ChaiTea2TaiChi

East River Park is a slice of heaven right next to Gotham City

Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, was the inspiration to claim my spot by the East River a few years ago. After quitting hard drugs and alcohol I had a hard time sleeping. On the regular, I would wake up around 4 or 5 am. And it seemed impossible for me to try to go back.

So I began moseying over to the east river park early in the morning. I wanted to play music at six or 7 AM. The old Chinese people are doing their Qi-Gong exercises just around that time. Busy bodies are starting their first workout in the jungle gym. Other early risers begin circling the track right next to where I’m sitting.

After six years of the practice, I know a lot of faces. I recognize people’s dogs. I have had conversations with the different types of birds. The birds show up in the early spring when it gets warm enough to sit out there and play. They take off when it gets too cold to be sitting out there on that big stone. That stone plays a supporting role in my reclusive practice.

Chilling in my spot by the river with Rodrick J Wolgamot. Check out the Podcast we recorded in the spring about his wild life as an artist, musician and Treehouse Builder to the Superstars

The best outdoor practice room in the world

That spot is mine. Nobody’s ever disputed it. I have never seen anybody sit there playing music before I show up. Sometimes people would ask me if I had to come directly from the gig. They wondered if I had not gone to sleep yet. I would smile and say no, this is for you. Thank you for asking.

Playing music is taking a spiritual dimension for me. I am not doing it for the pursuit of fame or money. That would be delusional for a 52-year-old jazz musician. My biggest claim to fame is touring the festival circuit in Europe for two weeks. With a young up and coming jazz pianist, whose father was a corporate raider and financed the whole thing. We performed at all the major festivals and I made $800 in two weeks. The plane tickets that the management company bought for the band probably added up to a few thousand dollars. This does not include the hotels, etc.

To say that that the experience was as exhilarating as it was disheartening is an understatement. At this point in my life, I am about to embark on a different trajectory. I hope I can maintain my early morning practice sessions in the future. However, I wouldn’t mind being in places that are less noisy and less busy. I prefer spots that are a little closer to real nature than East River Park can ever be. Meditation is the funny thing. I used to say that practicing music is my meditation.

Being too serious about practicing? That seriously is not Meditation

But when you are serious about practicing, thoughts emerge. They say, ‘You’re way too good to still be practicing. Why are you not playing and getting paid for this?’ Thoughts about doing the same thing for decades would always creep in. Thoughts that left a funny aftertaste.

In the last few years I learned to play to in order go deep. To deepen my relationship with the simplest of instruments, the worlds bamboo flutes. The are made out of simple pieces of fast growing wood. But there is nothing simple about playing them well. This practice has eliminated that self-destructive thinking. It leaves no room for impatient striving, for restless patterns and overbearing licks.

Greedy people will find you wherever you go

It’s especially funny because now I’m suddenly getting hit with copyright claims. This happens when I post my simple bamboo flute tracks without any accompaniment on well-known social media outlets. These platforms are predictive and focused on ‘getting the moooo-ney”. Desperate Managers are on the hunt. For making a their quota. Trying to steal a piece of something beyond their pay grade, music that is not meant for monetization.

Sonny Rollins was practicing to keep on improving HIMSELF

Sonny was on to something there. Music that is purely shared to give inspiration for people. Folks who get it. Aficionados, who want to meditate on the meaning of life. People who need a little lift me up to get into the day. We play for people who want to think about why they do what they do. Sonny Rollins has always been a big inspiration for me.

One day, I will get my tenor saxophone back out of the storage space. I am sure I will study Sonny’s magical lines again. I will also revisit his humorous citations of Broadway songs. And and so on and so on….

But for now I’m going to stick with the bamboo flutes.

The Quena….

the Shakuhachi…..

And the Bansuri….

These ancient instruments connect me to the indigenous cultures of the world.

The ancient Ragas from India. Music for Zen meditation from Japan. And the Icaros from the Andes mountains and the Amazon rain forest.

Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

Here is a link where you can follow the results of six years of me, myself and I regularly going to my sanctuary. And checking in with the gods of music.

Yuxibu !!! Patcha Mama!! Gautama, The Buddha!!!!

Let the Eagle and the Condor soar !!!

And walk quietly but with determination, like the mighty Jaguar.

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” reflects that saxophonist today, 91-year-old Sonny Rollins. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”He climbed the steep iron steps within two blocks of the apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille, at 400 Grand Street in Manhattan, and was thrilled by the space, light and noisy solitude they led to. Rollins was 28 and already one of the undisputed giants of the subtle and sophisticated modern-jazz advances known as bebop that had taken off in the 40s – even though Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were close on his heels with radical new approaches to how melody, harmony and rhythm could dance spontaneously together. Between 1956 and 1958, after a series of brilliant small-band albums including Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West, Rollins was acclaimed by the New Yorker’s Whitney Balliettas “possibly the most incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker”, while the jazz/classical musicologist Gunther Schuller wrote that the thematic fertility and coherence of the young genius’s off-the-cuff improvisations “held together as perfect compositions”.

Read the full story of Sonny Rollins 2 years of practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge.