While I’m here and since I haven’t posted in three months, I might as well update everyone on my doings …

I made three records in the month of July: the first, a collection of Ornette tunes with Happy House, a band I co-lead with the trombonist Pat Hall, which also includes six-string bassist Joe Gallant and drummer Dean Sharp; the second was a fully-improvised date with a band that comprised pianist Steve Cohn, bassist Tony DeCicco, and drummer Bruce Ditmas. The last was a as yet unnamed quintet covering some great, underappreciated music from a certain jazz icon whose name for the moment will be withheld. The first two sessions were for the Unseen Rain label, the last for Steven Walcott’s Engine label. I had a great time on all three dates and I think we made some memorable music. More on the music as release time grows near.

My wife and I are also involved in buying a cafe near our upstate New York home. We’ve not finalized the deal yet, but we’re hoping like crazy that everything works out and it goes through. Yes, it will have music. I’m looking forward to being a gatekeeper.

I’m thinking this is a “must-hear” …

As I told someone last night (details to follow), getting me to write words nowadays (as opposed to notes) is like pulling teeth, so involved am I with developing various musical projects, to say nothing of cooking, cleaning, and carting for my two kids. Once in a while, however, an event of some import rouses me to actually record a few thoughts. No, I’m not talking about that guy with the beard who came to a bad end, or even this morning’s stunning news that Ahnuld and Maria’s marriage is on the rocks, but rather something much more significant: my gig last night with saxophonist/composer Allen Lowe’s band.

If you don’t know who Allen is, you should. Check out his website; there are several fairly lengthy musical samples from his many albums that’ll give you an idea of his music’s breadth, originality, and humor. His latest recording project is The Blues and the Empirical Truth, selections from which we performed last night at Clemente Soto Velez on NYC’s Lower East Side as part of Arts for Art / Vision Festival / RUCMA’s Evolving Voice Series.

I was honored that Allen asked me to be part of his band, and bowled over by the experience. Not only are Allen’s tunes great, but his alto playing is sublimely inventive. Pianist Lewis Porter—best known, perhaps, as an educator and author (his Coltrane bio is far and away the best available)—wailed with malice aforethought, and trumpeter Steven Bernstein was absolutely monstrous. Allen’s fellow Mainers who comprised the rhythm section were first rate, and tubaist Chris Meeder was wonderful. The crowd was large and lively, the vibe terrific. All in all, a great musical experience. My thanks to Allen for including me.

As usual, one of the best parts was running into folks who I haven’t seen for a while. It was a treat hearing the incredible Ken Filiano with guitarist Adam Caine’s excellent trio (which also included drummer Jeremy Carlstedt). Ken’s an old friend and an amazing bassist who seems to just get better with age. If you haven’t checked out his recent Clean Feed CD, Dreams from a Clown Car, you should. The album features the under-appreciated masters, drummer Michael T.A. Thompson, and saxophonists Tony Malaby and Michael Attias. The playing is powerful and Ken’s compositions unique. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year.

It was also nice to see my friend Ras Moshe, the volcanic tenor saxophonist; Ras is an all-purpose force for everything that’s good about jazz. Ditto audio-journalist Jason Crane, whose enthusiasm and knowledge always elevates the vibe. I finally got to meet Fay Victor, whose album, The FreeSong Suite, I fell hard for when it came out in 2009. No surprise—her presence is as charming and graceful as her music.

Finally, I saw my friend with the English accent and beret, who seems to be at every Downtown concert I go to and who I always enjoy speaking with, but whose name I’ve forgotten (my bad—I’m terrible with names; I’m lucky if I can remember my own from one day to the next). If you read this, friend, please remind me!

A great night. Thanks to everyone who made it possible, including (especially) all those who came to listen and expressed their appreciation for our performance. It means more than you can know.

