And now back to music

So in the past few weeks I've recorded tracks for two different albums - five tracks for Emanuel and the Fear, my longtime project, and another two for Roxanne De Bastion, a London-based singer/songwriter who actually opened for us on our first show in London. These two sessions had one thing in common: they were low-pressure, chill, and the end results were really quite stellar.

Which brings me to the point: you don't have to spend a ton of money, basically destroy your sanity, and do all sorts of editing, to make a good album. You have to have good music, the capability to perform it well, and some good mics. And that's really it. Yeah of course there's some editing going on, but really, these tracks are all going to be pretty close to legitimate performances, and if there's one thing I've learned from these sessions, it's how I want to record everything. What you hear on the record is what you'll get live, for the most part (obviously dependent on a decent sound man and good gear, but meh, you work with what you have). I'm immensely pleased with these recordings, and I can't wait to hear the final versions. Plus, the recording engineers for both projects were really sympathetic types who really seemed to believe in the music, and that makes all the difference in the world as to the vibe in a session.

On another topic -

My passion for being a musician tends to wax and wane. Lately it's definitely been trending upwards - I've been having some good gigs recently, not only good in the sense that they have enabled me to pay my rent and make some more connections, but good also in the sense that they have been very artistically fulfilling. Like doing a lecture/demonstration series for high school students, or last week premiering a piece by a NYC composer and performing another by one of the composers in residence with the Chicago Symphony (for the record, Mason Bates, who apparently is a well-known turn-table artist as well as composer. Fun piece, too). Having gigs like that, good sessions, rewarding work, I just often find myself at a gig thinking, "thank God I'm a musician." And that's a nice thing to be able to say, it's not always so true. Or maybe it is always true and I just forget it sometimes. And it looks as though the trend will continue, as I just landed a gig recording some tracks later this month with a Cuban pianist/composer, whose work I have played before and had a blast doing it. Can't wait to see what he's cooked up this time.

On the God front:

Currently reading a book about Paul and women. There's a lot of stuff in Paul that can certainly be taken as fairly misogynistic, at least in the context of modern culture. This book is actually claiming that Paul was in fact urging equality between the sexes, and that his meaning was twisted by people unwilling or unable to break out of the Athenian mindset (as opposed to the Spartans, where women were generally equal, but they didn't end up influencing the cultural trends in the way the Athenian philosophers did), which generally held the view of women as inferiors at best. I've only read half of the book so far, but from what I've read, he is using a lot of arguments based on various uses of Greek words that had more meanings and connotations than the simple English translations could convey. It's a very interesting book, and it's certainly helping me see just how difficult it can be to really puzzle out the meaning of scripture.

For instance, he is pointing out how Paul uses different words that can be translated to mean roughly the same thing, but actually have vastly different connotations. For example, he uses one word when referring to the relations between children and their parents, and masters and slaves, but then uses a different word when talking about the relationship between wives and husbands; and yet the two different words are translated in basically the same way "to be subject to". The argument is, if Paul really meant for women to obey their husbands in the same fashion, as has often been taken for granted over the course of history, then why did he use two different words?

Now, one may say that, if mistranslations cause us to call into question views of the bible that have been mostly unchallenged for most of its existence, then how can we trust anything in it? I would argue that part of that comes from experience. For instance, we currently live in a world that, at least in large chunks of it, provides women with opportunities equal to, or at least nearly equal to, those that men have. And thus we have seen that any differences between the genders don't extend to such things as leadership and intelligence. We see in the world little reason to think of men as coming before women, and it turns out that this book I'm reading ends up making a very convincing argument that, in fact, Paul was indeed arguing for basic equality between the genders, and not reinforcing the old cultural norm, as has been thought for centuries. Regardless, it's a fascinating argument, one that has given me much food for thought.

Oh and for the curious among you, the book is "What Paul Really Said About Women", by John Temple Bristow. I don't really know enough about the subject to know if his research is accurate, but I'd guess he's basically on target with most of it, given that his conclusions certainly make the letters of Paul make a great deal more sense to me.