Fifteen Years Burning Down the Road...

My wife and I are experiencing hard times as we both find ourselves stretched to the limit. My wife has recently opened her own business and happens to be at the point in the life of it that requires hours and hours of dedication. Of course, like a relationship, a business needs blood, sweat, toil and tears and my wife has given each of the four. I think that she sees that all of her hard work is paying off in several ways; already she is making moves of opening a second business. This second business will be in our home town, which, even with the strain of opening a second location, means that she'll save over three hours of each day since she isn't commuting. Thoreau was right about the mass of men; today, countless millions of Americans lead lives of quiet desperation in absolute solitary confinement behind the wheels of their automobiles. I find my own personal hell in different ways but am amazed as my wife sacrifices so much of her own time daily in that damned Honda. Obivously this cuts into time that she can spend doing anything else, but our greatest struggle is balancing time with our young son. I can only imagine the stress and guilt my wife's experiencing as she knows she misses so much time with our son. He's the second major focus of our lives that is so central but difficult to balance. I wish I could spend every waking hour with my son and yet at times enjoy being able to go to work and not have to "parent" every minute with my boy. This semester of school, though, has allowed me more time with my son which helps my wife feel a bit better as she knows that our boy isn't in daycare but with her daddy. My son is an amazing reminder of how blessed my life is; I've said many times before and actually believe that the more I look at my son, the more I believe in God. My little boy makes me remake so much of my life and its direction and how I need to always keep his interests ahead of mine. Thankfully, my little boy has made me realize that my work, my chores, my free time and my own interests truly mean nothing compared to spending time with him that I'll never be able to recapture. At the risk of being completely cheesy, I bathed my son tonight and listened to Jim Croce and his signature song "Time In a Bottle" came on. That song alone makes one entirely understanding of his own mortality appreciate every breath, every hug, every splash, run around the table or "ELMO!!!!!!" the most valuable and rewarding experience of my life.

I completed my viewing of the Ken Burns' ten-disc Jazz dvd. On MLK day, I had a couple of hours to spare as my boy ran around the table and played with his toys. I threw in the last episode and as I remember from television five years ago, it truly was a disppointment. Where some of the previous episodes analyzed two to three years of pivotal jazz history, this last episode spent two years on more than forty years of some of the most valuable music of the twentieth century. Burns spent most of his time looking at personalities; the 1960s was John Coltrane and his demise; the early 70s was epitomized by the deaths of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as the absolute collapse of jazz as people knew it. Only the continuation of the art form by players such as Dexter Gordon kept the music alive and vital. This, obviously, is sheer bunk, as while the genre suffered greatly from the 70s and 80s as other forms of music flourished, jazz was busy evolving like rock and soul and disco. I am no expert on the genre, but jazz was evolving into a vibrant and eclectic movement of fusion; listening to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock will show that bop and bebop were truly things of the past. Watermelon Man or anything by John McLaughlin was as dynamic as Clifford Brown's trumpet playing two decades previous. The inclusion of rock music and musicians took both genres and expanded their horizons; Carlos Santana's greatest moments on vinyl were either with or inspired by McLaughlin, Coltrane or other jazz greats. Joni Mitchell was smashing barriers and even Steely Dan was incorporating jazz-tinged sounds or instruments that had yet to be used by popular musicians. Maybe it took the raising of expectations of rock in the 70s to incorporate other styles of music or that the music had gained accessibility but jazz in the 70s had not died. It simply evolved so far from its original roots that it was hardly identifiable.
Burns, however, does what he does in all of his documentaries, which helps the viewer find her or his true north by digging up something or someone who has helped return people to the roots or origins of whatever it is Burns is writing about; in this case, the messiah, the leader into the promised land, happens to be Wynton Marsalis. This trumpter, even in his early twenties, is the savior of jazz because he chooses not to incorporate stylings even imagined in the 1950s. This young leader brings us back to the days of swing and its beatific glories; only the apostates surely enjoyed music from the Sixties or beyond and God forbid that even further new ground be broken. The savior is truly one that has helped us awaken in us a love for neoclassicism, and this documentary maker shows us that now, since we are returned to our roots, we shall bask in the glories of those who have shown us that as long as we find what lies behind us, we shall see what lies ahead. This is not history, this is myth. Burns spun similar stories in other documentaries, showing viewers that as we continue to urbanize, we move farther from our American roots planted by Lewis and Clark; the more business involves itself in professional sports, the further we move away from the true spirt of baseball and the more we advance technologically and grow more diverse, the farther we shall continue to abandon the better angels of our nature. This documentarian/mythmaker does nothing but tell us moderns that as we create our own history it is false history if it moves in a direction otherwise unseen, that the pathfinders are all gone and we are only to follow and not lead in our journeys through life. I'd love to see how depressed, how insipid one of Ken Burns' documentaries of the 1980s or even suburbia would be. Nothing to be hopeful for, no gods to have touched earth and then move on, no prophesy to fulfill. Burns succeeded in outlining the roots of a truly American art form and yet loses sight of the art when he chooses not to recognize just how it had adapted to its environment; jazz in the 1970s was not Artie Shaw nor any other bandleader of the swing era; what to do, then, for performers like Sonny Rollins, Monk, McCoy Tyner or Bobby Hutcherson but to keep at it and pray for a renaissance, or yet, the second coming.