Up or Down?

Often when one is doing "ship" work, the refrain of, "I'm back in high school," resonates through the cavernous metal corridors.  The "I-95" is the longest corridor on ground zero of a cruise ship.  It is where most of the business takes place running a floating hotel.  The crew traverse this corridor most of the day, because like Disney World, employees are not allowed to use guest spaces.  There are two mess halls, a store, a bar, and offices for personnel.  All of the provisions that are needed for a cruise are loaded into a marshaling area on the I-95.  All of that is beside the point, because being back in high school sometimes is how it feels for a college educated adult to accept work in the cruise industry.  That applies to musicians.  There is truth to this sentiment, and consequently there is political maneurvering in the ranks of entertainers.  I didn't have time to think about it, but when I was dumped into the caldron of boiling water, my jazz skills kept me afloat.  My ability to play jazz sets allowed me to survive.  Ironically these sets did not benefit the guests.  I was used as fodder to amuse other senior musicians.  My jazz sets on one particular ship existed, because the guitarist liked to play drums.  The sole purpose of the sets never was to entertain guests.  It was to provide practice time (at a high level) for a guitarist learning to play drums.  This was not the only hypocrisy.  Several bands on several ships had their material sequenced and recorded, and they just lip-synced.  As I toiled with the most difficult piano music on a ship, show after show of "Fly On" entertainers, which required practice and rehearsal, incumbent bands would just coast through their gigs doing little.  There were two bands on one specific ship, where they faked playing.  It was infuriating to me.  I penciled a little note on the scheduling board about how few hours one band played, and the wrath of the Cruise Director descended upon me.  He demanded that the chief of security sit for hours and watch security video until they found who had written the note.  I wrote, "Foster Trio, seven days, four hours work."  I became a terrorist for such an inane comment written in the wee hours of the morning under the influence of alcohol returning from the Crew Bar.  The reality of the situation was, the response would have not been so savage, if it had not been true.  It was, and I hit a nerve.  They went to the extent of falsifying a schedule to try to prove the Foster Trio had  worked a normal load.  Ship politics, but this was not the case overall.  This was my second least favorite ship, the first being a non-smoking ship to which I was transferred abruptly for being cast a homophobe by the interim Cruise Director.  He was homosexual, and they were intimidated by my musical prowess and masculine spirit.  The new bass player wanted to sleep with me, and I was not interested.  With two days notice they transferred me to another ship, where I had to stop smoking cold turkey.  Again I played jazz set after jazz set for no guests.  It was just proving my worth and value to the incumbent musicians.  What does all of this mean?  What does it mean to kowtow to the popular trends, uneducated tastes, and popularity?  That is American pop music today.  Instead of expressing a viewpoint or opinion, a feeling, or a reaction to life, pop music caters to the lowest common denominator of immediate gratification like social media.  Some social media has value and significance, and Youtube is one platform that has become indispensable for the archiving of classic music footage.  With that massive catalog of information comes the same petty jockeying for position.  Those who are incapable of understanding and appreciating your work are those who are unhappy and unrequited.  They may be jealous and vindictive, and it is best to go around them quickly.  Life is too short to argue with those who love Donald Trump.  The majority of my cruise life I spent trying to survive.  Never was I comfortable or secure in my job performance, and perhaps that is a good thing.  It keeps you working.  It is a recurring refrain in life that the dues you have paid expire, and you must start anew.  Paying dues.  Abandoning your confidence and accomplishment and feigning being a peasant again.  Was this the message of Jesus?  The perfect metaphor for the high school mentality of cruise ship work is, "What is jazz?"  The answer from there is, "Jazz is anything.  It's what you want it to be."  That is not a traditional or historical definition of jazz music.  The reality is jazz is a highly evolved, complex, spiritual, and artistic musical language that could be considered the voice of freed slaves trying to survive in a predominantly white world.  "Holy shite, Batman!"  Should we change the definition?  How could anyone ever conceive of such a thing?  They can't, because they don't have the knowledge, experience, or wisdom to understand.  Does it mean they are not capable of learning or appreciating?  No.  The beauty of jazz is that it can communicate at a visceral level with gut level intent.  If you can feel, then you can understand it.  This is what art can do.  Life is a delicate balancing act of cognitive study and understanding with a hefty dose of raw emotion.  Art will not be art without the affective component.  As jazz evolved over the decades the Avant Garde slowly took over.  Like Abstract Expressionism in visual art, direct, raw, and sometimes brutal gestures were used to illicit an immediate emotional response abandoning some of the more sophisticated styled and techniques.  Rock 'n' Roll took the place of crooning Swing-based music.  African culture can be seen as an example of this aesthetic often cast as primitive or barbaric by those from the West.  Upon closer scrutiny most of the values in Western culture are present in African culture.  It is more dire and immediate, because there is no time for sophistication.  You are trying to survive.  The luxury of time, leisure, and amusement can breed sophistication.  Human beings it would seem intrinsically feel the need to create, progress, and evolve.  Until now.  If you take away the security of human compassion and empathy, and pollute the environment with inciting rhetoric and noise, we have no choice but to devolve to survival.  There is virtue in the finer things, but there can be a balance.  Without them and without art, man has no where to go but down.