Quality Questions

“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of questions you ask”- Aaron Lamont Curry

I have always been very inquisitive as a kid, and would ask so many questions to the point where my mother would say, “Son, I love you, but I need a break!”

Most children are pretty inquisitive because there is a great deal of the world that they don’t understand, but the beauty is they know that they don’t know a lot, hence the questions. 

One of the reasons I love hanging out with my “godson,” Aidan is that he asks tons of questions, and what’s also funny is that he’ll ask things that quite honestly I don’t know the answer to. I remember one day I was hanging out with him and his mother, and he asked some kind of geographical question, and I turned to her and said, “So what do you do when you really don’t know the answer?” She laughed and said, “I Google it.” Thank God for Google, but I honestly started taking advantage of questions I didn’t have the answer to, and would invite him into that reality and challenge him so that we could both figure out the answer together. This discovery turned our interactions into something way more substantive, cool, and inviting to him, I think. Instead of me acting like I was the all knowing older person, I was vulnerable to let him know that many times I am just like him. 

What I find, is when you become an adult, at least for me, I sort of felt I had to start playing dress up, put on a suit and tie, walk in a room, and act like I had it all together. When the reality is that a few years ago, I was just taking myself way to seriously. All of things are part of maturing, but I also think the beauty of maturity is to still reflect my youth, and bring both worlds together. 

I also feel in life when I acknowledge what I don’t know, and assume the childlike manner of being inquisitive, people are so open to explaining things to me, and sometimes they tell me even more than what I asked for. 

My challenge is to always have more questions in life than answer, because I feel that way I’m setting myself up to get my brain full of beautiful new information daily. 

I want to continue to be more curious in this life and create beautiful questions, and I have faith that life will continue to unfold the daily answers.

Is Jazz Still Alive?

I hear people ask questions like, “Is jazz still alive?” Is the music still relevant?” Do young people love it?”

My response is, “It’s alive and well!” You know why? Because too many of us are in love with it, because we live and breathe it. 

I first fell in Love with Jazz when I was about 16, but I first met “her’ when I was about 13 years old. My cousin played an Oscar Peterson recording of “Honeysuckle Rose,” and it was as if I was walking down the street and saw the most beautiful woman, ever, I admired her from afar, but was too afraid to speak to her. 

At 16, I was introduced to Miles Davis’s “Milestones” and from the sound of “Dr.Jekyll”, I was instantly hooked. The sound of Philly Joe’s ride cymbal, Red Garland’s piano coming and the beautiful bass lines by Paul Chambers left me speechless. I was so in love, that everyday had to start with that album. 

The second album that captivated me was Diana Krall’s “Love Scenes.” I listened to the album so much that my CD became scratched so deeply that it would skip after playing the first 30 seconds. I could sing all of the bass solos so genuinely sculpted by Christian McBride, and the intros created by McBride and Russell Malone are still etched in my memory. 

Jazz became greater than a sound, and began etching itself into the daily fabric of my life. It changed the way I walked, talked, dressed, and informed how I approached the world. 

I look at life now and I am a jazz musician undoubtedly, and it’s the most amazing thing to me. 

One of the things I am understanding about love is that even when you lose faith, it’s still there. Even if you take a break from it, you can’t stop loving. Love is essentially more powerful than our feeling about what we love. 

I simply love this music because it says everything I wish I could say. It speaks a language I will spend my life trying to decipher and speak more authentically. 

Jazz, I love you and always will eternally.