Is it just me, or is all the hoo-ha about corporate tax missing the point? Everyone talks about whether corporations pay enough taxes, whether rich people (who got their money as corporate execs) should pay more in taxes, and how this money will help the economy the most.

The question is posed as taxation vs. investment: If the federal government increases corporate taxes, we can reduce the national deficit, debt, and be able to fund direly needed social programs. But if we cut corporate taxes (which the Bush administration has been doing as much as possible, and then some), then corporations have money freed up to reinvest in new technology and various ventures that will grow the economy. Oh yes, and those hundreds of million lower income slobs will also get a few bucks back as a tax cut, with which they can buy some White Castle hamburgers or a tank of gas.

The point that seems missing is that the money that goes to the government or the corporations is the same money. It is the money that average Americans pay for goods and services in order to survive and function in America. We pay a small chunk for the little things, a gallon of milk at the grocery store, a six-pack here, a bag of bbq potato chips there…. But the big chunk goes to the big players, for phone bills, hospital bills, car insurance, utilities, and of course gasoline. At this level the difference between big business and big government fades away. Between lobbyists, corporate welfare, subsidies and tax abatements, the private and public sectors begin to merge. It’s what some people call corporate welfare, some people call the military-industrial complex, and some people just call The Man. As far as our pocketbooks go, it’s just a shell game. We pay to use the infrastructure of our society, which is organized on a largescale corporate/governmental plan. It is the end result of the efficiency of largescale economies.

One example of this is the fluidity with which corporate execs flow between the private and public sectors. Our president is an oilman, our vice-president is Halliburton, and so on. I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories because I think they are unnecessary to explain the logic of the corporate/governmental connections. These connections are the logical result of modern economic development models, with centralised planning and allocation of resources. Whether it’s agri-business, healthcare, transportation, or even music production, bigger is better, and the closer private and public structures become, the more efficiently the whole machine runs.

If you accept this premise, then my only point here is that our money goes into one machine to keep it running. I don’t care what you call it, corporate welfare, monopoly capitalism, bloated government, it’s all one entity, and our money is the fuel which keeps it running.

We aren’t hapless victims of some Matrix machine, held in stasis pods while the electric currents of our brains are siphoned. It’s not so diabolical: we get cable TV!

Seriously, we pay for goods and services, and our standard of living is better than that of most people in the world. But we pay for this. That means that our standard of living can be mathematically tabulated, budgeted. You have X amount of money to spend each month, and you get a Y amount of goods and services for it. The amount of money that the corporate/governmental machine spends to provide those goods and services is less than X, otherwise the economy would shrink. Let’s call the amount of money the machine spends on costs C, and the amount left over Z. X-C=Z. Simple enough. Z is what the corporate fatcats use to bribe congressmen, pay strippers, and light their hundred-dollar cigars. Of course, I’m not judging, just describing….

Z is the amount left over after the corporate/governmental machine has invested our money back into the social infrastructure. Corporations call it profits, the government calls it taxes, but it’s the same money. To me, it’s all taxes. Exxon tax, Social Security tax, Cable TV tax, Auto Insurance tax, it’s all taxes.

So what? you may ask. Well, for one thing, this gives us a different way of viewing corporate rip-offs, excess profits, embezzlement, price-gouging, oligarchy price-fixing, and the like. Instead of trying to follow the shell game and figure out who is a crook, we can just say that all the money in excess of corporate costs is just taxes. The question is then what to do with that tax money. It can be spent on lavish parties, million-dollar condos for mistresses, and all that. Or it could be spent on other things, I don’t know, maybe slightly less decadent things. Whatever. It’s just our tax dollars at work.

I spent 10 days in L.A. working on music with my cousin Tommy Kay, the devout guitarist. I say devout because he is dedicated to playing music and, in a town renowned for its high b.s. level, he cuts through the hype and labelling to try to get to the music.

We always have interesting discussions about music & culture, and he kicks my ass to improve my jazz chops. We call these visits Jazz Camp and, even though they are built around a specific project such as recording or playing some gigs, it is all about getting deeper into the music, not about the business of music.

One of the subjects we batted around was the perennial “what is jazz?” issue. Tommy cut his teeth on the blues, and he still considers himself a blues player, not unlike many other jazz musicians who view jazz as an extension of the blues, and attitude more than a set of licks or a theoretical system. The idea is that you play from the heart and try to express something emotionally real through your music. It doesn’t matter what the tempo is, if the song structure has 12 bars, if you use exotic altered chords rather than simple dominant sevenths. The blues is both a starting point and a reservoir, a springboard to leap wherever your imagination takes you, and a place to return when you lose your way and need to regroup.

