Tuesday December 19, 2023; 8:16 AM EST
- I went to my first since-pandemic live show, at The Colony in Woodstock. It's small venue that goes way back. It's basically a bar, with a stage and a small seating area which can hold about 50 people, seated at tables. Very comfortable space. Woodstock as you might imagine is a great place for live music, one of the reasons I moved here, the other being that it's a magnet for creative people, like a lot of the other places I've lived (New Orleans, Cambridge, Berkeley, Madison, Seattle, New York). But the pandemic squashed that, now maybe we're starting to come back. #
- I decided to risk it because a friend was playing last night, Tony Levin, who I know through his wife, Andi. When I first met Tony, at a birthday dinner last year, I thought he was a banker. He's tall, an impressive-looking person, like the people who rose to be an executive at companies like IBM in the 80s. Just shows how deceiving appearances can be. He's an accomplished musician, and a very sweet, quiet person. Probably about as far from an IBM exec or banker as you can get. Until Sunday I had never seen him perform. #
- The group I was with arrived early, and Tony was at the front door, greeting people as we entered, and immediately he made a very different impression. He seemed soft, hippieish, relaxed, smiling. Later I realized this may have been the first time I'd seen him in his element. And the show, a four-piece jazz band, with his brother Pete Levin on piano, started off playing (to my uneducated ear) pretty plain improvisational jazz. But as the show went on, I could see that this music had been composed, and had all kinds of themes running through it. It seemed to me the music had been cultivated over many years? #
- The Levins and friends, are roughly my age. I imagined they had been playing together as long as I have been making software. And I felt certain what I was seeing here were two very talented brothers, who have been performing together their whole lives, and there was something I had been trying to understand about myself, how I feel about my art, almost fifty years after I started. There is an important difference in how I do it at 68 vs how I did it when I was 22. Exactly how it is different, I'm probably too close to it to really understand, but seeing what I imagined to being something similar in two people I kind of know, that was thought-provoking.#
- To me, music is as software probably is to most people who use it. I love it, but I don't have much of an idea of how it's made. The last few years I've been reintroduced to it in a new way, thanks to the Get Back documentary, which gave us a view into the Beatles' creative process, something I wish I could have seen when I was much younger. The Beatles were the music my generation grew up with, but I never really even understood that there was a difference between a John song and a Paul song. #
- The second great influence has been Andrew Hickey's 500 songs podcast. Now I have so many more stories to go with the music that my life was formed by. And I have a feeling that attending this event on Sunday will turn out to be a similar influence. #
- Now, what music should I go see next? 💥#
- PS: The concert was reviewed by a professional.#
