12 Notes: On Life and Creativity

As beloved jazz bassist Christian McBride notes, Clark “taught thousands of students who have taught thousands of students, who are going to teach thousands of students.” One simple act has the power to go a long way, so don’t underestimate the impact that you can have on those you come into contact with.

It has been said that “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,”

remember the words of my beloved little brother, Lloyd. Before his unbearable passing in 1998, he told me that one of the things you realize when you’re dying is that you’ve wasted a lot of time. When one particular individual, who didn’t know that Lloyd was retiring due to a cancerous tumor in his kidney, asked Lloyd how he was going to identify h

Let’s take care of what we have while we have it, and spread love instead of hate, especially during times that test our humanity. We’ve all been put on this planet for a reason, and there’s no use spending the minutes we have trying to create enemies. The only choice we have now is to either fight or unite, and please hear me when I say, the only

When you work with people whom you respect, you naturally get connected to their network of relationships, and it continues to build from there.

“We go faster alone but further together.”

We often think of life as a series of events that happen to us. As a result, we neglect the fact that it’s often a series of actions that we do to ourselves. Having grown up under the guidance of jazz cats back in the ’40s and ’50s, I’ve seen and done the hard drug route, and I used to smoke four packs of cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period. Co

simply being alive and present in your everyday life is the highest form of creativity.

So, may we all continue to keep the light on for ourselves and for others. As Clark always used to quote from The Three Stooges, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on suckin’ ’til you do suck a seed!”