Sparks from the Fire

I am one of the many whose hero is Steven Jobs.  In 1985 I bought a Mac XL computer from a little known company with a funny name and became a devotee of both Apple and it’s wondrous leader for the next 26 years.  In that time I’ve owned nearly every successful product they’ve created.

Periodically I watched Steve’s addresses to his company touting his company’s new ideas and features with religious anticipation regarding what improvements he would bring to my life and work.  My life centered around the Mac computer both in the studio and at home.  I’m on the computer so much that I’ve learned to mouse equally with both hands – a left-handed mouser in the studio and a right-handed mouser in my home office.

Steve, with his clever wit, cool demeanor and sparkling eyes, was always three steps ahead of the game and out front of the pack.  I didn’t always agree with his choices, but I used them and grew to deeply respect his individuality.  He was the rare combination of artist, inventor and businessman and hugely successful at each — a true American hero.

Recently I read his sister’s eulogy, given at his memorial, and found him again to be leading me in yet another one of life’s endeavors.

As most of you know, I’m pretty consumed with my Goin’ Home – On Heaven And Beyond CD project these days.  In short, it’s about the transition we all face going from this world to the next and the meeting of it head on with open eyes and wonder. It’s about the eternality of life and its various preparations and speculations on the hereafter.

Right in the middle of the climactic phase of the project, my hero up and takes the journey himself.

His sister speaks about his last days in her eulogy: (more…)

Dmitri Shostakovich

I spent last evening with the Missus in what has now become my favorite place to be on the planet – Carnegie Hall.  Inspirational music rose to another high point with a visit from the Philadelphia Orchestra to our fair city.  The Missus and I were given gift tickets (better n’ Christmas) and though we sat up in the nose-bleed section, 4^th Tier and no place for vertigo sufferers, I was amazed once again by the acoustics of this wondrous concert hall.

When I first came to NYC back in my early twenties to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, I got a job at night selling orange drink in the tiers of Carnegie Hall and then eventually bar tending in its intermission café.  Though I made decent money in pay and tips, the real payment for me was the fact that for two years I got to see every concert presented in the main hall during that time.

I could fill a book with the stories and memories of those evenings and matinees.  It was certainly a huge and unexpected part of my education as an artist.  I had a place where I would stand in the back of the main floor and knew all the ushers who dubbed that spot, “Pete’s Place”.  In those two years I saw and heard a lifetime of great performances.

Since then I have had the great fortune to visit this hallowed hall many times and often had great seats.  Last night was, in fact, the first time I’ve ever watched a performance from the 4^th Tier.  But I must say I loved it.  There you sit above the orchestra looking down on the body of players and instruments and can watch the bowings of the strings and the bassoonists prepping their reeds and the timpanist tuning his kettle drums and the bass bassoonist endlessly counting bars of rests waiting for her big moment. (more…)

A Community…  A gathering of people who have like-minded purpose… Not at all people who are like-minded, in fact, better that they are all original thinkers, formulating their ideas, their life plans, their social structures, their life work, their religions, and creativity from a truly internal impulse.  Not followers, but leaders and thinkers and doers.  People who like people.  People who are positive supporters of the good in all people.  People who are an Inspiration to others.

This is our growing community. These are our Facebook friends, our tweeting family, our hands across the world.  The come from Africa, from Europe and South America, from Down Under and all across the U.S.  They are a world uniting to make a better world.

Sounds like a pretty high-falutin’ idea, but, in fact, it’s a reality.  It is organizing and it presently exists through social media, through mutual music appreciation, through spiritual seeking, through friends of Watchfire Music and even through a new CD project called Goin’ Home – On Heaven and Beyond.

It’s an idea that has created itself – not anything that anybody set out to create, but an idea that sprang up from necessity and natural evolution.  I see it coming and I simply try to open the road ahead to let it gain its own momentum in its own natural way.  This community has no leaders and no followers.  It’s a gathering of individuals, of originals, supporting one another with whatever it takes at a time when man really needs to reach out to his fellow man to survive.

I am eternally grateful for this community.  I am a member and I feel its value, its support and its bonding every day.  I watch it grow.  I fan the flames.  I sing its praises!

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

“Ouch, my arm hurts” you might say.  But you’d be wrong.  It’s not your arm that hurts; it’s your brain.  “Whoa, them’s fightin’ words.  It’s my arm.  I oughta know.” you retort.  Sorry, wrong again.  You’ve been duped – duped by a 5000 year-old misunderstanding of the origin and practice of pain.

It’s amazing the lies we’re taught and then live by for all our lives here on Planet Earth.

In a recent and most enlightening article in Sports Illustrated entitled The Truth About Pain: It’s In Your Head by David Epstein the old theories of pain’s beginnings in the injury itself and then traveling through the body’s nerve to the brain are trashed and re-theorized by modern medical science.

Relating to athletes in pain, a number of fascinating stories are told of athletes overcoming pain to complete their events, and these studies show conclusively, one after the other, that pain originates, not in the broken bone or the pulled muscle itself, but rather in the brain and not the injury. (more…)

Barry Danielian - Trumpeter

Yesterday I had a blast.  Inspirational music took on new meaning as I recorded virtuoso trumpeter, Barry Danielian, here in NYC at Link Recording Studios.  I needed a 16 bar trumpet solo for the song, In That Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ which is the climax song on my forthcoming CD, Goin’ Home – A Gospel Cantata – On Heaven and Beyond.

I had lost my precious musician phone book last year with all its numbers and so I called my friend, guitarist, Chieli Minucci and asked him for a recommendation of a great trumpet player who could play like the angel, Gabriel.  Chieli recommended Barry Danielian.  When Chieli speaks; I listen.  I hired Barry for the gig.

I wrote the first 4 bars of the trumpet solo for Barry to get him started and then gave him the direction to improvise the rest, to keep it Gospel, make it hot, iconic, hotter, joyful, timeless and apocalyptic.  Think, in the climax of the solo, Gabriel on acid trying to blow the roof off the moon.  I sent him home to listen to the track for a couple of days and he showed up yesterday afternoon ready to go at it, trumpet in hand.

We did 6 takes – each one discussed relating to shape, development and mood.  Barry was the perfect partner in crime.  He listened, but also brought his great ideas and mastery of his horn to the moment. (more…)

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to lie in bed at night and make up stupid lyrics to popular songs and giggle into the night.  One was:

My body lies over the ocean
My body lies over the sea
My body lies over the ocean
So bring back my body to me

I warned you that they were stupid.

Now today I’m writing lyrics on the same subject – hopefully with a little more content.  Here’s one drawn from a previous blog post on Sparks From The Fire.  The content, as explained in the post, has been capturing my imagination for months now and it finally all poured out in song form this past two weeks.

Both song and orchestration are now finished and will be presented in Julia Wade’s forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released in early 2012.

Not her usual fare?  Perhaps, but watch for some fascinating new directions from this most special vocalist as she branches out and develops this new Classical/Crossover genre.

This song will be a guaranteed eye and ear opener.  Enjoy!

My Body
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

I am not my body
My body is not me
I mean to live beyond it
In some capacity

I believe I’ve lived before it
Though memory fails
I cannot ignore it
Everything else
Pales in comparison
This wondrous invention
Of flesh and bone technology
Only belongs to me

Ladies choir

Temporarily

(more…)