I watched a dusty old science film recently of a lady who takes a powerful hallucinogenic drug. The change is astounding: she goes from being a typical 50s housewife to, a few hours later, quietly gushing about how everything is connected, how the air is alive all around her with dancing technicolor molecules, connected to every other thing in the world. The researcher asks her, “Is it all one?” She pauses, considers this and says, “It would be if you weren’t here.” This is essentially how I feel about dominator culture. It has an intrusive, degrading quality that tends to homogenize people and trivialize real experience. I’ve never used those drugs, even the milder ones, but people ask me questions like his all the time. They act as if it’s some sort of inquiry, but what they’re really saying is, I wish I could feel that way too. They can, though.

I experience the whole world as inspired and alive. If I think about something I’ll get three hits on it that day, and I love the synchronicity. I walk around wondering why more people aren’t inspired and excited about their lives. It’s such a privilege to be alive on this planet.

The thing about feeling this way is that you look at someone or you look at something, and you are that thing. It makes for a real depth of connection and feeling in this world, but also overwhelming sadness when you see images of animals in a factory farm. I would do anything to help that beautiful baby calf in that crate, and I will spend the rest of my life doing all I can for him. I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to be of help in this world; but that’s not so strange. There are many who do a lot more than I do.


Welcome. I’m Tristan. I was raised in the woods of the Berkshires. I was a curious kid, a lover of animals and nature.
I fell in love and felt real heartbreak before I started playing music. I was nineteen when I started taking it seriously: a late bloomer. I threw myself into it. My first instrument was drums, and I was fortunate to study with a world class jazz musician named Randy Kaye. Randy Kaye was a poet on the drums: a true artist, especially with brushes. Graceful, subtle, very unique. From the start I got a highly creative, non-traditional perspective in my instruction, and I threw myself into the craft. I was lucky. Randy recognized my commitment and in a year or so, started sending me on subs for him.
I went to school and studied jazz and music theory. I focused on piano and keyboards along with drums as my concentration; I loved the way it let me play the riffs I’d been dependent on others to play. With a little keyboard knowledge I could figure out the harmony to the Miles Davis piece I was listening to day and night, play the bass line to the Sade song I was in love with. I would hear a song like Thelonious Monk’s Misterioso, get intensely curious about the intervals that drove its quirky, irresistible melody, and then get such a thrill when I got inside and could plunk it out.

When I was a child I wondered why music had such a strange power over me. When I started to study it I was like a lifelong drug addict finally learning to grow his own plants and synthesize his own chemicals. It doesn’t take much to understand the Dorian mode, but for me it was like decoding the subtle mechanics of falling in love.
I found my passion was playing funk music and blues shuffles. Right out of school I started a blues band and we did just that. This was with three of the most creative, gifted people I knew. Looking back, one of the interesting things is that we had each (except our singer Ed Moran, who needed no schooling) studied and played jazz, and had a fairly complex understanding of music theory. But rather than exhibit this in the music, we chose to simplify. We found that when you channel that much intensity and passion into a simple structure, the results are fascinating and powerful. I loved that band. I look back on those years like a scene in a movie. Blues music is still my favorite in the world. It’s a misperception that Blues music is sad; a 12 bar shuffle is the most ecstatic music on the planet.

I love music. I dream of it. I’ve had anxiety dreams where I’m playing my drums on a steeply pitched roof, and I’m grabbing at the cymbal stands trying to hold it all together but it’s just falling apart. Other times I dream I’m listening. Most often though, I mean regularly, I dream that I am music. The dream plays out while I score it with evolving music literally pulsing out of my body. I wake up with whole songs, chord structure, a groove and bass line in my head, and if I lay still I can keep it going for minutes. In my waking life I have sonic ideas in my head all the time. You know how you go to the grocery store and get a song stuck in your head? I think we get songs lodged in the body. You have to hit the reset button to get it clear again. I like joyful, expressive, colorful works of art. Stuff where the artist is just in love with what he or she is doing. I feel it’s the best reason to do anything. Like Van Goth’s Sunflowers. If you watch old films of Art Blakey’s band playing Moanin’, you’ll see what I mean.

What follows are some thoughts of mine on life, culture, the world of arts and music. You can dive in if you like, or just move on and listen.



