By the time I had sent my last email to MySpace help, I was a bit frazzled. So I decided to listen to music and read. Of course the dogs were crawling all over me. But that is just how it is.

So as I was listening to Bill Evans play his lovely jazz piano I began to imagine that I was in a darkened club, I could see the glow of cigarettes, and hear the sound of glasses clinking. I began to think how I moved from my original love of Classical music to Jazz.

When I was about 15 years old, a friend of my father’s gave me an LP called Red Hot and Cool by the Dave Brubeck quartet. I put it on and found all sorts of dissonance and strange rhythms. I remember thinking that this was very strange and I put the album away for a long time. As time went on I began to hear more and more jazz. I found that the dissonance was actually very beautiful and the strange rhythms were interesting. This was in the middle 50’s. I listened to Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Bill Evans, George Shearing, Gabor Szabo, Chet Baker, Charlie Hayden, and eventually Miles Davis. There was something about this music that allowed me to relax and, and take me to magical places. I still loved Classical, Rock, blues, and Folk music. I had started playing the guitar at age 11, and began to listen to Charlie Byrd. Charlie Byrd was a jazz guitarist who had decided that there was something more for his guitar to do then to be part of the rhythm section. Jazz is about the interweaving of melodies and if all you play are chords then you are really offering nothing more then rhythm. He moved to Spain in order to study with Andre Segovia, the foremost classical guitarist in the world at the time. Charlie Byrd wanted to be able to use his instrument in the way a piano player or sax player uses their instruments. He learned to use his fingers to play one note at a time and therefore could now play melodies and harmonize with other musicians. I used to listen to him at least once a day. I was inspired to take classical lessons. I wanted to be the master of my instrument. It turned out that once I began to learn, everything I played became much better. I was a better blues, folk, classical, and jazz musician. I had a guitar with me every where I went. I could sit for hours and play and just leave this planet and be in my own little world. It’s a good thing I didn’t bring this up too often or I might have been committed.

The more I played the more I loved music, and it didn’t matter what the genre was. Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Pete Seger, The Weavers, Lighting Hopkins, Segovia, Brubeck, Desmond, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Miles, Charlie Hayden, and of course Charlie Byrd were favorites of mine. I began to learn about swing, Broadway show tunes, Ragtime, and every thing else I could find. By the time I was in College I was a music major. By that time I could play piano, violin, and guitar. I began to realize that although I was pretty good I wasn’t that good and no matter how hard I worked I would never make a living as a musician.

I decided that I would have to find a way to make a living some other way. I took math courses, language courses, and all sorts of other course but I just couldn’t stay interested long enough to develop a major. I did have the music minor but you need a major to graduate. After about four years I went out and found a job. I was good at what I did and kept moving up in companies until I was earning a decent living and managing one or more departments. I didn’t love it but I could support my family and I made every employer that I had realize that if they didn’t want my music playing in the background, they didn’t want me. These were always short conversations. By 1965 I was listening or playing music for most of my waking hours.

Then they invented the mp3 player and finally the Ipod. I must have over 700 cd’s. I have over 100GB recorded. Well this write began with my listening to music last night. I was listening to Paul Desmond playing, Song for A Seagull. His soprano sax starts out playing in a soft melodic beautiful manner and all of a sudden it was early morning here on the island, the sky was gray, fog was swirling, and a seagull was soaring into view. I could see this just as sure as I knew that my Lab was standing on my stomach.

Music can take you places and open your mind to all sorts of possibilities. It doesn’t matter what kind of music or what part of the world it comes from. It has the power to unite us and tell us that we have enough in common to be able to get along together.

Thank you for allowing me to go on and on. Peace, howie