JazzCore2/part four

JazzCore2/part four

JCore is back—and welcome (back) to you, too!  Come in and spend some time with our next soloist, Eric Slaughter. Your chorus is always welcome:  Play your comments below.

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Nat Pierce attended one of Erroll Garner’s record dates in 1969:

The red light went on and he started to play.  The red light went off and he kept on            playing. Everybody waved to him from the booth, and when he eventually finished they said, ‘Erroll, we turned off the light. You were supposed to stop.’ He looked at them and said, ‘I couldn’t stop.  I wanted to find out how it would come out.’

       --Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes(1990)

Eric Slaughter

To be a jazz musician is to be focused on creating your own language--your own personal language.  And always working on that, whether or not it's applicable to the gig you're doing at the time.

       --Eric Slaughter

The active learning that energizes his jazz improvisation also expresses itself again and again in Eric Slaughter’s life. His playing as a jazz musician represents how he lives: always growing, taking risks, ready to explore and build on the moment’s possibilities. 

Early on, Eric’s family life was filled with musical possibilities, supporting and inspiring him the way the other players in a jazz group can support and inspire the improvising soloist—but also helping him see how to learn and grow as a versatile musician.

Eric remembers that “there were a lot of people in my family that played.”

“My grandfather was a trumpet-player, and he owned a jazz club…. He played in George Hudson's bands, and he knew popular players such as Clark Terry and Oscar Peterson. I don't remember, but my mom remembers Oscar Peterson coming to the house.” 

Eric’s uncle was a bass player, and his aunt, Marsha Evans, a long-time professional singer in St. Louis with a famously broad repertoire that, as Kevin Johnson noted in 2011,  “encompasses blues, R & B, jazz, pop classics, and the great American songbook.” She would be a playing partner later in Eric’s life and a model for what her versatile nephew would become. 

Eric’s mother was a key figure in the explicit launching of Eric’s learning both about music and about growing as a musician.  Eric remembers: “We had a piano; my mother was a classical pianist.  She sort of forced piano on me.  Of course, I didn't want to play it!   I liked to improvise on it, but I didn't like to play the music.” 

A version of that tension surfaced soon after when Eric was 10 or 11 and his mother sent him for piano lessons to CASA, a community arts school in St. Louis, and, Eric says, “there was actually a disconnect between the teacher and me.”

His mother had sent him there “thinking that they were going to teach me classical music,” but his teacher apparently “didn't understand that I came from a musical household.  I had heard a lot of classical music already….  I don’t think she knew that.

“She was giving me ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ and songs like that, and I thought I'd get some simple Mozart things to play.  I didn't articulate that to her….  I just felt if she had given me some very simple classical music, I would have been more into that.  I just wasn't into the songs she was giving me.”

As if predicting the self-invention that was to come, young Eric had taught himself a two-handed version of “The Entertainer” when he was only five, and “I played it for the kids at my babysitter's, because she had a piano.”  

2

This process of trying out, experimenting, and seeing what works continued, the essence of an improvised musical life: always the active search for possibilities.

Eric stayed with piano lessons for about 4 years, and, yes, “I think I would have liked to have played classical piano, but we never got that far.”  His teacher “did teach me a lot.  She taught me how to play all the scales.  I still use that today.  She taught me how to read. So I got something out of it.”  

          

Perhaps most important, he pursued a new option, his mother once again a central figure: She had an acoustic guitar.  “She never learned to play it; she just had it around.  She didn't buy it for me -- she bought it for her!

“What happened was, my mom was like, ‘You have to stay with something classical.’ So I said, ‘Okay.  I want to do classical guitar.’  I started studying at CASA with Rod Stuckey when I got to be around 15.  I did that 'til the end of high school.”

And something else happened:  Classical-guitarist Eric discovered Jimi Hendrix and the blues.  He was living in Ferguson but attending elementary school at Country Day, then a private school for boys that he’d entered in sixth grade because his family thought he’d get the best education there.  

Eric’s musical options were expanding: “My friends were listening to rock music. The people in my neighborhood and all of my friends from before were listening to R&B.  I think somehow with the friends at school, I heard Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that.  But I had also heard blues records in the house.  I had heard Albert King and all these blues. “

He connected with Hendrix partly because of his blues listening:   “I already knew some of that language in my head.  A lot of Hendrix is Albert King.  He's playing it with a different sound and sometimes a different articulation.  But a lot of the vocabulary is the same:  I mean the actual licks he's playing.  It's Albert King, a lot of it!”

