The value of being older than most in a young person's game.

Tuesday night I met up with drummer Frank Russo, bassist Amy Shook, and guitarist Chris Kennedy at the studios of WTMD 89.7, Towson University's awesome independent public radio station, to do a taping for its weekly "Baltimore Unsigned" show. We recorded four of my originals and one cover song (Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"), which will be broadcast along with an interview of me on November 4 and again on November 8.

I knew it would be a good musical experience, because my bandmates are just so, so professional in every way. Chris and I have been playing a lot together lately, but Frank and Amy aren't often available. I've always loved how they can just show up, set up, take a quick rehearsal-ish looksee at the charts I've brought, and then slam out the tunes as if we've been playing them every night of the week for months. In the case of the Radiohead tune, not only had we never played it all together, Frank and Amy (being a bit more jazz purist than I) had never even heard the original song. But we ran through the taping beautifully and gracefully, and didn't even have to make use of the one "mulligan" the producer would have allowed us.

Point one in favor of being past forty even while you're just launching a music career: You get to play with grown-ups.

The producer of Baltimore Unsigned, Nick, and the host, Sam, were both really nice and easy-going, which helped eliminate any last bit of nervousness or fear I had about live-taping. DJ John Matthews was doing his show, and when it was over I got to talk with him a little bit, too. One thing that sort of became clear as we were all talking...these guys must often have to deal with teenage or twenty-something musicians who, although they may be talented and ambitious, haven't really figured out how to comport themselves like adults. From the stories these guys told, some bands come in so ill-prepared for their taping, it's almost like they're doing a rehearsal in-studio. They'll start and stop tunes, and ask again and again for do-overs. They'll take hour upon hour to crank out the requested four originals. They won't have any idea how to answer interview questions in a sensible or meaningful way.

They're not necessarily idiots, of course--they're just very young. I might have been just that ill-prepared at the same age. The sad thing is, as long as they're having so much trouble handling the business & networking aspects of what they do, it may not matter how well they play or how cool their songs are. After putting up with their b.s., who's going to want to invite them back?

So, point two in favor of being older than most "new" musical artists: When opportunities arise, you know how to behave in a way that might actually lead people to offer you more opportunities....

Why do I bother to explicate all this here? Because I'm sometimes still not immune to the critical, regretful inner voice that says, "Damn, I wish I'd been doing this stuff when I was still young and had more energy...."

Well, yeah, maybe....but then again....maybe not.....

Two whole months have passed since Camp MMW, can you believe it?

I know a lot of my fellow campers have been feeling quite dramatic changes in their playing, their practice, and their attitude toward music since we were joyously immersed in the MMW worldview this past August. For me, the changes have been pretty subtle, I think...part of a long-term, cumulative journey toward artistic and spiritual plenitude. But I will say this: almost immediately after that unique experience in the Catskills, I noticed a small but definite new boldness in my playing. A deeper sense of freedom when creating. I think it comes in part from watching John Medeski up close for so many hours over just a few days. It's sort of miraculous to see how...unseparate he is from his keyboards. He's got everything integrated, knows his music and his technique and his different instruments so thoroughly that there's not even a hair's-breadth gap between intention and action. He sings through his hands.

There are days when I get a glimmer of how that feels...when I achieve that unseparateness, that integration, if only for a song or a solo or a few phrases at a time. Sheer bliss.

Nonchalance in the face of rejection.

I just had a brief but interesting phone conversation with the guy who books one of the more active music venues in Baltimore, Joe Squared Pizza. Earlier this year, my quartet (i.e. the "B band") had played three gigs there in what was supposed to be a regular monthly spot. Then we were abruptly killed with no explanation--or at least, with semi-explanations that didn't really make sense. Since we seemed to be a hit there (I'd brought in 25 or more people, and also gained a good number of fans and sold a few CDs there), my best guess was that, in the opinion of the restaurant owner (a different guy than the booker) we were too loud for the dinner slot we were given.

Since then, I've continued to receive mass emails from this booker whenever he has dates to fill, and I've occasionally responded in the hopes of grabbing a performance slot. I've offered to bring the band in for a late-night slot, again on the premise that what we did was too loud for dinner hour. I've offered to come in as a solo piano/vocal dinner act. And the booker would never respond...yet continue to keep me on his mailing list for whenever he had open dates or band cancellations.

Today I called him to say, essentially, What the hell is up? And he was finally straight with me. "Look, as I told you, I like your stuff, I think your CD was really great, but Joe just didn't like you."

The booker basically apologized to me for the fact that the owner doesn't dig my music, and then he went on to say that he never knew exactly how to handle such situations. I told him that as far as I was concerned, I'm aware that not everybody is going to like what I do, but I'd much rather have the honest painful truth than the aggravating mystery. "I'm much happier," I told him, "knowing that I should never bother again to try to get a date at Joe Squared, rather than wondering from now until forever whether I just haven't been persistent enough, or something." I told him there were no hard feelings and that I'd appreciate him taking me off his email list, although he was welcome to keep me on his own personal performance list (he's a DJ).

So it turns out that owner Joe of Joe Squared Pizza doesn't like my music. So what? I'm so incredibly happy to be in a place in my life where a little bit of rejection feels like one single drop of water beading down my back, instead of a downpour.