In the Last Two Days...

... I have had quite the opportunities to be creative. Last night I met for the first time with a couple of other visual artists to get feedback on the painting I am doing for Kie's office. I found it helpful, and was encouraged by the fact that they seemed to have the same ideas as I did about where the painting needs to go in order to be successful. The real trick now is getting it to go there. Thanks, Candace and Niwah!

Tonight I got to do some jazzy improv stuff on the bass. The guitarist I was playing with is really gifted, but he plays these weird chords and progressions. I had to abandon all hope of just recognising the standard chord shapes and going along with them. Instead, I reckoned the key that they were in and I lept. That's what it felt like, Kiergaard's leap of faith. Every new note I played it was leap like that, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

My aunt recently asked me about the experience of playing music and this experience reminds me of how i described its appeal. Music, like dance, is organised by time. You can do a painting over a few weeks or months and it's not necessarily important how long it takes to do it. Music has to exist in a set piece of time. It's all bars and measures and tempos. To play music is to fill those moments, to live in each one, connect each one to the ones before it and after it. But you can't look too far forward or backward, you have to be in that note, that bar, that measure that you're in.