Setback

So here’s one of those things that happens that makes me wonder whether my responses to reality are inappropriate or not. Am I crazy?

They like my workshops, but they tell me I can’t continue unless I get cleared by the FBI.

Cleared by the FBI???

WTF?

I’m trying to volunteer. I’m not getting paid. I’m taking my own time and resources to drive all over the city to help people have fun improvising music, and in order to that I have to get FBI clearance? Get my fingerprints taken and put into that vast black box that our justice system uses to blackball anyone they don’t like for any reason they want?

When I grew up, the cops were being used to suppress opposition. They thought nothing of shooting at young people who were merely protesting a war that seemed to have no purpose and was killing so many of their fellow youngsters. When I was young, the feds were killing students everywhere from Kent State to Philadelphia Mississippi. It was so clear to me that the police thought like bullies and had little compassion.

Have things changed that much since then? How many people have been killed by cops in the last few months just because of the color of their skin? They were totally cooperating but it didn’t matter. They were killed because the cops couldn’t control their own fear.

My first job after college was canvassing for the equal rights amendment. We were trying to engage in political speech, going door to door, asking people for financial support, and the cops were always trying to stop us. They didn’t care about speech. They just wanted to keep strangers from knocking on their neighbors’ door. I never got arrested, but I’ve spent more time than I cared to sitting in police lobbies while they try to sort out whether we have a right to speak or not.

Nowadays, the “justice” department and the security departments have vast advances in technology that they can use to bully and intimidate people into behaving like normal people. Unfortunately, I can’t behave like a normal person even if I wanted to. I’ve got a diagnosis. I’m certifiably different from most people. Supposedly, there’s something wrong with my brain that makes me behave in ways that are against my own best interest, as other people see it. Who knows? Perhaps I am doing that now, writing this.

I’ve been a data librarian. I’ve dealt with large data bases. I know how much one can learn from seemingly innocuous data. Do I want to give away information to vast bureaucracies that engage in group think and are afraid of their own shadows? Do I want to let people have an easier time punishing me and forcing me to conform if they should ever have a desire to do so?

I can’t imagine that they would ever have such a desire. I’m a good person. But then, people have weird ideas about the mentally ill. They want to take away our right to own guns. Personally, I don’t think anyone should have a right to own a gun. I don’t think the cops should carry them around. So many people would still be alive if we didn’t have such easy access to guns. So many people would have had to find another way to kill themselves if we didn’t have such easy access to guns and guns weren’t so easy to use.

I don’t want to make it any easier for cops to make me change the way I live. Even if the chances are very low that this will happen, I don’t want to make it any easier.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that doing background checks actually make us any safer. I think using vast databases to make decisions is the lazy person’s way to evaluate others. So many people get caught up and punished forever for doing silly things. Getting drunk and getting caught urinating in public can get you banned from working with children, forever. It’s a sex offense that can get you on public lists. That’s just plain stupid.

The best way to evaluate people is to pay attention to them; to work with them; to see how they interact with the people they work for or with or who they serve. Bureaucracy is supposed to make it possible for vast organizations to control the workforce and this is supposed to be more efficient.

It isn’t. It discourages creativity and innovation. I don’t want to get caught up in these kinds of supposedly benign but secretly destructive social mechanisms.

So I don’t want to get my background checked, even though there’s nothing there to worry about. Or maybe something could show up, simply because these systems make a lot of mistakes. How many times have bill collectors harassed me on the phone because my name is so common. Never mind these other David Fords have completely different addresses. They can’t even be bothered to use the data easily available to them to figure that out. Laziness, venality and bullying seems so much easier than doing a good job, and doing a good job means nothing if you don’t fit inside the regulations that don’t accomplish what they want to accomplish. All they do is allow people to act as if they conform, thus covering their asses, while not actually improving security one whit.

Am I cutting off my nose to spite my face? Is there some kind of fear of success thing going on here? Am I letting this bureaucracy become an excuse to not try, and not take on responsibility?

I don’t know. I can’t tell. Maybe others would make those judgments, and then I could succumb to those judgments and make myself into a horrible person again, and get depressed and all that comes along with that.

All I know is that this really bothers me. It feels so wrong. If I have to do something that feels so wrong just to volunteer, then maybe I’m not really going to be able to help either myself or others this way. So maybe I just need to find some other way to do music with people. Maybe I can’t help in psychiatric rehabilitation facilities. Maybe I have to start my own operation, and try to run classes where people can choose to come to me, instead of being forced into attendance because that’s what they have to do to get their meals and SEPTA passes. I want people to do this work who want to do the work, not because they have to satisfy the unthinking rules of big bureaucracy. Maybe that’s not the place for me.

