Ted Gioia remembers his first ever jazz show, seeing Yusef Lateef in LA. It changed his life.
17 seconds into the performance by the Yusef Lateef Quartet. I honestly wanted to jump up, and tell everybody in the nightclub:
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
I knew in that instant that everything in my life had been leading up to this. And I’d been wasting my time with rock and pop and classical music. My destiny was jazz.
I had a similar experience with jazz. It was perhaps 1986 in Toronto and my friend Winston Smith, who worked at my local bookstore, Writers & Co. Invited me to go see Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy at The Rivoli on Queen Street. Winston fed me a steady diet of novels and poetry by African American writers like John Edgar Wideman and Nathanial Mackey and he turned my head when it came to music. And while the records he leant me were one thing seeing two master improvisers at work live was another thing altogether.
Waldron and Lacy were a phenomenal duet. Together they spanned the history of the genre. Waldron was one of Billie Holiday’s accompanists and Lacy played with the likes of Cecil Taylor. Their set was full of Monk tunes and original compositions that strayed wildly from the head as they entered into free music together. It was my introduction to this kind of jazz.
Unlike Gioia this performance didn’t make me want to play the music. I found it raw and intimidating and had no way in with the limited guitar technique I had. There were no guitar players making this music other than Sonny Sharrock and so what it did was light a fire in me for this music and art that approached this kind of intensity and thoughtfulness.
Life changing.
Go read this amazing blog post about these two musicians and their long history together.
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Louise Erdrich, courtesy of Maria Popova
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Got it.
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My spark bird was a Bufflehead duck seen in 1991 through the binoculars that were a childhood gift. I was walking with Caitlin across a bridge in Peterborough on a still and hot summer night and we were looking for birds. She pointed to the small black and white duck with a bright white patch on its head and said "Bufflehead." For whatever reason, I thought the only ducks were Mallards, familiar to the parks and lake shore where I grew up in Toronto. The Bufflehead was a revelation.
Today I found this BEAUTIFUL site called "Searching for Birds" which you should lose yourself in.
And also, with yesterday's Stellar Jay, I'm up to 157 species for the year so far.
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It has taken me a while, but I have finally deleted my Facebook account.
Lots of you will say “it’s about time” and others will say “oh no! that’s how we stay connected.” Doesn’t matter. You can easily find me on the actual internet.
I’ll tell you why I did it. For a website that knows more about me than I know about myself, today I was served a stream of hate in my feed related to a mass shooting that happened yesterday in British Columbia. I am not going into any more details than that. But it is OBVIOUS to me that the Facebook algorithm chose the material to put in front of me that would enrage rather than inform or connect. It was so hateful that I wasted no time in actually searching for the arcane spells to chant to do it and then I did it. I am no longer on Facebook.
I know all about the kind of place that Facebook is and the kind of violence it enables. I know that they are complexity unaccountable for the hate they spread. I have gradually weaned myself away from it, keeping it mostly to stay connected to local events. But today was the last straw.
So. How’s your day going?
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When Mark Carney killed the carbon tax, Canada gave up its last shred of honesty about addressing the climate crisis. Oil companies got their way. We have built them pipelines, we have passed legislation to ease restrictions on their infrastructure projects and we are now pandering to an astro-turfed movement Alberta that is funded by the oil and gas sector and which, if it ever became a more serious threat than simply a partisan shill show, would threaten the unity of the country.
We are a climate change pariah, a position that we have never been very far away from. But it is clear now that the Canadian policy sphere is far more interested in crating the conditions for profiting from climate change than it is from doing our part to address it. We are working to enable a bunch of people who are shorting life on earth.
Catherine McKenna, the former federal environment minister, was quite candid about why the carbon tax didn’t stand a chance once the oil and gas lobbies, aided by a movement of “conservatives” who were doing their bidding, got their tendrils into the policy shop. She has published a new memoir and excerpted part of it on a Substack post which makes for fascinating reading.
In the end, Canada lost a climate policy that worked to reduce emissions in the most cost effective way, ensured that most families were better off (especially middle- and low-income ones), while creating an incentive for people to save even more money by choosing more energy efficient options, and which provided an opportunity for businesses to innovate and develop clean solutions. Losing a policy which leads to one of the most significant reductions in Canada’s emissions makes hitting the country’s climate target even harder.
Justin Trudeau can take the blame for a lot of this. Carney too. We will never hit the targets we need to. The Conservatives, who backed off their own preferred policy choice and convinced the Canadian electorate that a program that fairly priced carbon AND put money in the pockets of most Canadians was the height of evil.
Now you have Pierre Poilievre touting a further reduction in industrial carbon pricing to somehow make groceries more affordable for average people. He’s wrong about that, but Conservatives these days will cite any rationale, no matter how flimsy as long as taxes on the wealthy can be reduced.
The net result of all of this bad policy and a decade of stupid politics is a world in which there will be no more climate change solutions addressed by Canadian lawmakers until such a time as the market prices renewables so low that braying for markets for bitumen will look as archaic as whale oil. And our country will not be part of that conversation, because we will be relying on Chinese and European technology and resources to do it while still trying to jam sticky oil into tubes and send it to the coast to markets that don’t want it at a price that doesn’t make mining it profitable.