[Note: In Germany, it's downright dangerous to post a link to any copyrighted material, with greedy lawyers on everyone's backside and labels trying to cash in from low-profile sites to compensate for huge losses they brought down on their own bloody heads, but I'll risk it: Check out the Brian Setzer Orchestra's version of the above-mentioned Louis Prima classic, "Jump, Jive and Wail, just to get with the program and to get in the mood ...]

Baby, baby it looks like its gonna hail
Baby, baby it looks like its gonna hail
You better come inside
Let me teach you how to jive and wail

Livingwithmusic.com is as alive as it ever was, but the hail kept me offline for a while. I’m not going to overdo the puns and associations here, but real life hailed down on me with such strength that I was forced to take a timeout. You know how it is: If you keep a site like I do, for pure pleasure and distraction only, sometimes all online work has to take a backseat to offline life. Promotions, additional tasks, massively reduced spare time and a general realignment just have to take their toll at some point and because I do not want my life to be reduced to a rapid succession of online and offline activities only, I invested heavily into pulling myself out of a motivational hole by my own hair. I had to pull a Münchhausen, so to speak.

You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail away!

Additionally, my linear musical life became disjointed, as it always has these past two or three decades, and these past weeks and months I’ve been all over the map, musically. Classical music, raw and extremely powerful blues of the late 60s and early 70s, very early 60s big band recordings, recorder quartets playing anything from romantic to outrageously modern tunes, … in short, I went into a musical tailspin that was akin to sitting in a space simulator, exposed to 4G and more.

Papa’s in the icebox lookin for a can of ale
Papa’s in the icebox lookin for a can of ale
Mama’s in the backyard learning how to jive and wail

Having worked my rear end off for weeks - if not months - and while doing so, also taking out time massively for getting a life instead of sitting in front of a (new and wonderful) Eizo 19” flat screen, trying to avoid having the color drained not only from my face but from every inch of my body, I needed a break. Yes, I sat down in the evenings not with an ale, but with a decent Cuba Libre, a Gin & Tonic, or simply a stunningly good glass of wine, went through my collection of thousands of CDs and jumped from one extreme to the other. At times, I even dropped music altogether (ouch), went on holidays, watched films, met friends, went out … you know … kick-started my life again which had gotten somewhat stale by having been weighed-down by work, work, and work. “I don’t like Mondays” basically turned into “I don’t like any weekday”, as it is often likely to do if you live in as strange a universe as I do.

You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail away!

It wasn’t until I first threw on Louis Prima’s “Jump Jive and Wail”, skipped over to Brian Setzer’s “remake” and then hit the latter big band’s live DVD from Tokyo, Japan, that (re)inforced that itch again. Hell, it’s not easy to explain, but whenever I’m “down” musically, professionally or personally, that tune always manages to get the juices flowing again, rekindling the fire and gets me started on wild explorations, plowing through what I have amassed these past 30 years. Passion is a constant ebb and flow and if you’ve been at it as long as I have, you just know what I mean. There just has to be time for some time off, to recharge the batteries and to jump-start the brain again.

A woman is a woman and a man aint nothin but a male
A woman is a woman and a man aint nothin but a male
One good thing about him
He knows how to jive and wail

We don’t want to be politically incorrect here - although we absolutely love to do so - but it’s true: If we forego the lurid subtext of the lyrics, women are much more determined and steadfast than men are. I’ve often witnessed it online (and certainly not only there), women plowing along with their sites, their work and their lives whereas men have these wild mood swings (PMS, anyone?) … and many women don’t, no matter what biology tells us. Unfortunately, I’m a man and have, as has always happened in the past, had these eruptive symptoms of “must withdraw” and “must get a life“, although I certainly have the latter. In my humble opinion, these phases are necessary to let the well fill up again.

Rest assured: It’s overflowing by now.

Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail
Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail
Jill stayed up, she wants to learn how to jive and wail

So, I filled the pail again, with classical music, jazz, blues of the 60s and 70s, world music, big band and small combos, songwriters and rough and raw rock & roll bands. If you’d like, you could say I’m ready to unleash my usual eclectic mix on an unsuspecting audience once again, and I’m about to get going once more. It’s as simple as that.

You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail
You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail away!

I’ll jump.
And I’ll wail.
And that’s a promise.
If you’d like a piece of that, keep me in your feed readers, on your reading list or within a click’s reach.
I’m back.

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Tags: livingwithmusic.com, news, website