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Once, an ex tried to convince me to go back together with him in a quite, let us say, original way. He said that he really wanted to wake up next to a singer because, according to him, we get up singing. Did it work? No way! I remained irreducible. And you do not need to feel sorry for him, okay? The guy was a jerk. What kind? A “I-do-not-like-you-traveling-alone-to-conferences” kind of jerk. Nevertheless, he had a point.

I always thought this was something everyone did on a normal basis. It never occurred to me that entering the day singingit was a privilege, let alone a specific characteristic of singers. I wonder if my many birthday rituals also count as, let us say singer’s follies.

The thing with my b-day superticious is that they are quite flexible, but they usually include changing the bed linen, bringing the garbage out, followed by a nice shower or bath, finalizing with a glass of Champagne by midnight. They may or may not include posting a story on a social network (sign of the times) or some sort of self-care routine, such as a facial moisturing mask.

Silly? Sure it is silly, but it helps me somehow, not only to leave the previous solar year and all the stuff I do not need anymore behind, but also getting ready for the new cycle to come. To be honest, I think my rituals are charming, say what you will.

You know what? I am sure you have your rituals too, if not for your birthday, at least for some special dates, such as New Year´s Eve. Am I right?

Here in Brazil there are many rituals for the last last of the year: we dress in white, eat lentils and grapes (seven grapes, to be more specific) and there is a complete chapter on how the colour of your underwear will influence your life in the coming year (yellow for money, red for love, green for health, so on and so forth, and another one for the beach-related rituals suposed to bring you good luck.

My guess is that we follow rituals for a variety of reasons, including the fleeting feeling of power over a destiny we do not control. Whatever your ritual to start another year might be, I wish you face the inevitable coming challenges with courage, because often that is all life asks of us.

Happy New Year and, as Annie Lennox sings in Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This):

Hold your head up (movin’ on)

and keep your head up (movin’ on)

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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Every year I go out to buy material to wrap Christmas presents: paper, bags, ribbons. I return home, open the drawer where the remains of what I bought the previous year are, and only then I remember that there were enough leftovers.

In a sort of déjà vu experience, I also remember that last year I had promised myself to check that drawer before buying anything. And the year before that. Some people call it the magic of Christmas. I believe the technical name is Christmas amnesia.

I know that reactions to the end of the year and the holiday season are diverse: some people love it, some people hate it, but the real difficult thing is to remain indifferent to all the turmoil around us. Ever tried? I try every year and fail. Miserably.

The commitments seem to multiply, and they may turn into a source of anxiety and stress, but sometimes they hold a truly “Christmas spirit”. This year, one of them brought me immense joy. My mother had insisted on having a pre-Christmas gathering at her house, so that she could show off the Christmas home decorations created by my sister. Despite the heat wave, it was a very pleasant afternoon.

Among the many subjects discussed and left along the way, one story stood out: we talked about the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1984), a dark period that we have not yet overcome. At this point, my mother said that my father, at the time a high-ranking state civil servant, was given the task of denouncing possible opponents to the regime.

There was no way out: if he refused, he would himself be considered an opponent of the system (which at the time meant possible arrest, imprisonment, torture and death or, at best, exile); if he accepted, he would be forced to inform on colleagues. How to get out of this moral impasse?

With pride, my mother recounted the ingenious solution found by my father: in all cases he wrote after the nema of the employee: “to date, nothing has been found to be discreditable about this person”. The task was accomplished and, at the same time, no one was denounced. Including the term “to date” also saved him in case of any future problems.

My father died when I was nine years old, after a two-year long period of degenerative illness. As you can imagine, I did not have much time to hear his stories in person, but knowing that he was an unlikely hero in a period of terror was a great emotion. In fact, it was like being able to hug him again.

I know this is often the season of hoping for the future and exchanging presents, but sometimes the best gift is in the past. Feliz Natal!

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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Yesterday, on the way home after a delicious dinner at a small Colombian restaurant in the neighborhood, I noticed that the driver was listening to my favourite jazz program and whose host usually treats me with great attention. I was so happy to meet a member of the Jazz family that I immediately texted the show host and the jazz-loving driver got greetings from him, live on air.

The driver told me that listening to jazz made him more atttemptive to other kinds of music. “Now I even like opera!”, he said. I could not help but thinking about the enormous power of music to get people together, and how one genre usually leads to another, often making classifications between classical and popular music silly.

Speaking of jazz in particular, perhaps because it is a niche that has been out of the spotlight for some time already, it gives us the impression that its fans are but a few souls scattered around, which is a big mistake. The jazz family is huge and everywhere.

Talking about the congregational aspect of music, I think that sometimes it clashes with the so-called herd instinct or, as the Oxford Dictinary defines it: “an inclination in people or animals to behave or think like the majority”.

Extensively exploited by advertising, it explains a lot of the “more of the same”, that seems to be the policy for most radio stations (and tv shows etc). Any attentive music listener knows what I am talking about. With the argument that “this is what people want to hear”, an intense narrowing of what is heard or not heard on major communication channels is justified.

The algorithm (always the algorithm) did not invent musical sameness. It just intensified an already existing process. It is somehow sad we actually do not even notice how our playlists have very few choices that are truly ours and a whole lot of suggestions from…guess what? Your Highness, the algorithm.

Of course, you read this many, many times already, but you do not care too much, because the algorithm and you are the same, you think. It knows exactly what you like. It can see your soul and preview what you want to listen, right? No, honey. Wrong. Totally wrong.

The first step to find out what you really like is to pay attention to what you hear and decide, undisturbed, whether a song will be saved in your playlist.

The next step is to find out more about the artists who touch your heart. There is a world of music production that is not part of the streaming platform catalogs. Do your homework and be amazed by your discoveries!

Now go back to your “most played from the previous year” playlist and review your concepts. I would love to know what’s changed, what’s left and what’s new.

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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And there they are once again, folks. We always knew the moment would come but, somehow, we expected it to be different this time. Somehow. Well, we were wrong and here they are: the end-of-year retrospectives. Yay!… or, is it?

I must confess those recaps make me usually a bit sad because, it does not matter how much I have reached, I always had bigger plans on my mind when the year started. So, recaps work for me as an (unasked) update on the items in the list of resolutions we all make at the beginning of the year. How many promises were fulfilled? How much progress in our lives?

Not that I have problems with reassessments, not at all! If you read me frequently, and I bet you do, you know that a good part of our meetings are dedicated to promoting strategies on how to deal with changes in the itinerary, unforeseen events and the like. My motto is: Life is like jazz: you have to know how to improvise!

So what is the problem with recaps? Sincerely, I do not know how to explain it, but there is an melancholy air in such compilations of “the best moments of the year”, that makes me blue. Besides, they tend to vary between condescending (“we are all victorious”), and hysterically euphoric (“people are sharing your music in X different countries!”).

I frankly like observing the numbers, the statistics, and finding out the number of playlists in which I was included always puts a smile on my face. In short: I enjoy having access to the amazing amount of data that retrospectives contain, but I do not like the idea of making a spectacle out of it.

Actualy, the end of the year awakens feelings of contemplation in me. Maybe because it is my birthday month, for me retrospectives fall into the big package of “rethink your new cycle”, and to reflect I need introspection, which does not always fit with the current social policy of constant content share.

At least in my astral hell I would like to have a little time to digest the results of a whole year of hard work. I want to celebrate my achievements and think about what can be done, so as not to make the same mistakes. I want to return to my metrics without fear, aware of the place I occupy, without comparisons or competitions.

Would it be too much to ask?

Be seeing you!

G.F.