Moving the Pieces

Aaron Copeland (not my childhood friend, the composer) once said that “If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong”. With this in mind I’d like to apologize for glossing over so much in my last post! There’s a lot of truths I didn’t get to, and this in itself is a type of falsehood. There's lots more to say about music another day. I’m going to discuss this other small hobby of mine now.

Indian Proverb: Chess is an ocean in which a fly can drink and an elephant may bathe.

You probably don’t think chess is dope. Put simply, you’re wrong. It’s the royal game. If you don’t back it hard maybe you’re not regal enough. Maybe you’re a simpleton. For some reason it has a reputation as a nerdy game. I’m a really cool guy and I back it. If you still need more convincing the words ahead will do it.

It’s an old game. Whether it came from India or an African country is debatable. I don’t remember that far back and neither does anyone else. Lots of old peeps had a game with similar rules. Regardless of time and place the game appealed to everyone. Think about it: civilizations that hated each other and went to war and killed and raped each others babies went home after battle and moved pieces with their loved ones. We all have the game in common!

Chess was always regarded as a past time for nerds until Bobby Fischer talked mad noise about the Russians before going there and personally schooling them. Russians dominated chess more than Canadians killed hockey (I’m being honest, sorry). Fischer would later prove himself to be completely mental (9/11 Jewish conspiracies etc.), and the seeds of insanity were present in his match against Spassky (the top Russian). He lost the first game. There were video cameras taping the match and Fischer thought they were too loud (even when they were turned off), so they put thick blankets over to quiet the noise. This wasn’t enough, so they played in a small back room isolated from everyone! Once alone Fischer beat him 7-1 with a bunch of draws. Top grandmasters don’t get dominated that way!

This explains it all pretty much:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6WsuBZfr10&feature=related

The American public followed the match and chess became popular! YAY! This was during the cold war, the same year Paul Henderson scored for Canada to beat the Russians. The US had some beef with the communists too! Canada expected to beat the Russians in hockey. It’s our game. They gave us a real run for our money, but before the Spassky match no American capitalist had a place beating the top Russian in chess!

Personally, I am a logical hombre. I like debating things and understanding them in an abstract way so I can superimpose them in another context. That’s the appeal literature has for me, with metaphors and all that. But chess is at once abstract and finite. No rhetoric convinces the loser the battle is still going; when his King is cooked the game cannot legally proceed. One time in the parks of New York the police tried to arrest people for gambling on chess games, only the judge acquitted them since he determined it couldn't legally be considered gambling. Unlike poker, backgammon or hockey there is absolutely no luck involved in chess! True story. It's one persons brain against the other. No more, no less.

You know what else is cool? Historically, Jews have a habit of whooping ass at chess boards around the world. The greatest world champions have all been Jews: Steinitz, Lasker, Fischer, and Kasparov. I should mention that Fischer has publicly disassociated himself from his Jewish heritage..he’s a real hater. Still there’s no shortage of Jewish chess leaders: Kashdan, Fine, Reshevsky, Tartakower, Flohr, Najdorf, Bronstein, Botvinnik, Tal, and that ultra good looking Halperin! Even that kid Josh Waitzkin who the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer” was made about is Jewish. Josh actually connects to my next point, the final reason why chess is undisputedly dope.

The Wu-tang back it! They always rap about the pieces. In the Wu-Tang manual there’s a whole chapter on the significance chess plays in the Wu’s whole philosophy. Rza phrases it in a way I just can’t: “At parties chess was considered nerdy at one point. Now it’s considered cool…The other day when GZA was playing Melquan, when he took his queen he said ‘Hey, your bitch chose me’—that is some pimp shit. That’s just how we flip it”. That’s how I feel too.


This connects with Josh since that kid stopped playing serious chess and grew up to be a martial arts champion. He’s practically the RZA’s hero now! They hang out all the time, Josh discusses the links between chess and martial arts at the promotional work he does for http://www.wuchess.com/, an online hip hop chess community the RZA started. I am going to learn more about it because for some reason I have nothing to do with it. In my last two posts I discussed blues and chess and I bet none of you thought I’d bring up Hip Hop/Wu-Tang in both of em!