Self-proclaimed blues purists may be historians, they may be able to connect various parts of the blues tradition into a well-organized musical genealogy. But that is just one facet of the music. Other music historians trace the blues back to traditional African music, through singing style, instruments, lyric content and function. You can get as anthropological as you want, but as a musician the real thread is how the blues shapes and clarifies your own creative approach. If you listen in this way, you can hear the blues in John McGlaughlin, McCoy Tyner, Fela Kuti, Steve Lacy, just to name a few varied expressive voices.

So, Tommy had some songs he had written and we tweaked them a little, played a few shows around town, and then went into the studio and cut 10 tracks in about 4 hours. We played shows at the Bar Coda in Sherman Oaks, and at Vitello’s on Tujunga (when people ask for directions to the place, one just says “It’s where Robert Blake shot his wife” and everyone instantly goes “Oh yeah, I know where that is”) over the week.

Then on monday evening we went into the studio. It was an amazing, strenuous, and musically challenging experience, and I know that we were playing some blues as we paid some dues. Tommy always has great musicians to work with (one of the benefits of living in L.A.), and we had a great band in the studio: Sinclair Lott on drums, Clarence Robinson on bass, and Joe Bagg on piano.
Hopefully Tommy will be able to get the songs out on CD soon for everyone to hear.

Perusing the NY Times while sipping my capuccino and pretending I have my life together, I came across an article about American Catholics changing the current translation of parts of the church liturgy. The issue seems to be whether to have a translation that is closer to the traditional latin text, or to use more idiomatic language that is more comprehensible in the various native languages around the world.

That’s fine. Whatever. Most of the time the burning issues within the Catholic church are as interesting as reading the minutes of an Elks Lodge meeting; that is, it’s a closed club with its own arcane rituals and traditions. I only get worked up when church politics ripple out to affect the lives of people around the world, exacerbating ignorance and suffering for millions. The pope doesn’t like condoms, even if they could save millions of lives from being destroyed by AIDS. The pope doesn’t like gay marriage, so millions of gay couples can just move to the back of the bus. But that’s hardly new; dog bites man, etc.

What struck me in this article was an undercurrent running through conservative christian thinking. It has something to do with who gets to represent God, and what words will be used.

Leon Suprenant, president of Catholics United for the Faith, a conservative group in Steubenville, Ohio, said, “When the Mass was first celebrated in English shortly after Vatican II, some of the translations took liberties with the original, and we lost some of the beauty and dignity of the original.”

For me the issue in the above quote was the phrase “beauty and dignity.” The Catholic conservatives evidently feel that the older the language used in their rituals, the more “beautiful and dignified” it is. Even if the langauge is harder to understand, and is more difficult to connect to a practitioner’s daily life experiences, that is secondary to maintaining a higher level of beauty and dignity.

But what do these terms “beauty” and “dignity” really mean? They are aesthetic descriptions, like one would use to describe a poem, a piece or music, or a building. Why should these be criteria for religious worship? How important are the clothes, the stained glass windows, the candlesticks, and the the other accoutrements of a religious ritual? Do these trappings bring one closer to the sacred?

Is it just me, or are religious leaders trying to have it both ways? Of course they will be the first ones to quote a biblical aphorism about humility and the purity of the spiritual life. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle…” and all that. Faith is about your honest and direct experience of the sacred in life, not about what you wear to church, how loudly you sing hymns, or any of that.

And yet there is the undercurrent that if you act a certain way, speak a certain way, carry out the various traditional rituals a certain way, there is greater “beauty and dignity” in your actions. Does this make those rituals more sacred? If so, then a slippery slope appears, wherein material and aesthetic aspects of a ritual regulate its spiritual value. A humble little clapboard church is not as close to God as a richly decorated cathedral. God can’t hear the prayers of Africans worshipping in their local dialect as well as if they phonetically mumbled in latin, even if those who pray don’t understand the actual words they are speaking.

Religious leaders, I presume, would be the first to say, “Tut, tut, nay, nay, it matters not what language you speak; God hears what is in your heart.” And yet traditional, officially sanctioned language somehow has more “beauty and dignity” and is therefore somehow a little closer to the sacred. Seems to me the religious powers that be want to have it both ways.

I could stop there, but I should put in a disclaimer. I don’t practice any particular officially sanctioned religious ritual (except of course playing jazz), and so my concern is not really with whatever church groups want to do behind their closed doors. My concern is more with what human activities are deemed to express “beauty and dignity.” I’m all for beauty and dignity, we need more of that. If praying in traditional latin somehow had a ripple effect, spreading beauty and dignity out into society, then I might be less critical of all those official church blowhards. But I don’t think it does.

