Adam Cole

We’re fine.  We’re living together, my family, all 12 of us, in a big house.  We’re only going out when we need to. 

I have been doing lots of piano lessons online, so I’m not bored, really.  However, I do have more time during the day to consider my precarious state and to plan for getting out of it.  I can be relentless with such planning. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how effective my personal promotion has been on my website.  Periodically I revisit my presentation, my persona, my product…

I’ve learned so many lessons from the crisis we’re in.  The horrible situation provides many gifts which are not horrible.  I’m greedily gathering them around myself. 

Monday night I hit a low point.  I crawled in my bed and pulled the covers up to my head.  When I had recovered myself enough, I called a friend of mine who is a crisis manager and I asked him for his advice on how to just *be* during all of this. 

He gave me this advice about how to manage a crisis. 

      1) You can only work with the…

My grandmother passed yesterday.  She was 104.  I was privileged to give a speech at her funeral in which I talked about the things she taught me. 

I didn’t have time to include everything I learned from her in that short address.  In these confusing times, one of the more important lessons is especially relevant and I want to share it in this blog.  Safety is not the goal. 

It’s not that we shouldn’t be safe, or shouldn’t want to be safe. If you’re in danger, safety is the goal.  But living a life…

Have you ever had that dream?  The one where you're making a presentation and you have no idea what you're supposed to say?  Or you're a performer and you've forgotten your lines?

It's a very common dream.  It's not one of my recurring nightmares.  But I did have "the dream" a few nights ago.

However, mine had a very interesting twist.

In my dream I had somehow agreed to play piano with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Bartok Violin Concerto.  Never mind that there isn't a piano part…

Johnny Costa is one of the best known and least known jazz pianists of the 20th century.  Have you heard of him?  His albums are hardly jazz essentials.  And yet he was one of the most facile, brilliant pianists who ever played the instrument.  Remember all that jazz piano at the beginning and end of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood?  That was Johnny Costa! 

As I was listening to one of his records, jealous of his chops, I noticed something I never noticed before about a good solo.  Johnny wasn't always playing…

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about getting older and the choices you make along the way, I finally listened to Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along.  It tells the story of three friends, but it goes backwards in time, starting at their callous middle-age years and ending with their first meeting as carefree young people.  Once you know how the show works, it’s quite powerful to see the inevitable future fold back and offer them painful choices you know they have to take.

Sondheim and Hal…

Mornings Monday through Thursday I do music with children ages 3 months to 5 years.  The school where I work is inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach.  Reggio Emilia acts on the assumption that even very young children have ideas about what they want and need to learn, and listening to them and following their ideas is the best way to help them grow.

I have struggled somewhat applying this approach to music.  In my experience, letting children have too much control over a music class can create chaotic…

I’d like to tell you a story.  It’s about who I was and who I am and who I want to be.  It’s also about jazz.

I play jazz every Thursday night with a friend of mine who lives up the street.  He used to road-manage jazz and rock acts.  His stories about the road are mind-boggling.  He opens his house to a few friends once a week to come and play jazz for two hours.  He plays bass, and he calls the rest of us in.  I’ve been doing that for about six years.

I used to have to play either gigs or jam sessions if…

One of my favorite observations about life comes from Moshe Feldenkrais.  He points out that at birth, the origin of seeing is in the eye, so if you destroy the eye you destroy seeing.  But later in life you don’t necessarily destroy the function of seeing if you destroy the eye.  Seeing has become something we do with our body and their mind, even if we have lost our visual sense.

As I’ve meditated on this strange observation, I’ve found it true again and again in other places.  I thought I’d list a few…

According to marketing experts, in order to make money, you have to solve someone’s problem.  This is easy for a plumber, but hard for a writer.  In my life I’ve written a great deal without thinking about who it’s for, and that’s made it difficult to sell.

The better I have gotten at learning to do business, the more unhappy I’ve become about this truth of marketing.  I’ve written, published and marketed book after book.  They are on sale at Teachers Pay Teachers, Amazon, Selz and just about anywhere else…