Since I've been away, I've been having my ususal ups and downs. I could go into gory detail, and at some point I will, but in the midst of all this conflict and having to adapt to situations I wasn't terribly happy with, I managed to find pleasant distractions. One of them being music. I would find a quiet time, usually late at night into the morning hours, much like now. I seem to be more creative at night. My promotions work is done under Nephthys One Media Managment, Nephthys being one of the Goddesses of Night.
So in these late, quiet times, I'd get on my laptop and play with Reason. I can't say more about these programs. If you can get your hands on one of them, give yourself the patience to learn it. Think of it as a music toy and you can play things however you like. The trick is to actually have a good ear for melody and rhythm and harmony and such. I have to give credit to people I remember stimulating me with music.
The first are my uncles. They were teenagers when I was born, and they had very eclectic tastes for black men in the early 70's. They, and my parents, listened to the Beatles and Zepplin and the Doors and The Faces and all these tripped out UK bands. My first official favorite band was The Police. I was 9. My uncle brought Outlandos D'Amour and Zenyatta Mondatta and I literally fell in love with it. It was the first music where I really understood the lyrics and the music mezmerized me. Then I fell in love with Jimi Hendrix after a friend taped every song he ever made and gave it to me for my birthday. I was convinced that if only I had been alive and an adult when he was, he would still be here. What a cosmic joke that the man of my dreams died when I was 10 months old. Then I went through a MAJOR Beatles phase, just around the whole 20 anniversary of the Summer of Love stuff. I hippied out and decided that Paul is my favorite, John was a genius in his own right, and George kinda creeped me out, but I grew to dig his vibe. Ringo doesn't make any impression on me. He's like the Shemp of the Beatles.
I also had a great 5th grade teacher named Mr. Kolataze at P.S. 97 in the Bronx. I had moved there in the mid- 4th grade, so I was the New Girl. That year was tough. I had come from a school in Yonkers that was one of those progressive schools with no walls and split grade classes. I could read very well when I went to kindergarten so they had me go to 3rd grade reading classes. I was in a class where it was high functioning 4th graders and mid fuctioning 5th graders. I guess the idea was that somewhere in the middle they could close the gap. Seemed to work, from what I remember. Very different from an old 85 year old school with traditional wooden desks and the big creaky windows that you needed a long stick to open. I went from New Age to Old School, and I stuck out. But I was still bright and got along. In the 5th grade, I had Kolataze and I knew right away it was going to be a cool year. He was tall, lean, good looking and had longish hair and he was a piano player who LOVED Beethoven. Had a bust of him right on the piano in the classroom. He could play his ass off and he would take bee pollen in the middle of class and taught us to play Song of Joy on the recorder and did cool shit like play the soundtrack to The Shining beacause it was all Bela Bartok music. I was 10 and listening to Bartok and sneaking to watch the movie so I could see what I heard. AND we still managed to learn all our other subjects. He was the kind of teacher I liked..they knew when to be serious and when to be really cool and you did well in his class cause you really wanted to. You felt like the cool stuff was the bonus for doing the boring stuff. That was the year Lennon got killed and the guy was destroyed. He just sat at the piano and played slow, sad Beatles stuff and we listened to Sgt Pepper, and I really understood how deep music was. He was so cool that he even dated someone's mom at school. It was the talk of 1980. Mrs. Andrucki. Either widowed or divorced or maybe still married, who knows. One of her daughters was a year ahead of me and one a year behind. The got one look at each other and it was a wrap. The last time I ran into him in the 90's, they were still together.
So, now I sit here and experiment my own. Once I figure out which site I can load it to, you'll hear it. Soon Come..
