Another rewarding day at the studio on saturday. We finished Eveningstar's guitar and synth parts. I got my first chance to play my prized PRS Hollowbody on tape. To my surprise, it works on both clean and high distortion lead parts. You can play a jazzy rhythm part and a creamy, distorted solo part on the same instrument.

Looking forward to hearing a final mix. Krisse played some mean synths. He was especially creative in the supporting rhodes behind the guitar solo. His ARP-sound synth solo is a gem, both in terms of how it helps the song to progress towards the finale and as a standalone solo. Understated, melodic, and it tells a story.

I have been listening to John Coltrane's last studio masterpiece, Interstellar Space, a series of duets with drummer Rashied Ali. This monument to improvisational dialogue was reconmmended to me by Matt, a fellow philosopher-cum-organizational scientist. While the duo format makes the listening experience perhaps a bit easier than Coltrane's other free jazz explorations such as Ascension or Meditations, still it's striking how free jazz demands a form of surrender to the music: it cannot be appreciated from an angle where the music is used as a servant: to soothe an anxious mind or provide a pleasant background. Free jazz embraces the listener.

The whole family has been ill for a week now. Today I discovered how much voice is related to social control. I was giving a lecture for a group of experienced practitioners, and while I think Ibuprofen helped to control the temperature and I was feeling somewhat lucid, the fact that I had little voice just made me lost the room, I think. It's not as if the people did not hear me; it's about one's ability to control the dynamics of the social situation by using one's voice. When there's only one setting: low and mellow, the room is soon lost.

On a more cheerful note: I have re-discovered the Muppet Show, one of my childhood favorites. I was particularly impressed by the show's ability to do comedy with just music, no lyrics involved. Think about the drummer character, Animal from the house band "Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem". I think he defines the rock drummer stereotype: violent, beastly, non-cerebral, yet kind of cuddly and cute.

I also discovered a new favorite character while watching a recently published DVD boxed set with my daughter: the saxophone player Zoot. A laid back character, he portrays how the cool, possessed by so many jazz sax players can be both convincing and ridiculous at the same time. Wikipedia has a particularly helpful entry on Dr. Teeth's band. On Zoot, it states that:

Zoot's claim to fame was playing the final off key note to the end theme of the show, then looking into his saxophone with a bewildered expression, checks his music and gives a satisfied nod and looks around at the other musicians and gives the same nod. Curiously, the note played is the lowest note on the baritone saxophone, and most of Zoot's other playing has the sound of a tenor saxophone, while his instrument appears to be an alto.

His name comes from "zoot suit", a large-shouldered, taper-waisted, gaudy garment popular in the 1940s. It is alternately possible that his name comes from Zoot Sims, a great jazz tenor saxophone player. Others believe that he is based on the great blues saxophonist Lou Marini. Zoot's appearance seems to be an amalgam of Latin tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri and Frank Tiberi, longtime member and current leader of the Woody Herman big band. Yet another version is that Zoot is based on tenor-sax player Yaroslav Yakubovich, Israeli jazzman, who immigrated to the USA and continued his stage career there during the 1970s. Zoot is performed and voiced by Dave Goelz.

Spent tuesday and wednesday in Paris. Presented a paper with Mikko Ketokivi, a friend and colleague at HEC, a business school outside the city. Got a chance to meet some interesting colleagues on the top of their respective fields, including an old acquaintance, Xavier Castaner, Mikko's coauthor.

We presented a paper in a joint seminar with Bill McKelvey, a giant in organization theory, which was somewhat unnerving, yet I think we did ok. The main idea in our paper, that the current practice of equating specific research designs (e.g., hypothetico-deductive, inductive, hermeneutic/dialogical, etc.) with specific basic forms of inference: inductive, deductive, abductive is simply unwarranted, did not meet any open resistance, so I think it's worth developing the paper further.

