I live in Pawl­ing, New York, a lit­tle town in Dutchess County, about an hour-and-a-half north of New York City. For a lit­tle town of 4000 or so, Pawl­ing has a sur­pris­ing num­ber of claims-to-fame. George Wash­ing­ton lit­er­ally slept here dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion (not the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion in Jazz, but rather the big 18^th cen­tury Patri­ots vs. Red­coats con­tretemps). Pawl­ing was his field head­quar­ters for sev­eral months.

In the 20th cen­tury, the town was home to for­mer New York Gov­er­nor Thomas Dewey of “Dewey Defeats Tru­man” fame. Pio­neer­ing broad­cast­ers Edward R. Mur­row and Low­ell Thomas also lived in Pawl­ing. Today, actor James Earl Jones resides here­abouts (my son Jasper and I met him at the local post office the day before Thanks­giv­ing one year, Jasper very psy­ched to get the auto­graph of the guy who voiced Darth Vader), as does — or so I’m told — Sally Jessy Raphael.

How­ever, as I was reminded yes­ter­day in a brief mis­sive from writer/videographer Bret Pri­mack, Pawling’s most famous cit­i­zen was Dr. Nor­man Vin­cent Peale, who in the ‘50s authored The Power of Pos­i­tive Think­ing.

I will admit right here and now that I know next to noth­ing about Mr. Peale, whose death in 1993 pre­ceded our res­i­dence here by eight years.  I’ve never read any­thing he wrote. My wife attends a church here in town where he once preached. His name is all over it, but I don’t go to church, so I’ve never felt the urge to check him out.

Not until a few min­utes ago, when I checked his Wikipedia entry, did I know Peale was one of those short-sighted Protes­tant cler­gy­men who in 1960 opposed the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of John F. Kennedy, fear­ing the Catholic Kennedy would take direc­tion from the pope.

I know next to noth­ing about Peale’s “Power of Pos­i­tive Think­ing” phi­los­o­phy, other than the title has a nice ring to it. Appar­ently, like so many of today’s self-help gurus,  Peale was con­sid­ered some­thing of a snake-oil sales­man in his time, espe­cially by those in the psy­chi­atric pro­fes­sion (it takes one to know one, I guess … ba-dum-bum).

Per­haps because of Peale and oth­ers like him, the idea of think­ing pos­i­tively gets a bad rap. I myself  was once one of those bad-rappers (not the Vanilla Ice kind) … out of sheer cyn­i­cism, mainly.

These days, such skep­ti­cism seems to be in the air. For exam­ple, author Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich recently wrote Bright-sided: How the Relent­less Pro­mo­tion of Pos­i­tive Think­ing Has Under­mined Amer­ica, a book appar­ently devoted to tak­ing the con­cept of “think­ing good thoughts” down sev­eral pegs. At one point in my life I would’ve jumped on her the­sis and rode it like a hun­gry pig at slop­pin’ time.

But not long ago I had an epiphany.

I real­ized that no one who’s ever accom­plished some­thing great has got­ten there by think­ing, “Well, I’m going to try to do this great thing, but I’ll prob­a­bly fail.”

Untold num­bers of peo­ple through the ages have held that low esti­ma­tion of their prospects. Unless they’re your Cousin Larry or Aunt Myr­tle, you’ve never heard of them. Why? Because (sur­prise!) they failed.

Did Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell invent the tele­phone think­ing, “I prob­a­bly can’t do it, and even if I can, in 150 years, polit­i­cal con­sul­tants will just invent robo-calling, which would suck, so really, what’s the point?”

Did Richard Bran­son start Vir­gin think­ing “Yeah, but it’ll never be any­thing but a mail-order record business?”

Did Beethoven go deaf and say, “That’s it, I’m done, where’s the opium?”

I see a lot writ­ten about how the most cre­ative musi­cal efforts are doomed to obscu­rity, how they’ll never find an audi­ence, how Free Jazz — my par­tic­u­lar pas­sion — was a dead end that never caught-on with sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of peo­ple and never will. Or how jazz in gen­eral is a dying art form, a his­tor­i­cal arti­fact whose only hope of preser­va­tion lies in the formaldehyde-filled jars of well-meaning but mis­guided non-profit organizations.

If those ideas gain trac­tion, espe­cially among those who have a rea­son to refute them, the prophe­cies will ful­fill themselves.

The music world as we knew it a decade ago is falling down around our ears. The changes in the indus­try pre­saged by the rise of file-sharing and the decline of the over­all econ­omy have come to pass. Record com­pa­nies are increas­ingly irrel­e­vant. Jazz clubs are closing.

The truth is, we don’t know how it’s all gonna shake out. We don’t know what form jazz will take, how it will sound, how it will be con­sumed either as a recorded medium or in live performance.

We do know, how­ever, that jazz has a power, and that power will not wane if we refuse to let it. That means we can’t let despair get the bet­ter of us. That means, rather than shoot the mes­sen­ger that tells us jazz is in trou­ble, we should heed his warn­ings and work to devise ways to build that audi­ence to a level com­men­su­rate with the music’s quality.

The other day, Matt LeGroulx sent me an e-mail that said, in effect, years from now peo­ple will look back on this time as a golden age, where musi­cians dis­cov­ered the free­dom to do what they want when they wanted, unfil­tered by old mech­a­nisms that deter­mined what did and didn’t get heard. I think he’s right, and hal­lelu­jah for that, but there’s the ques­tion of pay­ing the bills, and that’s no small concern.

The decline of the scle­rotic music indus­try has led to more artis­tic free­dom, and that’s good, but we need to use our newly found inde­pen­dence to devise viable means of get­ting paid to replace the old, now obso­lete ways. It’s a huge chal­lenge, one that will take great inge­nu­ity and effort, yet I have no doubt it can be done. The recent changes present a new oppor­tu­nity, and we need to take advantage.

Hold off on the epi­taphs, and let’s get to work. Peo­ple are smarter than we some­times give them credit for.  The audi­ence for intel­li­gent, forward-thinking music is out there. That audi­ence might not be able to afford the $50 cover and two-drink per-set min­i­mum charged by the big present-day jazz clubs (no won­der they’re going-under right and left), but I’ll bet they’ll be more than happy to pay a rea­son­able amount if we give them some­thing worth pay­ing for. Let’s fig­ure out strate­gies to get the music to them in ways that will ben­e­fit us both.

We might have to hunt awhile to find them. And once we do find them, we might actu­ally have to be nice to them, say a few words, treat them like we appre­ci­ate their appre­ci­a­tion. We might actu­ally have to go to them, rather than have them come to us. But the audi­ence is there. We can’t har­bor even the slight­est doubt about that. If we do, we’re licked before we start.