3

Eric’s self-directed, improvised life moved forward into new possibilities, new languages:  “Somehow through Hendrix, I started reading Guitar Player Magazinearound age 12.   In the articles at the end, they'd talk about records.  I'd read those articles and then go to this place called CD Reunion, which was like a bargain-bin record place.  I'd take my allowance and buy comic books and records.  Because those records --the jazz records -- nobody wanted them then!  They were like 25 cents!”

                         Eric explored: “At first I'd just go by the cover.  If the cover looked cool, I'd buy it.” His listening ranged from McCoy Tyner and Jack DeJohnette to “some weird stuff, like Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal,” a prediction of the older Eric’s diverse musical languages. As he says now, this was “a hip collection for a 12-year old.”

“Around that time, I think because of those articles and those records, I started getting into fusion.  I was listening to John Scofield and Mike Stern. Some of the fusion Miles records.”

Then Eric’s record-resource uncle entered Eric’s life:  “I think he realized I was listening to that, and he started making me tapes of his collection.  He had thousands of records.  He was almost a record-hoarder.  

“First, he'd lend me the record.  Then I was keeping the records too long.  So then he started making me cassette tapes.”

            Learning happened:  “I remember the first couple of things I listened to were Oscar Peterson.  There was also a Bill Evans record called Symbiosis.  That's kind of weird for him, because he was playing a Fender Rhodes, and it had an orchestra on it. I remember listening to that a lot.

            “I got a Charlie Parker record -- Live at Carnegie Hall -- with Dizzy Gillespie.  That really got me into jazz.  That was the first record that I was like, ‘Oh, my God!  This is something cool!  I don't know what it is!’” 

4

Eric responded to the opportunity to learn more:  Like his listening life, his music-playing life was growing as he moved through school.  When he was finishing middle school, Eric began playing both keyboard and guitar in an R&B band.  “It was kind of serious.  They were trying to make a boy band with a bunch of black kids.  We had a manager, and we were playing Prince and Ready for the World and stuff like that.  We were rehearsing a lot, and we played out a lot.  They were trying to get us to do moves.  It was like a show.”

Then in high school he began playing guitar in a rock band:  “We were playing progressive rock, like Rush and Yes,” and playing out for school functions such as alumni events.  All along, he was learning how to play improvised music on the guitar.

At this point, Eric says, jazz “was my personal project because I had nobody to play it with,” but that was about to change, and he started to grow into another dimension of his diverse playing:  “When I got to high school, I joined the jazz band at Country Day, also on guitar, and that's when I started knowing the songs and learning the tunes…. The bandleader—Bill Habetler--was a jazz enthusiast. He got me connected with trombonist Robert Edwards, who was teaching at Normandy and East St. Louis, and Robert helped me start to know other kids.  I started playing with them, too. We didn't do gigs, but we'd get together and play jazz.”  

Eric played both rhythm and solo guitar in the big band, and he had success: He was selected to play guitar in both the district- and the state-wide jazz bands made up of the best high-school players, and “I actually won the best soloist award at the state competition.”  

Then Eric’s mother enriched her son’s musical options and possibilities again: “When I was 15, she started sending me to a jazz camp in Connecticut called the National Guitar Summer Workshop.  The first jazz lesson I had was with Jim Hall!  I got to study with him for like a week.  Another year, I went, and it was Mark Whitfield and John Abercrombie.  And Mike Stern one year.  It was in New Milford, Connecticut, and there's nothing to do there. So those guys were actually around for the whole week.  You were just walking around with Jim Hall!”  Moreover, “there were people of all ages; it wasn't just kids.  I think I might've been the youngest one.  There were guys in their 70s there.  It was a really unique program.” 

5

After graduation from Country Day in 1990,Eric chose to move away from music—but not for long. Because “I didn't have an outlet to play out with jazz when I was in high school, I didn't think about making jazz a career.” Options would eventually lead him in another direction, but for the moment Eric chose a very different life course: He enrolled at the University of Michigan where he “had a full ride to study electrical engineering.”   