That’s my case for myself. That’s my case against myself. I really have no idea whether I’m fooling myself or this is just the way I feel. I’m so used to not being able to honor my feelings that this throws me. Should I contort myself to be good and be liked or will that send me back to place that made me depressed?

The irony, is that these organizations are trying to help people with mental issues such as anxiety and depression. I need therapy, too. This work is my therapy. But do I have to submit to their rules, and thus shove myself down again, in order to be allowed to be helpful to others and to myself? Would that even work? Or would it all be counterproductive?

I don’t know. My therapist says “I don’t know” is a part of myself that I use to avoid my feelings. I’m pissed off. Does it matter if my anger is justified or not? I’m angry and that comes from fear that these systems will squash me yet again. I don’t trust these huge bureaucratic systems. The individuals in them are surely well-meaning, but the systems they develop take on a life of their own, and that’s dangerous, particularly to marginalized people like the mentally ill, or people who aren’t white or especially, people who are both.

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Who’s they?” He wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
“Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.
Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it’s true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I’m paranoid.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Edit: I went to a meeting of the West Philly Icarus Project tonight and told this story.

The Icarus Project is a support network and education project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness. We advance social justice by fostering mutual aid practices that reconnect healing and collective liberation. We transform ourselves through transforming the world around us.

There were fifteen people there and three of them came up to me afterwards to tell me that they had been required to give their fingerprints in order to work in the mental health field. One of them had been fingerprinted seven times. None of them felt that the process was anything other than busy work. They didn’t seem to believe that anyone was safer because of it. I’m not sure they shared my indignation about big brother, but in any case, it was nice to know I’m not the only one who has problems with this.

Maybe it is worth trying to fight this senseless and worthless bit of do-nothing, feel good legislation. In any case, I’m sorry I won’t be able to work with people who could probably really benefit from what I’m doing. Maybe there’s a way around this. If anyone has any ideas, please add a comment.

The Music Workshop Live!

It works!

I’m kind of high right now because the response to the first two workshops I gave was so enthusiastic. I’m so excited right now, that I did a bunch of research and correspondence in the last few hours. I really, really don’t like passive engagement, just interacting with a screen and my imaginary ideas about the people I’m writing to. I’ve done too much of that in my life and it leads me far away from the kind of human connection I really want.

Leaving these workshops, I’m feeling so open, I can talk to anyone. After each one, I had a pretty intense conversation with people on the street! Yesterday, right after I crossed the street from a support center on Germantown Ave, I looked into the eyes of a man, something I would ordinarily never do. He looked so interesting, though, that I felt like I knew him, and weirdly, he thought he knew me, as well. Maybe it’s that we were both feeling open to the world at the time.

He was about my height. Skin the color of light chocolate. A big, almost Muslim beard, but a bit bushier. His brown eyes were intense, and he engaged my gaze directly, but without threat, nor urgency. He was present. He had that aura of a street person, but his clothes were clean, and he didn’t ask for money — not right away, anyway.

“Don’t I know you?” He asked.

“I don’t think so.” It was a strange feeling, feeling like you know someone, but not recalling ever having seen them before.

“Do you drive a red Cadillac,” he asked?

“No. That must be someone else. You’re the second person today who thought he knew me. I just gave a music workshop across the street,” I pointed down the street to the entrance to The Wedge.

“I did an improvisational music workshop,” I said. Then, volunteering, “It’s for people with…” I jabbed my finger towards my head. “I have bipolar disorder.”

“I have bipolar disorder, too. I’ve got a lot of problems. I need some help — finding some place to live. Could you help me out?”

Oh the struggle in my head. I dearly wanted this to be one of those cool encounters where you just meet a kind of kindred spirit. Giving him money would make me feel like I was paying him to talk to me. I fished out my wallet, anyway, and gave him a dollar.

“The music helps with the depression and the self-hatred. It’s like a mini-vacation from all the crap that goes on in my head.”

“I play the guitar.”

“Do you know about the center across the street?”

“No.”

They have a lot of services there. They help you get a place to live. They get you medical care. They’ve got a bunch of things for people to do. Like the music thing I’m doing.”

We talked a little bit more, and then said goodbye with a handshake and a little “bro” hug.

Today, the workshop at another location of the support center was a lot more energetic. I tell my story about how this workshop came to be, and then I enter into the first exercise, which is a short meditation designed to ease people’s fear of what others might think of the sounds they make. Even before I asked people to start making sounds, some of the people were. It made me relax, because I knew I wouldn’t have to do much coaxing.

A lot of people were making a low, guttural sound, like an idling motor boat. It felt like it was coming from deep inside, without any filters. There were a few self-conscious laughs here and there, but there were just as many people who were already lost in the sound.

The next exercise generated most of the high. It’s the name game, where we each take a turn singing our names together with a movement. Later on, I recall the movement and I can recall people’s names. Normally, I would forget their names right away — maybe even before they said them.

The person on my right was a staff person. Maybe a ringer, but she was so genuinely enthusiastic about this exercise that she was free in making up her song and movement, as well as improvising later on when we repeated her name. The group developed a rhythm and even the reluctant people were encouraged to step up and after that, everyone was on board. I got back so much energy from their enthusiasm that I’m still buzzing hours later.

Out on the sidewalk after the workshop, I struck up a conversation with one of the people from the workshop. He ended up telling me about how tough his life had been. How dangerous it was; how many people had died; how he’d spent time in jail; in the shoe, and so on.

It was like the music totally opened him up. He started telling me about his brother.

“He was in the hospital with a stroke. When I went to pick him up, I had to carry him to the car. His legs were paralyzed.” He was choking up as he remembered this scene, and as he struggled to hold back his tears, he turned away from me a little. I stood there, letting him be. Remembering my therapist telling me to feel my feelings. You feel them, and they start to dissipate. They’re no longer something you run away from and do all kinds of stuff to keep from feeling them.

“Will you be coming back?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Those people,” he said, pointing back inside, “They don’t get it. They hear what I’m telling you and they’ll use it against me.”

I think he was expecting me to judge him for the things he’d done. I just wanted him to be able to tell his story, and I’m a little bit amazed at how powerful music can be to help people have fun and open up the things they’ve kept hidden, if they feel safe enough to do so. I respect that as a sacred trust. I’m not going to name names or share too many details about what happens. Just enough to give an idea of how powerful this work can be.

I am gaining confidence about it. I’m a bit in awe. I know that people are lonely and isolated and desperately want to be their true selves and share the real stuff with others. I know that because I know how isolated I’ve been. I know where that has led me.

By sharing that with others, and by teaching them a way to create the safety they need, perhaps this can help them heal. At the least, it can help them cope, as it has helped me. I can’t guarantee that anyone will be safe. But I hope that I can teach folks methods to create that safety for themselves. Perhaps they will learn how to build trust with each other.

Improvisation and spiritual connection

I studied classical trumpet as a youth. While I loved my horn and its sound, learning to play musical compositions perfectly eventually became a terror for me. The problem with performing classical music for me, is that everyone knows what the music is supposed to sound like, and if you make a mistake, everyone knows, and they can do a “gotcha” afterwards. It is extremely unpleasant and I know I developed a defense of pointing out my mistakes before anyone else could. It’s not a good way to enjoy performing.

I quit playing trumpet for about fifteen years, and I only got back into it through circumstance (including back injury from a car accident and a chiropractor who was also a trumpet player) and because I was then involved with groups that were pretty much entirely improvisational. When you improvise, I felt, there are no wrong notes. I could believe this enough that I was able to play comfortably for audiences.

I was brought up on perfectionism, and it has caused me great pain in my life. I am only able to play as long as I believe that right and wrong don’t apply. The key, for me, is to have fun, and now I live to teach others to improvise and to have fun — to listen for what they love in music, instead of listening to criticize or feeling that they have no right to make music because they aren’t good enough.

Composition is the process of inventing and writing down music. Improvisation is making up music in the moment. Unless someone listens to a recording of an improvisation and transcribes it into music notation, it is never written down.

The process of writing is quite different from the process of improvising. It’s the same as the difference between writing a story or telling a story during a conversation. When you write, you usually revise and revise many times over. When telling a story, you tell it once for the audience, and then it is gone. Whatever you bring to the performance is never going to be seen or heard again, even if you record the event, or transcribe the improvisation.

Each performance of a composition is unique, just as each performance of a play is unique or each reading of a story is unique, yet there will be a marked similarity in the performances, since they are trying to enact the composition as accurately as possible.

In improvisation, anything might happen. An improvisation can sound “wrong” but if you make a “mistake” you merely have to repeat it to make it sound like something you meant to do, and if you repeat it, then it becomes an acceptable part of the experience. There are no wrong notes. Wrong doesn’t make sense in improvisation.

Composition is not completely about setting music in stone, but, except for matters of interpretation, musicians are expected to play compositions note for note, without any room for improvisation. While jazz compositions do have room for improvisation, you are still expected to play the heads in a way that will be recognizable. You’re allowed to put it to a different rhythm or time signature, and even to modulate it, but these are variations, that must leave the melody recognizable. Even in the improvisational parts, you have to stay within the structure of the composition, because playing too far outside that composition can rattle your bandmates, unless they are prepared for free improvisation.

Free improvisation can start from anywhere with anything, and can become anything it wants. People often wonder how music develops in free improvisation, if there is nothing composed at all. This is possible because music is essentially about repetition, and you barely need to repeat a few notes, for others to pick up on what you are doing and help you build it. Free improvisation is about listening for the recognizable motifs, supporting them and building them into larger patterns. If you play with musicians who listen well and are generous in supporting each other, this is easy.

It’s also easy with people who don’t consider themselves musicians. Set a few ground rules, and people can learn to improvise quite happily with each other very quickly. See Improvisation Games for more about the Sonic Sandbox improvisational instruction process.

Improvising music is built into human beings, I believe. It is a part of our natural pattern recognizing abilities. We do it instinctively, the same way that birds can flock together in amazing formations with millions of birds, and they never hit each other in the air. We know much more about rhythm and melody and harmony than we are aware of. We have been unconsciously analyzing these patterns all our lives, and so if we are allowed to play together without judgment, we can do it easily and intuitively.

It is only judgment that turns musical improvisation into musical composition. Someone writes down music, and makes critical choices about how they want their music to be performed from here on. Others make judgments about how well performers interpret that composition.

After writing this, I now believe it is fair to say that improvisation is about working with what we know, intuitively. Composition is about taking intuition and making judgments about it. For me, that takes a lot of fun out of music making. Music making is for fun and play and for bringing people together in a way that connects us without using our linguistic minds. Some people call this spiritual. I don’t care what people call it, so long as we can share that experience and feel more connected.

My practice is to find something to love in the sounds people make together. This helps me suspend judgment, and reach an altered state of consciousness that is not possible when my critical mind is engaged. This altered state helps me accept myself and others, and perhaps most importantly, it helps me feel connected in a way that I crave most of the time.

West Philly Porchfest

Thirty years ago, give or take a month, I arrived in West Philly to look for a place to rent. I looked at a place on Windsor avenue, across the street from where I live, now. I had just graduated with a degree in Labor Relations, and I was moving to Philly because my girlfriend was going to Grad school at Penn. I was looking for work with a union.

One of the things that I thought would help in locating a good place to live was to interview people living on the street about what it was like. The person I interviewed is now my next door neighbor, and her husband was working for a union. What more did I need to know about the block?

That decision changed my life forever (not that every decision you make doesn’t change your life in the same way). It led to me finding a cool place to dance, which led to meeting my wife, which led to more dancing, which led to music returning to my life when a car accident made it impossible to dance. Which led to…. And led to…. And so on.

When we moved into this house after we married, 48^th Street was the edge of the gentrified area. Now, I have no idea how far it extends, but it’s a lot further out. 50^th? 52^nd? When we moved in, it was a pretty quiet area that focused on each block, in terms of most community activities.

In those days, the neighborhood was not only seen as edgy, but also not very cool. It might still be edgy in a different kind of way, but now, as my daughter said on returning from college last week, “The neighborhood is a lot cooler now than it was when I left.”

This was even before Porchfest. How cool are we now?

The band that eventually became Sonic Sandbox started a little over a year ago, when I started jamming with a few friends. When we started, the others weren’t sure what they wanted to do, but I had an idea about how we could improvise together, which is what I wanted to do because playing music that other people know makes me feel judged, and feeling judged makes me not want to play.

I don’t want to be compared to anyone, because I’m convinced I won’t compare well, and I’ve used that feeling to hurt myself a lot in the past. Instead, I wanted to get together to improvise because when you improvise, nobody can tell you that you didn’t do it the way it was supposed to be.

I had a few musical games in mind that we could use to start us improvising, and we started using them to jam together. We tried doing other people’s songs once or twice, but we kept going back to the improvisation, especially as the others came to understand the process better.

Playing at Porchfest was perfect for us, because they just wanted people to make music. They didn’t care about your experience. No one was getting paid. We were all on our own to make things go. But is was a community thing. Strength in numbers. The intangible feeling of support you get knowing that everyone knows this is happening and a lot of other people are out there playing or listening. It’s such a West Philly thing for me.

