By my calculations, I’ve lived for 22 years in places where deer are a big hazard when driving to and from home. I’ve often seen dead deer by the side of the road and sometimes damaged cars right in front of them. Over the years I’ve had maybe 15 or 20 close calls, times when I’ve had to slam on the brakes. But I hadn’t ever hit one.

Tonight I was zooming up the hill to my house at possibly as fast as 50 mph in the 35 zone (I push it a little, but not as far as the kid who passed me at probably 70 a couple of weeks ago. A few days later I saw his new black BMW seriously damaged on the side of the road).

A buck darted in front of me. I slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed. I stopped possibly about 5 feet after smacking into him, so I wasn’t going that fast at that point. He ran off, seriously injured, I’m afraid. I don’t want to be too graphic, but it seems something spattered a bit. This was on a curve with no shoulder, so I didn’t want to get out and inspect the damage, but I drove home just a little shaken, and as far as I can tell, there’s no damage to the car.

Fall in California can be subtle; the trees turn colors at different times and sometimes it takes a number of trees changing in unison, or one tree right in one’s face, to make one notice. This Japanese maple in my front yard falls into the latter category.

Sunday was a pretty perfect day—saw John Abercrombie’s quartet at the Legion of Honor, had an unbelievably good dinner at Burma Star, had a nice cognac at a bar near Davies Hall, and saw Ornette Coleman there.

Abercrombie’s playing is understated, subtle, harmonically and rhythmically intricate. He’s also pretty funny when he talks to the audience. His Wait Till You See Her CD is the third with the quartet featuring violinist Mark Feldman; they played much of the album.

At 79, Ornette is walking a bit slowly but gave a thoroughly spirited performance. He’d play a head, a sax solo, and then pick up the trumpet and do another solo (maybe even channeling Miles Davis a little; his excursions on violin and trumpet are more restrained than I remember from the Song X tour in 1984). The band would dive into a cacophonous swirl in unison, Ornette playing from plaintive to frenetic, end on a surprising, consonant resolution between the two basses, and I would laugh like I’d just gotten off an amusement park ride or finished watching a Loony Toon.

And in between there was this view of the Golden Gate from near the Legion of Honor.

There’s something pretty special about hearing a band perform a new album for the first time, even moreso when they play the whole 55 minutes of the first disc. My son and I got to hear Porcupine Tree do just that with their new album The Incident, last Friday night in San Francisco. There’s a guy with a Mohawk to the left of the mic stand; I’m right behind him and Tim’s in front.

Photo borrowed from theincidentontour.blogspot.com.

Old interviews with Patrick Swayze have been playing on the news, in the background while I work this morning.

“We’re all dying; it’s just a matter of when.”

“You get busy living or you get busy dying.”

... make music! Yesterday I scheduled a visit from the piano tuner, which means the piano will sound so achingly great for about a week afterwards that I ought to record. That means that right now, I should start playing more regularly than I have been.

I’m thinking about what happened last time I used the piano tuning as a motivator. Part of the difficulty was that I was recovering from surgery. But I recognized something else when listening to Pat Metheny in a podcast about the making of the Day Trip album: they recorded most of the tracks in one day, and they didn’t listen to any of them during the session; they just trusted the engineer. For me, the trouble started with concern about microphone positioning, and continued into premature analysis and evaluation of the performances. There’s no place for the Rewind button in improvising.

It’s like writing: there’s a time to fling sentence after sentence onto the page (or screen), and then there’s a time to make sure it reads well.