• Back at it
  
  It's been almost two months since my last post.
  
  No that's not a cardboard cutout. Chucho Valdes is really standing beside me. Chucho is a big man - I'm 6'2". And he does have huge mitts, though not as large as I recall Oscar's to be. Those suckers seemed to wrap around my hands twice when I shook hands with him backstage after a gig in Halifax in the late seventies.
  
  I really hadn't intended to write anything more but I've received encouragement from a number of people, particularly Brian Nation, to keep going so I will, but not on a daily basis.
  
  I needed some time to decompress after Banff and really process what happened there, but I didn't have that luxury. Reintegration into regular family life would have been enough, but just to raise the degree of difficulty, I had a deadline for my Song Room composition and a number of important gigs.
  
  Also Marianne Trudel came to Vancouver and used my home as a base of operations for two weeks. Keeping up with her whirlwind lifestyle was like doing another intensive program. She ended up gigging almost every day and made two trips to Vancouver Island for work. She played at The Cellar four times over a period of eight days, an evening at Rime and did a CBC radio recording session with Andre Lachance and Dylan van der Schyff, and made a couple of visits to Tom Keenleyside's studio, amongst other things. A number of people, myself included, have been encouraging her to spend part of every year here, perhaps a two-month stretch once or twice a year. I pulled out the heavy artillery, which was taking her on a walk at Lighthouse Park, something that really turned her crank. A jaunt to the Gulf Islands would probably have sealed the deal.
  
  People who heard me play in the weeks after I returned home heard an immediate change in my playing. There was much more of an emotional element, an urgency, that I was feeling. It's the very thing that I admire most in a player like Bruce Freedman. It was certainly the Big Message that I got from my brief time with Chucho.
  
  So now I measure my time in terms of BC (Before Chucho) and AD (After Discovery, no Devastation, no... I'll have to work on something catchy). Whatever the hell I'm going to end up calling it, this year at Banff marked a turning point in my career as an artist. I had wondered when Hugh had pronounced that hearing Chucho play Giant Steps had changed his life, if it was hyperbole in the heat of the moment, but no, it was simply a statement of fact.
  
  I have performed weekly with Wanda Nowicki since returning home. Especially in doing this sort of straight-up playing, often in a restaurant situation, I realize the challenge to play with a higher emotional urgency. It's an interesting constraint to have, if one is to play within a standard group context, and certainly helps to avoid the trap of overplaying or musical hytrionics, as I may be wont to do. It has to be done in a more subtle way. There is also the trap of falling back into old patterns, or becoming cynical about the gig situation. So this is actually a great vehicle for putting this new approach into practise.
  
  Coat Cooke has often mentioned that his favourite musicians to play with are the guys who play like there there is no tomorrow, like every day may be their last. These guys bring it all to the stage every time they play, and furthermore are thrilled to be playing regardless of the context and show it. They bring an element of joy to everything they do.
  
  As musicians, most of us have talked about this approach to music. Few of us actually model this behaviour. Of the people I know well, perhaps Hugh Fraser exemplifies it best. He brings a certain joy to the stage every time, sometimes a barely contained mania, even on the nights when I have seen him backstage feeling anything but joyous. He models himself on players like Chucho and Slide Hampton, who embody this approach. Of course, they all have seriously heavy chops to back it up.
  
  What I've found is that playing with this approach is unexpectedly liberating. Stan Karp has often said that the sole purpose of musical technique is to better enable the musician to express through his instrument what is in his head and in his heart. I find the more I connect my heart to what I am playing, the easier it is to do. Playing over changes is different, not so hard when I am really saying something.
  
  This is why the regular gigs with Wanda are so great. I get to work on the same songs week after week, aiming to put more into them, but not going overboard. As recently as last Friday, I continue to have small insights as to how to achieve this goal. That night I realized that a person can play a simple egg shaker with emotion and commitment, not just stand there like a lump and keep time. It may not sound any different, but it FEELS different. And I saw how that works in performance, when we got some unexpected and very enthusiastic applause during our third set, particularly after one of Wanda's great ballads. I knew that it felt more passionate onstage, but was nontheless pleased and surprised when the audience acknowleged it.
  
  The other challenge is how to keep the spirit from Banff going. Often these things fade over time, but my goal is to make this a permanent change in my life. I keep a poster with Chucho's picture on my practise room wall. I ordered that great DVD Calle 54 to watch Chucho and his dad Bebo play together. In the DVD performances, I now very clearly see how he combines simple folkloric melodies with staggering virtuosity for the big emotional wallop. And with Wanda's group, I'll now call Chucho's Mambo Influenciado as an instrumental set-opener. I still practise it at home, as part of my daily flute practise, including the great tutti section that Hugh wrote. I have no idea how I played it so fast on flute in Banff!
  
  All of these things serve as small reminders of what I should be focussing on. Though I have said that I'm a changed musician, that is something that I will have to continue to strive for for the rest of my life, hopefully getting a little closer to my heart each time that I play.