Hello from Liechtenstein, a small country of 30,000 people nestled in between Switzerland and Austria. This is the final stop of a month-long tour. I’m working with an amateur big band comprised of folks that love jazz and have jobs other than full-time musician. In fact, one of the saxophonists is the assistant to the prime minister (who I met today). Liechtenstein is a beautiful little place surrounded by the Alps, which happens to be home to two world class manufacturers of high-end tools and electronic components. Liechtenstein is also home to many wealthy clients' fortunes, held by banks in a country where the top tax bracket is 17%. People here seem very cool and comfortable.

One of the musicians in the band took me today to the local art museum which houses various rotating special exhibits and also a rotating exhibit supplied by the Prince of Liechtenstein, who has one of the largest private collections of art in the world. It is a truly extraordinary museum. The visiting exhibit is by French artist Christian Boltanski. The exhibit is called “La Vie Possible” , and was a very unusual exhibit which addressed the issue of if and how an image, document, or recording represents the person depicted, and to what degree. There were photo images of acquaintances of the artist as well as photos of other people in varying degrees of clarity. The photos were framed in interesting ways, sometimes very dark and macabre. The message I got from this exhibit is that representations of people, be it photos, works of art, or sound recordings are quite far removed from the reality of the person in the moment, but rather seem to represent some past perception or memory of the person. This has all kinds of implications as far as the world of the internet, mp3s, and all the images flying around on the web. It is interesting to consider that we meet thousands of people and process hundreds of thousands of bits of information concerning events in our life time. Once we’ve experienced encounters with either the person or events surrounding that person, the recorded image or sound byte is a mere representation of a past experience. The exhibit we saw depicted Boltanski’s take on how his perception could be represented by an art exhibit using photos, a wall of clothing, a room with three screens of news reports going by at lightening speed with the sound sped up, and an actual photo of himself that changed over time from child to his current age. The exhibit was conspicuously void of the human component, and said to me that these representations of life are quite separate from the life experience, becoming more so all the time.

We went to see the documentary film about Bela Fleck traveling around Africa playing with local musicians in several different locations. This was an incredibly inspiring film which actually depicted an amazing level of humanity and artistry. Bela clearly did some serious homework in studying how to integrate his playing with the various African music and musicians he encountered there. The musicianship was astounding all around. I realized how profound the effect ofAfrican music has been on musics of the world, and how integral a part of society music is in these areas of Africa. There was a great scene where seemingly a whole village was surrounding this huge xylophone-like instrument. Several of the men were hammering out these amazing rhythms on this long instrument while women sang and danced, and the children mimicked the men’s playing of the instrument and moved to the music. I really admire Bela for having the courage to embark on this project. He came away with some astounding music, which is available on cd. You must hear/see this!

I’ve been working on patterns lately thanks to the offering of Russ Ferrante. He showed me how he arpeggiated various pentatonic scales by playing every other note. For example, if you take the following pentatonic scale:
C,D,E,G, Bflat, C (ascending)
and then arpeggiated using every other note, it would look like this:
C,E,Bflat, D, (ascending)
E,C,G,D (descending)
E,Bflat,D,G (ascending)
Bflat,E,Bflat,E (descending)
G,C,E,Bflat (ascending)
C,G,D,Bflat (descending)
etc.
You can do this with any scale.