Memories of Arizona

Last July, I was on a road trip with family and friends through the southwest deserts. I drove out alone from Dallas to Las Vegas, and then everyone else flew from Toronto to there to meet up with me and then drive back to Dallas across the desert. It was a great, fun trip.
We spent a couple of days in Las Vegas, saw the Hoover Dam, we went to the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff, the meteor crater, we saw the painted desert, the Petrified Forest, we went to Santa Fe, and we went touring in northwest area of New Mexico looking for an ancient pueblo used for magic ceremonies over a thousand years ago. But one of the most interesting and amazing places we visited was Sedona, Arizona.
Winding down through the trees and vistas of Oak Creek Canyon on the way down from the highland plateau at 8,000 ft down to Sedona at about 2,000 ft, is a beautiful trip. I just happened to be playing some great music all the way down, and it made for a very memorable experience. The steep decline combined with the tight, blind curves, combined with the fact that it was dark in the crevice of the valley where the road is by the time we started our descent made an interesting experience. The cars behind me were obviously very familiar with the twists and turns and so they were pushing me to go faster, but I was already going down at a rate that possibly a little nerve racking for the other 6 people in the van with me. Nevertheless, the scenery was awe-inspiring. As the last of the sunlight struck the mountain tops across the valley and canyon walls high above us, it almost makes you gasp with the beauty of it.


But then we levelled out and entered into the first streets of artsy little shops in Sedona. It is a desert valley of red rocks. It looks like you could be on Mars. If Las Vegas is the capital city of gambling for the US, then Sedona is the capital city of mystical and spiritual awareness. There are all kinds of signs, maps and tours of the so-called "vortexes" of spiritual energy. So, we found a decent hotel, and after a good night’s rest, the next morning we went vortex hunting.

There was one showing on the map, called Bell Rock. This was at a classic mountain site just south of town, just off the side of the highway. So we went there, and we climbed that small mountain. There is a picture of it here, taken from a camera on a car as it drove past. I climbed up very near the top, but I didn’t feel anything. I climbed all over the side of the Bell Rock shown in this picture. I was by myself, because I had stayed with the car for a while and let the others go on ahead, so when I climbed the rocks, I would have a solitary experience. I opened my sensitivities to the space around me, but still felt nothing. I didn’t know what to think. Could it all be an elaborate hoax? But there are maps, and stories, and experiences…..Could the others be hallucinating or imagining their experiences? Could it simply be dormant at the moment? Could I be too inundated with the stresses of the material world that I was completely de-sensitized to any sort of spiritual energy?

Well at least the climb and the exercise felt good. My legs had been cramped up for two days driving the van, so it felt good to be out, walking around, climbing up a rock like that.

As we were driving back up into town, we saw an amazing looking church sticking out of the side of a mountain, so I decided it was worth going to investigate. This is one of the many landmarks of Sedona. It’s called “Chapel of the Rock Church”. As I wound my way up the steep road leading around and up behind the little church, I could see it from all angles. It is small, but beautiful. I parked the van, and we walked the rest of the way up to the church. Before going in, I walked around the patio they have, to view the valley from there and it is stunningly beautiful. There is a huge mansion being built on a mountaintop at a lower level that this church looks down upon. It’s probably over 10,000 square feet, with indoor pool, etc. It looks incredible. I turned and went inside.

Inside this tiny church, it was silent and peaceful. There were candles lit, and soft gentle chanting that sounded like monks. I went up to the front and put in some money and lit a candle, and then went to sit on the bench. I sat quietly and experienced a peace, that I could not remember feeling ever before. Well, that’s not exactly true. Actually the sense of peace did feel familiar, but I couldn’t remember when I felt it before. It was as if this is what it feels like in the afterlife. Peaceful. Relaxed. Silent and still, but aware and awake. I sat there for the longest time, just thinking. Thinking about this beautiful place within a beautiful place. Thinking about my life. Taking a big picture perspective of where I was, where I had been, and where I was going in life.

I could literally have sat there for many more hours without getting tired or bored. It just seemed to open up my inner world so easily. I normally have a very active mind, so my inner world is an interesting place all the time anyway. I can just sit and watch it sometimes – almost like watching TV. Just watching to see what ideas come up, what music is playing, memories being played, and future conversations being played out, engineering solutions to problems, etc. etc..

Later, when we got to a tour office, we checked a map and found that that little church was built upon one of the famous vortexes of spiritual energy that Sedona is well known for. Aha! So THAT’S what a spiritual energy vortex feels like!

After that, we got our bathing suits on and went to Slide Rock in Oak Creek Canyon. It’s about halfway-up the road between the lowlands of Sedona and the upper plateau where Flagstaff is. That was a lot of fun. Think of a natural waterpark. It’s a stream/creek of running water shallow over smooth rocks. It gathers in pools in places and there are hundreds of people there swimming, and sunning themselves on the rocks. It’s clean, beautiful, and completely natural. It’s what central Arizona has instead of a beach.

Of all the states I’ve visited, I must say that I think Arizona and New Mexico may be the most beautiful. And of these, Sedona is a wonderful place to visit for a few days. I most heartily recommend it.

The Show Party

I am thinking about my upcoming "show party".
I have been trying to get a band together for over a year now, and it became clear to me that I needed a goal for this. A target gig. Something to organize the band around and focus everyone on.
So I decided to create the event myself. I am having a party at my place. People have parties for all sorts of reasons - graduations, birthdays, book publishing releases (hey! - I didn't get one of those!) This will be a show party. A party specifically built around putting on a small concert. I’ll invite about 100 people or so. The band will play and hopefully, a good time will be had by all.
I haven’t played on stage with a band in many years, so I’m really looking forward to this.
I've given some thought to how and where to set up the 'stage' fopr the band.
I could set up the band in the back yard, but then the noise might trouble the neighbors. I will invite the people on either side, but I’ve never met or seen the people behind our house, so I can’t include them. Also, the date will be Aug 5th, so it may be very hot – too hot for people to sit comfortably, even in the evening. Or it could rain, or be too windy, or whatever. Outside parties are fraught with risk because the weather is unpredictable.

So for now I’ve decided to have it inside the house. In the so-called “greatroom”. This is the central open room with 25ft ceilings around which most of the rest of the house is centered in this style of house. We’ll be in front of the tall windows and fireplace.

I plan to open the window blinds for the third song called “Under a Texas Sky”. I have done a little research and found that the sun will set at precisely 8:22pm on that day. So the show will begin at 8:00. The opening intros, explanations, etc. plus the first two songs should take until about 8:18. That way, the song "Under a Texas Sky", should be ending just as the sun is setting behind us in the actual Texas sky. Hey - I’m looking to create a moment, here!
There will be stage lighting, and a fog machine, and a decent-size double PA system. Also, I will be recording audio into Pro Tools AND video with 5 cameras. 4 cameras on tripods, and one roving mobile one. Joe, the film producer has agreed to come to make the video for this.

I have already created the set list of songs. They are all my own original tunes, of course, except one. I wrote a cover version of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. Hers is a very piano-oriented one and it’s beautiful. Mine is very guitar-oriented, with a completely different chord arrangement. I treated it as if I were writing my own original song, but I just already had the vocal lyrics and melody.

Here is the setlist:

First set
1) You Make Me Feel Good
2) Best Day of Your Life
3) Under a Texas Sky
4) I Can’t Make You Love Me
5) We Will Be Alright
6) Diamonds In Her Soul
7) Anthem

Second Set
8) The Sun Through the Trees
9) Honeymoon Suite
10) Second Wind
11) Goodbye
12) Just Before the Storm
13) The Visions of Nostradamus
14) Yavanna Smiled

Encore: (if needed)
It Seems Like Only Yesterday
The Best Day of Your Life

I have already created CD's of this setlist, for the guys in the band to practice to.
We’ll have Joe on rhythm guitar, Mike on drums, Ryan on Bass, and myself on lead guitar and vocals. In addition, I am creating backing tracks to provide the other instruments that I put in my recordings but cannot have live, such as keyboards, harmony vocals, extra guitars, extra percussion, flute, whatever. This will be synched with a click track played ‘backstage’ for us to synch with. It seems this is what a lot of bands do these days.

Anyway – it should be great fun. In the meantime, thinking about it and planning for it is on my mind a lot.

In The Movies

Well, I received a call tonight from a fellow I met a few months ago named Joe Caneen, who has a filmaking company called Audiovisual Works Consulting. We had talked about collaborating on two new films he wants to do for the Trucking industry. (Specifically for Swift, a very very large trucking company with over 22,000 drivers.)
I met him through a mutual friend, Doug Wittifield, who owns Reve Records in Las Vegas. Doug had thought that Joe and I might work something out and help each other along. Joe checked out my music on my website and decided that he liked it, and would like to have me help him.

Joe and I spoke and then he came to visit me here in Dallas and we had a very nice discussion about the films he wanted to do, and the kinds of sounds that might make sense to add in as a soundtrack. He had promissed the potential buyers of the films that these would NOT have elevator music, but would have original music. Music that sounds interesting and unique and has artistic value. ... but he decided to come to me anyway.....

The way we left it was that we both wanted to work further on this, and that he would go shoot some footage and give it to me to write some music to. That was several months ago.
Tonight, he called to tell me that he had finished the first film. A 20-minute film on the truck driving lifestyle intended to spur recruitment into the industry.

He went to my website and downloaded 5 of my songs and used them for the film and he said they worked perfect. He seemed excited at how well they fit - especially how the film ends with a truck heading off down the road away from the camera while my song, "The Road Not Taken" plays and finishes right on cue.

So, it's done. Now the job turns to shopping the film around to get the right deal for it, and the extensions, and the other main film.

I wish him the best of luck. His luck is my luck in this enterprise.

Hmmm... I wonder if I should add "Wrote and recorded music for film score" to my resume....

It's Raining Aliens... again?

In the summer of 2001, in the state of Kerala in southern India, there were about 50 tons of mysterious red particles mixed in with the rain. After some scientific research, Godfrey Louis, a physicist from Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious journal Astrophysics and Space Science, implying that these particles are actually microbes from space.

They reproduce, however they have no DNA – unlike other life on Earth. In fact, in the samples taken and analyzed, these microbes are able to reproduce in superheated water at temperatures over 600F. For Earth-based life forms, nothing can survive past about 250F. So these are hardy seeds indeed – as they would have to be to survive a space journey – given the radiation and heat and cold they would have been exposed to in space on their trip here.
It is speculated that they may have been riding onboard a comet or meteorite that exploded when it hit Earth’s atmosphere.

More researchers in the UK, are now studying the rainwater samples to corroborate or dispute the findings. Predictably, there are always naysayers to just about any theory. Some people will come up with the most protracted, unlikely theories to explain away anything that suggests that there might be life on other worlds besides this one. In one case, an Indian government scientist blamed it on algae. Another one says it is fungal spores. Another says it must be red dust swept up from the Arabian Desert, to drop on this one particlar spot of Kerala, India. And another one – this is my favorite – is that a meteorite hit a flock of bats veeeeeery high up – say 30,000 feet where the clouds are, and it’s tiny droplets of bat’s blood. No other parts of the bats. Just the blood. 50 tons of it. Mixed in the rain. Yep.

Well, for one thing, blood cells don’t replicate. And these cells are definitely replicating. In fact they have photographs showing cross-sections of the cells showing budding daughter-cells coming from within the parent cells. It also means they are not dust – Arabian or otherwise. For another thing – these cells HAVE NO DNA!!! That means they are not any kind of life from Earth, not bats, nor spores, nor anything else Earth-based, since all our life forms have DNA.

It amazes me that some people simply CANNOT accept that there are other forms of life elsewhere despite evidence or logical reasoning to the contrary. That’s like Christopher Columbus being determined to find no life forms in the Americas when he arrived here. As if Europe was the only land that could produce life. The arrogance of that type of thinking is simply staggering.

I have an older aunt who does not believe that it is possible to travel to the moon because it is only a light in the sky – it is not a real place. That is her belief. And she thinks it is laughable and preposterous to think otherwise. There are also those who firmly believe the Earth is flat. How crazy of the rest of us to suggest that it might be round.

So we have the contingent of people who believe that this cannot be from space or from another world because no lifeforms could possibly exist outside THIS one world - REGARDLESS of any evidence, facts or reasoning. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, there will no doubt be those who are thoroughly convinced that this is an alien plot. A spaceship dropped off a sample of alien lifeform by seeding it into our clouds so that it would come down in the rain, and then it grows and develops into a horrible disease that wipes out all life on this planet, clearing the way for the aliens to come and assume ownership of our world. There are all kinds of people…

Panspermia is the name of the theory proposed about 25 years ago that suggests that life here originally developed from a sample of similar simple lifeforms from space that arrived onboard another meteorite. Maybe this is an ongoing process. In fact, it would be illogical to assume otherwise.

* information for this article gathered from Popular Science, 2006

Al DiMeola

Let me preface this by saying that Al DiMeola may actually be the very best guitarist on the planet today.
That's a pretty bold statement, but I don't make it lightly. He literally seems unlimited in terms of what he can play. And his impeccable technique, accuracy, and blinding speed are legendary. However, his music is VERY sophisticated and so - it's not for everyone.

It is probably beyond the understanding of most people, or at least appreciating it is more work than a lot of people are willing to do to listen to music. I have played little snippets for some young musicians lately and their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. They didn't know music like this even existed. There is just so much sheer musical content stuffed in there, that many people would miss it, because they are used to simple radioplay material. Each piece (I hesitate to call it a song) probably has more movements and changes than an entire album of music from a typical artist. If you were a songwriter looking for ideas, you could easily take any two bars of music from any Al DiMeola piece and make an entire song from that.

Imagine a person who talks nonstop for 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes, he tells you the cure for cancer, the solution to terrorism, the cure for hunger and poverty, gives the key to correcting our economy, solves the problems of the Middle East, and shows you the technology for invisibility, instantaneous travel, and a great tasting hamburger that actually makes you thin when you eat it. Well, an Al DiMeola piece is kind of like a musical version of that. If you're not paying attention, you'll miss a lot of good stuff! If you've never heard him, then you are in for a treat.

Al has evolved over the decades and his music is a little different now compared to what it was in the 90's and that was different again from what it was in the 70's and 80's. I think to understand who and what he is, you need to get at least two albums. Let me explain:

The music that originally made him a well-known guitar player is probably his work with Chick Corea and Return to Forever, especially the album, Romantic Warrior. That's the RTF album I enjoy the most. Then his first solo albums after leaving Return to Forever vaulted him into icon-level recognition in the guitar world. These are albums like: Land of the Midnight Sun, This is Jazz, Elegant Gypsy, Casino, Soaring Through a Dream, etc. This is the time when he was an absolute so-called "Guitar God", playing a black Les Paul Custom and making it sing and soar at triple speed, with his ultra-precise runs. That is what made him famous.

The music itself is a latin-jazz-rock fusion. It sounds like the musical version of Swiss clockworks. All the pieces of the band working together with absolute precision, but in imaginative ways. It's very progressive. Very sophisticated. Not everyone can truly appreciate it, but many musicians are wowed by the technical challenge and achievement of it. It's not ALL a high-speed parade of instrument skills though. There is definitely musical value in these pieces. Some are very beautiful, but the first thing that strikes most people is how good the musicians are technically.
The best way to capture that whole early era of his career is to get his "Anthology" album. That is a double album that has a nice cross section of his better tunes from those albums. I would certainly recommend that one to listen to first.