One of the things I like to do sometimes when we improvise, is to sing a story that I make up as I go along. I just picture some events from my life in my head, and do a musical play by play as the internal movie plays in my imagination. I sang the story that I am now writing.

In the end, I started talking about what I find so cool about West Philly. Porchfest is a perfect example of that kind of thing. It’s all about people not judging each other. It’s about setting up community, connecting to others and not judging. Not criticizing. There’s an awful lot of creativity in this community, and that’s no accident. Creative people locate here because it’s a safe place to play, to express ourselves and to live the way we want to without others judging us. I’m not saying there are no limits, but the limits are a lot more flexible here than in many other communities. West Philly is an oasis for many people who get stigmatized and judged for being who they are in a lot of other places.

I told myself that playing on our porch was just like any other time we get together to jam. We’re just playing, and we’re doing it so we can get out of our minds and into that place where we become part of something larger than ourselves. It doesn’t matter if others like it or don’t. We’re doing it for fun.

Of course, having support does make a difference. So when an audience started filling the chairs I had put out, it gave us a lift. It’s nice to be able to play for others as well as ourselves, and we knew people were there by choice. They could get up and leave any time they wanted, but they could also stay, and stay they did.

I think we were all grateful for the people who listened to us having fun playing together. They were fellow players in the sonic sandbox, and some of them even joined us. We take inspiration from any place we can, and once we started like a pack of dogs, because my neighbor’s dog was barking. Listen hear: It may have started in an unusual way, but what it turned into had a lot of energy, and that’s true for most of what we do.

I think it helps to understand our process when you listen to us. It’s not just about pretty sounds. It’s about accepting sounds. When we accept the sounds we hear, no matter how we might judge them if we were in judgement mode, we can take them to places we’d never go otherwise. That means we have to ask an audience to give us a chance. Don’t give up in the first couple of minutes. It might take us a while, but we will find some place cool, musically speaking, to go. It’s just that we have to wander around in trackless spaces for a while before we can agree on what path to follow. I have fond hopes that people will enjoy listening to us wander, and then be amazed at the incredible scenery we find when we agree on a trail to follow.

Whether or not people listen to us that way, we can still have fun wandering around together and creating a path through the places we’re exploring. We can do that, and we can lead others in doing that through our workshops, and others can watch and listen to us doing that in our performances. What’s important is that we do it. It’s a spiritual practice for us, and as long as we do it, we’re better off, and if we can share it with others, either as participants or as audience, there’s a chance that others will be better off, too. That’s my hope.

Bump Trump to the Dump

Bump Trump to the dump

Trump won Indiana tonight, and it seems he has a clear path to the Republican Nomination. In honor of that, we created Bump Trump to the Dump. It’s a sort of bluesy piece. It reflects my fear that if Trump gets elected President, the economy will go to hell and a lot of people will get hurt. The rich, including Trump, will only get even richer, and the disparity between the rich and the poor will ascend to even higher levels. That’s destabilizing to the nation. Depressing. But the music is a lot more fun than that!

This piece is a good example of our process. You can hear how it developed out of a simple little conversation that sprang up after we heard the news about Indiana.

Last Act for Poetry Night at W/nw/n

We were the final act at the W/nw/n coffee bar tonight. This is the second month in a row. The people there are really nice (Hail Miguel, Tony, Rosie and Unity)! They’ve been really supportive of us.

Normally, we meet on Tuesday night to play together, but this week, it got moved to Wednesday. Then we realized it was the last Wednesday of the month, and wondered if we should try to play at W/nw/n again. I texted Miguel and we kinda sorta made an arrangement, in an improvisational way. Making it up as we go along. Not that it’s always so easy for me to sit back and enjoy the ride without being certain where we’ll end up. But I’m learning.

I picked up Bob and Kurt, and then it occurred to me that we might be spending a lot of time listening to poetry when we could be playing together, so we decided to go over and check out the scene and if we had to wait until the end of the evening, we might just bag it and go back to Bob’s to play.

There were three stools at the end of the bar closest to the place where the poets stand. So we sat there, to see what was happening. Miguel was just announcing the first poet.

At first I was feeling annoyed about listening to the poetry, but as the poets started doing their thing, I got drawn in, and after a while, I was happy to listen, although I was still itching to play. At the break, we went to get our instruments. Kurt must have spoken to Miguel, because when I came back in, he told me we would be doing the same thing as we did last month.

