Sealed in Blood

Never make the mistake of telling anyone that your musical psyche or "Id" is blocked.  You are opening yourself up to the worst kind of patronizing abuse from those only who want to live through you.  Vicarious is a humorous term around here.  Music as a profession is laced with cyanide, and the worst of it I have experienced.  The people around me never have been supportive of my musical inclinations.  Only they have been stunned that I chose to go my own path in music.  I lived my father's life of music my entire life.  I have no animosity about it.  He gave me what I have, and I am grateful.  It became clear to me when he wanted me to carry on his lineage, play his music his way, I said no.  Never did I want to become a band director.  Now after almost having a doctorate in music composition, I am feeling guilty for not being able to do the things he chose to do.  I took my class woodwinds and brass.  I learned my rudiments on the snare drum.  The music education program at UNC Chapel Hill was at a low point when I attended.  They hired a new Wind Ensemble conductor, who replaced a professor who should have gotten tenure.  He spoke German and played tuba, and they axed him.  Instead they hired James Arrowood, because he gave a charming and entertaining presentation in front of the Wind Ensemble.  He was a competent conductor, but one of his responsibilities in addition to conducting the Wind Ensemble was to teach the music education block courses.  These were two hour long affairs where basically he taught us nothing.  I sat in his classes for an entire semester and never wrote anything down, because he never told us anything.  When I turned in my notebook at the end of the course, he asked me why there was nothing written.  I said frankly, "You didn't tell us anything."  He didn't.  He was not prepared to teach these education courses, so my class was deprived of part of our necessary music education at UNC.  Because I had watched my father be a band director my entire life, I had an idea how to do it.  I didn't want to.  I got the Ed. degree, because it was something good to fall back on, teaching that is.  Because Mr. Arrowood didn't like me for my recalcitrance, my student teaching assignment was the bottom of the barrel.  The other students got good schools that were nearby.  I got Lee County Junior and Senior High Schools.  That sealed my fate of ever becoming a high school band director.  Never make the mistake of telling anyone close to you that your musical psyche is blocked.  What will ensue is the most patronizing, debilitating. insulting set of instructions ever.  Never make the mistake of asking anyone for musical suggestions, not in this day and age where musical ignorance is rife.  Look at television.  Listen to a song on any streaming service.  Music no longer is music.  No ones know better than you do what you should be doing musically.  To find that guidance one must separate themselves from the pack like Miles did.  No one can tell you how to excel in music.  Recently I had to listen to suggestions for my own vocation.  My mother continually yells at me that it is work.  
She accuses me of shirking work.  Truly she believes I don't want to work, but in reality it is all I want to do.  I just can't do it living with her.  The result is her trying to get her husband back by instructing me to play in his place.  I experienced this last night, and I will not experience it again.  I would rather be cooking in a food truck or busing tables rather then be forced to fill my father's very large and absent musical shoes.  I have no problems with his legacy.  I played  gigs with and for him many times when he was recovering from a stroke.  We worked well together, and he appreciated it.  Then he developed dementia.  Immediately I became an enemy and a competitor, just as I have become for my mother.  I have to coerce her into supporting my musical output.  There is nothing more I would rather do that work in the music field again in my own capacity.  It is not her fault she is not able to understand what that is.  Instead she demands I become the organist at her church, her husband, or any other music job that is prevalent in Fayetteville.  I am left feeling guilty, because I never studied the pipe organ.  I never studied church music or choral conducting.  I never sang tenor in our church choir.  I did different things, things which were interesting to me.  These are not.  They are old and stagnant to me.  There is no growth or development doing these things, unless you keep an outlet open for you own creativity.  I would have not issue with doing a rote music job, but the problem is I am not skilled in any of these areas.  I do not have adequate vision to read fly shit.  Instead I play jazz and improvise.  Of course I can read music, but sitting at the piano reading clumps of grapes never has been appealing to me.  It is the single reason why I was not a piano major at UNC.  I majored in the trumpet, and the entire time I was enrolled my teacher was threatened with my knowledge of the piano.  The same is true of my professors at USC.  When you skill rivals the skills of your teachers, in my experience, they are not supportive of you.  Instead they are threatened.  Hence none of my college teachers ever have helped me in the least finding a job.  Thirty years later and having returned to my childhood city, things have not changed.  They are still churning out the same hash at both schools.  I really thought about attending the South Carolina Masterworks Jazz Ensemble concert featuring Chris Potter in Newberry.  Chris played in my band when he only was in high school.  This was after John Emche, the director of jazz studies at USC, had died of a large brain tumor.  When I saw the program I knew why.  The taste is the same for me.  It is a noble accomplishment establishing this organization.  I have perused it with interest, all of its players and their achievements.  I take pride in having taught Dr. Robert Gardiner, while I was a Graduate Teaching Associate at USC.  He was my most serious student.  Still I have no interest in ingesting the same menu that was presented thirty years ago.  The faces are pretty much the same.  Columbia, although now filled with new and fresh faces of jazz, still is the same flavor.  That is because those academic jobs are long lasting, rewarding, and empowering.  They do not go away.  They just become "Emeritus."  In a society which needs freedom, change, and opportunity, this process is laboring.  It is too slow.  Forty years is long enough for anyone to have a well-paying university job.  It is time for those individuals to move on and let someone else have a chance.