Birth and Death and What's in Between

It's 2022.07.01 on the lunar calendar today.

Hello! I'm away right now on a recording retreat with the band, a couple hours out from Los Angeles. The idea for the Jungian album came about near the end of 2020 and while it has morphed and taken shape since then, I'm thinking the initial notion of it helping me gain my footing in the second half of life still holds.

Reading Richard Rohr's "Falling Upward," I was thinking about the

two halves of life

 and drew the stick-figure diagram above, feeling that I had broken away from the first half but that I was stuck in the chasm between the halves and just beginning to make my way up to the second half. Stay tuned for what that sounds like. 

Crescent the Chromatic Bears Turns 10!

Please wish Crescent the Chromatic Bear a happy birthday! He came into the world ten years ago when I took my classmate Pat Carroll's transcription of Coltrane's solo on "Crescent" and wrote a vocalese story to it. In his brief life, he's had his 15 minutes of jazz fame when

Dave Liebman raved about him

 and has been acquainted with classrooms of confused first graders who have mistaken his friend Bessie the ant for a caterpillar. Press his nose for the story.

In Memoriam

I was saddened to hear about the passing of

Professor Richard Taruskin (1945–2022)

from the music department at Berkeley. He will be missed, not only in his celebrity an "

unabashed flamethrower

" in musicology but by the generations of music students he inspired in a small classroom in Morrison Hall. He was old-school, always in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, but the stories he told from Western music history felt current. 

I had given up on his impossible listening exams and was resigned to submitting papers without a thesis—which must have baffled the graduate student instructor reading them—but I looked forward to every one of his lectures. I loved listening while doodling and taking notes, seated in a chair-desk combo near the back door. No doubt he was one of the greats.

To this day, I think about something Professor Taruskin would say in his class:

“The problem with music ... is that it takes time.”

Stay cool 🏝️

www.joycekwon.com