“Riddle me this, Illegal Alien Man …”

Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle takes a hard line on illegal immigration. From her official website: “Every year, illegal immigration costs the state billions in your hard earned tax dollars by providing services to those who have no right to be in our country in the first place. We must stop all public benefits to illegal immigrants, punish employers who hire them, and allow our local law enforcement officials to expedite the process of arresting and deporting them to their country of origin.”

Rep. Riddle (a Republican and a fave of the tea baggers) feels so strongly about the subject, she’s sponsored House Bill 2012, which would make hiring an “unauthorized alien” a crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

That is, unless said “unauthorized alien” is hired as a domestic servant. The proposed law makes that just okey-dokey.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A small business owner who hires an undocumented worker—providing benefits, paying unemployment insurance (assuming they have that in Texas, not a sure bet)—would, under this law, get the book thrown at him.

Yet it would be perfectly fine for your friendly neighborhood millionaire to pay a Mexican groundskeeper sub-minimum wage off the books. Why? Because, as Riddle’s colleague, Representative Rep. Aaron Pena (also a Republican … Surprise!) says: “With things as they are today, her bill will see a large segment of the Texas population in prison” if it passes without the exception. “When it comes to household employees or yard workers, it is extremely common for Texans to hire people who are likely undocumented workers. It is so common, it is overlooked.”

Jon English, the Tea Baggin’ Toady’s chief-of-staff, explains away the apparent contradiction, saying that the exception was included to avoid “stifling the economic engine” in Texas. “It is an admittedly clumsy first attempt to say, ‘We are really focusing on the big businesses,’ ” he said, presumably meaning all those Fortune 500 companies hiring illegals to fill vacant CEO positions.

I guess we can just chalk this up to what must be a genetic predisposition to hypocrisy on the part of Republicans, taking its place alongside “Right-to-Lifers for the Death Penalty” and “Supporters of Marriage Who Deny People the Right to Get Married.”

Bonzo and some moron.

Must I suffer fools gladly? In the name of some ersatz comity imposed by the shark-jumping Jon Stewart, must I treat every idiotic statement on the right with respect? Is it necessary that I take the time to politely point out the flaws in the nonsensical, self-defeating rantings of addled nincompoops who wouldn’t know their own best interests if they bit them in the tea bags?

Case in point: the recent contretemps in Wisconsin. Governor Walker deliberately precipitates a budget crisis by giving huge corporate tax cuts, then claims the only way to re-balance the budget is to strip public unions of critical collective bargaining rights. A child can see that he’s just out to break the unions at the behest of his wealthy campaign contributors, yet the screams on the right are how greedy teachers and EMS workers making 40 grand a year are to blame for the state’s financial straits.

“These unionized workers make more than their counterparts in the private sector,” these idiots say, all puffed up and proud because they used the word “sector” in a sentence. Even if that were true (it’s not), my response is, HELLO! That’s what unions do, dummy! They get the best deal for their members. Don’t you think that, if workers in the private sector aren’t making as much, it might just be because the vast majority of them are not represented by unions? And doesn’t it make sense that big business—with its hunger for ever-more obscene profits so it can compensate its top brass ever-more obscenely—would pay toadies like Scott Walker to crush organized labor wherever and whenever they can?

Big biz wants to pay workers as little as possible. As it is, has ever been, and shall always be. Unions get in the way. Hence, it is in the interest of big biz to bust the unions. Simple, huh? It’s so simple a child could understand it. Why can’t millions of adults?

Because they are fools.

Must I suffer them gladly?

For some reason that came to mind after recording this (I finally learned to properly size the video, btw).

The most recent entry in my quest to learn the compositions of T. Monk.

Why Dr. Pangloss Panned My Book

By Randy Sandke

The subject of race inflames passions on all sides, which makes it all the more imperative to handle such a sensitive subject with extreme care. So when Howard Mandel barges into this emotional china shop, his critical ax swinging recklessly, we are all liable to end up bloody. The main thrust of his attack is his own misconception of my motive in writing the book; not what the book actually says. In doing so he violates the first principle of responsible journalism: to report the facts. In order to bolster his position statements are misrepresented, major issues neglected, and history rewritten. Judging by some of Mandel’s remarks I doubt he read the book (or large portions of it) at all.