Just as his less-than-satisfying experience with piano lessons didn’t drive music out of his life, so Eric soon found—chose—a way back to playing. He was in the engineering program, but he still got to know the head of the music program, Ed Sarath, a graduate of Berklee in Boston.  The Michigan program “was very small, and it was a classical program.  This was when jazz education wasn't really accepted,” Eric recalls, but he still met some jazz musicians there and began jamming with them, including three still playing in New York:  Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver, and Xavier Davis.  “The way the music program treated us was terrible.  They wouldn't let us get practice rooms.  We were not acknowledged—we were the evil stepchildren.  But I didn't care so much, because I wasn't in the program.  I was in the engineering program.”  

Still, change was coming, and Eric was receptive.  “There were really monster players there.  That was what made me get more into jazz.  Just realizing that, ‘Oh, wow, these kids are playing like adults!’” 

Eric’s life solo changed:  “At that point, I knew I wanted to study music, but I couldn't stay at Michigan, because there wasn't a jazz program.” So after a half-year at Michigan, he transferred to Berklee, Ed Sereth’s alma mater.  He gave up his full-ride at Michigan--which “my mom wasn't happy with, understandably”—and moved to Boston. “Yes,” he says, with clarity:  “I was seriously into jazz.  That’s what I wanted to pursue.”

6

After about a year and a half, Eric’s musical growth once more began to move from the formal to the experiential, as it had in high school and at Michigan.  His choice:  “I got way into Wally's,” a club in Roxbury that “was like a sit-in thing. I got more into that than Berklee. They'd have after-hours sessions pretty much every night.  But it would be different.  Like Thursday night I remember was Afro-Cuban.  But most of the other nights were jazz nights.  I started playing there, and then I started getting gigs there. And they were good players--Reuben Rogers, Aaron Goldberg.  Like the real players. Roy Hargrove would be there and Joshua Redman, before anybody knew who he was.”

Eric’s formal Berklee studies began to fade: “I was staying out so late, so it was hard to get up and go to class!  I'd be coming in, and it was daylight.  Sometimes I had friends take my homework.  I remember one time I was in composition class, and my girlfriend took a composition that I'd written in, and the teacher liked it.  He talked about it for a whole class.  I wasn't there!  It was like, ‘I don't know who this Eric Slaughter guy is, but he can write songs!’”

Eric didn’t finish his Berklee degree.  “No, I didn't.  Actually, we ran out of money. So I did a bunch of loans.  After a while, my mom was like, ‘Listen.  I can't really pay for you to stay in school, but I can pay for you to stay in Boston.’ I had gigs by then, so I stayed in Boston for another year or year and a half and just played.  There were a lot of straight-ahead jazz gigs, even though they didn't pay anything.”

As for moving towards becoming a performing player, Eric says, “I would never have predicted it.”  So goes improvisation.  Yes, maybe “I was dreaming about being a musician but wasn’t serious.  Everybody in the family was steering me into something else. Like, ‘Well, you could do this; that's kind of musical.  But you could survive!’” Teaching, for example. But “I never wanted to do any of those things.”

After a year of jamming in Boston, doing what he wanted, around 1994 Eric returned to St. Louis, a versatile and ready musician.  He started playing with two of St. Louis’ hippest saxophonists:  Willie Akins and Peanuts Whalum.  His gig with Peanuts (which sometimes included pianist/vocalist Christine Hitt) soon went to six nights a week at the Adam’s Mark and lasted for a year, “so I couldn’t play with anybody else in town during that time.” When the job ended abruptly, it was as if Eric had been off the scene for a year. “I was still playing with Peanuts sporadically, but we didn't have that many nights.  All of a sudden, I didn't have as much work, and nobody knew who I was.”

7

So Eric started doing gigs with his aunt, Marsha Evans, “to supplement the lost nights and make the money back.”  She had an R & B blues band that was playing six nights a week.  “She always had great players.  Like Greg Tardy played with her for a year.”

Eric’s uncle played with Marsha, too, and he also worked with popular St. Louis bandleader Oliver Sain.  “Although Oliver was like a blues-R&B saxophone player, he came up in the era of Illinois Jacquet, and he loved jazz.”  Versatile Eric was the right player at the right time: Oliver invited him to join the band, especially “because of the jazz set.  We could actually really play jazz.  Most of his guitar players couldn't.  He wanted to keep me in the band, and he took really good care of me.”

