Doesn’t Yet Know Me

I’m not looking for anything in particular.  Youtube’s algorithm thinks it knows me, but it always seems to serve up the same predictable choices.  I’ve never, willfully thrown Chet Baker on, for example, but once I choose to find something by Duke Pearson or, say Hampton Hawes, it decides to profile nothing but Chet Baker and Bill Evans on the column along the side.  “Here.  You’ll want this!”  Why is that?  I know, I should relish the fact that the A.I. doesn’t yet know me particularly well.   This will change.

I haven’t heard Miles’ “On the Corner” in a while and when I searched, I was presented with a six C.D., six hours and forty-seven minutes’ worth of music, selection, which I played once and then twice.  Typing with a friend about it he asked me if there were any particularly remarkable new moments and it was difficult to suggest any.  At a quick listen they mostly seemed to be extended jams and retakes of the familiar tunes we already knew. 

I was unintentionally focused on John McLaughlin’s playing.  There are some wonderful moments, but he often seems striving, and a-rhythmical in way his later work is not.  I always imagine hearing Miles yelling “play like Hendrix” as he was supposedly known to do.  But there he is on album after album in that critical era, at least four albums in a row.  I watched an interview or two and he comes across as extremely thoughtful, humble, in his description of how Miles got him to play what he didn’t know he had within on “In A Silent Way”, and I began to rethink some of those sessions I’d otherwise thought I knew. 

Finished a meeting around 5:00PM in San Li Tun and decided to bike back to WangJing.  I’m struck by how geography determines patterns of behavior.  Living out in Shunyi for so long I would never think to do such a thing, but WangJing is different.  I rode up through the embassy compound and came up to the viaduct that brings the second ring traffic up to the third and road along until I was forced back south, when I reached the San Yuan Qiao cloverleaf.  I walked my bike under and ended up coming up the Lido side of the airport express way.  There’s a more efficient way to get back here certainly, but it didn’t matter.  This is the best season in Beijing and though these particular neighborhoods are predictable, I was happy to pedal along, against the bike lane traffic on Fang Yuan West Road. 

Tuesday 9/17/19