Let’s start with what the book is about. It recounts how several jazz writers from the late 1930s (the dawn of jazz writing) to the present day have attempted to impose extra-musical agendas on the music. The book meticulously documents the many ways jazz history and criticism have been distorted to serve ideological ends. The book is neither pro-white nor pro-black; rather it is pro-musician and pro-music.

According to Mandel, the book “insists that white jazz composers, players, bandleaders and business men—even the famous ones who have made fortunes—have consistently been denied appropriate status in the music.” I defy Mandel to find a single quote in the book that supports this thesis. I’m not even sure what he means by “appropriate status”: money, recognition, work opportunities? I never made any such claim, nor would I. I can think of many black musicians who are underrated, as well as many white musicians I consider overrated, and vice versa. But that’s not what my book is about.

Mandel maintains that “I shrug off the obvious: that popularizers from Paul Whiteman through Kenny G have been rewarded with promotion, acceptance and wealth disproportionate to the value of many other musicians’ creativity.” Mandel is pitching a red herring here: (and forgive me for mixing metaphors) a classic apples vs. oranges argument. Whiteman and Kenny G play(ed) popular music, so it’s a truism to say that they entertain(ed) a wide audience and profit(ed) accordingly. What does my book say on Whiteman? That “they [the first-generation jazz writers] sought to distinguish commercial jazz (exemplified by Paul Whiteman in the twenties and many swing bands in the thirties) from ‘real’ jazz. The term ‘jazz’ would refer exclusively to that variety of ‘hot’ music characterized by improvisation. Many subsequent jazz commentators have stumbled over the conundrum that Whiteman and others did not ‘co-opt’ a black style so much as these writers co-opted the term jazz. Up to that time, ‘jazz’ had a broad generic meaning referring to any type of syncopated music.” So even after this prudent warning, Mandel insists on stumbling yet again.

Mandel also claims that, “Without the efforts of white writers who Sandke accuses of having been overly laudatory to black musicians—and also the enthusiasm of listeners of all stripes—the music of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and the other greats may never have been heard by the majority of white America at all.” Like so many statements I examine in the book, there is such an overload of factual errors crammed into this one sentence that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, nowhere in the book do I accuse anyone of being “overly laudatory to black musicians.” On the contrary, the book plainly states that jazz was created by African-Americans and that:

the vast majority of its greatest exponents have been black. This amazing profusion of world-class talent has no historical parallel, except perhaps the Italian Renaissance. I would not argue that these artists have received too much attention; if anything they have not received enough. The point I wish to make is that the leading figures of jazz, regardless of color, have created music that can stand on its own terms next to the best art of any epoch. Their work doesn’t need to be propped up with the aid of socio-political theorizing. (Pages 11 and 12)

Mandel thinks that the fame of such greats as Morton, Oliver, Armstrong, and Ellington depended on the work of white writers, but the fact is that all were well known to white audiences over a decade before there were any real jazz writers. The reputations of these seminal musicians were established via recordings and live performances, not reviews in the press. I must say it is rather arrogant for Mandel to maintain that Ellington et al would have failed to make an impact without the efforts of white writers. And no matter what was later written about Morton and Oliver, their music was never “heard by the majority of white America.” The world did come to revere the music of Ellington and Armstrong, but frequently despite condemnations from a variety of jazz journalists. Ricky Riccardi’s upcoming book will detail the slings and arrows targeting Armstrong throughout the entire second half of his career, and my book cites a few as well. John Hammond wrote that “Armstrong’s deterioration began when he chose to think of himself as a soloist”; and “Ellington’s music has become vapid and without the slightest semblance of guts” since “he has added slick, un-Negroid musicians to his band and because he himself is aping Tin Pan Alley composers for commercial reasons.”

In the case of Basie, Hammond was responsible for bringing the band to national prominence, and for that he deserves credit. But this fact is well known and my book was never intended to be a recitation of information widely available in other sources. The truth is that, despite his considerable accomplishments, much of Hammond’s writing is divisive and wrong-headed. For Mandel to object to my pointing out what Otis Ferguson referred to as Hammond’s “complete lack of temperance and caution” as a jazz critic is to show utter disregard for the historic record.

Mandel accuses me of creating a “false binary” by asking whether jazz “represents the expression of a distinct and independent African-American culture, isolated by its long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Or, even when produced by African-Americans (or anyone else for that matter) is it more properly understood as the juncture of a wide variety of influences under the broader umbrella of American and indeed world culture?” Mandel attempts to correct me by saying “it’s not too difficult to entertain both depictions.” However my very next paragraph plainly states: “This is a question that ultimately doesn’t require an either/or answer, as there is truth in both positions. But the degree to which one accepts one or the other of these contrasting orientations can produce startlingly different results.”

Mandel claims I naively hearken back to a “Golden Age” (his term) in which musicians routinely expressed respect and admiration for their colleagues across the color line. Many such citations exist in a plethora of oral histories, but apparently this truth doesn’t fit into Mandel’s clichéd narrative so he chooses to ignore it. He goes on to say that “circumstances during at least the first half-century of jazz favored musicians with white skins who appealed often exclusively to white audiences.” Here’s where I question whether Mandel actually read my book. I wouldn’t for a minute deny that African-Americans experienced untold hardships throughout this period, though it’s also true that Armstrong was a home-owner by his mid-twenties, and Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington found comfortable accommodations on Striver’s Row and Edgecombe Avenue respectively. Even their sidemen earned nearly double the average wage for that time in the United States.

In the realm of syncopated music and what we now know as jazz, black musicians reigned supreme from the late 1890s through the mid-30s. In many cases they out-earned white bands, and had a near total monopoly on jazz work in the ‘20s. The phenomenon of great black musicians hired by wealthy and sophisticated white audiences helped drive and develop the music. All of this is thoroughly documented in my book. At the same time, and through most of the twentieth century, white musicians were relegated to playing popular music for a living, with jazz perhaps added as a spice, but almost never the main course. By the mid-twenties, white musicians began to outpace black musicians in earnings, but still had little, if any, chance to play jazz. Benny Goodman and the so-called “swing era” changed this formula significantly, but only briefly. By the late thirties, most white bands were again consigned to commercial fare to stay afloat.

The history of the business of jazz is a complex and ever-changing affair, and it has seldom been systematically examined, which is what my book attempts to do. But Mandel clings desperately to the conventional wisdom of old, which I refute time and again with well-documented evidence.

Mandel argues that I cite as “villains who demonize white jazzers” such illustrious and important figures as Langston Hughes, Milt Gabler, Norman Granz, Barney Josephson and Max Gordon. What I do say is that they were all affiliated with the Popular Front of the 1930s (an indisputable fact). Even of this I explain how:

The Popular Front was an international movement that arose in response to the Great Depression and the threat of fascism. In the United States, the movement centered around union advocacy, various anti-fascist causes, and the fight for racial equality. For a variety of social issues, the “old left” was indeed a vanguard for positive and necessary change in America. Many of their once-radical views have since become enshrined in law, taking the country several steps closer to its founding principles. (Page 16)

As for Langston Hughes, I quote Benny Carter saying that “he was a man who had much respect for and understanding of this music.” I make a point of stating that Gabler and Josephson were among the first to insist on interracial seating in their clubs and often featured mixed bands. Norman Granz was “by most accounts, one of the good guys who strove to improve working conditions as well as the bank accounts of those in his care.” How can any of this be construed as vilifying these people?