The last time I was in Paris, I have been told, was when I was a babe in arms. So, it is a new city for me. In new cities, I enjoy immensing myself in the art of strolling around. It's strange how strolling creates a completely different mode of being, a connection with the city. Typically, when in a conference, you emerge out of the airport, give an address to the taxi driver, and emerge in some location separated from the airport. You do your stuff at the conference, and take yet another taxi to a hotel. You jump between discrete geographical points, without commencing in the process of living in a new city.

Strolling is a perfect antidote to such alienation from one's surroundings. I try to find a few hours in each city just to wander around. Actually, I think there was a philosophical movement for strolling in cities I read about recently, but don't remember much of what it was about. I also had a digital compact with me for capturing some moments in time.

Some glimpses of Paris-in-practice, submitted to memory:

- at the airport two African (I think they were) nuns, a young and an old one. The younger guiding the elder, holding hands.
- people facing each other on the streets, animated in conversation, hands waving wildly in the air.
- dogshit everywhere.

Friday afternoon, sitting under a tree, waiting for drumsound to be finished, I got a call from a journalist Helsingin Sanomat. It turned out that a US general Gregg F. Martin has published an academic paper titled "Jesus the Strategic Leader", where he argues that the example of Jesus Christ should be taken seriously as a model of strategic leadership. For instance, love should be assumed as one of the cornerstones of strategic leadership.

The reporter wanted to know how this sounded to me. The article came out yesterday (sunday, May 8th, 2006), where I was quoted saying that yes, Jesus can be an example of good leadership. It is also a very non-surprising proposition, as religious speech has for long been part of the official discourse of strategic mananagement. Think of Hamel and Prahalad arguing that organizational strategic intent should convey "a sense of destiny".

The point I was unable to make in the article, however, was that strategic management nowadays draws influences from many traditional discourses such as technology, warfare, sports and yes, religion. Each discourse has its uses and important limitations. Religious language is uften used to mystify organizational decisions, and legitimize them unquestioned.

At its worst, Martin's doctrine of love, for instance, can turn out like the "ministry of love" in Orwell's 1984, that is, a Stasi-like organization veiled to be built on a principle of caring for the public.

Great weekend. Spring has finally arrived or maybe it's summer already. Spirits uplifted, listening to 80's heavy metal with the iPod which is a good sign (the metal, not the iPod).

Spent friday in the recording studio. We worked on one of my reworked compositions from the early 90's, a tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera called Eveningstar. Yes, I do believe what the world needs right now is another tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera. :-) Actually, it's quite liberating to revisit an earlier work which you can treat with an ironic distance. I actually believe in the concept even if I would never consider writing a song like that now, the cynical thirtysomething I am now.

I was working with an old friend Krisse, a classical pianist and a IT entrepreneur. He is one of the prog-rock pioneers in the Finnish counterculture in the eighties (in the eighties people were still so traumatized by 70's prog rock operas, that you could not do prog rock within anything resembling the mainstream). I had a small stint in Krisse's band Rivendell in the early nineties when wrote Eveningstar for them. Recently, I heard their new album, Mars, which I really enjoyed. I had met Krisse backstage after a gig and Eveningstar came up. He graciously offered to rework the song with me in a studio he shares in southern Finland with a Seppo Silaste, another Rivendell guitar alumnus.

Me and Seppo used to study philosophy together in the Helsinki University (he specializes in Adorno). He inherited an idyllic farm where Krisse and Seppo share a studio. I really admire his habitus these days: a combination of farming, composing and programming.

Working from the early afternoon to 1 AM without having a meal we managed to get down drums, bass and vocals for the track. We still need to get down the guitars and keyboards. The musicians did a splendid job: I really admire their combination of professionalism and creativity. The drummer Nikke Lindholm did 83 takes and got better each time. We would have been happy with the things he got down earlier, but he instisted doing more and astounded us by the things he came up with, Listening to the raw mix, I find myself grinning at the crazy things he did. Mikko Jokinen got the vocals down in a few virtuoso takes. I really admire his command of phrasing and rhythm, which I think are the things which differentiate a good singer from a great one.