But then, for a while, Al went into some weird phases during the so-called "Manhattan Years" and made music that sounded too bizarre for me to enjoy. That stuff was just way out there with weird time signatures for two bars, then changing again, and again, and again. It's almost as if he was deliberately trying to come up with material that displayed how tight the band was and how controlled and precise, but it sounds to me as if no one cared whether the end product was listenable to anyone.

Then he evolved to a new place again. This time, it was much more gentle, beautiful music, but still with that Latin Jazz flavor with a touch of rock thrown in here and there. And even slightly more than a hint of classical music.
I believe this represented a change of focus away from instrumental virtuosity, and toward the essence of the music itself. Now it creates moods. It has space. It flows. It dreams. It lives.
He focused on the percussion more and added other orchestral instruments like violins, etc.. He also made the piano more prominent, I think. With the guitar, he started doing a lot more acoustic work and moved away from the electric stuff.
I bought the same acoustic guitar as his: the top of the line Ovation 1869 Custom Legend. Except that I got mine in a deep cherry burst finish and his is black. I also bought my first Gibson Les Paul Custom because of him, though his was black and mine was white. Then I bought another one to replace it, but a three pickup one. And I still have that one today.

Probably because of my appreciation of his work, combined with the fact that I liked to play some of his pieces in live shows back when I was a full-time professional guitarist, the other band members and other people used to jokingly refer to me as "Val DiMeola". I do not profess to play as well him, however. I played his music, but few people can play as well as him. My fellow band members humored me by allowing me to add a couple of early Al DiMeola pieces to the setlist that we played every night. It was our chance to show off - but it also added to our musician credentials that we could play that material.

Then my style changed after one day a friend of mine came to see me playing in a club and said, "Your playing is very impressive, but why do you always want to make the guitar sound like a machine gun? I thought it was supposed to be about MUSIC" Those were words of wisdom. After that, my playing changed. It was no longer about speed and precision for me. It was now about the music.
I think Al came to that same conclusion in the 1990's. In a relatively recent interview, he said that if he and his band tried to play the original music they played back in the 70's and 80's now every night, they'd probably have heart attacks. It was just too intense, too demanding to play.

His latest album is Flesh on Flesh and it's quite good. He is merging his newer style of music with some of his old electric tones and tricks. So he has all the Latin percussion and piano, and different instruments, and plenty of acoustic guitar, and classical instruments and passages, AND the sizzling electric guitar stuff thrown in there for good measure. He's trying to keep everybody happy, I suppose.

But I would say that my overall favorite Al DiMeola album to just LISTEN to is probably "Kiss My Axe". Some guitarists don't like this one because there is less wild and fast guitarwork on it, but I find the music is beautiful. It does have his style all over it, but it's far more subtle. And the guitar serves the music, rather than the music being a backdrop for jawdropping guitarwork. Also, frankly, I find the overall production quality and fidelity is higher than the older recordings. I assume this is because it's recorded on newer digital equipment, rather than the older analog tape equipment that was available in the 70's and 80's.

If you want to experience Al DiMeola's music properly, my recommendation is to get his Anthology album first, to see why he became famous, and truly appreciate his mastery of guitar and his approach to music. Then get "Kiss My Axe" to get what I consider to be his best, most beautiful music. Then, once you are up to speed so-to-speak, get his latest album, Flesh On Flesh to see where he is at the moment. If you just rush to this last album, you might not understand it out of context. Do it in the right sequence and see the progression, and you may find that your tastes and understanding can evolve along with him to a degree.

The Gentle Fog

The Gentle Fog

The fog slips in sideways
to arrive unnoticed.
It adds a note of silence
into the music around you
until all relaxes into stillness.

It obscures details
that might otherwise distract you.
To allow you space to think
your most private thoughts in peace.
And then it gives you a secret place
to tuck them away for later.
For when you might need them again.

You entrust your thoughts to the mists

But when you turn to look away,
like a caring mother's kind discretion,
it hides the bad ones in its skirts
to save you the trouble.

Is this what the rest of the dream world looks like when the story has moved elsewhere?