What he actually said at the press conference was “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music.”
This is the closest I’ve ever come to agreeing with Mr. Trump. My only quibble is with the word ‘listen’. I mean, I love that word. Next to love, it might be the word we need more than any other word right now. I just think that if he had said “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just play music,” he mighta gotten my vote. Just kidding.
The thing is though, that we need more listening AND playing. Now, the kind of playing I’m talking about IS listening. I’m playing with words now. OK, so why don’t we call playing music doing music? I mean that’s what we’re doing. It’s because we’re playing! Don’t forget that when you play. I like to get to the music inside the music where the real connections are.
I think we need more playing and less doing in everything we do. I really wish everyone knew that playing music really is playing and not doing. It's fun! And listening can be fun too!
Playing music is a conversation. When I play by myself, I’m talking to myself. When I play with you, I’m trying to listen and talk at the same time. You know that I’m using the words talk and play interchangeably right? I know you know what I’m talking about.
If you say something I don’t agree with, like, let’s say you play a “wrong” note. You might think it’s a right note and I think it’s wrong. My job is to make that note work. I gotta say something that works with that note and makes it right. Or maybe you feel that you misspoke. You can’t take it back. We gotta work together or maybe we gotta play together to make it work even better or play better.
Maybe you’re playing a sad song and I want to make it happy? Can we listen to each other enough that the emotions are so interwoven that words will never describe them? Maybe your sad and my happy merge into a joy of connection beyond what we ever knew possible.
Why can’t all conversations be like that? Even tough ones like the ones about Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Siera, the US… OMG, this is getting complicated already. Did you notice how the tone of this song I’m writing just shifted?
Like everything else, these things feed into each other in circles. I’ve set up musical conversations intentionally connected to difficult verbal conversations. I found that if we start with a musical conversation, it can flow into the difficult verbal conversation which becomes a musical conversation. I wrote about a conversation I had with a gun enthusiast who came to a Black Lives Matter rally with about 100 other people with guns from pistols in holsters to AR-15s strapped around their shoulder. Their intent was to prevent us from burning down the town.
She brought her conga drums to my studio and we jammed. Then we compared our backgrounds from me raised a pacifist Quaker to her being an army kid and then joining a military band while I played rock n roll. We became friends. We talked a lot on the phone after she lost her husband to covid.
It was scary being surrounded by guns at the square that day. She told me that they didn't intend to shoot anyone, just scare us. When we talked on the phone, she told me once that she was in such deep grief from her loss that she was scared to be surrounded by guns in her house.
That was a powerful musical experience for me. I have never touched a gun in my life. I don't think that closeness could have happened without music.
This leads me to the difficult conversation about who gets to have these musical conversations. The easy answer is everybody. Because every body is a musical body designed from the ground up to connect. The difficult part is that this truth has been systematically drilled out of most of our bodies. Even the bodies that consider themselves musicians. The music’s in there but the trust is missing.
I believe it’s easier for “non-musicians” to access the music inside the music because they haven’t been fooled into believing that just by playing the notes they are playing the music. The music inside the music is where the gold is. The interconnectedness.
One way to get inside is to put a sheet of music in front of you and pretend to play it even if you have no idea what any of the dots mean. I remember pretending to write script before I ever went to school. They were just scribbles but it looked as real as what my older siblings wrote. Remember it’s the music inside the music which is real. It’s the connections with yourself or others, including the earth and any animals, plants, or mountains on it.
Another way to access that gold is to get together with a close friend where there is no judgement. Take turns singing to each other and listening. As you feel more confident, you can start to listen and sing at the same time. You can weave in and out of each other.
And this takes us back to the guy who I misquoted at the top. Let’s not give him or any other make believe leader more power than they already have which is the same as you or me. The power they wield is not their own. That power is a systemic one that depends on people to feed it. And it can push a Trump or a Harris under a bus on a whim.
If we feed each other with music and art, we can make those systems irrelevant along with the make believe music and art they fake.
And artificial intelligence? It’s started before computers. Along with artificial flowers. It takes intelligence to know when intelligence is artificial. CIA? Artificial intelligence.
Same with artificial art and music. Now that we have AI it’s a perfect guide. If you wonder whether it’s AI or not, it’s probably artificial whether or not it’s AI. It’s always easier to tell in person. I mean, real music is interaction in real time. Uh-oh. Time isn’t real is it?
That's good because I don't think our brains can evolve in the manner they have been for millennia as fast as AI is evolving. We gotta play a different game. Play OUR music. Connect in OUR way.
Can you guess whether or not the picture at the top is AI or real? It's a mural inside a shelter for asylum seekers in Tijuana I took while on a break from playing real music with real people. Let's keep it real.
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