Quarter Notes: Q1.26

There’s a lot of shit happening in this world, and very little soothes me the way music does. I’ve been in a lot of rooms these past three months. The experiences continue to shape my perspective about life, not so much about change or transformation, or the notion of coming out different on the other side with a clearer sense of who you are and where you’re going. The older I get, that’s almost never the case.

If anything, music has been less about becoming someone new and more about returning to something that has been there the whole time, waiting for me to come back into alignment with it. It’s never a breakthrough or reinvention, but always a recalibration toward something that feels continuous and alive, something that keeps unfolding without needing to announce itself as progress.

I can feel the difference when it’s missing. My thinking gets tighter, more reactive, and brittle. Cynicism breaks through and the world loses dimension. And then I find myself back in a room with music, the scale shifts again, and suddenly there’s more space to hold what I’m carrying without being defined by it.

Music restores proportion. The anger, the low-grade hum of frustration, the flashes of rage that feel so immediate and justified—they’re still there, but they’re no longer the entire field. Music can’t erase those feelings, but it places them inside something larger, something that reminds me I’m more than my anger and fear, that there is still a part of me capable of curiosity, of pursuing beauty and connection.

I felt that most clearly in an intimate room in January, sitting on a couch at the end of a long day, listening to a piano and a voice that opened something deeper than performance. The room shifted, you could feel people settling into a shared, unforced, present attention. It was spiritual, maybe even religious in a distant way, but without the weight those spaces carry for a lot of us. It carried both meaning and healing.

At some point I closed my eyes and the room fell away, a physical sensation that walls disappeared and time stretched. It felt infinite and precise at the same time, something that didn’t need to be explained in order to be real.

What stayed with me afterward wasn’t just the beauty of it, but the recognition that the part of me that can access healing in a communal, spiritual space is still intact. That no matter how chaotic things get, or how easy it is to get pulled into reaction, fatigue, or a low-grade despair, there is still a path through music I can follow back to steadiness.

From there, the rest of the quarter unfolded across rooms that could not have been more different from each other and yet felt connected. An opera at a scale so vast it feels architectural, every gesture part of something carefully constructed and still alive in the moment. Sitting close enough to see the faces of the musicians and singers, to catch the small exchanges between them, collapses that grandeur back into something human you can feel part of.

A symphony that moves between familiarity and surprise, where even the moments that drift into sleepiness can be interrupted by a swell that pulls you right back into attention, reminding you why these works endure and why they still have the capacity to rearrange something inside you, if you let them.

A performance that pushes so far into experimentation that it resists easy entry, where I can feel myself admiring the ambition of it while also recognizing that it doesn’t quite suit my taste. That, too, becomes part of the map. Learning the difference between what expands me and what simply asks to be appreciated is its own kind of clarity.

And then the other end of the spectrum, which is not really the opposite so much as a different expression of the same instinct. A dance floor at sunset in Puerto Vallarta, the air still warm, the light dropping into the ocean while a house set stretches out just long enough to dissolve any distance between you and the people around you. Bodies moving without self-consciousness, a closeness with someone you just met, bonding over music without pretense. Just the feeling of being fully present with something shared and immediate and alive.

There is a kind of intelligence in that, a knowledge that doesn’t pass through language first. It reminds us that not everything meaningful has to be interpreted in order to matter, that sometimes the body understands before the mind catches up, or maybe doesn’t need to catch up at all.

For me, these wide-ranging expressions are a way of staying in contact with different dimensions of being alive. Intimacy, scale, discipline, release, structure, improvisation, solitude, communion. Different rooms and spaces make different parts of that accessible, and I seem to need all of it in circulation to feel like myself.

There’s probably a reason for that that goes back further than I can fully articulate. Music started for me in church and it was treated as sacred, something capable of holding people together in a shared experience that reached beyond explanation. I’ve moved away from the dogmatic structures that defined those spaces, but the imprint of that understanding never really left. It just found new forms.

Now it shows up wherever I’m willing to follow it. In a small studio or a concert hall or an opera house. Or in a crowded, sweaty warehouse or on a dance floor on the beach. Different settings, audiences, and expectations, and yet the same connective tissue running through all of them.

It’s continuity vs. escape. A reminder, again and again, of what it feels like to be aligned with myself, to be open and responsive, and still able to be moved.

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1-15-26 — Seth Parker Woods, Julia Bullock, Conor Hanick — UCLA Nimoy Theater

1-29-26 — Jonathan Singletary, Piano and Prayer — 6 Degrees Studio, DTLA

1-30-26 — Gerald Clayton, Tonality, Duke Ellington’s Sacred Music — Soraya

2-11-26 — Kenneth Whalum & Friends — Blue Note Hollywood

2-28-26 — LA Opera, Akhnaten — Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

3-13-26 — Matt Suave, Horsemeat Disco, The Shapeshifters et al. — Fairyland

3-20-26 — Amber Mark — The Fonda

3-27-26 — LA Phil, Brahms & Beethoven — Walt Disney Concert Hall

3-29-26 — Delirium Musicum — BroadStage Santa Monica