Bassic-ly me

I was just asked to answer the following question for a Philosophy of music course.  Thought I'd share my answer here as well. why do you make and perform music? The beautiful and very interesting thing about music is that the answer to this question is never, ever the same.  The answer I give tonight would be different than a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago, and finally two decades ago when I first started playing music.  20 years ago I played music because someone handed me a bass at school.  I didn't choose it.  A month after that I chose to play music in an orchestra festival and was bitten with the performing/musician bug.  In these days I played music in and out of school for love - for the great feeling of doing something creative and collaborative.   When I studied music at University I played music because I had to succeed.  The focus was different. Scholastic.  There was still love but there was dissection of "why" and "how"...

I have a confession to make.  I lied when talking  on   +CBC News  about what inspired the idea to give a perfectly good electric bass away to someone. It wasn't sitting there thinking about what to give my kids for Christmas that inspired the flashback of me 20 years ago when I got my first bass.  It was a lie. What really inspired it was a beautiful sunburst 2003 American Standard +Fender Guitars  Stratocaster that I purchased on November 25th 2011.   Its story was too fresh an open wound to discuss publicly when doing the interviews.  I'm ready now. My mother died in October 2011 only four months after being diagnosed with cancer. It wasn't the best time in my life to say the least. Many things that occupied my daily stream of brainpower, previous to my mothers diagnosis, seemed to fade in priority and many things which I had forgotten about bubbled to the surface in clear picture and sound, screaming at me like bright sunshine ...

My goal was to find someone deserving for my bass .  I did.  He's happy.  I'm happy.  Awesome. I published the blog on a Friday around 5pm. Around 7pm that night I had my first response. It was Sean's mother Kerry saying "I do know someone [that could use the bass], my son Sean" and she explained why. Sean "was in band at Birchwood for a while and played the trombone but because of his heart surgeries lately he had to sadly give it up cause he couldn't hold the breath long enough to play."  Born with CHD (Congenital Heart Disease), he's made several trips to the IWK  since he was an infant. Check out a couple of really nice online versions of his story. http://www.iwkstories.com/en/story/135 http://thetinylight-ourtinylights.blogspot.com/2011/12/seans-story.html I truly didn't expect this bass giveaway to balloon like it did - both in the response from people and from the media.   Jocelyne Lloyd from the Guardian said a great ...

This time of year, a little over 20 Years ago, my life changed forever.    I'm not guaranteeing this will do the same for someone else but ...I have a perfectly good electric bass that I want to give away - for free. This is why... 20 years ago I was handed an upright bass in my grade 9 general music class in Birchwood.   I didn’t want it.  I hadn’t thought of it previously.  It just happened.  But then music entered my life. If someone told me that day that “you will become a professional musician and eventually teach upright bass at a university level”, I would have exploded with laughter in that persons face.  If someone on that same day told me “If you stick with music and study it at a university level this is where you will eventually meet your beautiful wife that you will have 3 beautiful children with”, I probably would have listened, but still not believed.  You see, I hated myself.  I had zero self ...

Palliative care - it's a beautiful place. It's not the curtains, the nice pictures on the wall, the items with little gold plaques in memory of, the flatscreen TV, or the free coffee and snacks, or the free wifi, or any material thing in here. Yes, they all help.... the patient and the family. But it's the idea of care.... that is beautiful. It's not about "you didn't take care of yourself now let's try to fix". It's the comfort that is beautiful. It's not about suffering unnecessarily. It's about love and respect of the human form in what may or may not be its last days. It's about allowing a family to take over the kitchen and make pico de gallo with the tomatoes from my mother's home garden. A story that will be told for years. Remember the time.....? It's about allowing a family full of kids and sisters and grand-kids to stay until 10pm laughing and screaming and accidentally hitting the nurse call button...remember th...

This.................. is physically the absolute worse I've ever felt in my entire life... It was during a Groove Company gig the Friday after an over 135 hour-in-10-days-straight insane work week including 7 days of travel to Halifax ... it's funny the things we do to ourselves to stay afloat...to stay employed...to stay "normal" ...but it is what it is. I remember getting ready for this gig and Elizabeth said something to me...something I can't even remember now.. ( and neither can she because I just asked her ) ..it was probably nothing...and on any other day it probably would have been fine.. but on this day...on this day....I turned around...walked out of the house ...without a word...if anything came out of my mouth it probably would have been foul, it could have been tears, it may have lead to WWIII ...who knows...either way...whatever was going to come out of my mouth was going to be driven by insanity and unreasonabilityness ... so...I mad...

Great Queen song....great sampling by Vanilla Ice so that we can make fun of it today  "stop...collaborate and listen...." ..but it's also just an accurate description of my life right now... I made a drastic realization this week... I'm not super man.  and some days I just can't @$%#ing take it.  I can be weak.  But that's actually not the realization part....I've felt and thought a lot of those things before...but...I always handled it...I was stronger than my weakness.  I was more willing than my feeling that I can't take it.  I was even more super than superman. The realization this week was....it's ok.  It's...O...K.   It really is...even though I'm understandably stressed out at home and work, mentally exhausted, stretched thin, eating more crap, getting more overweight,  exercising less, getting less healthy, being less patient with the kids, cranky, etc, etc, etc I don't have to pretend that I'm OK and nothing is wrong a...