It appears inevitable that an author who criticizes the agendas of others is destined to be accused of harboring an agenda of his own. I anticipated this in the book and explicitly stated mine: “I want to see music judged on its own terms, free of external considerations. Of course jazz is an immense subject that touches on many others areas of human experience. But I feel strongly that any examination of jazz must be grounded in a knowledge of—and hopefully love and respect for—jazz as music first and foremost.” Mandel’s revealing answer to this simple and heartfelt request is to deny its validity and poke fun at it. “Well isn’t that a nice thought,” he writes. “Dream on, pilgrim, dream on.” In other words, here we have the president of the JJA insisting it ain’t about the music, stupid. No wonder so many musicians can’t get a fair hearing from Mandel and his ilk: those beholden not to the music, but the industry surrounding it through selling books, articles, liner notes, and pandering to the dinosaurs of the jazz print and recording business.

Mandel further makes the dubious claim that “jazz journalists, scholars and listeners who’ve emerged over the past forty years seem to generally have more nuanced views of who’s black, who’s white, who’s great, who’s not than previous generations did.” Later he lists musicians with “highly diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds,” and asks: “Where do they fit on a color line? Who cares?”

Well, Amiri Baraka for one. And Stanley Crouch, who is a nominee for a lifetime achievement award from the JJA.  Add to this list the cultural and ethnic studies departments in universities all across this country, as well as many in Canada and Europe, who have produced much of the jazz literature over the past thirty years. This radical wing of academia threatens to dominate the jazz discourse, and is intent on hyper-politicizing it. What’s Mandel’s position on this attempt to de-musicalize jazz? Evidently he’s in favor of it, because he cites Jon Panish’s book, The Color of Jazz (itself a product of this ideologically-driven movement), as a much worthier book than mine. In this book, Panish’s writes of “the white male’s continued, unapologetic privileging of the dominant culture’s individualistic ethic, from which he more than anyone else benefited.” In other words: the group ethic is good and the individualistic ethic bad. I doubt whether such iconoclastic individuals as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane would have agreed with such a contention.

But this and so many critical issues I raise in my book are totally sidestepped in Mandel’s review. Among them are: what are the dangers of combining history with social activism? How have both black and white musicians been negatively impacted by stereotypes? Are the rhythmic approaches of African music and jazz fundamentally the same, as so many authors insist? Why have so many African-American musicians disputed this concept? Was the notion that music performed in Congo Square decisively influenced early jazz a sham? How, if at all, did Jim Crow laws affect the creation of jazz? What was Buddy Bolden’s real contribution to the music? When did white musicians begin playing jazz in New Orleans and why? How did pop tunes of the ‘30s influence the emergence of bebop? How does avant-garde jazz relate to the modernist movement? How did the riots of the ‘60s shape race relations in America? Why did the ideals of separatism win out over integration? How did jazz go from a self-proclaimed art form to an icon of black achievement? How have jazz writers been complicit in de-valuing the importance of innovation, meaning a fundamental change in the language of jazz? (Strangely enough, the New York Times maintains that innovation can occur in restaurants, boardrooms, and even on fashion runways, but not in jazz venues–according to Ben Ratliff). Is Wynton Marsalis the equal of Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong given the fact that they were innovators and he is not? Has an emphasis on group identity over individualism contributed to a lack of overall creativity within the jazz scene? How did big business dominate the jazz world for twenty years starting in the 1980s? And I’m just up to chapter 7 (out of 12).

Subsequent chapters deal with business aspects of jazz: audiences and presenters, recording, studio and staff work, agents and managers, and copyrights. I also examine the changing racial dynamic in the United States over the last century, and look at the state of jazz today since the decline of the major labels and the rise of the Internet.

Instead of addressing any of these matters, Mandel recycles tired and threadbare arguments about jazz and race. He casts my book into a generic “sour grapes” category while saying almost nothing about its contents. For instance, does the use of ideology to twist facts bother Mandel at all? Apparently not in the slightest. After all, we live in the best of all possible jazz worlds thanks to the diligent work of jazz writers like himself. “I find little in his selective evidence and muddled analysis,” says Mandel, “to convince me that past perspectives have been overwhelmingly unfair.” Really? Once again Mandel, AKA Dr. Pangloss, is content to gloss over facts, as well as the complicity of his fellow writers in distorting them.

