Kinship

As I write this I’m listening to Swingin’ for Schuur, an album I downloaded from the iTunes store last evening, featuring Diane Schuur backed by Maynard Ferguson and his Big Bop Nouveau band (1991). There is one obvious misfire on the album — regrettably the first track, “Just One Of Those Things” — but otherwise there is so much joyful singing and playing in this collection! And I feel a kinship with these musicians. In my mind’s eye I can see them in the studio, listening to the charts they’d just put down and knowing that in so many ways, and in so many moments, they had “nailed it.” On stage at the piano, where I did most of my work, I too have felt that.

It is so personally uplifting to be able to take pleasure in a fellow human being’s achievement. Technology rocks!

Hello world!

Here’s my sense of life:

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well, and having done it well, he loves to do it better.You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder. (Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man)

…a self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters. (Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead)