I like the idea of things like this. Different approaches interacting in a common space. Years ago, I was in the schedule rotation in a restaurant chain that featured jazz every night. On the evening I worked we had 2 shifts; I played solo piano from 5-8pm, followed by a trio (with a different piano player, plus bass and sax) from 8-midnight. One day, the manager got the idea to have Ed Yellen (the sax player) move his shift up an hour, and play 7-11. So for one hour a week, for several months, one of our sets would overlap. It's probably safe to say that I was the most traditionally minded of the musicians who played there (on any night), and Ed was the most "modern". Kind of like Oscar and  Coltrane here, but perhaps even further apart. The one thing we had in common is that we knew some of the same tunes. And we played them, even as I was hearing things come out of his sax that I didn't know what to do with, and he was, in all likelihood, playing with a stride (more or less) piano player for the first time. And we enjoyed the heck out of it, both of us looking forward each week to that one hour of unique experience. Whenever two musicians play together, an unique space is created. It would be fun if there were any recordings of those sets to listen to now, on one hand. But on the other, the memory of how if felt is a nice place to visit, when something like this video reminds me.

Many if not most of us, myself included, will trust our intuition. Or better put, trust in our intuition (leaving the interpretations of what that may mean aside). How many times have we heard it said, or said ourselves that we should trust our gut/first impression, and not over-think things. Yet who doesn't? I think many would agree that we already know that second guessing our intuition will send us down a side road, if not the wrong one altogether. And we still do it. It occurred to me recently that trusting one's intuition could be understood as a very (if not most) basic expression of (the idea of) faith. For me, personally, trusting my intuition has become pretty much the center of gravity of this season of life. Especially so when playing piano. When I will get, and stay, out of my own way is when I will connect to the deeper places. But I've also come to learn that those spaces that music will allow me to enter are not just places to make music, they are places to live. Practicing music, and in particular, practicing to the space, is in a very real sense, where I can learn and inhabit who I am. So I have arrived at some level of comfort in recognizing the "signals" and allowing them to point me to in the direction I should be. One night, a few months ago, I felt the familiar wave, this time more of a jolt. And it told me something I may have already known, but unwilling to embrace without a proper push, that the time had come to put an end date on Mainstay Mondays. To allow myself to be guided and led as I play piano is to avoid getting tangled up in my head, and allow myself to travel beyond self-imposed boundaries. To allow this everywhere else in life is to be taken where I am supposed to go, or be, even if I don't know what or where that is. It's all the same thing. I'm learning.