            Taking risks, embracing growth, Eric’s life solo advanced: Through Oliver, he met drummer Gerald Warren who was blues singer/songwriter Willie Clayton’s musical director.  “They used to call Willie the ‘Young King of the Blues.’”

For almost two years, Eric toured with Willie, who “had a tour bus and everything.  He did the ‘Chitlin' Circuit,’ which was like all these southern clubs where you'd do shows. You'd have 45-minute slots, and there'd be like arena shows, where there'd be five acts.  People would pay one ticket price and see five bands,” sometimes including performers such as Bobby “Blue” Bland, Shirley Brown, Johnnie Taylor, and Bobby Rush.

            “Willie would do a lot of stuff like that.  But he'd also do clubs.  We played a club in a cornfield!  So you'd go from that where there'd be like 2,000 people, and then you'd go to a joint where there's no electricity and you're running electricity from the bus via extension cords.”

8

Around 1997, Eric returned to St. Louis because his mother was ill.  His versatility and daring once again served him well and opened surprisingly into a new way for receptive Eric:  One night, when he was playing with local saxophonist and teacher John Norment at the Delmar Lounge in the Loop, U. City-born trumpeter Jeremy Davenport, in town for his annual gig here, came to listen.  

It turned out Jeremy was looking for a guitar player who could do Brazilian music with the pianist in Jeremy’s New Orleans band.  Otherwise the pianist planned to leave the group, “and Jeremy didn’t want to lose his pianist.  When he heard me at the club, I guess he liked what he heard”--and so did his pianist. “What Jeremy did was, he held his phone up in the club to Glen, his pianist, and Glen heard me play through the phone.”  The two agreed:  They wanted Eric. “That’s how I got hired.   Jeremy asked me if I wanted to move to New Orleans, and he made it very easy: He gave me an apartment next to his.”

Eric moved and began a two-nights-a-week gig with Jeremy’s jazz quintet at a club called The Red Room.  “Actually, it was a piece of the Eiffel Tower that they somehow transported to New Orleans and turned into a club.  It was like the top part.  It doesn't exist anymore.” 

By this time Eric was playing both guitar and—his old mate—piano, and he was, as always, learning.  “I started playing jazz with everybody there, and I realized there that I wasn't really that good.  I thought I was better than I was,” but  “everybody had faith in me, and I had a good attitude.  All the older guys let me play.”

Eric’s “good attitude” meant he pursued the readiness to learn that had already served him well:  “I was very into the music.  I was practicing all the time, and I got to the point where I was playing solo piano on gigs.  I think they had faith that I was going to learn something, so they let me stay in the fray.  And there were so many gigs back then, down there…. There was a place called Storyville that had three rooms going all day.”

Eric eventually left New Orleans and spent two years playing in New York with local jazz and Latin musicians (including drummer Billy Kaye), mostly at Harlem venues. He also got married there, and when his wife—now ex-wife—got a job in New Orleans, they moved back there, and Eric had the opportunity to draw on his deep versatility.  The first time there, “I was playing all jazz.  This time, I was also playing in a reggae band and a hip-hop band.”  

Eric made a virtue of necessity: “The scene had changed a little bit, and also with a wife, I needed to make more money….That's the first time I really started playing all styles -- which you can do there, because every style is there.  The good thing is, I started learning about new stuff. Like Latin music. I didn't really know anything about it.  I started to learn about it there from people from those countries.”

9

Eric was growing more multi-lingual as a musician, thanks partly to his embracing international experiences with language, musical and verbal.  “My ex-wife was from Brazil.  So we went to Brazil a bunch of times just to see her family.” Then, when he got divorced, Eric began playing on cruises, a gig that grew more and more stressful:  “I went from having a job I loved to a job I hated, because I had no free time…. So I quit. I just got off in San Diego, and I didn't know what I was going to do, because I didn't live in St Louis anymore.” 

            Improvising, Eric decided he wanted to learn Spanish—really learn it. “I'd taken it in high school but never got to the point where I could talk.  But I could understand a lot, and I knew a lot of words. 

