Well, the good news this week is that beloved Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki is still alive. See, here he is conducting his Violin Concerto No.2 ‘Metamorphosen’:

Put down your pitchfork, dear reader: this isn’t a tasteless joke but yet another complicated philosophical point. Penderecki has indeed left this vale of tears in order to go do whatever composers do when they’re done with their bodies, and you can mosey over here to read Arts Watch contributor Charles Rose’s assessment of Krzysztof’s time on this plane. But Penderecki did, before departing, leave many copies of himself scattered about this realm, and I don’t just mean the usual copies: written musical scores (we’ve had that form of immortality since Gutenberg) and the fond memories of his students and colleagues (that road to heaven has always been open to us all).

No, I’m mainly talking about the New Flesh, the digital ghost realm Penderecki now inhabits via the audio and video recordings he made while inhabiting the Old Flesh–these myriad recordings of Penderecki conducting his own work over the years make especially good company right now, here in the vale of tears. As more artists follow Penderecki (and Prince, Bowie, Lemmy, et alia) along the via dolorosa into virtual immortality, that famous old “giants walking behind you” problem becomes more acute than ever.

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You can thank American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein for this week’s title: we lifted it from her popular 1996 book about creating your own mindfulness meditation retreat. It took us a moment to track down the provenance of that memorable phrase and its author (whom we only dimly remembered from a version of Powell’s which no longer exists), and in the process we saw a cartoon and commentary that unpacks it all wonderfully. You can read that right here, so for now we simply wish to quote Boorstein’s later clarification of her witticism:

I think the phrase needs notation, like music, to let the reader know where the accent goes: Don’t JUST do something (i.e. impulsively respond) — Think It Over!”

And that’s what we really want to talk about this week, dear reader, as our global pause continues and many of us remain confined to quarters, sitting and doing nothing. Because there’s a problem there: you’re not really sitting there doing nothing, and neither am I. We’re sitting here using the internet.

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After retiring from his last teaching job, at Eugene’s Spencer Butte Middle School, Paul Bodin “wanted to see what it was like to be a student again.” And he wanted to explore the music that had enchanted him since childhood but had been put on a thirty-year back burner — jazz. Enrolling in the University’s jazz studies program in 2005, Bodin took composition courses from well-known teacher-performers Mike Denny and Steve Owen, and played saxophone in a student jazz combo. He and his wife Peggy “started meeting wonderful young undergrads and grads in the program,” and occasionally invited the hungry students over to dinner at their bungalow at the corner of Broadway and Monroe Streets near downtown Eugene.

“We have this table that expands out, and started having these epic dinners for eight, nine, ten people,” he recalls. Some of them suggested that they bring instruments and jam.

Those informal gatherings grew into a recurring series of intimate living-room concerts open to the public. Since the Broadway House series began in June 2010 with Bodin’s classmate keyboardist/singer/songwriter Ben Darwish’s quartet, Broadway House has presented more than 60 concerts, most but not all jazz. The series is celebrating its tenth anniversary season this year with eight concerts, but the last five have been suspended because you-know-what.

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