weather report

i hit a bit of a wall today - low energy after a night of fitful sleeping. i was running low on energy around nine and so ploughed back a really good and strong mug of coffee. it did what i wanted it to - jacked me wayyyyyy up and of course i came down. but my body plays tag with caffeine and so around two in the morning i woke up and listened to the various wheezings and snorings and rustlings and house cooling down popping and stretching sounds around my supine form, and then got up for an around-the-house walk and of course got back into bed and lay there running life past my mind’s eye. mostly useless trivia and low level grunt stuff but some good things blew past and i replayed some of those good things. kind of like eating candy ‘till you’re sick of it.
waking up after a a night of that drivel and drollery is brutal and this morning was no exception. i had a deep sense of futility and i did manage to find a brave and honest face and maybe even some exuberance but i knew it couldn’t last and sure enough the grumps came over me around two when in the ideal real world of my imagining (and summer experiencing) i felt the undeniable urge to nap. but when you’re working you can’t nap. doctors and even corporate monkeys admit that the afternoon nap is a good thing and even works. but the public education system hasn’t caught onto that. heck even the little weebles have lost that privilege.
anyhow, focus on the goodness in the day hmmmmm lemme see now. beautiful deep sunshine and warmth - seasonal perhaps but still a reminder of the glorious summer days when i could dream about how good a teacher i was going to be this year, read volumes of books, listen to all kinds of music and watch films like mad. today was about recognizing the constraints of my work . . . . and anyone reading this who knows me is aware that i love my work. there are days though when i resent how that love is compromised.
so tonight’s music is weather report live in tokyo in 1972 . . . . joe zawinul the keyboardist (died a week and a half ago) apparently instructed the band to “hit ‘em hard right from the first note”. this is uncompromising electric jazz with the mournful soprano sax of wayne shorter lifting the music out of its electric percussive edginess into a more pensive and cerebral realm.
here’s part of a review that took place after the event:
”Part of the fire seemed to come from the Japanese people themselves. "When we went to Japan we didn't know what kind of a response we would get, but I couldn't believe what happened. We thought, 'What are we gonna do with these Japanese people, man?' They're so beautiful, such wonderful listeners, but laid back. That was their culture. So we said, 'Let's hit 'em hard, right from the first note,' and we hit 'em hard! We improvised, because the tunes we had written at that time were not very long--eight bars here, a nice little melody, and so on--but we worked it over, and sometimes we'd play it long, sometimes short. It was an inspirational way of doing things, and through that slowly we developed into a band."

i saw weather report years ago in toronto - probably a half dozen years after this album. they had found a mellow accessible edge that sold many records and allowed some elements of the force that weather report was to surface without scaring off the paying customers. this tokyo concert reminds me of the tremendous changes jazz and rock underwent in the early seventies as the earliest of the global influences and the advent of a more accessible avant garde merged into bands such as weather report, mahavishnu orchestra, return to forever, herbie hancock and the headhunters and of course, miles davis’ electric bands.