Hey peoples,
As I was writing one of the sections in this post I realized I had a lot more to say on the subject and thought it would be better to write as a separate post (it’ll come out soon). Happens sometimes. We make an outline or plan but it takes it’s own path.
When that happens it’s best to not wrestle with the wave. Just harness it’s power and hang on.
If you have some spare change lying around, you can click this button below and donate it to the Cannon Dispatch and it will help it grow and get better and better. Promise. Here’s what that button looks like:
here are this week’s four things:
music:
Solo Monk by Thelonious Monk: When I was a kid I took piano lessons, but it didn’t last long. I was a drummer. Perhaps I was born with the love and passion for drums, or perhaps it was nurtured by my dad, who was also a drummer. But from an early age I’ve always been entranced by music, and particularly by rhythm.
This record has exactly zero drums1. But it has lots of rhythm.
Rhythm and jazz, blues. And emotion. Memory. Reflection. Happiness and sadness. It’s got it all, and more.
The piano evokes human emotion like no other instrument. Maybe a cello is close. But the way Monk plays is magic. He can almost bend notes. Do you know how crazy that is? He plays with the stuff of life, the good parts and the bad. It’s his energy, his fuel. This record has captured these elements of the mind, body, and heart and presents it to us raw, with no other accompaniment.
Just a man, his thoughts, and his piano.
podcast episode:
Rick Rubin on the Joe Rogan Experience. When I was on deployment on an aircraft carrier a great friend of mine (Clemmons, still a great friend) would assign different rap and hip hop personalities to the people in the crew. This guy was Fat Joe. This guy was Snoop. We had an Eminem. Dr. Dre. Jay Z. Lil’ Kim. With me he assigned Rick Rubin.
That was probably one of the biggest compliments of my life.
Rick Rubin is probably not human. He might be a bodhisattva. In fact for me, he is one. His discography as a producer is astounding. His Instagram account only posts one picture at a time, and for 24 hours (and most of the time it’s empty). He has a podcast with Malcolm Gladwell. You’ve listened to tons of songs which he’s produced, you just don’t know it. For instance: Run DMC, Jay Z, Black Sabbath, Johnny Cash, Metallica, LL Cool J, Red Hot Chili Peppers, LL Cool J, Audioslave, Tom Petty, Avett Brothers, Justin Timberlake, U2, Adele. There are hundreds more.
He has a way about conjuring the correct and necessary environment, whether internally or externally, to produce sonic art. He’s a spiritual teacher of sorts, for musicians. His thoughts on creativity are beautiful and pragmatic. They can be applied to every creative endeavor.
If you have a creative person in your life, a musician, painter, writer, entrepreneur, I highly recommend sharing this episode.
book:
The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. This book is important and timely.
It’s about how ours is an age of comfort, and how comfort over a long period of time is actually bad for us. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Not long ago, life was different. We had to strive to survive. Just getting food on the table was a constant struggle. Hell, not long before that there were not even tables. Today we have an abundance of “food” designed to keep you hungry. Our lives are mostly sedentary. We try to engineer struggles our of our lives to get more free time. Even the very idea of “free time” is a relatively new concept in a human life. Humans never had the need to differentiate time from what was free and what was work, they just lived. And all sorts of problems stem from this change in human life.
Easter writes about how all of this stuff is slowing making us miserable and killing us. Our bodies were meant to move, carry weight. Our stress mechanisms are out of whack because we are no longer in physical, “oh-shit-if-I-don’t-do-something-I’m-gonna-die”-stress. We are in a mental health pandemic worse than any other time in history. These are huge issues and we continue to ignore them.
These problems aren’t for someone else to fix, they are for us to fix for ourselves. The great thing about the book is that he shows the problem and the negative affects of the problem, and then writes possible solutions. It’s well-researched, well-written. It has made my “to be re-read often” list, and it will be one of the books I will gift to others.
quote:
When you get out in the ocean, big surf, the playing field is absolutely level. So you get to see people's true colors. You get to see the real them come out.
-Mark Healy, EP 44 Hawaiiverse Podcast
Thanks for reading, see you next time.
-Tyler
Piano is considered a percussive instrument. It just so happens that with a piano, the percussion also creates the melody. These old players from the black and white era of jazz, in the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s.. these guys contained this wild range of musical knowledge in their heads. They played so raw and beautiful and unorthodox. I like unorthodox. It means there’s some sort of shunning of the rules, a disdain for compliance, and the world could be re-written as they saw fit. I don’t know shit about jazz piano technique, but if a modern high-brow jazz piano teacher were to encounter a player with the exact skills of Monk, I believe they would be appalled at his lack of technique.