professional soapbox

I almost just booked a flight to New Orleans: they are very cheap, and it is on my short list of places to check out--music, vibe, poverty, party-ethic, tantra girls, ethnic mixing, creole pidgins, weird food, familiarity with devastation, recovering from war...the town has a lot of what I like, and may be as close to Berlin as I come in this country. A friend is going for Mardi Gras, and that's when I was looking, but...

I'm not sure if that's really the best time. For one thing, rooms are hard to find and pricey. (Although I think I could find my way around that, it might not meet my need for ease). The other is that it's probably like Indian Market around here, when it's harder to connect with locals because everything is such a silly mess. As a rapidly-turning-pro traveler, I like off-seasons...accessibility to folks, rooms, good service, low-key off-the-map fun is much higher. Of course this means I have to again randomly decide WHEN to go again!

The main draw is entirely different music scene than what I experienced the other day and night, which after putting myself and music out here so many times, I'm tired of. I hate Professional Music. Even in a living room or a public circle. I always have. Ever since I went to Berklee in Boston in 19frikin81, I have loathed the so-called music made by people who play with technique but no emotion, who consider it an achievement to play a style just right, with all the right cliches, but no meaning or purpose or even the fun of contributing some danceable rhythm to the world. Showing off is fun, but not the core of anything in life! And I am finally clear on this, hallelujah, thanks for listening.

In Berlin, for example, I played rhythm on a frikkin beer bottle, and any other available percussion, my first night there, after getting hauled across town in a tiny car with three other large guys, because only one owned a car which we waited an hour for to arrive...where powerful German rock drummer Andreas (think large, white Teuton...and extremely nice) who spoke German and English but not French, an amazing French jazz bass player Andre (a very quiet and intense Black man with Jaco Pastorius chops) who only spoke French, and Guy the Brazilian (likely the most gregarious guy I've ever met--who invited me to the jam minutes after I introduced myself to him on the street, which was minutes after I arrived in Berlin) who spoke five languages and translated everything, as well as playing incongruously mellifluous Latin guitar grooves...all of which added up to a very loud, chaotic, incredibly fun, rhythmic, often synchronized, hours-long, all-time-great funk jam... with smoke breaks of course, in this concrete basement in some wrecked industrial side of Berlin I would not be able to find again, and mostly which I deeply grateful to have been a witness to, of which I have a few minutes of completely useless distorted recordings on one of my myriad microcassettes somewhere which I will also likely never find again.

That's in line with what making music is to me. Maybe I need to call it something else?