A Daily Spoonful of Strong Kicking Medicine

Sitting around in the studios WRUW, I stumbled across this message from jazz drummer Peeter Uuskyla. It comes from the liner notes of the album medicina by the swedish trio of Peter Brotzmann, Friis Nielsen and Uuskyla. Even if you don't like free jazz (and not many people do) I think a lot of people can relate to what he says about music, the act of creation and life. I've produced it here in its entirety:

At work, the everyday job to make the living, ones daily bread. Thinking of breaking the chain of doing this samething. How bored do you have to be? How much money will you get for all these hours, days and years you are selling off from your lifetime? Will be there enough for your kids and the ones you love? Will there ever be enough and who will not get enough? Why must it be boring to earn ones bread? Must it always be boring? So if it's not going to be boring all the time, you have to shorten the boring time and use it as a reference point when defining the good time. To make the good times happen at least once a day, you have to get in touch daily with your dreams and visions. [bold mine]


Music comes first. The sound, the noise, shaped into form while letting it pass your body. It's difficult to keep and own the music, it's not like a piece of art. Maybe you can borrow it for a short while. You can anyway never just buy it and keep it for yourself. It's abstract and untouchable and therefore difficult to dissect. This music is never perfect or complete. It is always in progress. You can change it's direction, like your path in life. It's give and take. You must put in some of whatever you have, leave your fingerprints ringing, loud and clear. You are able to change the over-all sound by the way you are adding your own sound. Like painting and writing, but on the run, you never go backwards for correction. A living music is more ritualistic than a package of rehearsals and concerts. It continues day after day, changing slowly or fast, like life. It sounds now, in this moment, every day, living only once you have to act in every now situation. There is not too much time to talk about it while you better play it, guts out, music as life security, as a daily spoonful of strong kicking medicine.

And you may maybe be able to handle reality.