The only thing that bothers Mandel, and irks him to no end, is the prospect of a musician who dares criticize critics. Such insolence, such blasphemy, must be stopped dead in its tracks. To which I say: Dream on, Pangloss, dream on.

Tadd was bad.

Regular readers know that I’ve been working on Monk tunes for the last several months. It’s really the first time in my life that I’ve given concentrated attention over an extended period to playing anyone’s compositions but my own. As a kid, as soon as I could safely escape playing tunes from the standard jazz repertoire, I did. Indeed, I learned the theory undergirding bebop but never really put it into practice. I was more interested in learning and incorporating 20^0th–century classical techniques into my work—tone rows, pitch sets, graphic scores, relative notation, and the like. In addition to the great free jazz guys, I was into “modern” classical composers like John Cage, Earle Brown, and Anton Webern.

(I place the word “modern” in italics, because in fact most of the classical composers I was into had done their most innovative work years and even decades before I first picked up a horn. In fact, an older generation of free jazz guys more directly influenced by the mid-20^0th–century classical avant-garde—artists like Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Dixon, and Anthony Braxton—had a much greater effect on my own music.)

Yet during that time when I was composing, performing and—as a writer—extolling the virtues of modernity, I never stopped listening to the great straight-ahead players. My love for Bird and pre-free Coltrane probably eclipsed the affection I felt for any free jazz musicians but a precious few—guys like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman,  Cecil Taylor, David Murray and his cohorts in the World Saxophone Quartet, and Steve Lacy (not exactly a free player, but always working on the edge). The avant-gardists inspired me creatively, but I never stopped loving the older cats. If anything, their work has come to mean even more to me as I grow older and discover an incredible wealth of great music that I ignored in my youth.

Monk was one of those guys I missed-out on when I was young and stupid. Why I ignored him isn’t especially pertinent to this post. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t as curious as I should have been. Thank goodness I had the good sense to finally check him out in-depth, for listening to him and learning his compositions has been a transformative experience. I’m a better musician for having encountered Monk.

One fact highlighted by this experience is that so few contemporary jazz musicians play compositions written by their peers. So many—including many, maybe most, straight-ahead players—either write their own material or play classic tunes written 30/40/50 years ago. Composers like Monk, or Tadd Dameron, or Duke Ellington, whose tunes appeal to musicians across such a wide spectrum, are a thing of the past.

The world today is a much different place. Jazz styles are more diverse, the music is more far-flung. That’s a good thing in many ways. I am, however, more inclined in my middle age to appreciate the accomplishments of the great jazz composers of the pre-free era, who developed a language so universal and so profound, it continues to enlighten and inspire so many musicians, so many years later.

Tea Partiers, try to remember that Old Tom was coming off a real revolution against tyranny, not some phony baloney version whipped up by cable news.

In the aftermath of the tragedy in Arizona, a debate rages about whether or not it was the cynical manipulations of the Becks and Limbaughs and Palins that inspired Jared Loughner to do the things he did. The defenders on the right say such a notion is ridiculous, even as they try to paint Loughner as a heavy-metal-listening, Communist Manifesto-reading, pot-smoking liberal—using the same type of characteristically pathetic, lying, self-serving, through-the-looking-glass rhetoric that is their stock-in-trade.

Those on the “left”—whatever that means … these days it seems to mean anyone who believes women should keep the vote and Obama isn’t the antichrist—suspect that the hateful verbal imagery used by the right was at least in part Loughner’s motivation.

Still others (a distinct minority, it seems) think Loughner did what he did not because he was egged on by the likes of Michelle Bachmann or Sharron Angle, but because he was quite obviously stark raving mad.

Of the three groups, I would discount only the weasels on the right. They recognize their own culpability. Like any criminal trying to avoid the consequences of his actions, they’ll say anything. As for the other two groups, I suspect that, as time allows for a calmer perspective, they will come to realize that the truth lies somewhere between their present positions.

