In Bangkok now. Will be away from tomorrow till 1 June on a 10 day Vipassana Meditation course at Dhamma Kamala. Unfortunately, will have to miss Sonny Rollins performing at the Esplanade on 28 May 08. Fortunately, YS is also in Bangkok so I get to stay with him for free for one night.

Other belated records:

• Bought a jazz semi-hollow guitar which I was very happy with: a Cort Joe Beck model.
• Did a 3-day Vipassana meditation course at Camp Christine in late April.
• Finished reading Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad and have started on Philip Zimbardo’s “The Lucifer Effect“.
• Watched “Hustle and Flow” on DVD during the last day of Feb and first day of Mar 08 . My favourite movie ever. Complex movie about the lowest of the low (a male pimp who prostitutes his partners) being redeemed with the love of a woman, dream, struggles, creativity. One of the main themes in the story is about how a man needs woman who believes in them, supports and shares their dreams. The lead character is a very unsavoury guy and there are scenes of exploitation that would make you hate the lead character but in the end the movie still makes you like the guy enough. It’s really an interestingly ambiguous movie.
• Attended the Singapore International Guitar Festival last year and saw my friend CC get third prize in the competition. The following quote (from a musician colleague) is taken totally out of context but it still applies to my friend’s showing at the Guitar Festival. Performance is 65% of what you play at home.
• Last year’s reservist saw me sleeping in the back of truck with more than twenty soldiers.
• A cancelled trip to Phuket and Beijing.
• Got my new Honda Jazz off-peak car last Fri, on 16 May 08.
• Downloaded Jimmy Bruno’s Maplewood Avenue. The best album I’ve heard this year. I don’t normally like all the songs in an album or sit through an entire album. But in this case, it was easy to do both. I highly recommend it. Buy it here. See also an awesome video of Jimmy Bruno playing with Joe Beck here.
• Finally checked out the Modern Jazz Quarter after reading about them from Kenneth Wood’s blog (if I don’t recall wrongly) one or two years ago. I’m glad I did cos I love MJQ. Also listened to Mike Stern’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” at the Esplanade Library recently. Love it. Modern electric swing!

Tommy Emmanuel / J.Shimabukuro- While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Richard Smith & Tommy Emmanuel – Stompin’ at the Savoy

Read this passage in “Awaken”, a Buddhist magazine published by Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery. The title of the article is “Training the Mind”, a compilation of teachings extracted from “The Teachings of Ajahn Chah” :

“So we say that the mental activity is like the deadly poisonous cobral. If we don’t interfere with a cobra, it simply goes its own way. Even though it may be extremely poisonous, we are not affected by it; we don’t go near it or take hold of it, and it doesn’t bite us. The cobra does what is natural for a cobra to do. That’s the way it is. If you are clever you’ll leave it alone.

Let be your liking and your disliking, the same way as you don’t interfere with the cobra. So, one who is intelligent will have this kind of attitude towards the various moods that arise in the mind. When goodness arises, we let it be good, but we know also. We understand its nature. And, too, we let be the not-good, we let it be according to its nature. We don’t take hold of it because we don’t want anything. We don’t want evil, neither do we want good. We want neither heaviness nor lightness, happiness nor suffering. When, in this way, our wanting is at an end, peace is firmly established.”

One of the clearest accounts of Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin that I’ve read

First of all, I should mention that there are said to be three kinds of knowledge: blind faith, intellectual understanding, and experiential understanding. Vipassana is all about the third kind. They talk about the theory so you can know why you’re doing what you’re doing, but the truly important part is the practice. If you practice correctly you should see benefits in your life, regardless of whether you understand why (though of course that intellectual part does help the learning and the practice).

Therefore, I’m not going to describe the technique in detail. Part of this is because I know that if I saw the instructions written out, I would just jump to the end, say “that looks easy,” give it a try for 15 minutes, and then give it up as no good. The technique is simple, but that’s not the same as easy. It’s a completely different experience if you spend a 10 hour day meditating on each incremental step in thoroughly learning the technique. (This is why it makes so much sense to have what seems like an intimidatingly long 10-day course for beginners.) However, I do want to share some of the ideas behind the technique.

Most of what they taught at the intellectual level wasn’t anything new to me, and probably many of you have heard a lot of it before as well. Things like “suffering is caused by attachments to cravings and aversions,” “everything is constantly changing and impermanent,” “the only thing you can really control is how you think and react,” and “only you can truly make yourself happy or unhappy.” The problem is that just knowing this intellectually doesn’t help much because it’s so hard to do anything about it. And for a long time before the life of Gautama Buddha, this theoretical level was all there was, until he came along and created (or rediscovered) a technique for putting the theories into practice. That technique is Vipassana.

The theory says that there are four levels of the mind. The first two are perception and recognition — pretty straightforward utilities that we don’t need to worry about too much. Any sensory input (including thoughts and emotions) passes through these first. The third level is called vedan? in P?li. This is the direct, physical sensation we feel as a result of this input. There are sensations created throughout our body for everything we experience. When we have a reaction to something “out there” in the world, what we are actually responding to is the physical sensation in our body generated by our perception of that object, not the object itself. That response comes from the final level, called sa?kh?ra. It decides whether it likes or dislikes the sensations, then develops cravings or aversions to them, or trots out our old, established, habitual reactions. This is the problematic part, because the world is never conforming perfectly to our wishes, and we’re therefore constantly feeling cravings and aversions that we can’t satisfy, and that’s what makes us unhappy.

The idea behind Vipassana is to learn to set up a filter of sorts between the vedana and sankhara parts of your mind. From a direct experience of the vedana we can choose how best to react, without being slaves to our old habits of behavioral patterns or emotional reactions. The first part of doing this consists in developing your awareness. You learn to be aware of and focus on all the myriad sensations constantly going on in your entire body, from the most obvious to the most subtle. The second part requires developing your equanimity. Whatever sensations you observe, you do so objectively, dispassionately, taking them as neither good nor bad. If the sankhara comes in and tries to make you react, you don’t give in to it. The more you practice this awareness and equanimity together, the more you also come to realize (experientially) how much everything really is constantly changing. These things we form attachments to are coming and going, arising and passing away, all the time. Which makes it easier, of course, to just take things as they come and not form cravings or aversions for them.

Out Of Nowhere

Via my friend Dom, I learnt about this 12-year old kid who plays an amazing version of a tune by Andy Mckee.

Sungha Jung playing Rylynn

See the original here.

Andy Mckee – Rylynn

More videos of Sungha Jung.

Living on A Prayer

With or Without You

All Along the Watchtower

Sweet playing. First video is an example of the use of the guitar as a melodic and percussive instrument done in the 1960s before the advent of Tommy Emmanuel, Preston Reed or Ben Lacy.

Batucada & A Day In The Life Of A Fool

Samba de 2 Notas (Two Notes Samba),Sambolero and Tenderly

Once in a while I discover music that catches me immediately when I hear it. The music of Egberto Gismonti is an example.

Egberto Gismonti was born on 5 Dec 1947. He trained as pianist and composer for 15 years with Nadia Bouglanger and Jean Barlaque in Paris. With Baden Powell as a decisive influence, Gismonti studied the guitar in 1967 so that he could play choros.

Information taken from “Masters of Jazz Guitar: The Story of the Players and Their Music” by Charles Alexander.

Magico

Dança das Cabeças

This was composed after he spent time with the Xingui Indians in the Amazon rain forest in the interior of Brazil in 1976 and played with a multi-string (12 string?) classical guitar.

In the videos below, he plays the piano.

7 Anéis

Palhaço

Frevo

Silence

Stevie Wonder Cover

It’s a song I’ve heard before but I can’t recall the name. Maybe someone can help.

Let’s Dance (David Bowie cover)

Kashmir (Led Zeppelin Cover) – Live in Nashville