Anyway, I’m sure you have a lot more respect for the 64 squares now. I’m part Russian and all the way Jew so I can’t really help but love moving pieces. Really with the world wide explosion of chess in the 70s, and especially since the internet, people from all over the world are unreal at chess and games are analyzed the same day they’re played! It’s not just for Russian Jews anymore. That having been said, challenge me. I take on all comers. But beware: I’m into regicide buddy!

One last note: I thought I'd provide a link to what is arguably Bobby Fischer's most famous games from when he was a 13 year old: "The Game of the Century". Check out move 17 where he allows his Queen to be taken in order to unleash a WICKED combination!

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361

Man, this is dirty stuff! Peace out ya'll.

Black Music as told by a White Boy

BIG TINGS ALERT: CHRIS BROWN CHANGED HIS FACEBOOK STATUS TO SINGLE!



Moving right along. Have you ever travelled to a place and thought "man this spot has character! There's something about it that's unlike anywhere I've ever been". Switzerland feels like the technology is dope, but it doesn't have explosive culture like Paris. When you walk around Paris you know you're not in Chicago. And not just because you can't understand a thing people say. Every place has an aura. I think it's essential to think about when and where a style of music came from if you want to be an informed listener. Blues didn't come from Sweden! Chicago blues couldn't be born in California.



I'm going to begin by saying I think blues, jazz and hip hop is an evolution of the same thing, extended over time and place: black music! Initially blues was played by a single musician on an acoustic guitar. You might have the image of a man on a porch in Mississippi wearing a straw hat and overalls. Maybe a piece of straw dangles in his mouth. Maybe I'm just thinking about the cover of my Mississippi John Hurt album but I really think I had that image in my head before! The harmonies were simple. So was the melody. The fingerpicking could be intricate but it wasn't conceptually advanced compared to what was to come, even if it was techinically difficult to play. A guy could go to a bar and play the same song for literally 10-15 minutes and just sing/mumble about how his girl left him for another man and took everything he had ( This makes me think of Tom Arnold in True Lies: "What kind of a sick bitch takes the ice tray!"). Perhaps he ran into the devil at an intersection. Crossroads whatever. Cool. Basic. I love it! But I get it.



Moving North to the Windy City. The blues got drummers, electric guitars, and saxophones! BB Kings harmonies/chord structures are virtually the same as Robert Johnson's but the rhythm is BIGGER. This is chicago blues. People in Chicago are more demanding than the Mississippi crowd. Maybe people are dancing to it instead of just bar-fighting. Solo acoustic guitar don't cut it. Different place, different music.



Parallel to this is rag-time piano coming up in the EARLY 20th century in N'awlins. Then Louis Armstrong's trumpet makes musicians around the world cry. In New York, Duke Ellington plays and starts SWINGING the blues with an orchestra! ORCHESTRA! He's most associated with jazz, but he's got tons of tunes based on the 3 chords of blues. One of my favourite albums of his is Blues in Orbit. Listen to Oscar Peterson play Duke's composition "C Jam Blues". It's dope. But his blues is jazz. Just like Jimi Hendrix's blues is rock. More on that.



New York is now the jazz centre. During World War II there's a ban on recording. Several years go by where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are playing and playing and playing but nobody's heard it because the vinyl used for records is needed for the war effort (specifically for what I don't know, but it's true). War ends, records are made, Parker takes world by storm! Everything is twice as fast and the harmonies are NUTS! It's BeBop now. Louis Armstrong will give you a blank stare if you ask him what a tri-tone substitution is! People make connections between the atom bomb/war and the change in jazz. It makes a lot of sense to me, but even musicians at the time thought it was ruining jazz. Go to any music store now and any book of "jazz standards" Listen to Parker play KoKo and tell me the world is the same as John Hurt, Robert Johnson or even Ellington. Place and time are different.


Miles Davis travels to New York to find Parker before they had ever met, and he becomes his protege and all that. But he's never happy playing the same way for long. He makes harmonies simple again and people on California love it! It becomes "cool jazz" that fits in perfectly with their laid back, anything goes surfer attitude. Jazz is accessible for people again! Now white people can play it too! Hello Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker. That's California.