Two things are indisputable, however. If Arizona law did not make it so easy to buy and carry a semi-automatic weapon, Jared Loughner would not have had access to the Glock 19 he used to kill six people and wound 14 others. And if the bought-and-paid-for-by-the-NRA Republican congress had not allowed the 1994 Assault Weapons ban to expire in 2004, Loughner would not have been able to purchase legally the 30-round magazines he used in the shooting.

I’m not anti-gun. I grew up around them. I know that in the hands of a rational, responsible person, a gun like a Glock 19 is not necessarily a threat to a community’s well-being. I don’t need one and I frankly don’t see why anyone does, but if someone else thinks they need a Glock, that’s ok, as long as they don’t shoot someone with it. Rational, responsible people generally don’t shoot other people.

The problems begin when our allergy to any laws whatsoever regulating guns make it possible for a lunatic like Jared Loughner to buy one legally … and not just any gun—a semi-automatic handgun that can accommodate a ridiculous foot-long magazine which makes it possible to reel off 30 shots in the span of a few seconds. No civilian needs a 30-shot magazine for any reason, least of all a paranoid-schizophrenic whipped into a frenzy by the inflamed rhetoric of political opportunism.

Don’t talk to me about slippery slopes. Don’t tell me that Obama wants your gun so he can more easily send the guys in the black helicopters to sweep you up and take you to the Gulag to make ID cards for his commie/fascist health care plan. If you’re not a nut or a criminal, you can have your gun—your six-shot revolver, your .30–06 rifle, even your Glock 19 with the standard issue ten-shot magazine. I don’t need ‘em, but if you can follow the rules and avoid shooting anybody or using them to hold-up gas stations, you might as well have ‘em. Gun ownership is too much a part of this country’s history (guaranteed to its citizens 235 years ago by a group of men who could never have foreseen anything like a Glock 19) for us to ever disentangle and eliminate it completely. This isn’t an ideal state of affairs. It’s just a fact of life.

But let’s pass some laws that keep guns of any kind out of the hands of the mentally ill. And let’s make it impossible for anyone to get their hands on a 30-shot magazine, because as long as those things are being manufactured and sold—the more of them that we have lying around—the likelihood of another massacre in the current poisoned political environment grows exponentially.

Let’s make it known to the idiots in Washington that it’s in their best interest to use their common sense on this one. They sure as heck aren’t going to do it on their own.

Not this Faith. I mean, she’s nice and all …

I’m not a religious person. Far from it. In fact, I’m the total opposite, if you get my drift. However, those religious folks have one thing of which I’d most definitely like a piece.

Faith.

I want it. I need it.

Not in the sense of believing in a supreme being, or that I’m going to heaven when I die. Nothing at all metaphysical.

I’m talking faith in myself.

There are times when I play my horn and love everything that comes out. Every idea seems elegant and profound. It happens often. There are times when I struggle, but they’re the exception. Most times, when I improvise, the horn feels like an extension of me. Playing feels as natural as talking, laughing … crying.

The problem comes when I’m not playing. When I listen to a recording of myself, or contemplate playing with someone new. Confidence can evaporate quicker than an Eric Dolphy sixteenth note. Doubt seeps in, self-regard plummets. My breathing gets fast. I begin counting the ways I suck. Paralysis sets in.

I try to remember positives—good reviews, compliments received—but a negative corner of my mind laughs and tells me: The people who said nice things about you were idiots. You should’ve listened to the college professor who told you that you were the worst legit sax player he’d ever heard; the stage band director who dropped you from his ensemble because he didn’t dig your playing; the record reviewer who trashed your first album. They’re the ones who knew what they were talkin’ about. You can’t play. Give it up.

A nice big helping of faith would come in handy at a time like that.

I might not be as good as I think when I’m feeling my best. But surely I’m not as bad as when I feel my worst.

That way I feel while in the act of creating music? I need it to become my default position. I need to believe that it’s the real me.

I need faith.

I’m betting I’m not the only one.