My experience with the world of music and musicians is that there are some who can be quite orthodox in their approach. There is a certain way things are done, whether you’re producing a pop record or playing a jazz gig. I still find this surprising. Music is considered a quintessential art form for expressing rebellion, dissent, freedom! I find it curious then, that it attracts a certain amount of people who follow the well worn path of what’s already been done.

It just seems like the artist’s path is so codified these days, especially in music. Reality shows and “rock star” camps teach people how to act like “rock stars.” Am I the only one who finds this cynical and tired? I get the feeling people don’t even really believe in it anymore. I think tradition can be a good thing, but a situation like that is inherently focused on what’s already been done. Here we are in the new millennium, and all I’m saying is, let’s have the courage to evolve. If you’re attracted to a certain style or a way of life, then fine, go for it. Many of our ideas just float around and recycle anyway. But let’s not deny that authentic self just because we’re afraid it’s “not what people want” or some other sad, misguided reason. I think people always have a thirst for genuine, inspired ideas. This can certainly be pop music; I love pop music. I’m just saying let’s keep it real, and be open to possibility. Have you noticed that when Tim Burton and Johnny Depp make a new movie you know it’s going to be quirky and fun? I wish more new music was like that, including and especially pop music.

I was born in the United States, and from what I can see, this empire is structured in a kind of pyramid scheme of exploitation and brutality, with a fair amount of people in the middle who don’t seem to have the inner resources to treat other feeling beings more kindly than someone treated them. They’ve been dominated and dehumanized, and many can’t wait to get a little power and do the same. If challenged, they will point to others who do it as justification. So it continues. There are official positions and roles in our society, perfectly legal and sanctioned by authority, that virtually guarantee this kind of abuse.
But I think we should remember that exploitation and domination are only one aspect of human nature. We have the ability to express the most beautiful and inspiring aspects, too. Nothing defines human nature more than potential and possibility. Much of our current system appeals to and encourages the worst aspects of human nature, but we always have the choice to unplug. How long will people tolerate blatant corruption, war profiteering, horrific suffering of animals in factory farms and testing labs, the killing of unarmed civilians? I think as long as we are lulled into unconsciousness, silenced by fear and confused by the false authority of empire.


Let us wake up to a truth. Wars are arranged by the ruling class and fought by the working class; common people suffer and die while a small minority reaps obscene profits. One of the hardest things about this is to watch the propagandists and media shills trick people into believing “support” for aggression and outright atrocity makes one patriotic; it is not even remotely patriotic.
We buy into many lies about war, but the first one is that it’s necessary. Don’t get me wrong; I am not a pacifist. I have a warrior spirit and I am angry about injustice. If hostile aggressors land on American soil to murder, exploit, enslave women and murder our children (as the genocidist and war criminal Christopher Columbus did in his well documented atrocities), I will be among the first to get up and fight. The problem, my friends, is that this is happening from the inside. Corporations with their inherently fascist and sociopathic agenda, war profiteers, transnational banks and the bizarrely corrupt media that serves them are the ones degrading and destroying this nation and the world, not some poor soul living in a hovel in Fallujah. War boils down to a massive and complex enterprise for profit that, in the end, doesn’t even benefit the tiny contingent of super rich who promote it, although they apparently believe it does. It is painful to watch militarism sold as some kind of patriotic adventure when in most cases it is an exercise in atrocity: a sad and unnecessary illusion driven by fear and greed. I think we should fight for the well meaning and sincere people who’s lives are co-opted by that corrupt system into fighting and killing others who, in most cases, are very much like them. An American man or woman in a US war for profit (the current ruse being “terrorism” as before it was Communism) has more in common with the people he’s fighting than he does with any of the power elite who put him there. The only war worth fighting is one against oppression and injustice.

It’s just that with our current level of fear and ignorance, social conditioning appears to work. With even moderate pretensions of authority, it is easy to convince people to behave with great cruelty, and the rest to be indifferent and compliant. If we look into history (even our own), governments state and federal have used illegitimate authority driven by economic interests to enforce the worst conditions. It would be naive of us to think this aspect of human nature and of power structures is not alive today; it is; the ruling elite just as convinced of their authority and the false legitimacy of their atrocities as they were during the time of slavery.

In 2003 the United States began the worst and most large scale atrocity of my generation’s lifetime, one that caused and will continue to cause incalculable suffering for all feeling beings on this planet, but especially for the Iraqi people. While war contractors and private security firms reaped obscene profits, US soldiers tortured prisoners for their entertainment, shot defenseless pets who were tied in the yards of innocent Iraqi families, members of the US 101st Airborne Division gang raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family, including a five year old child. The war proceeded as horrifically and senselessly as it began, though it quickly became clear that the reasons cited for this unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, flimsy from the start, were false.

Anyone who cares to look at this and other cases like it will see this is what war does, this is what militarism does. Our former National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, who used deliberate misinformation and scare tactics to sell the public on the international war crime that was “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the result of which even conservative experts state we are less safe in the world, currently has a book on shelves in stores around the nation with a proud picture of herself on the cover entitled: No Higher Honor. Ms. Rice repeatedly used the phrase “The smoking gun, that could turn into a mushroom cloud.” I found this staggering even as it was happening, it was so obviously empty. The notion that Iraq could attack us in such a way was as ridiculous as it was a lie for her to present it. This occurred along with such a rapacious and open attack on the Earth and the environment and tax cuts for the super rich so blatant and obscene that if there was anything resembling justice in the United States and any interest in same by its legislators, law enforcement agencies or the UN, the cowards and rapists of the Bush administration who perpetrated the Iraq war and committed these crimes of blatant profiteering against the people and against the Earth would be stripped of their illegitimate wealth, sentenced and convicted, and put in prison for the rest of their lives.

There’s much talk these days about the “dumbing down” of our culture. I suppose it’s true, but as much as modern media and education systems may have been successful in dumbing people down, I think a worse effect has been their success in numbing people down. If we allowed ourselves to feel the pain of animals in factory farms, of children dying of hunger, of small farmers losing their family farms while the government subsidizes petrochemicals, weapons and crops that make people fat and sick, of families put out of their homes while corporate thugs hoard more than they could use in a lifetime, if we truly became aware of this at an experiential level, the political changes we’re all talking about would happen in an instant. If our species evolves, the people who look back at this time will see it as a strikingly hypocritical one, but they will also recognize it as a cruel one. Cruelty is intrinsic to this culture. It is so ingrained that often times we just aren’t aware of it. We segment ourselves. We have fleeting moments of fear that something is wrong; we hear someone talking about Katrina victims, or US supported genocide, or animals suffering horribly in a testing lab somewhere but we don’t believe we can do anything about it. That’s the kind of despair a system of oppression depends on, that and the consistent mirage of false authority to commit that cruelty. But it’s not true. We can make choices every day that address these conditions. We can insist on cruelty free products, buy local food; voting with our pocketbooks is one piece of activism that will certainly get attention.
Cruise ships, for example, and their industry: most of us aren’t aware that they spew massive amounts of raw human sewage (a cruise ship can generate over 20,000 gallons in a day) as well as even more harmful chemicals straight into the beautiful, fragile ocean. This is a staggeringly arrogant and destructive thing to do, a true outrage, and most people don’t know, don’t care. I do not believe the beautiful fragile ecosystem, the playful dolphins, majestic loggerhead sea turtles, fishes and coral reefs should endure this horror, all for something that is blatant luxury, and all of this when on board treatment facilities and storage for the chemicals are real and available; they would just cost a little more. Again, these sociopathic industries will continue to rape and destroy wholesale until we compel them to stop. If our politicians fail to strictly regulate the cruise ship industry, and they have, then I believe we should choose to boycott them. If we do this, and let them know why, they will change.

In my observation, our culture is one of enforced mediocrity, and many of us enforce that condition without even thinking about it. Put downs are a big one; that’s how friends do it to each other. If you start to let the energy and inspiration you were born with flow, if you’re not crushed by your early education, mass mind thinking, chemical additives in food, etc, then you have an energy that either draws people to you or makes them afraid. Either way, you’ve broken through to the level of sincerity and authenticity, and this is the only way to achieve anything good. Interestingly, this seems to also involve a sensitivity to others and how they feel. This is why, of all the politicians you hear speak (if you’re lucky it isn’t many), the ones who talk the most about being “tough” or “taking a hard line” are the most stupid, the most primitive and the most pathetic. Vote for them the least. Delete them from your life.

Music
Paradise
Broken Arrow