Miles doesn't like the fact that white people are taking jazz back!! He starts playing tunes like Airegin. Yes. This is Nigeria backwards. Tony Williams and Elvin Jones enter the picture and start laying down rhythms that are simply astounding. White drummers everywhere shake their heads! But really so does everyone.


But Jazz starts losing ground. It's not mainstream anymore. James Brown hears Fela Kuti and puts a band together. Sly has a family too (a white and black one). They have horns and electric guitars too! Bitches Brew=the album where Miles goes electric himself. Keyboard, not piano. Electric guitar, not no guitar. Jazz and funk intersect. They're pretty similar right?


Enter Jimi Hendrix. He is a blues player but people call it psychadelic rock. Only he's got a jazz drummer (basically...Jimi called him "my Elvin Jones" who you remember was Miles' drummer for a time but became famous with Coltrane). I said earlier white people couldn't drum like that. I take it back now. White people are cool too! Anyway, that's really why I can't tell the difference between music anymore. Jazz rock and blues have a thin line between em.


Let's just get to hip hop already! Do you know who Ali Shaheed Muhammad is? He's the DJ for A Tribe Called Quest and he's obcessed with jazz. It's not a secret. The sickest track on the album is called "jazz"! Miles Davis' bassist Ron Carter plays on the album. They shout out "Be bop" too. Digable Planets, Guru and Jazzmatazz, and countless others EXPLICITLY take jazz cuts. My favourite jazz guitar player now, Grant Green, is used all the time in break beats. For squares, that's music people break dance too. For real squares, break dancing is one of four pillars of hip hop along with rap, graffitti and DJing. Nas' father was a blues musician. Cool eh? These things come full circle.


Lastly, consider the difference between a Dre beat and WuTang: PLACE! Dre is Westside and his beats sound like. WuTang reflects the cold hard concrete of New York. Dre rolls Sess, Wu is into Kush. Primo is the same way. Time and place forms the creation of music. People all over listen and enjoy no matter where they're from. This didn't use to be true. Before people Chicago heard Chicago blues, etc.But thanks to the interweb, blonde kids named Sved from Sveden can listen to NWA!


Music is for everyone, black white swedish american whatever. I guess those countries that burn American flags are an exception...Maybe Jimi playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock? Anyway, an understanding of where it's from is necessary to really get into it. I know I say this but I really will be shocked if people have gotten this far. I will not put you through more! I really could though! I left out a ton. Regards to Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, De La Soul, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Pigpen (he was sort of black!) and more.

Leafs lost again. They had a lead coming into the third. It was obvious they were going to lose. JERRY LIVES.


J

The most Original Gangster of them all

Hey. How are ya? I hope everyone reading this is having the best day of their lives. If so, it's about to get even better. Today's writing is going to be a gem.



I have decided this one's about music. Yesterday was Jerry and I was claiming to go to the beginning. But now I'm going to the beginning. Yup. J.S. Bach. The discussion doesn't need to be technical and the last thing I want to do is convince the few people who are reading my blog to tune out after only 2 posts!



Bach is thinking music. I was doing work while I was listening (Violin Concertos) and I swear I had no urge to check facebook, chess moves in my online games or Israeli politics. I even forgot the Leafs were playing/losing! It's 9:30 now and without checking the score I'm confident they're behind. They're also playing the worst team in the league (playing ourselves is impossible but Tampa is garbage too). I have digressed quickly. The cool thing about the JS B man is the harmony. But even that pales in comparison to the melody. The rhythm is dope too. OK I think that's every component of music!



COOL BACH FACTS: did you know that half of everything he composed in his lifetime burned in a house fire? My father believes that Bach was not only a much greater composer than that kid Mozart or Beethoven, but that he was a greater composer than Lemieux was a hockey player, or Einstein was a physicist, or Madoff was a crook! It's very likely that we have never heard his greatest pieces! Scary thought.



Bach wasn't popular in his day because the musicians wanted to play easier music! 100 years after Bach died Beethoven was leafing through some papers one day and stumbled on my man Johann and realised quickly how dope he was. But it wasn't until a Canadian piano player named Glenn Gould played the Goldberg Variations in the 50s that Bach came back into favour. Before that he was respected, not loved. Gould lived in an apartment building at St. Clair and Avenue...there's a plaque in front of it and there's a park named after him beside it.



