want to grow, we want to become something else. We want to evolve. So when people come to me, it's about resonance - it goes back to that word.
I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that from many, many elders who think that way. I'm not just being a jerk.
Music making features real-time creation, real-time decisions and actions. It's basically improvisation, which is the stuff of everyday life. In the realm of discourse about music, improvisation is marginal, but in the realm of doing it, it's omnipresent. Strange distinction here: we're improvising all the time, but when we tend to talk about music, we tend to talk about objects that are fixed, like recordings, scores, pieces.
Lately I feel being political is also about the company I keep and the ideas I put forward. When I do a curate a program or do a workshop, I want to make it intergenerational; I want to have women on the faculty and also among the students.
I want to make sure that I represent a variety of backgrounds and that represents the reality out here in the world.
To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
In heaven, knowledge shall be commensurate with the enlarged powers of the glorified soul.
That said, I'm embarrassed and furious that so many coal-state Democrats in the U. S. Senate are paralyzing international progress to protect the short term interests of a dying industry that ravages the environment from mine to slag heap.