Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life

I gave up my horn about 10 years ago because truth be told I wasn't even mediocre, and even if I practiced for hours a day I'd never be great. I want to be a lot things, but I have no intention of getting in the habit of spending my time being mediocre. I love jazz, but I couldn't play it. I just don't have that ability. My creativity is in my writing. 

So for years now I have socked away all of the academic knowledge I built up around the music. (I studied it for a year in college and played in a few different bands.) People ask me if I miss playing, and truth be told I don't. I never even think about it. Playing music doesn't hold any kind of magic for me, but I still very much enjoy listening to it, and really what I enjoy is the history, all of the stories that come along with musicians. And there are plenty of stories to go around. 

My brother is a trumpet player and because he is 6 years older than me, I learned about Wynton Marsalis and the Marsalis family at a very young age. When I saw that Wynton would be at my local Barnes and Noble I decided to go hear some of his stories. He was so engaging and charming that I bought his book on sight, which I never do at author readings. And once I started reading Moving to High Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, I couldn't put it down. (And it helps that his co-author is the brilliant and well-spoken historian, Geoffrey Ward.)

For me the genius of this book is not to tell you about all the drugs that musicians have done, or all the women they've had or how down and out and poor they were. It talks about what the music has to teach us about living other aspects of our lives. How we treat each other. It teaches us about acceptance and nurturing and compassion. Wynton lays out the value is studying jazz not to be great, but to realize a certain aspect of humanity that comes through generosity.  Its is a living, breathing thing that connects the generations. It allows us to learn from generations of people who were long gone before we were every a twinkle in our parents' eyes.  

Wynton goes on to talk about how we all hear something different in the music. He talks about arrogance and greed and the darker sides of our personalities that the music uncovers. But mostly he talks about how musicians with disparate styles can come together, should come together, to create something wholly different than they could ever make on their own. Nobody gets through this world alone in the same way that no jazz musician builds a career alone. Jazz is a way of capturing what it means to be out and about in this world. It's a way of sharing that experience with others whom we will never meet but for whom our music could be a beacon of freedom if we are strong enough to tell our own stories, look them in the eye, and harvest the very best of what they have to teach us.

Wynton's thoughts on community come at a particularly poignant time. Throughout the book I thought a lot of about the state of our world. How scary all these moving parts are - the economy, our national security, our political systems, health care, education. There is a lot to be afraid, maybe even more to be afraid of than at any other time in our history. What jazz, and musicians like Wynton teach us, is that the only way we can be safe is to let go of that fear with the confidence that those around us will support us. Their harmonies will carry us through. And if all else fails at least the swingin' will give us enough encouragement to keep our chins up and the rest of us moving forward with grace.  

Social geeks

I love ethnographers. I appreciate their fervent desire to bucket people in an attempt to figure out the human race, though I must admit I have never been one to enjoy being in a box. My boss recently passed me the book, Microtrends by Mark Penn, an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

When I tell people I work in the field of trend and innovation they assume that I must be checking out the latest “fads” and “fashions”. And I do check those things out, only to the extent that they reveal some underlying and unifying trends that may be emerging. Trends take the long-view, have a psycho-social implication, and signal major shifts in how a large group of people see themselves and their place in the world. This long-view is what holds my interest.

As I read through Microtrends, I discovered a few new interesting groups that I actually belong to, on my own terms. I’m a joiner (there in lying the paradox that while I love groups I hate formal classifications), and so this news of “my people” coming together has got me jazzed. First up, those of us who believe in being DIY doctors. I’ve previously blogged on my neurotic addiction to WebMD, mostly stemming from my preoccupation with health and wellness and the sense of worry etched in my DNA. Turns out that my years-long tracking of WebMD just meant that I was ahead of the trend curve. The tipping point for DIY medicine is approaching, thanks in part to our horrid health insurance system.

Another group I love and seek acceptance to: the Tech Fatales – women and girls who are not only interested in technology but seek to be the people who change and improve the systems and their applications. Finally, those of us who have long been hanging out on the edge contemplating how in the heck all of these technological advancements actually apply to us are not only figuring out that conundrum – we’re also finding new uses for the technologies to make them more applicable to us.

And the last group of note for me – the social geeks. How I love this! Finally a description in two words that does justice to my weirdo nature. I’m so nerdy that at times in my life it has been a source of embarrassment. I was one of those kids who embraced the word “why” with every fiber of my being. My library is my most precious material possession. I have a hard time parting with any of my books, even if I never intend to read them again. And the subject matters are so varied that I have a hard time placing any two books into a single category.

The flipside to my nerd nature is that I have often been correctly accused of being a social butterfly. I love making the rounds, meeting new people, and bringing people together. So imagine my delight when social networking came on the scene in a big way – it would be possible for me to connect with tons of people with all kinds of interests, spread across the globe, all from my cute and comfy apartment. Are you kidding me? Count me in!

Mark Penn points out that Myers-Briggs recently needed to alter their classifications. Previously people interested in technology had been placed in the “introvert” bucket. That’s changed – now people most interested and active in technology are also the most extroverted. Sorry Myers and Briggs: the social geeks will define their own characteristics in their own words.

The above photo can be found at http://www.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/websites_feature/1.jpg

No one needs to pay you

From my earliest memories about what profession I'd like to have, I wanted to write. And the troublesome thing to me was always that I may never get anyone to pay me for doing what I love. I'm 31 so when I was growing up, blogs and the like didn't exist. We were still living in the days of big blue chip companies dominating the globe. "New media" as it's known today was just a dream inside the imaginations of a handful of people.