“When I went to New York, a lot of people would come up to me and think I was Hispanic, and they'd talk to me because I was living in an Hispanic neighborhood. I couldn't talk back to them. That got it on my mind.

            “I started trying to learn there, just on my own.” He joined a Spanish-speaking conversation group, and “the guy that spoke the best Spanish had been to Costa Rica for like three months.  I was like, ‘I'm going to actually go to Costa Rica, and I'll be talking in three months.’  Which didn't happen! It took me like a year and a half.” 

Eric’s mother had died, and his inheritance helped him pay his travel expenses.  He did some playing, “but I just really focused on learning Spanish.  Mostly I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but I also went to Costa Rica, to Quito, Ecuador, and to Cali, Colombia. Then I came back in 2009.  I had run out of money.  Also, my grandfather—my father’s father--died.  So I came back.  I felt I'd gotten to a point where my Spanish was pretty good.”

10

Being back in St. Louis, Eric recalls, “was weird, really strange.  The older guys remembered me.  But there were all these guys I didn't know, and they didn't know who I was.  I thought I was just going to waltz in and start playing again.  It wasn't like that!  So I was like, ‘Wow.  Do I even want to?’”

Another junction point, another chance to examine options, try changes: “I considered going back to engineering school…. I took some advanced-math classes in preparation. I was trying to figure out if I was feeling my way back into doing that or not.” Once again, the option of music appeared:   “Right as I started doing that, I started to get some gigs.  Not long after, I started playing with Willie Akins again.  I played with him pretty much every week 'til he died in 2015.”

When another chance to grow through international experience presented itself in 2013, Eric took three months off to play and teach in Nepal.  “It was a really interesting situation.   There was a guy from Spain that started a jazz school in Nepal, and what they were trying to do was bring teachers over to teach teachers…. We were teaching the guys that are teaching there now.”  Eric’s students were from India and Nepal, but the teaching focused on jazz.

             At the same time, Eric seized the chance to learn a new musical language. He joined Su Karma, a Nepalese ensemble that played classical Indian music.  “We got a fusion band together, and I had to learn about their music, which is totally different.”  The group was playing “Indian-based music,” but “we would just improvise the way we improvise.” The band played gigs at “big embassy parties where they have a whole spread and a lot of wealthy diplomats.”

Once again, Eric embraced an opportunity and took a risk, going to Nepal:   “Yes.  I hadn't planned to do it, but it happened.”  After three months, he headed home—but couldn’t resist the chance to spend three weeks in Thailand on his way back.

11

Eric entered an active, instructive musical life after his return to St. Louis.  “I played guitar with St. Louis-born Ronnie Burrage for a few years.  We were playing a lot up on the East Coast.  We went to Martinique and played a jazz festival there.

            “Then Ronnie formed a band that was a tribute to Weather Report. He had Wallace Roney's brother, Antoine Roney, on tenor and Gerald Veasley on bass.  They were some really good players. I learned a lot from them. We didn't tour a lot.  We did maybe like eight gigs.”

            On the local scene, Eric “started playing with--and I'm still playing with—vocalist Denise Thimes.  I'm playing with Kasimu Taylor.  I was playing with Theo Peoples.  Now I've been playing with Anita Jackson and Erin Bode. I'm just freelancing and playing with whomever.

“I've also been going up to Kansas City a lot.  There's a lot of good jazz up there now, and there are lots of places to play. There's a piano-player from here named Matt Villinger--he and a vibes player with a St. Louis connection named Peter Schlamb, who has also moved there. Very good players.  They let musicians go do gigs there and stay at their house and come back.

           “So I've been able to meet a lot of really good players up there.  They're going through a period of prosperity.  I guess they have a tech boom, so there are all of these younger people out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  That doesn't happen in St Louis.  That can keep the clubs going.

“Last year I was up there like half of the year just like every other weekend.  This year, I haven't done it as much…. In order to facilitate going up there, I started playing at Murray's in Columbia.  

            

“I'll try to get a gig up there and then try to get something in Columbia…. I can play two gigs up there and one on the way back.”

            Is Eric able to support himself as a musician? “Yes--barely!  It's not easy—and it's not all jazz, especially when I'm in St Louis. It's really hard to make it because the jazz money has steadily gone down.

            “When I started playing, the first jazz gigs I did after Berklee were with Willie, John Norment, Freddie Washington, and people like that.  They were paying me $100.  This was '94.  Now sometimes they want to pay you $75.”

Eric has had jazz gigs at Jazz at the Bistro with Denise Thimes and the popular fusion group Weather Forever.

He has done some teaching as well, for about three years working privately with students from Jazz St. Louis’ Jazz U. program, but he says the scheduling of the lessons, often held at the students’ homes, grew too complicated, especially when he was going out of town and had to re-schedule lessons. 

True, Eric had taught in Nepal, and “I always liked teaching, because I learn a lot about what I need to do.”  Indeed, he says, “I was learning a lot, so I liked it in that way.  And I liked the feeling of the student getting better.  So I didn't mind the teaching.  I just couldn't find a way to make it easy for me with my schedule,” so he cut way back. Today he has only a couple of students, one of them through Jazz St Louis.

12

To help make ends meet, Eric has begun doing what he’d avoided so far:  Joining top-40s bands.  “Ironically,” he says,  “that’s the best job in St. Louis” because it is regular and it pays.   “If you want to buy a house, you can do it with a Top-40 band and not teach and do other things.  If you look at guys that used to play jazz, it's not that they can't play jazz anymore, but they're doing those kinds of gigs now.  Or they're doing road gigs that are not jazz gigs. But they have houses, and they're comfortable.

“I've resisted that, because it's hard for me to do the same thing exactly the same way,” and that’s how those gigs are.  “It's like a shtick.  Even the order of the tunes.  It's a show,” and soon “it feels like a day job!  Even when it's with good musicians.  In the beginning, it's fun if the musicians are really good.  But at some point, it's like you've done everything you can do with it.  It's just the same all the time.”

The work becomes routine, allowing little room for the creative improvising and growth that have defined Eric’s musical career.

“The thing that really gets me is not so much only that, but that after a while I feel that I'm not thinking about being creative or improving”—essential themes of his life.  “I'm just doing the gig and going through the motions.  It starts to affect how I think about music in a bigger sense.” After gigging with a couple of top-40 bands,  “I just felt,  ‘I'm not even enthusiastic about playing anymore.’”

Eric pushed back against the power of routine.  Among the four or five weekly jobs he may have, he plays non-jazz gigs with room for creativity, including solo guitar work at places such as St. Louis Country Club and the Racquet Club.  “I try to mix it up and watch what they’re responding to—all different styles. 

“You can just play anything and improvise.  You don't feel like you have to play certain clichés.  You can just express yourself through that material.”

Just as he has found possibilities for growth in many kinds of experience, so Eric’s solo gigs have shown him that “you can play jazz on any form.  I mean you could improvise on any form…. It might sound strange, but the good thing about playing a song that's never been played by Miles or Coltrane is, you have to figure out a way to play it.”

            Eric’s goal, once again, is to grow: “I want to get to the point where I can freely express myself so it's not a drag for me to play that stuff.  What I've realized is that if I encounter resistance to playing it, sometimes it's because I don't know it well enough.”  Room to grow.

13

Since returning to St. Louis, Eric has also pursued intellectual and spiritual interests, choosing again to embrace new ways of thinking and being.  They have taken him into Buddhism and meditation through writers such as Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki.  Although he has since moved closer to Western religion, he continues to meditate.  “I believe in the power of that.  I think when the Bible talks about prayer that they really mean meditation.”

Eric began by practising breath-based meditation, “then I became aware of Eckhart Tolle.  He was talking about meditating on the energy field of the body.  I started doing that,” then—no surprise—he began doing auditory meditation using “ambient sound in the room.  If you listen to it for a while, you'll hear something inside of it. It's like you can tune into the sound more and more 'til you're on a very specific frequency.  You're still aware of the peace in your body and your breath, but that's in the background.

            “For some reason, maybe because I'm a musician, I get more stability with that than with just the field of the body. I always wanted to get to the point with the energy field where I could feel the energy field going all the way out and couldn't feel my body.  That very rarely happens.  But that started happening with the sound meditation.”

Eric meditates daily, and, partly through reading Neville Goddard, he has thought explicitly about the process of manifesting that his musical life seems to have thrived on: “I'm trying to work on visualizing things that I want to happen. I'm experimenting with that…. I'm starting to think that maybe things that happen on the outside are based on thoughts we have on the inside.” 