It’s more akin to the fashions of the aristocracy of any epoch, which are designated through the mechanisms of power and wealth as the things which should be imitated by the masses. Whether it’s powdered wigs, latin masses, or $200 Nike basketball shoes, that is really the “beauty and dignity” in question here. The gatekeepers of culture dictate what is sacred and meaningful, and the rest of us are supposed to jump on the bandwagon. If there isn’t room on the bandwagon, then we just tag along behind, eating the dust. At least Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.” For an empty-headed aristocratic platitude, it has more “beauty and dignity” than “Let them eat my dust.”

When summer hits in Texas there are three possible responses:

1) If you have the time and resources, you try to make the best of what Texas has to offer. This includes primarily frozen margaritas and bodies of water. It ain’t the Riviera, it ain’t even the Caribbean (well, sort of, I guess, since the Gulf of Mexico is only about a 5 hour drive from Austin), but you can find a shady spot by Lake Travis, sip on your beverage of choice, and hurl yourself into the water when you get too overheated. If you have a boat, or rich friends with a boat, there’s that as well. Mostly, my beautiful female friends find the guys with boats to hang out with and I never seem to get invited. I guess once you have a couple of bikini-clad muses sunning themselves on your yacht, a scruffy sax player seems pretty superfluous. But I manage to get my toes wet a little. Special thanks to my surrogate Ft. Worth family at the Chez Hinkle Spa and Recuperation Center.

2) If you don’t have the time and resources, you just hunker down. You try to make sure your car AC works, and you spend most of the summer shuttling from one air-conditioned building to another. If you aren’t a gigging musician, you might even wake up early enough to enjoy the cool of the morning (somewhere between 6 and 6:20 am, or so I hear). You forego heavy & spicy foods, and favor smoothies, salads and chunks of ice. You notice how most animals flop on their bellies on whatever is the coolest horizontal surface - dogs, cats, squirrels, lizards, even the 4-inch cockroaches seem to lay low to the floor in the summer.

3) You get out of Texas, as much as possible. You find yourself making unsubtle hints to your friends in Northern California, Montana, and other cooler climes…”I just called to say that I was thinking about you. Say, how long has it been since we hung out? So, how big is your house again?”

Myself, I’m making a break for the west coast for part of June, to record some songs with guitarist Tommy Kay, play a few gigs, and groove on the SoCal vibe. Getting out of Texas, just for a week or two, helps to break up the summer. Of course, summer in Texas lasts through October, but every little bit helps. How does that saying go? “If I owned Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas…”

Cousin Tommy has a stack of original tunes that we will dissect and ruminate over, in what we call “Jazz Camp”, which usually involves sitting around in our boxers, smoking cigars and trading brilliant musical insights at 3am. He’s been investigating fine red wines of late, so that should influence our musical insights, hopefully for the better. I told him to start a wine page on his website. You can keep abreast of such haute couture at www.tommykay.com.

So, I’ve been noodling on my lydian flat-seven and altered dominant scales, getting ready for Jazz Camp, as well as another birthday looming on the horizon. I try not to worry about where it all leads, what does it all mean. The music sustains you, as long as you don’t expect material rewards. You get a lot back from the art, if you put a little of yourself into it, and I try to remember this as I stand sweltering on an outdoor stage in central Texas, wondering if I’m out of my Vulcan mind.

So far, this has been a year for varied musical projects. My main gig with Memphis Train Revue is a lot of fun, as we cover some great dance music of the last 40 years. The band keeps getting tighter, and the effort we put in each week comes back to us onstage and makes me proud to be part of this group.

I’m about halfway through the recording process for the debut album of my Manteca Beat project. Very exciting, and I have some wonderful guest artists lending their talents. More on that as it takes shape.

I do feel blessed to be here in Austin where some of the most creative musical people have congregated, which has meant unexpected and interesting musical projects falling my way. I’m looking forward to the new Richard Linklater movie “Scanner Darkly,” with music by Golden Arm Trio fearless leader Graham Reynolds. You can hear a little of my sax work on the soundtrack, I do believe. Barbara Kooyman’s Texamericana project will also be making ripples soon, and I will do my best to support that.

Finally, if you find yourself in West Austin on a sultry Friday evening, and want to eat fine Italian cuisine in a cafe patio setting, check out the Flying Tomato on Bee Cave road. You might find an over-heated sax player serenading the diners there, hunkered down in the Texas summer, fighting the heat with some cool riffs and a big glass of iced tea.