I had a guitar teacher at Dalhousie who toured as a classical musician. I told him about what my father said to see if my old man was really just an insane bastard posing as my father. Douglas Reach agreed too! My dad plays Bach on piano and he used to teach too...he knows how to tickle the ivories!



Is anyone still reading? I wasn't sure I could make an entry about Bach accessible or entertaining (and I don't know that I have) but this comes back to an issue I've been considering since I began blogging yesterday. Should I write for peoples entertainment or my own? I have decided I have to wait until someones pays me before I can sell out, so I am writing things that really are on my mind. I could have gone on about Bach longer but I thought it was enough. Actually I have one more cool thing to say!



So not only did Bach come back into the mainstream after Goulds recording, but Gould did too. Overnight success. International hit. He is Canada's greatest musician (shout outs to Neil and Oscar Peterson...apples and oranges). Anyway, this was his first recording and a major one by all accounts. In 1982, a week before he died, Gould made his final recording: a revisit of the same Goldberg Variations. Only it sounds almost nothing like the first one. The first shows a young kid with dazzling talent whipping off Baroque riffs which swing like a Jazz musicians. The final recording is that of an introspective mature musician who has nothing left to prove. He died a week later. WOW. Talk about symmetry! Wouldn't it be a coincidence if the word "symmetry" was a palindrome? Or is that Ironic? It would certainly be cool. How does a guy who writes blogs about Bach get to determine what Cool is?



I used to tell this story when I worked at Madrigal in Halifax because there's a double CD available which features both versions. It's a dope CD...I wasn't just telling this story to sell products. I hope one of my custumers is reading this so they know what a genuine young fella I was! Doubt it.



Next post will be about something mainstream. OMG did you hear singer Chris Brown Bobby Browned his girlfriend Rihanna?? Isn't that totally random?



OK I'm really done. Confirmed: Leafs lost; Bach is dead; Jerry lives.

Introspection Intro

HI!


How are ya? Welcome to my interweb space! It appears I have become a blogger. Cool! This blog will be good for the thousands of people who have thought "I wonder what it would be like to open up Jeff's brain and check it out". Too many times I have a thought that I know would change the world (in a good way), but then I play guitar or watch hilites of the Leafs losing and the thought is gone forever and the world is still terrible. This blog will change that. I have humble intentions: my plan is to discuss my ideas about music, chess, sports, literature, movies, philosophy, life, death, etc. etc. Once people begin to understand my mind the world will start correcting itself.





I'll begin at the beginning. JERRY. I've gone through so many musical phases over the years (Short chronological list: Pearl Jam, MC Hammer, Phish, Dead, Dead, Neil Young, Robert Johnson, Parker/Miles/Coltrane, Dead) but it always comes back to the fat man's band! Lately I've been getting something different from their music. It used to be I needed to hear a 30 minute jam. That was the Dead to me...any band can play songs right? NO! The chord movements floor me now! They're so elegantly constucted! They write poetry. I recently got their annotated book of lyrics...no matter how large a deadhead you think you are, you will be shocked at how much goes into their songwriting. Their reputation for psychadelia distorts how grounded they really were. The roots of the Grateful Dead are complicated and it's a separate topic. There will be a lot more about this to come! In closing I'll say that I have become a more three dimensional listener of their music and it's been a rewarding experience.

Some people reading this are thinking "holy god this man is deep. I wonder what he thinks about other things?" I don't want to make this long. But I will give you a trailer of what's to come"

Sports: Leafs are cool but terrible. There are three stable things in the organization in no particular order: Burke, Wilson, Schenn. Movement in the right direction is good, however slow.

Chess: I play at U of T Chess Club. As white I like playing the risky Kings gambit against weak players. Against stronger players I play E4 and after that who knows. As black I like the Sicilian.

Literature: I read lots of different tings But lately I've been loving Mordechai Richler because he is blunt, politically incorrect and hysterical. Read Barney's Version.

Hopefully the process of blogging will make my writing/thinking more explicit and will develop into a novel. In other words one day this will cost you all money! This first blog was scattered because it's sort of a survey, like I'm playing a virtual "get to know you" game. I hate those games so this will be the last one. If you're still reading this I am shocked and offer my humble appreciation. Have a good day all! JERRY LIVES.

-J