True, Eric says, “I don't understand how that happens.  I don't claim to know.  But I have noticed a connection…. If I harbor resentment against somebody but don't say it openly to them and smile in their face, the relationship still gets messed up.

“Then sometimes some feelings I have about myself are mirrored in my environment.  If I change those feelings, they change in the environment….That's what Neville Goddard talks about.

“I remember when I was a kid, I think I did that automatically.  I'd think a thought and certain things would happen -- like Jeremy Davenport moving me to New Orleans….Then I thought, before I got that blues band gig on the road, that ‘I think I'd like to play blues on the road.’ Two weeks later….”

14

In 2017, in his mid-forties, Eric was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He had no health insurance at the time and was soon facing bills of up to $50,000.   “I was in the hospital for a week, and they had me on this heart monitor that I had to wear—a big battery-pack, a belt with straps--for three months.  I had to start taking medicine for the first time in my life, which I'm still taking:  two medications for blood pressure, a diuretic, and aspirin.  I would love to get off the medicine.

            “By the grace of God, I've gotten out of all of that debt by jumping through hoops pretty much every week.  Like sending somebody something.  Bank statements.  Tax statements.  Multiple times.  They’d lose it!  I don't think I owe anybody anything now, but it wasn't easy!” 

Some of his fellow St. Louis players helped out.  “Musicians like Montez Coleman and Adam Maness did a birthday party for Montez, and he gave me all the money from that.  The whole band pitched in their money.  That was totally unexpected.  It helped immensely, because I couldn't work for a while.”

            You would expect Eric to move forward, seek improvement.  “Since then, I've had to change a lot of things about my lifestyle.  I’ve become vegan and started exercising.  My heart is almost back to normal now.”  And he’s enrolled in Gateway,  “which is state health insurance for low-income people.”

15

Eric has also been learning and growing as a musician--pushing past his limitations--in another key language:  “Now what I'm trying to learn about is technology, which I've resisted for a long time…. I'm trying to learn this program, Ableton Live.  I'm also getting better at Sibelius, which is a music-software program where you can change the key of your charts.  It's pretty amazing, actually.”

Eric uses the software to practice, to write, and to play. 

            “I can lay down a bass line of a song and make it a loop -- then lower that an octave.  Then I can make another loop of me comping over it.  Then I can make another loop of me soloing over it.  Then I can program the drums.  I use it every day to practice.  But I also use it to write and perform original music.  I think I could actually get to the point where I could learn about orchestration using these tools and not have to go back to school.”

For Eric’s playing, the new technology “helps me to just hear what I'm doing.  If you hear yourself every day, it starts to change how you think.  You're like, ‘Oh, I need to work on this.’”  So recording himself is part of Eric’s daily practice routine, putting down lines and learning by listening to himself.

Eventually Eric hopes to use the technology on gigs by programming his bass lines, then comping and playing guitar over them, especially on gigs where he’s playing with one or two musicians, can’t afford to hire more, but wants a bigger sound.  “I can program all of that, even if it wouldn't be as good as having live players….”

No wonder Eric, embracing the possibilities of uncertainty as an improviser does, says of Ableton Live, “I think that's actually going to be the new instrument.”

16

             Eric continues to gig—and to grow musically, to embrace change (as in his recently playing a concert of Stevie Wonder’s music with a local quartet).  He especially wants to move forward in his mastery of Ableton technology and its application in his playing. “For the gigs that I’m sometimes doing now either by myself on guitar or just with a singer, I’m using the computer and manipulating what happens with the music just with my feet on a pedal-board. 

            “I’m controlling it live, and that’s the challenge: Right now I have to figure out, ‘Okay, which program am I going to use?  What are the steps I'm going to need to do?’ I want to get more fluid with the system, more spontaneous and flexible, so it’s like playing an instrument, and I can make it work with improvised music and use it as a live-performance tool.

“It's like every time I do something new, I have to learn how to do it.  I just want to develop a flow with the computerized system where it's like picking up the guitar.  I want to have the same kind of mastery on both.  When I pick up the guitar, I have ideas in my mind and the music comes out. I want that whole system to be an instrument like that.”

Daring to learn as always: “I think it can make me a better musician.”