I will be on the road for most of October, leaving on the 2nd, returning on the 24th, and look forward to seeing friends and family throughout the visit.  Here’s a look at the itinerary.

I will join Billy Cobham, Randy Brecker, and the Crosswinds tour band for their performances, notably,

Jazz Alley, Seattle, October 3-6

Kuumbwa, Santa Cruz, October 10

Blue Note, Napa, October 11-12

I will be signing copies of “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation” after each show. I especially look forward to meeting Randy Brecker, one of the world’s great jazz trumpeters, and a featured interview in the book.  It will be a particular pleasure to have my daughter Andrea join me at one of the Napa shows, her first time meeting Bill and Faina. Then on to Auburn, for a visit with the now one-year-old Silas.

Also scheduled are coaching sessions with U.S. clients and continued work on the Surmountable protest book project. I will be proud to be attending the launch of my coaching client Wendy May’s book, “Regenerative Purpose” at San Francisco’s Dolores Park, noon on the 12th. Wendy credits the workshop I facilitated at Koh Phangan’s Mermaid Villa with inspiring her to write the book, and our coaching sessions for completing it. It is a terrific work, on sale soon. I am privileged to have written the book’s foreword.

On an occasional basis, monthly during high season, spoken word artists from around the island come together to perform under the mango tree at Green Gallery on Koh Phangan. There are always surprises, some choreographed in advance, some spontaneous sharing from the audience. Phangan Poetry Jam is an ongoing project of Writers of Koh Phangan, a group I founded 20 months ago. We recently added our 400th member, quite a group on a small Thai island with 2,000 expats.

I perform the Master of Ceremonies role so I often choose not topresent. This time, I presented two pieces. One, the opening page of my last book “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation,” and an except of my interview with Adbusters publisher and Occupy Wall Street provocateur Kalle Lasn.

Michal Dohan, the impressive proprietor of Green Gallery, set up, once again, a living style set, with a couch and both a handheld and standup mic. The night was lovely, with a near full moon and a calm about the place. Perfect weather.

Here is the Cobham book piece that I read, imagining how Bill’s love for percussion originated in his Bedford-Stuyvesant walkup brownstone.

Chapter ONE: In the Beginning

Brooklyn, New York, Spring 1947

A three-year-old boy alone in his room on a Saturday morning is master of the universe.

The rest of the week is regulated by Ivy and William Senior. What to eat, what to wear, what to hear. Bath time, shopping time, promenade time. And this just months into the cacophony of Bedford-Stuyvesant life. The Cristobaltransports the family from Panamanian shantytown Colon to Manhattan’s west side, then they’re on to Harlem, then Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, Chauncey Street, across from Fulton Park, a brownstone clustered with other Caribbean households.

Saturday morning at the park is time for driving percussive beats, untamed power. The boy notices the Puertorriqueño, Cubano, Colombiano, Panameno congueros in the neighborhood, coming off the ‘A’ train on Utica Avenue all week long. Exhausted bus drivers, filthy construction laborers, put-upon janitors, exasperated store owners, all beholden, controlled by someone or something. The twenty-something Nicaraguan accosted by his girlfriend with furious accusations, the older fellow burdened by some damn thing. A week of complaining, protesting, bemoaning. Then…Saturday comes.

It’s 1947, so Saturday morning cartoons on black-and-white televisions are a decade away. He’ll have to wait till he’s eight to make his weekly trek with kids on the block to the local movie theatre for six hours of movies, shorts, cartoons, and trailers. These men, some just back from World War II service in Europe or the Pacific, some feeling sucked dry from a week of bosses, cops, families, life, exude power and joy, their laughs are fierce, fat, and ecstatic. He is captivated, the beats filling his room. Here’s an early lesson: joy, power, freedom, human connection flow from the hands of men who can drive a beat forward.

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I then read this short excerpt from an extended interview with Lasn in Vancouver, about the effects of the “mental environment” of western culture and the value of travel in transforming and clarifying one’s view of the world. The full interview will be in the upcoming book fro the Surmountable project on the art and alchemy of effective protest.

Gruber:  How does a young person who has grown up in the mental environment you’ve described engage in the world effectively?

Lasn:  For most people, I just feel like saying to them, you’re all fucked up, go back and start from zero. That’s really my advice. If we can identify the memes and meta-memes and come up with books with big ideas, a new set of first principles, this is something I still believe in. Trying to talk some guy in San Francisco into living a more benign life, I don’t have time for that.

Gruber:  In the Culture Jam book, you made some provocative statements; one of them is, a free, authentic life is no longer possible in America today.

Lasn:  No, I don’t think so. It was motivated by the reality of what a constant barrage of two or three thousand marketing messages actually does to your brain. I mean, once your brain has been pickled with emotionally coercive advertising like that, from the moment that you’re a little kid, you’re running around the living room, you’re looking at the TV set, then you’re a cooked goose.

Gruber:  It’s not just the advertising, it’s in the television shows you watch, the movies, the way the culture is formed and structured, the cars people buy and the reason that they buy them, what you see as you walk down the street. Living on a Thai island, coming back to visit, it’s an interesting difference in the physical and mental living experience.

Lasn:  I can understand that. I also understood that when I traveled around the world for three years, when I was young, I found people who were still authentic, still alive, still real. And then you arrive back in LA, and you realize that these people running around America, they’ve lost it, they just can’t live an authentic life anymore. They’re finished.

Gruber:  You mentioned the travel experience. I think for many people the experience of travel is a kind of revolutionary personal act.

Lasn:  I’m still running on that juice. I have never forgotten many of the lessons and epiphanies I had during those three years. And actually, there is an answer to that young guy in San Francisco, the answer is, go travelling. Go travelling, go and find yourself. Find your true self. Go travelling, go to Thailand, go to magic mushroom village in Mexico, look at the people in the streets of Calcutta dropping off like flies, and then come back and then figure out what has to happen.

Next Phangan Poetry Jam is slated for late November, details to be announced at the Writers of Koh Phangan Facebook group page.

Billy Cobham comes to the west coast with his Crosswinds Project in October. I will be singing books with him after shows at the following venues:

October 3-6, Jazz Alley, Seattle

October 10, Kuumbwa, Santa Cruz

October 11-12, Blue Note, Napa

Bill is widely acknowledged as the greatest living jazz fusion drummer and he is joined on the tour by the man acclaimed as the greatest living jazz fusion trumpeter, Randy Brecker. They will be playing a nationwide tour that kicks off at the Blue Note in New York in September. I interviewed Randy for Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation. Here’s a favorite excerpt.

GRUBER: You had been around for some years before that release, playing with the likes of Larry Coryell. Did you believe that there were artists and forms of experimentation prior that deserved equal recognition?

BRECKER: It’s funny you asked that. We were a little bit ahead of that. I’ll tell you a funny story. It goes to show you where maybe Miles was influenced himself. Dreams became kind of the house band at the Village Gate, a large club on Bleeker Street, now closed for many years. That was one of the hippest if not the hippest place to play in New York. Miles would play there, in fact I saw him in a double bill with Charles Lloyd with his great band with Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett. That was an amazing double bill. Miles would come down and never come and talk to us, but you always knew when he was there, everyone saying, “Miles is here,” which spread around the audience like wildfire. You could see him sitting in the back. In the meantime, I had electrified my trumpet. We had John Abercrombie in the band who always played with a wah-wah pedal. One day he couldn’t make rehearsal and his pedal was just sitting there and we had these devices called ‘condors’ which made bubbly sounds on the horn and I plugged the wah-wah into my trumpet and it sounded just great. I got a wah-wah myself and started using it, using guitar effects and Miles would always come down. Eventually he hired Billy for Bitches Brew. When I joined Billy’s band, there was a guy named Jim Rose, who was Miles’ road manager, would come by the gig and say I was trying to sound like Miles with the wah-wah, and I explained to him the way things had developed. It became a running joke between me and Jim. He liked Billy so he would come to hear us a lot.

Years later when we were all at (Brecker brothers-owned jazz club) Seventh Avenue South, I found myself standing next to Miles. The club was really crowded. I never really met him so I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Randy Brecker, I’m a big fan, I own the club and it’s great to meet you,” and his response was…nothing. He had his dark glasses on so it was just silence, he just kind of looked through me. I slunked away, went downstairs to the bar and started having a couple of martinis. About an hour later, I hear a little wisp of air in my left ear, “I love my wah-wah, you love your wah-wah.” And he split. It was the only thing he said to me (laughter). He was still a big influence, especially when it started, it was a little later that Bitches Brewgot recorded but then his influence was undeniable when he put together that great electric band. I know it influenced Billy. It influenced all of us.

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My “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Art of Creation” is voted one of the year’s top four jazz books in the just released JazzTimes Reader’s Poll. The winner of the poll is Dexter Gordon: Sophisticated Giant by Maxine Gordon. Other runners-up are Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century by Nate Chinen and Tony Bennett: Onstage and in the Studio by Tony Bennett with Dick Golden