I sat down and did a bit of drumming with Unity. They have a lot of percussion instruments to play — djembes, congas, some really neat vibraphony sounding things. Those vibraphones created some really nice spaces for the poetry. Not all the poets wanted musical accompaniment. But it was a nice vibe when they did. I found myself keeping beat very quietly on my Djembe. It was really interested how all the poets read with a very regular rhythm, no matter how many syllables they had to speak. Sometimes, I felt like I knew their rhythm even before they started. I’d love to play with poets more, and get into the musical aspect of poetry.

There were traditional poetry styles as well as more energetic hiphop and poetry slam styles. Some of the poets just made it up on the spot, and that went pretty well. Impressive. Some of them had poetry handles, like Number X, who I believe was the one who claimed to be bipolar. Hail fellow bippie!

I started thinking about how it would go. Last time we had to fiddle around setting up after the last poet, and the audience started talking, and we didn’t really interact with us the way I had imagined. I felt like we were background music and I had been hoping we could get a closer listen.

I decided I would use the Kalimba and sing about us while Bob and Kurt were getting set up. I tried not to think too much about what I would say. I just reminded myself that I’ve been writing a lot about us for this website, so I could use some of those ideas. Maybe tell a bit of our story. Maybe sing about how to listen.

So I started singing in my own way. Telling our story, using the kalimba. I started right after Miguel introduced us instead of waiting. I was almost weird how comfortable I felt. Last month, I felt so hot and I sweated an awful lot. This time, I was much more relaxed. No sweat. Literally.

I got a few laughs, but most importantly, I kept their attention. They weren’t drifting off to their own conversations. There were even some guys who were nodding their heads and making eye contact with me and smiling, which really helped. At one point, I looked back to see if Kurt and Bob were ready, but they were still setting up, so I said something about that, which got another laugh.

Then I got the idea of doing a music game with them. I decided to do toning, so I explained what toning is in my song, and got them all to do it. Twice. The second time, Kurt joined in on the guitar, and it turned into our jam. Perfect! I love how ideas can come to you in the moment, and you don’t even have to think twice. You just implement them, and it works.

I stopped singing, and picked up my horn, and came in as if there was a head to the song, and we were off. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t believe how comfortable I felt. I was dancing and playing. I invited people to move, but either they didn’t hear me, or they didn’t really want to. I didn’t push it. Maybe next time.

It’s all about acceptance. Me accepting myself. We all practice accepting ourselves in the Sonic Sandbox and then we practice accepting others. I was teaching the crowd our ethos. How to love the one true sound they make, and people got it, and we were all together for a few moments.

We asked Tony about having a night of our own, and he seems into it, now. So we got to figure that out, and then get our people to come. I’ve got the website now. And a template for flyers. Just gotta print them up and maybe make up some cards. Maybe print out a few CDs and try to sell them, although I really want to do it online. Just get a paypal payment and give them the link.

It’s been really healing. Kurt and Bob are really enjoying it. I am, too. It’s all about practicing acceptance and stopping all that second guessing and worrying about how I come across. It’s great to play for others. It’s one of those off-road trips you might have on vacation when you turn off the highway and stop driving with the GPS. Who knows where you’ll end up, but you see a lot of stuff you’d never see otherwise. That’s what happens in the Sonic Sandbox. I just gotta let myself play and I’ll have fun. It’s a choice I can make. Just keep myself from thinking all those obsessive, ruminative thoughts, and focusing on the play.

….note to self: take pictures next time. They might help give more flavor to this blog! Yeah. Just a note. Don’t beat yourself up for not thinking about it before. Just do it next time. Remember, we’re just playing. As long as we’re playing, it won’t become a job. And there won’t be any judgment.

How I will use this Blog

From time to time, I will post my thoughts about playing in the Sonic Sandbox. The charter membership is made up of three or four of us. We all met in the “recovery rooms,” which is jargon for the rooms where people meet at twelve step meetings. Because we met that way, we may or may not actually know each other’s names. The key to twelve step recovery is anonymity. Most of us only feel safe enough to talk about what is really going on inside when we have some measure of protection about our deepest shames becoming public knowledge.

For that reason, I only know the first names of the people I play with in the Sonic Sandbox. I will also not be able to provide any more details about what kind of twelve step group it is, nor what troubles we are dealing with that brought us together. I hope that won’t matter. What is important is that playing in the Sonic Sandbox has become a part of our recoveries. It is a coping technique that helps us learn to change our habits from ones that are destructive to both us and the people we love to ones that, we hope, will be a lot healthier.

The idea of making music together, I believe, was first discussed by Bob and Kurt. Bob plays electric violin and Kurt plays electric guitar. Bob also told me that Kurt was a singer. When I heard they were going to do some music together, I decided that I wanted to crash that party. I wanted to play with other people, because I had stopped playing for over a year, as a punishment to myself for harming people I loved. This was an opportunity to get together in a way that wouldn’t contribute to my problems. In the past, music had opened the door for me to get into trouble.

