Imagine yourself, if you will, to be a person who is basically happy with life. You have your problems and challenges, but what is on your plate is essentially good. You're comfortable with your age, your gender, your race, your nationality, your job or profession or calling, your family, and with all the ways your world goes. You look out on the past and see a long and happy, interesting prelude to your present, and your future looks equally exciting and engaging. You're bursting with your plans and dreams, full of hope and fire, and your world is full of opportunity to match. If you are young, imagine yourself feeling like you'll never be old; if you are old, imagine yourself at peace and ready for death, even curious about it. If you are married, imagine a long and good marriage, with children and grandchildren to carry on all you started, and to care for you. Imagine your fellow human beings, above all, full of understanding, recognition, and respect for you and your work with them.

Now call all of this happy state of vital joy and connection to your world and your physical, psychic, and most transcendent self TRADITION.

Now imagine yourself suddenly thrown into crisis. Imagine your world turned upside down. If you're young, imagine suddenly feeling that your childhood is ashes in your mouth, and that you are facing a terrifying void, the beast in the wilderness, your initiation into adulthood--which is just another word for survival, because you know you won't survive as the person you were. If you're old, imagine that death is no longer the sleepy friend off to the side, but now a howling monster whose time has come and whose food is you . If you're in love and friendship imagine wife, lovers, family and friends suddenly turning on you, away from you, strangers and enemies. If you're a student, imagine all your teachers failing you, denouncing your work; imagine your enemies embracing you as one of them. If you're a woman, imagine feeling sick to death of what was your bliss yesterday; if you're fond of your country and people, imagine yourself now filled with loathing and restlessness. Imagine yourself thrashing and thrashing and flailing wildly and blindly but then gradually noticing certain patterns in your reflexive chaos, certain strategies that you can begin to recognize and control. Imagine yourself finally coming to terms with your new horrible situation, and slowly but surely beginning to prefer and enjoy it. Beginning to see where it might be taking you beyond mere sheer survival, and how it might relate to everything you've lost, and even bring it all back somehow.

Call all this terrible and exhilarating freedom that engenders discipline INNOVATION.

Now that you have that general abstract sense of those words, let's calibrate their focus as lens onto our subject. Imagine yourself to be a music lover; the music you love offers you both of the above experiences of tradition and innovation, like your own body offers you two of everything important (eyes, hands, ears, and the rest)--just as your world offers you night and day. The music you love is someone's "tradition"--someone's self--whether it's a thousand years old or yesterday's new song, it's a timeless source of stability and familiar affirmation. At the same time, it is someone else's "innovation: a total shock and challenge and alien threat, feathering into something more friendly but no less tame. Being, as you are, a late-20th-century, post-baby-boomer person, with access to music from all over time and space, imagine yourself accustomed to moving in and out of the myriad of musical universes available to you. If you're an inner-city South Side Chicago kid with little day-to-day contact with anything but your immediate world, you nonetheless have an imagination and a knack for music that can light on, say, Louis Armstrong's storming of high-society "sweet" music for dancing and schmoozing with his "hot" New Orleans style, so unapologetically and boldly African in its aesthetic that it not only fights its way into the scene like some scrappy runt of the litter, but actually assumes the leadership role in the music, having mastered the West European terms of the previous administration and redirected them, regrounded them in their African source. Or your imagination could light on the music of someone much farther from your world, as an exotic and beckoning, promising alternate universe--say, Paul Desmond, with a cool, clean, laid-back aesthetic that contrasts with and complements the other pleasantly, nutritiously, as air does fire.

