We keep batting 1,000 on Six Days book reviews. This one from Geoff Wills of the esteemed Penniless Press. 

SIX DAYS AT RONNIE SCOTT’S: BILLY COBHAM ON JAZZ FUSION AND THE ACT OF CREATION

by Brian Gruber 

Enjoy the website, read the book reviews, check out my bio, read about visioning and writing coaching. I will have this glorious new book to the editor by May and then, back on track with the blog including dozens of interviews from activists around the world, Koh Phangan characters and witnesses to its magic history, and jazz legends.

Thanks to Mike Paschall for sharing this.  A recording of the livestream from Billy Cobham and the band in Ardmore Music Hall. Wonderful stuff.

The tour features legendary trumpeter Randy Brecker. Here is an excerpt from my interview with Randy for “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation.”

GRUBER: It fascinates me that Bill at 73 is not only touring a lot but almost every year producing new music. What is it for men like you and Bill that motivates you to continue to create and innovate when you can simply play other people’s music or rely on things you might have done years ago?

BRECKER: It’s a good question and I don’t know if I can put myself on a level of Billy’s output, which is really just incredible, but I think it has to do with, after you do something, it gets old pretty quickly. So, we are always trying, we just want to play something new, we can’t rest on our laurels too long. Plus, this is what we do. We don’t have many outside interests. You find that with a lot of great artists. I’m very close for instance with Paul Simon, and a tour manager that works with Paul and Bob Dylan. I asked him the same question, how come most guys are still killing themselves on tour? Not everybody has to do it. He said, “Look man, they don’t know what else to do with themselves.” Other than play, write music and tour, I don’t have a lot of outside interests. Of course my famIly, I want to be home sometime, but that’s what motivates us I think. We love to play. And for my money, I think Bill is, I swear to God, playing better than ever. I heard him in Brazil, maybe two, three years ago with Jeff Berlin and Scott Henderson, it was a trio and man, he just played better than ever. Everything is just settled now. It’s incredible.

GRUBER: When you watch him in YouTube videos from the ’70’s and ’80’s, to now, he really does have quite a physical presence.

BRECKER: And let me say one other thing. In the ensuing years, I wouldn’t play with him regularly, more like a special guest thing. But every time I did, I noticed he always brought something new to the table. Not only new music, the way he played, it always fascinated me. Some kind of new drum that he invented or something I never heard before. That alone, throughout the years, is quite an accomplishment.

GRUBER: Do you have some favorite memories on or off-stage?

BRECKER: There are a lot of them. How do I narrow it down? I was just always completely knocked out playing with him. (Laughs.) I probably shouldn’t say this. I remember he was so confident of his playing – as he should have been because I think he was the greatest drummer and still is – but when drum machines first came out, he tried to overdub the drum machine over his track. That didn’t work too well. I remember the look on his face.

GRUBER: Where do you think he fits in the history of percussion? How would you sum up his cumulative contribution to the music world?

BRECKER: He always would mention Tony Williams and Jack. After that period it was just Billy as far as I am concerned. The guy who originated the whole thing was Bill. The fact that he has been playing so long and is still this great, places him at the forefront of jazz drumming, of composition. He has had the same kind of influence on drummers that Jaco had on bass players.

Another story about Bill’s Crosswinds tour by By Rob Nagy, and another discussion of the new book.

“Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s” covers six decades of Cobham’s musical life, from his early days playing with Miles Davis on “Bitches Brew” to the formation of Mahavishnu Orchestra to performances with virtually every jazz great to his still-prolific schedule of touring and recording at age 73. Masters such as Ron Carter, Randy Brecker, Jan Hammer, and Guy Barker, as well as club owners, jazz critics and fans all get in on the action as the transformative early years of jazz fusion are explored, along with what drives Cobham to continue to create. Details of the full print and eBook release will be made public shortly.