I knew I needed music because of what it does to my brain. I helps me access my sense of connection to others. As such, it directly counteracts the feeling of loneliness and isolation I was living in. It gave me respite from despair and hopelessness. It provided a few moments of relief from what felt like a black hole in the pit of my stomach, that was slowing down light as well as weighing me down. My life, for a time, felt slow and miserable and impossible — except for those moments when I was connected to others, primarily through music.

Then, I decided I was such a bad person, that I didn’t even deserve any relief at all. I stopped playing music. I stopped dancing. I stopped socializing. I stopped talking to friends and family members. I stopped working. I stopped using the phone. I simply couldn’t.

Finding people I felt safe to be with and to make music with was a miracle for me. It started at my house. Kurt and Bob and Ralph started coming over on Tuesday evenings to play together. Not all of them every single time. Sometimes it was only two of us.

I used my background in improvisational music to come up with games that would help us develop a practice. At first, we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We thought about writing music or songs. We thought about being a rock band. We’re still open to any ideas that anyone wants to bring to our practice, but mostly we started playing together using these improvisational games I either borrowed from others I have learned from, or that I made up myself.

I started recording our sessions, and then listening to the recordings, and after a while, I started thinking that maybe we had something that other people would enjoy. Maybe we were developing a process that could help others gain the benefits we were gaining. Maybe we could play for others and with others in more public situations.

To date, we’ve played for others in a formal way three times. We’ve given the workshop once in a formal setting (a twelve step group retreat). We enjoyed ourselves on each occasion, and we also got some positive feedback, which felt good. The workshop went over very well, and our last performance generated an amazing amount of energy. It got a group to get up out of their audience roles, and some played music with us, while others danced. It was a regular party!

I am beginning to see a future for this play for us. We can do the workshop at parties, or for people interested in learning how to make music together (no experience required). The workshop is also good for people in recovery, both from addictions and from mental illnesses. It provides a coping technique that gives people relief from the pain these things can bring.

Performing also brings people together, both as audience members and participants. It provides another way to connect with others, and, I hope, it helps to break down judgmental barriers that often come between us. It is great fun for us to be the spark plugs that generate the energy of connection within groups of people we do not yet know.

So, from time to time, I will post my descriptions and reactions to these events — our practices and our outreach to others. This may primarily be my thoughts, but I hope that other members of Sonic Sandbox will also want to post their thoughts, too. Until next time… I hope we can play in the sonic sandbox together one day soon.

Roots of the Sonic Sandbox

The Sonic Sandbox has roots extending to many sources of inspiration. Some roots grow out of the improvisational music and dance community. Other roots reach into spiritual traditions meditation, yoga, and mindfulness, as well as into the support group and recovery movement.

Dance Improvisation

In 1986, I moved to an apartment in West Philadelphia with my then girlfriend. We were invited to a party by our upstairs neighbors — mostly, I think, out of self defense. They wanted to avoid us complaining about the loud music. It worked.

I liked the party, although my girlfriend didn’t seem to enjoy them so much. I think she made an appearance and then went back downstairs to study. I stayed, up in the attic where the party was being held, to witness a form of dance that was both new to me, but it felt like I’d known it for a long time. I asked the party-goers where they learned to dance like that.

“The Friday Night Workshop at Group Motion,” I was told.

I started going to the workshop, almost religiously. I met my wife there. I took the workshop facilitator training in Bermuda. I danced. I played music. I learned about rituals, tribes, and getting out of your head and into your body. Eventually, I figured out that this was my form of meditation, and later on, when I got sick, dancing at Group Motion was the only relief I got from my despair and hopelessness.

Music Improvisation

One of the dancers at Group Motion introduced me to his passions: drumming and a special form of music improvisation that he learned from the cell

David Darling and Chungliang Al Huang

o player, David Darling at Music for People workshops. Ron Kravitz, creator of Music in the Moment, introduced me to Baba
tunde Olatungi’s drumming style as well as Music for People. I had the privilege of studying with Olatunji himself, at a weekend workshop in Philadelphia. I also worked with David Darling together with Taiji master improviser, Chungliang Al Huang at a workshop at Esalen Institute.
I played music. I improvised. I danced Taiji to the shapes of the giant pines and played my recorder to the sounds of the birds and the ocean at Big Sur.

I learned about the hero’s journey and story telling and five minutes before the group performance on the last night, David Darling told me he wanted me to do a solo.

Support Groups

In 2008, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and I started attending both a bipolar support group to learn how to manage depression and a twelve step group to learn how to cope with compulsive behavior. I learned about the power of listening to other people’s stories. I learned how rules can create a safe environment for people to tell their deepest shames openly in an effort to learn how to stop punishing themselves for the imagined and real hurts they have inflicted on others and themselves. I learned that giving back is a very good way to help heal myself.

The Warp and Weft of Root Weaving

Many roots. Many influences. Coming together to inform my life and my true work. It’s all a mass of knotted roots, now. I doubt if I could ever unentangle it, even if I wanted to. There’s much more, of course. Stuff from my family and my childhood. My struggle to feel lovable and loved. My efforts to punish myself for all the hurts I caused others.

These are also my spiritual roots. For me, spirituality is about feeling connections between me and others and our environment in a way that feels as if there is no separation. The magical paradox of being a separate being while being a part of everything. I am weaving all these things together; mostly making it up as I go along; and trying to pass on the things I have learned so they can help themselves recover from whatever it is that haunts them, and to find more joy and fun and love in their lives.

The Rules of Play in the Sonic Sandbox

Making our Sandbox Safe

Sonic Sandbox re-imagines the playgrounds of our childhood. For many, these playgrounds were places where we played without thought, just for fun. For some, they were places where they could be ostracized or bullied. The Sonic Sandbox is dedicated to creating a safe place for playing together without feeling judged or made wrong. The rules are simple:

Listen. Find something interesting in every sound.
Support others by copying them.
Take turns riffing off what others are doing
Make sure everyone gets a chance to develop their solo voice.
Guard everyone else in the group.

The Sonic Sandbox is a place to practice acceptance. There are plenty of opportunities to beat ourselves up in the rest of the world. It is easy to feel criticized and then take that further: to join in and criticize yourself. This is what stops people from playing.

When I was in third grade, someone from the instrument rental store came in to demonstrate all the instruments. When he played the trumpet, I knew instantly that that was my instrument. My parents rented a cornet for me (because it was easier for a kid to hold) and I started taking lessons with a high school student.

Later on, I took lessons from adults, eventually studying with Walter Chestnut, the trumpet professor at the University of Massachusetts. I loved the trumpet, and Mr. Chestnut was a very jovial teacher, who rarely made me feel that bad when I hadn’t practiced.

I was studying classical music, which was the only thing I really knew about in those days. My parents listened to classical music at home. I knew little about jazz or even popular music, except that when I heard “Never on Sunday,” Herb Albert became one of my favorite trumpet players. I still own several of his albums — on vinyl.

I loved playing my horn, and I joined the junior high and high school bands, and was in the local youth symphony. It was great, except for two things: soloing and competition. It was (and still is) the practice for most students of classical music to have to perform in recitals as a part of our training. Another problematic custom for me was having to challenge others in the band for the first chair — the one who always played the melody line and who, on occasion, also took the solos.

I think that all my life I have had a love-hate relationship with wanting to be a star and hating the pressure of trying to be a star. I wanted to take the solos and be first chair because it carried some prestige and because we got to play the most interesting parts. I hated playing in recitals or taking solos in band concerts because if I screwed up, everyone would hear it and know who had made the mistake.

In classical music, most listeners are pretty familiar with the music, and so they know when performers make mistakes. When I was growing up, it became a kind of game to catch people out — especially the more famous people. I guess it might have made them seem more human and approachable. Unfortunately, when it was time to play the solos or the recitals, I imagined the audience and my fellow musicians (especially my teacher) were only listening for my mistakes.

There is a long, complicated, and amazingly common psychology behind this. I’ll simply say that in my family, making mistakes was a really bad thing that would get you a lot of scorn. Classical music just built on the neuroses I learned in my family. The culture of star worship in the United States also reinforced this message, and thus, every solo, for me, became a period of terror, as I knew I would have ample opportunity to make a glaring mistake (or more than one) that everyone would know about.

As a result, I couldn’t really enjoy the music. I was too concerned with not screwing up to enjoy myself.

I’ll tell the story of how I learned to get over this fear another time, but the main thing I learned that has lead me to try to create the Sonic Sandbox is that I need a place where there are no mistakes. A place where people will not be looking for mistakes. That means, I learned in David Darling’s Music for People workshops, that I need to learn a different way of listening.

If we listen for what there is to enjoy in music instead of listening for mistakes, both musicians and listeners will get a lot more enjoyment from it.