March 12, 2012 – A View From The Middle (Class)

The thing about doing a daily blog — and doing it faithfully on a daily basis — is that in one way or another I give a glimpse into my moods, and I show how I make it through even the lowest moods.

This weekend was going so smoothly, so nicely … until all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose and a dream of a weekend turned into a nightmare, for deeply personal reasons. You know the saying, “When it rains, it pours.” Well, that was the case for me late Saturday night. It hit with a proverbial burst of lightning and didn’t ease up for way too many hours to bear, it seemed at times. And when it started to “rain,” it drenched me to the bone on a couple of different fronts.

Yeah, that deep.

But I found some “inspiration” to help pull me through on Sunday afternoon. I did what I love to do when a sense of pain and anger begins to overwhelm me and I need to “chill out.” I decided to take a lone drive up through Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountain range that dominates the Salt Lake Valley skyline, with my good camera equipment in hand, winding my way through the canyon with my eyes peeled for some decent shots that show the real beauty of this area as I went through the neighboring Solitude and Brighton ski resort areas.

The “solitude” part seemed to fit my needs so well. My lovely wife wanted to come along, and I normally would have been ecstatic to have her along with me. But this was one trip I needed to make alone and she was very understanding (bless her heart), with my music playing loudly along the way.

This was the true “solitude” that I needed, at a high elevation. I needed to, in my own way, fly like an eagle. This is what I found, in the exact order I found it. As usual, I’ll even provide a soundtrack.

I was lucky enough to grab a couple of albums when they came out from 1983-85 that are pretty hard to come by today — or at least one of them is out of print now. The albums were “Music For Piano and Drums” (sadly under-represented here in video due to lack of videos posted) and “Flags.” The artists were British rock and jazz drummer Bill Bruford and Swiss keyboardist Patrick Moraz.

“Music For Piano and Drums” was just that … straight piano and drums, with some super-sweet music contained within. “Flags” was more electronic, and just as good as the duo’s first effort.

Both musicians had some glorious moments in the progressive rock group Yes, although they never played together in the studio with that group. When they did get together on these two albums, it was magical. They both had a touch and a chemistry that was like pure cane sugar.

A LATE NOTE: Just now, after posting this, I was informed that not only are these albums not out of print, but an additional live CD was released. Fantastic news to me! http://billbruford.co.uk/