Midlife Meditation

Vandalism on the car and home of recent emigrees to Portland. I was grooving to a blues band when Amy showed me her phone. She had clicked on a Facebook link that took her to an Oregonian  stor y about a young couple whose home and car had been vandalized, possibly by an impatient motorist who, after having to briefly wait behind their car as one dropped the other off at their home, shouted at them to "go home to fucking California." It was a beautiful day on the waterfront, and the music was all good--ten great bands, no two of them alike, all at the top of their game--matched with an enthusiastic, joyous crowd; and yet, seeing the picture, and putting it in the context of this time of great political turmoil, I couldn't help but be brought down. In fact, if this were a vlog instead of a blog, I'd sing you some blues, something like this: I just looked at the paper, and what I saw brought me down. That's right I just looked at the paper, and it really br...

Sure, they look far more fierce than meek, but read on to find out how they got there. The occasion for this post: I'm in San Francisco re-taking Doug Goodkin's "Jazz Course," a week-long workshop on how to teach jazz to young children. Doug is a master teacher of the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education. Studying with him has shaped me as an educator, a musician, and a spiritual human being, and this course is a huge part of that. Most programs for jazz education are aimed at secondary and collegiate instruction. The Jazz Course is unique in its focus on children between the ages of 3 and 13. I took the course in 2008, and was inspired to build an entire year's curriculum around jazz. I'm back now, seven years later, with my full Orff certification, dozens of workshops, last week's trip to Ghana, and several more years' experience under my belt. Most importantly, I've got a far greater jazz vocabulary: as much as I knew about jazz (an...