Let your imagination go as far as science-fiction might take you, not only out of your inner-city or white suburban world but out of your time and place completely say into turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Arnold Schoenberg is glorying in the post-Wagnerian, post-Mahlerian dismantling of half a millenium's worth of Western music theory, rearranging the entire cultural hierarchy expressed in tonality; or, later, where Webern and then Stockhausen are rearranging that out of fixed system altogether and into acoustic and then electronic sound masses plotting and thrashing their own new ways into a theoretically endless succession of new systems, sounds, and pieces themselves. Imagine going from your primal Baptist church transplanted from the deep South into Chicago's Catholic churches for your first taste of the Medieval Western legacy of chant (even if you went there mainly to see the girls, as a teen-ager); moving from there into the reclaimed masterpieces of the Medieval woman composer Hildegaard of Bingen and being totally moved; coming upon the Connecticut Yankee Charles Ives and his clashing worlds of the New England hymnodists, John Philip Sousa, and the Harlem Stride pianists that fed his lush, crackling, humorous scores as he worked between Central Park and Hartford. Move from there up through Harry Partch, who reclaimed nature as an instrument; then John Cage, who reclaimed silence and synchronicity as music; then take all that, now seared across your soul while still in youth, back to your own more immediate world of American bebop: Charlie Parker opening up the chromatic and polyrhythmic pallette only implicit in what Armstrong and Duke Ellington started; Sun Ra turning Fletcher Henderson inside out into ancient Egyptian myth and interstellar space; Miles Davis reconnecting with the ancient and global modal approach to musicmaking, John Coltrane moving through that and bebop both into sheer avalanches of sound, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor riding those avalanches like glacial surfers, Ornette Coleman going back past the Blues into an evocation of a Morroccan civilization predating the slave trade, when Medieval West and Arabic and North African cosmopoli comprised the center of your historical world.

Imagine yourself, again, at a still more specific crisis point. You are not only a lover of all this music, but are now compelled to participate in making it. Saturated as you are with these influences, totally, engaged, you find yourself itching not only to play an instrument, but to learn the theory necessary to improvise rather than merely interpret; and to compose, and to learn and understand the theoretical principles necessary thereto. Not only generally, but in those specific contexts--you are driven to find your own original voice and contribution, and it has to be one that will draw on elements of everything that has won your heart. This is as important to you as if you were trying to find the common ground for a family of yours that was full of extremely diverse and often mutually hostile members, all vying for dominance as a way to their rightful place in the sun.

Now imagine yourself struck with the impossibility of this but relying on faith far beyond your own means and inner and outer resources to pull it off. You start where you are: on the single-line instrument you have a knack for, and set off to reach for your highest goals as if you had all the training and skill and traits and understanding and support you need. You put yourself out on the limb of this dream--but fast find yourself lost in space, with all the steps you hoped would unfold for you being suddenly one long freefall into the void.

At this point all thought of going back, or of going forward in the way you had hoped is gone. You are rather forced to put one foot carefully in front of the other in midair as though it were solid ground. Imagine yourself, starting so, to come up with something like this:

[ here was an off-the-cuff look at Anthony's chart of his music system, breaking down the 3 main categories of Architectural, Philosophical, and Ritual/Ceremonial into the 9 of the logics, into the 3 columns of 12 units of language, geometric schemes, and identity states. WE'LL SCAN IT IN]

These are your subjective principles, fished out from deep inside yourself as well as the world, named with your names and ordered for your access; they are the patterns that occur and interrelate and and codify your creative process, and give you something to hold fast to from within yourself, and to replace the fixed logics and rules of all your initial influences, and to honor them as such at the same time.

As you proceed through such experiences and reflections, imagine periods of success and failure on several levels. Imagine the music industry and community and press at times treating you like their darling and at others like a dog. Imagine encountering the politics of such a sifting process of allies and friends and enemies--racial, cultural, gender, and social and class and personal dynamics determine the lines drawn by this process even thought to you it's all primarily a musical exercise and adventure. Imagine progressing through your adult life on such a path with little or no profit until well into midlife and beyond. Now imagine reflecting on what you've done musically, and how it relates to the place and history into which you were born and moved.

Imagine then feeling you were basically happy with what you had done, on the terms you originally set for yourself. You had opened up a few simple premises, expanded a few others, and broken down some walls that had been barriers and dividers. You had helped change the class politics of genres, of instruments and orchestration, freeing up a myriad of new situations and opportunities for future musicians. You had helped expand the aesthetic for improvisers (and composers/arrangers for improvisers) from the diatonic American pop songbook into the farthest reaches of what Western culture had to offer. You had helped break down prejudice and tension between men and women, old and young, between races, between "stars" and "unknowns" in music practice; you had helped expand the African rhythmic field from the hierarchy of polyrhythms over simple basic pulse to a concept of pulse appropriate to the freefall of the Space Age, and shown it its place in relation to the musical universe around it.

Most of all, you had survived, had fun, and come to understand the truth of a couple of verses of the great poet Charles Williams: