My changing musical profile

I often marvel at the fact that the jazz I listen to on the radio today is by and large the same 50s, 60s cool jazz I listened to fifty years ago and ever since. Mulligan, Baker, and company seem to be constants in my life.

As a musical performer, however, I find myself changed in major ways. Beginning with the Army in 1959, and six months before that in Berkeley, I carried my instrument around with me everywhere, a five-string banjo in the Army days and a six-string guitar while at UCLA and a 12-string guitar in grad school and later on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

When I returned west in the late 70s, 20 years after the Army, I began a life without the constant companion of my instrument. Earlier, I took it as a part of who I was, someone who played music wherever I went, was expected to play. Friends were other musicians or people who appreciated the music. A week would not go by without one or two songfests included in the rhythm of the night. Even in the Army, anywhere from four to eight of us would gather somewhere with lots of beer, I with my banjo, and we'd sing the night away.

All this changed when I came to Portland in the late 70s. Divorced, a bit broken, starting over. I still had my 12-string and I played it at home but I didn't venture out with it. In time I defined myself in a different way as a performer, in a more formal way. Instead of playing at home and the homes of friends, free, I wrote a show, got a grant to tour it, and managed to maintain the tour through much of the 1980s, getting paid. This was Ramblin': the song and stories of Woody Guthrie. I performed it in Seattle, in Los Angeles, and throughout the Northwest.

After putting it aside for a few years, I resurrected the show in the 90s, adding Jim Wylie as a second musician. We did a few shows, perhaps the best being at the Newport Performing Arts Center. Then I set it aside again, some years before Jim passed away far too soon.

I didn't perform for several years once again. Then I picked up the banjo again. I played the "Pete Seeger lick" and wanted to learn clawhammer, so I found a class and ended up taking 3 from an excellent teacher, Leela Grace. But I found myself playing more when class was on than when not. I wasn't playing banjo much on my own. Yes, I'd pick out a tune now and again but I wasn't practicing regularly, which is what one needs to do to keep the chops up.

In fact, I've lost a lot of interest in playing music. I'm not sure why. Instead I find myself wanting to compose music, small operas, chamber operas, writing down music I'm hearing in my head. I've done a little of this but I haven't vigorously attacked any of the several projects that focus on this.

I may yet get to a composition project. The present novella feels like "a last work" in several ways, a kind of dramatic summing up of my themes as a writer. I have a libretto I really like that needs music, having lost its composer, an adaptation of my stage play Varmints. If I get lucky and live long enough, it might be a nice swan song.

I'm still trying to figure out why I don't get the old kick from playing music, though. And if another class came up, I might well take it. Curious. But I have no answers. I just don't play music the way I used to.