HAPPY 62!

(add photos)

playing Woodsongs w/ Tabi Gervis

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." - Madeleine L'Engle

Another chaotic year....another birth month, and another birth day!

Just before the month started, I was fortunate enough to yet again perform at Woodsongs, and was super stoked that I got to do so by backing up (again!) the incredible Tabi Gervis! From there, it was (Oct 2) my First Friday gig at Goodwood (now Doc Crow's Social), then my very first half marathon on Saturday, Oct 3, took the kids to King's Island on Sunday (and logged another 10 miles!), and back to the gym & teaching on Monday!

Sunday, Oct 11 my Second Sunday Open Mic was converted to my annual birthday jam....then to Cumberland Lake with my beautiful fiancee Agatha on Friday for steak on the lake, back to Lexington Saturday for a wedding (we got to listen to Boogie G and the Titanics play!), and finally got to rest on Sunday for a few (haha!).

Thursday before my birthday, Agatha took me and the boys out to dinner - they'd never done hibachi before! That was a blast!

Friday Oct 23 (my actual birthday), I got up, got the kids off to school, and hit the gym. Great workout. About an hour of cardio and 45 minutes of a full body resistance workout (light weights, some pullups & dips, and ended with 3 laps of farmer's carry). Home for a VERY rare steak and a few strawberries, then took the afternoon off until the kids got home....though I did play my nylon string guitar quite a bit! From there it was a cookout with the kids and then I took them to the Haunted Tower or whatever the hell its called (hahaha!).

GREAT day!

Angelee has kicked off the Lexi Music Awards season with voting open via local radio and hosting showcase gigs weekly. She's quite amazing! This leaves me time now to work on my awards spin-off projects (I've written HERE about it, but focusing on scholarship programs and a few other surprises!).

Now that my voice has finally healed up (details of my illness here), I'm looking forward to getting at least ONE of my projects recorded. I was supposed to have several done by this time, but the illness definitely had other plans. What's the old saying? Ah, yes....:

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" - Woody Allen

Of course, that's based on the Yiddish "Man plans, God laughs" which is probably based on the ancient Greek "Chance, not wisdom, rules the lives of men."

Anyway....I'm blessed to have received hundreds upon hundreds of birthday wishes via text, email, snail mail, social media, phone calls, & the like...and as I do each year, I took my annual ODIS (Old Dudes In Shape) pictures as a challenge to my buddies who also post ODIS pics. Good accountability and keeps us all motivated and disciplined!

On the off chance that you are interested in the stories & photos from past birthdays, you can punch THIS LINK, which will list them all (and my ODIS pics through the past decade or more).

That's it for now. New songs to learn, old songs to chart, business to handle, and the kids want my attention!

Hope to see y'all soon....in person or over the airwaves!


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AMA - AI and the Arts (part two)

In Part One, I drew some lines in the sand and delivered a history of technology to demonstrate that, while disruptive, AI is just another technological step - an extension of the mind of man.

For clarification, it should be said that early technology (up to the industrial revolution) was focused primarily on amplifying the BODY of man, while 20th  & 21st century technology has shifted focus to extending the MIND of man.

That caveat aside, I decided (even though I had already sketched out the foundation of this article) to feed the entirety of Part One into Google's AI Gemini and see what it had to say. But not what it had to say in support of my thesis, but instead with explicit instructions to challenge EVERYTHING. 

"Tear it all down" were my specific words.

While it praised both the historical & philosophical rigor as well as the writing style (it seems machine minds dig my musical sense of symmetry and repetition - hahaha!), it hit back HARD.

If this topic concerns you, prepare to get even more anxiety and depression.

Journey to Japan!

Lexington....blue tower and blue lights....Horse Capital of the World....horses and bourbon....bluegrass and blues...."Athens of the West".....basketball and music....

70 miles an hour....blurry eyed but bushy tailed....

Cincinnati....glass and hot pavement....Queen City....Riverfront Park....beer and UC and Xavier....bright lights and green space....

Bumpy rush....then 30,000 feet and 500 miles per hour....

Touchdown....

Modern art and echoes and standing waves....Mont Royal and Vieux-Montreal....Jazz Festivals and Just For Laughs and Osheaga....City of Festivals and City of a Hundred Steeples....its Montreal. The smell of smoked meats and maple syrup and Starbucks rolling through the sound of French accents.

Then 13 hours at 40,000 feet...almost 600 miles per hour. 

Touchdown....

Bright lights and glass and metal....long lines moving too slow and too fast....black car at maximum speed blurs through gates and lanes in the darkness....a black-grey sky and the city is...big.

Tokyo.

AMA - My Health Clash with Pertussis

"It is health that is real wealth, and not pieces of gold and silver." - Mahatma Gandhi

AMA (for anyone new here, it means "Ask Me Anything")....

I mentioned in an earlier post and elsewhere an illness that KO-ed me earlier this year, but have not written about it. I was asked about and have spoken openly about it in workshops (including Paulie Felice's amazing "The Forge" weekend retreat) and even a few of my more interactive gigs, but was recently asked again and decided to write a short piece on it.

Bordetella Pertussis bacteria

Let's leap right in!

Pertussis is the medical term (you may know it as "Whooping Cough"), and is something I always thought was just something little kids get.

Nope.

And, speaking bluntly, it's not just brutal, its a potential career ender for vocalists.

Retched cough, fever, broncho spasms, loss of voice....lasts for upwards of 3 months!

You've had the vaccine as a child, but unless you step on a rusty nail as an adult, you might find its been decades since you've had it. 

Don't mess around with this - if you've not been boosted in the last decade, get your vaccine now.

AMA - AI and The Arts (part one)

Art created by Gemini for this essay.

AI in music....and AI in the arts in general.

Before we leap in, one thing worth remembering - and it's highly likely to anger everyone reading this right now - is that most of the public discourse on this topic (at least by musicians and industry folk) has been of a legal or philosophical nature, while usually taking a brief moment to mention how "fake" AI sounds as composer or performer (or poet or essayist or visual artist).

If that's your view, you need to swallow a bitter pill: The market disagrees with you, and (by any metrics you yourself would apply to a fellow human) you are wrong.

Sienna Rose, The Velvet Sundown, Nick Hustles, Xania Monet, FN Meka, Yona, Breaking Rust, Eddie Dalton, and more....including the 100% AI driven (no human intervention) creation Anna Indiana - all streaming millions to hungry listeners. Listeners who largely don't care about any of the issues we're about to get into - they care only about if they like the music.

Admittedly, this pisses me off a little, too.

At any rate, ponder that for a moment and then we'll leap in.

While I've thought extensively about this topic (and have for longer than I care to say, as I've been an avid fan of the works of Raymond Kurzweil for a long time, starting with his 1990 book "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and, as an irrelevant aside, still own my Kurzweil K-2000 keyboard), it's usually fragmented based on specifics. I've never really coalesced these thoughts into a single, specific policy position.

So let's explore "both sides" of this issue and see where we land.

Worthy of note: It should be obvious that the history given below (on both sides of the issue) is greatly abbreviated and oversimplified for brevity and ease of discussion. But the major pillars remain.

Let's get into it!