Today, I can confidently say that I am a writer. I don't have a magazine gig. I don't write for television of film. You can't see my work in a theatre. I never signed a contract and I don't have an agent. No one gives me assignments. And it's no longer just tucked away in some old journal that even I'll never go back and review, much less have anyone else read. It's out in the world, in this wonderful thing called the blogosphere and I write whatever I'd like to write about. I do what I want, when I want, which is really the only way I am capable of living my life. I have a disdain for authority or anything that hampers personal freedom and creativity and I am largely a contrarian at the mere mention of phrases like "well, you HAVE to do it this way." I actually don't HAVE to do anything, and I won't.

I used to be weird for feeling this way. Now, it's become the way of the world. With user-generated content growing by leaps and bounds by the minute, the limits that have been placed on our lives are being ripped down in the blink of an eye. Agents, creative unions, casting directors, TV networks, producers, and film studios used to rule the roost. And while they still wield some power, it is largely dwindling to a modicum of what it used to be. We are very quickly becoming the "take charge of our lives" generation. Contrarians rejoice, we have worked our own way out of the job of being contrarians. (And not a moment too soon. Being a contrarian is exhausting work and I have other things I'd like to be doing!)

Last night I attended the Mustaches for Kids event at the Montauck Club in Park Slope. A hilarious and worthwhile event. The only nosh available was pickles by Bob from McClure's pickles. (http://www.mcclurespickles.com/) When not in the kitchen whipping up his grandmother's recipes, he's acting and writing. He was telling my friend, Monika, and I about a new webtv show he's on - http://www.theburg.tv/. It's entirely created by his friends from college who live in Williamsburg. They didn't create it to make money, they did it for the love of creating. And here's the good news: they have 4 million people who have watched the show on-line, the audience is global, SAG is contacting, and Michael Eisner's company is interested in investing in the project. The paradigm of entertainment is being torn down and built up by the talent rather than being dictated to them.

These kinds of success stories by the underdog brighten my day. It is indeed a brand new world. Focus on being great and creating your life, and the money will follow.

Get your head in the clouds

I spend about 8 hours on my computer, and roughly 10% of that time belongs to some Google application. I stand in awe of a system that can pull up exactly what I'm looking for, regardless of how obscure the subject, in a fraction of a second. Until today, I had resigned myself to the fact that there was some magic Google elf pulling the info for me. I have confirmed that not only is there an elf, there could actually be a million of them out there in the Googlesphere, known increasingly as a "cloud".

While it focuses on Google and one engineer's story, Business Week's cover story this week talks broadly about how our information world is increasingly being built upon this idea of clouds, a group of hundreds of thousands of computers that are all bolted together to store massive quantities of data. While many companies are struggling this holiday season to stay afloat, Google is contemplating world domination of information. Their mantra can be described as "Whatever you can dream, dream it bigger." Imagine being at a company that tells you you're wildest dreams are too small, and that you need to formulate projects that are far more outlandish than even your wildest expectations.

There is a lesson in this wild dream making: every dream can be broken down into very small pieces that can be handled by individual "cloud elves" and then aggregated to get you exactly to where you need to be, all in about half a second. And there is no finite number of tasks. The possibilities are truly endless.

While many companies are in the mode of tempering expectations, pulling in spending, and plummeting morale this holiday season, Google is doing the exact opposite. They are determined to fly high and make sense of the massive amount of knowledge out there. They are so optimistic about what they are capable of accomplishing that they feel these clouds may ultimately push the limits of human imagination. Talk about a tipping point! We have been told for centuries that the human imagination is the most powerful tool on Earth - is it possible that when we pool our imaginations together, we can build something larger than our own sense of creativity?

One last astonishing thing about Google. In all of its success and dreaming, they maintain a public humility that is staggering. They are absolutely fearless when it comes to failure so long as there is learning involved. Their CEO, arguably one of the most powerful and wealthiest men on the planet, sits in a cubicle and moves around from building to building so as to interact with different people at all levels of the organization. And he responds to emails from people at all levels at a unbelievable rate. He is respectful of people's time, both on and off the job. With someone like this at the helm, it's no wonder that Google believes in defying limits.

The Business Week article can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

The picture above can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_52/B4064magazine.htm

Words on the street

I am fascinated by language. My dad spoke six of them. While I didn’t inherit his ability to learn language, as is evidenced by my sad attempts at French, I did inherit a love of hearing different languages and dialects. I particularly enjoy studying how a language truly shapes a culture and national behavior patterns. And the dynamism of language allows it to reflect societal trends.

It’s no wonder that my recent discovery of Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/ , brought a smile to my face. The more tech-saavy readers of this blog will think that I just now have emerged from the dark ages. I fear that this is proof that my long, slow slide from hip, urban chick to crusty old broad may have finally begun. Nevertheless, I think this may also be a new find for some of you, or a refresher of knowledge gained long ago, so it is worthwhile to post the link.

Those out of the know may be asking, “So what is this urban dictionary all about?” It is a slang dictionary that is based on user-generated definitions. Literally, it is helping to define this quickly evolving world around us. And then there is a feature that allows the community members to vote on the definitions added. For example, "wOOt" is top of mind on Urban Dictionary today. It means “an expression of joy”. 3106 people give this definition a thumbs up. 565 shot it down.

The other cool feature that I love is that community members are recording the history of these words. From many definitions, we can learn where words come from, their original use, and how they’ve been adapted to become more main stream. So not only is this a dictionary, it is an anthropological history book. I’m so excited about this, it’s hard for me to sit still!

"WOOt" was recently voted word of the year for 2007 by the dictionary gurus at Merriam-Webster. Facebook was the runner up. In years past words like “google” and “blog” have received the top word honor – not a bad track record as these words are now commonplace in daily conversations. Is "wOOt" destined for this type of fame and recognition? Unclear. But it’s found its place in the American lexicon and I’m all for anything, or any word for that matter, that spreads joy.