“There are flashes of things that happened in my career,” says Cobham. “The things that you go through in life that make you say, ‘Wow I never thought about it like that, until it happens.’ When you put it down on paper it takes on a life of its own. A really great friend named Brian Gruber sat down with me. We used to chuckle about a lot of the funny quirky things that used to happen, over time he said, ‘We should do this.’

Sure enough we did it, the book is here and it’s really interesting.”

“It was fascinating for me to explore what happens with an artist that has that strong impulse to create and Bill’s personal story as to how he has stayed the course all these decades as an innovator and pioneer,” adds the book’s author, Brian Gruber. All the jazz legends that I spoke to said, ‘Billy is one of the greats.’ A very unusual combination of someone who can do it all, not just do one thing great, but from jazz to rock to funk and integrating it all.”

Now there are all kinds of reasons why you might not want to take life wisdom from Matthew McConaughey”s True Detective character Rust Cohle. One, it”s a TV show. It might be the best written show in the history of television, but still.

The second is that some of the darkest aspects of Rust”s character and history may be yet to come.  Another is the story takes its literary cues and pedigree from the H.P. Lovecraft horror tale precursor Robert W. Chambers, who wrote The King in Yellow in 1895, a story that is supposed to drive its readers to insanity.

But if you were to seek out the best nuggets that might inspire reflection, you might choose some of these.

I know who I am. And after all these years, there”s a victory in that. 

I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and They should also review the California Driver Handbook which covers all subjects from licensing to traffic laws, driving schools bronx tips, insurance, emergency situations, etc. sisters opting out of a raw deal.

OK, maybe not that one. How about this….

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of shit.

Or this,

I don”t think that man can love.

This is a world where nothing gets solved. Someone once told me; time is a flat circle, everything we have ever done or will do, we will do over and over and over again.

Look, everybody knows there’s somethin’ wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is. Everybody wants confession. Everybody wants some cathartic narrative for them – the guilty especially. But everybody’s guilty.

Well, maybe there will be some more hopeful bits of wisdom in the final episodes.

From Matt Novak's Paleofuture blog for the Smithsonian Magazine, a look at the great Aldous Huxley's predictions for the the modern age. Huxley died fifty years ago, on the same day as President John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis.

“During the next fifty years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billions, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources.

“Let us assume—and unhappily it is a large assumption—that the nations can agree to live in peace. In this event mankind will be free to devote all its energy and skill to the solution of its other major problems.

“By 2000, let us hope, the peoples of the world will have adopted a program to increase the planet’s output of food and other necessities, while conserving its resources. Because all available land will be needed for food production, concerted efforts will be made to derive all the fibers used for textiles from inorganic materials or vegetable wastes. Food crops will be cultivated on the land now devoted to cotton, flax, hemp and jute, and, since wool will no longer be used, the huge flocks of sheep which now menace Australian and North American watersheds will be greatly diminished. Because of the need to give overworked soil a rest and to extract the greatest possible number of calories from every acre under cultivation, meat production, which is fantastically wasteful of land, will be cut down, and increasing attention will be given to the products, vegetable no less than animal, of the ocean. Landlocked inlets, lakes, ponds and swamps will be scientifically farmed.

“In many parts of the world forests are being recklessly destroyed. To conserve them we shall have to develop new types of synthetic building materials and new sources for paper. That the production of a comic supplement should entail the death of thousands of magnificent trees is a scandal which cannot much longer be tolerated.

“How will individuals be affected by all this? For many farmers the changes will mean a shift from one kind of production to another. For many others they will entail a transfer to the chemical industry. For the chemical industry is bound to grow more important as world erosion compels us, for the sake of the land, to rely increasingly on synthetics derived from practically inexhaustible When the craving for guacamole hits, it’s easy to think that grabbing a premade variety at the grocery …I get asked this all the time, especially when people are doing the 21-Day Sugar buy-detox.com or are new to Paleo: “What can I do about sugar and carb cravings?”  Before we go any further, know that I can help you with this! There are steps that you can take to break free from this …It’s probably the #1 question I’m asked right now… “How do I get started on The 21-Day Sugar Detox?” This post is here to help you get started, and for you to find all of the amazing (and many free) resources I have created to support you in completing the program. inorganic materials.

“That enormous technological advances will be recorded during the next fifty years is certain. But to the worker as a worker, such advances will not necessarily be of great significance. It makes very little difference to the textile worker whether the stuff he handles is the product of a worm, a plant, a mammal or a chemical laboratory. Work is work, and what matters to the worker is neither the product nor the technical process, but the pay, the hours, the attitude of the boss, the physical environment. To most office and factory workers in 2000 the application of nuclear fission to industry will mean very little. What they will care about is what their fathers and mothers care about today—improvement in the conditions of labor. Given peace, it should be possible, within the next fifty years, to improve working conditions very considerably. Better equipped, workers will produce more and therefore earn more. Meanwhile most of the hideous relics of the industrial Middle Ages will have been replaced by new factories, offices and homes. More and more factories and offices will be relocated in small country communities, where life is cheaper, pleasanter and more genuinely human than in those breeding-grounds of mass neurosis, the great metropolitan centers of today. Decentralization may help to check that march toward the asylum, which is a threat to our civilization hardly less grave than that of erosion and A-bomb.

“If the finished product means little to the worker, it means much to the housewife. New synthetic building materials will be easier to keep clean. New solar heating systems will be cheaper and less messy. Electronics in the kitchen will greatly simplify the task of the cook. In a word, by 2000 the business of living should have become decidedly less arduous than it is at present. But, though less arduous, it will last on the average a good deal longer. In 2000 there will be more elderly people in the world than at any previous time. In many countries the citizens of sixty-five and over will outnumber the boys and girls of fifteen and under. Pensions and a pointless leisure offer no solution to the problems of an aging population. In 2000 the younger readers of this article, who will then be in their seventies, will probably be inhabiting a world in which the old are provided with opportunities for using their experience and remaining strength in ways satisfactory to themselves, and valuable to the community.”

In my years of executive and startup leadership and consulting, I have utilized and been exposed to a range of strategic planning and visioning methods. I have spent a lot of time with the tools and process of The Grove Consultants International, including two workshops on site at their idyllic Presidio headquarters. The second of my workshops was with the organizations’s founder and president, David Sibbet, a thoughtful and accomplished human being who has carved out new ground over the decades in the area of strategy and meeting facilitation.

I caught up with David after his all day “Visual Leaders” event and he was kind enough to spend some time together late on a Friday afternoon.  We talked about his vision for The Grove, the story of the founding and growth of his group and his unique insights into the concept of visioning.

David’s original idea for The Grove was to have a place to explore the practice of graphic recordings for meetings. He had done leadership development work for several years and felt that there was a lack of attention to the long cycle of change. The Grove would be like a learning-by-doing business school… and he could be one of the main students. There was not a well-developed plan about how to do it, just that people were responding to a visual way of working. About three years in, they started running workshops in 1980 to introduce people to the idea.

David Sibbet, The Grove

David had an epiphany that the real clients in those early days were management consultants doing strategy work that needed to differentiate. Sibbet then spent eight years learning the strategy business. The vision of marrying the consultants with a product company and sharing the methodology with the world then developed. The Grove considers itself a visual meetings company. In the late eighties, the vision for the Grove emerged, as a group that would transform the art of collaboration worldwide. That was “our North Star.”

In the nineties, Silicon Valley tech companies were growing rapidly, and there was a lot of emphasis on inventing new things. Sibbet observed that traditional strategic planning is biased toward an analytical and historical approach, which is not good for entering new markets, when you need to balance that with foresight around a desired future. That’s the vision part. Taking the best tools of strategy work and marrying them with the best tools of visioning, which is foresight oriented, and seeing how you can apply those insights in action.

Eventually, a visioning tool for personal development was built as well as people who worked with templates for strategic visioning thought that this would be a great way to think through one’s own life. Here’s David telling his story: