Fourteen Hundred Strong, No Gatekeepers Required

Look Ma, I'm on Top of the World

Finally. 1,400 subscribers. One thousand four hundred souls who chose to follow this journey from digital wreckage to creative resurrection. You beautiful chaos connoisseurs have kept me alive when everything fell apart.

Thank you. Every single one of you.

Two days after my birthday in August 2023, I woke up in Guanajuato, Mexico to discover my life's work had vanished. My fully equipped MacBook Pro and 4 TB external SSD—containing archive content, current projects, and unfinished dreams—gone through a busted office window. The gardener I'd trusted had helped himself to my digital soul and pawned it within hours.

No insurance. No recourse. Just loss.

That theft didn't just take my equipment. It forced a reckoning.

Rewind to 2006. I was the Jazz Video Guy, one of YouTube's early adopters, pumping high-quality content into the internet's bloodstream when the platform still rewarded creators who gave a damn. My reach was substantial, my purpose clear: bring real jazz to digital natives.

For over a decade, it worked. Then the algorithm gods shifted the rules. TikTok arrived, attention spans evaporated, and YouTube began playing favorites with content that moved fast and thought slow. I watched my views plummet as the platform pushed fifteen-second clips over fifteen-minute deep dives. The medium I'd helped pioneer no longer had room for what I did best.

But this wasn't my first digital exile.

In 1997, I launched Bird Lives, the internet's first real jazz blog. Writing anonymously as The Pariah, I lobbed truth grenades at the music industry's hypocrisy and corporate greed. For months, no one knew who was behind the brutal honesty. I'd attend jazz festivals and hear whispers: "Who IS this guy tearing everyone apart?"

When my identity surfaced, certain record executives stopped speaking to me for a decade. Some still haven't forgiven me. Worth every word.

Bird Lives proved something crucial: I could build an audience by refusing to compromise. But I got distracted by video, by YouTube's promise of broader reach. I abandoned writing for the sexier medium, chasing views instead of truth.

The theft brought me home.

Stripped of my video tools, I did what writers do: I wrote. Syncopated Justice emerged not as a comeback but as a return to form. This time, I wasn't limiting myself to jazz stories. Life as an American expat in Mexico, politics, culture, injustice, the absurdity of digital platforms—everything became fair game.

Then ChatGPT arrived like a cosmic joke with perfect timing. Initially skeptical, I began experimenting, feeding it ideas and watching my writing accelerate. Suddenly I was composing like Cannonball improvised—freer, faster, with more fire. When AI video tools followed, I took a course eleven months ago, just to stay current. The progress since then has been terrifyingly magnificent.

The irony is delicious: the technology that many fear will replace human creativity gave me back my voice.

This year I’ve been writing, John Coltrane in the Afterlife, a visionary journey through the Tibetan Bardo, where the legendary saxophonist awakens after death and continues his eternal quest for truth, beauty, and sound. In the Bardo, Coltrane awakens to a different kind of sound—one made of memory, emotion, silence, and infinite possibility. He meets Miles and Malcolm, Freud and Picasso, Nietzche and Beethoven. Each encounter is a duet of spirit, a collision of frequencies where reality bends and deeper truths emerge.

This is a self-published project—an E-Book (in English and Spanish), print-on-demand, and audiobook. No gatekeepers. No industry leeches siphoning off the soul of the work. No agents, lawyers, managers, accountants or ego-drunk narcissists—just me.

Two more books are already simmering, waiting for their moment.

Last year, I almost got pulled back into the old world when a Horace Silver documentary opportunity emerged. The pianist deserved the film, and I was all in—until the music industry lawyers and record company executives arrived like locusts. Rights issues, bureaucratic maze-running, ego wars that made the Cold War look friendly. The project died in committee, strangled by the very system it aimed to celebrate.

That failure clarified everything. I'm done begging for budgets, stroking egos, compromising vision for market research. From now on, it's just me, AI tools, and pure creative will. DIY meets the Singularity.

Here's what kills me: my dormant YouTube channel still pulls 100,000 views monthly. I barely post anymore, yet new subscribers arrive daily, drawn to content I created in a different lifetime. It's like watching a ghost of my former self continue performing while I've moved on to something deeper.

I won't go back. YouTube's algorithm now serves five-second fragments to goldfish attention spans and calls it "engagement." I want wholeness, not metrics. Meaning, not viral moments.

Unlikely Syncopated Justice will ever go viral, and I'm fine with that. It's pure because it's mine. No advertiser considerations, no platform policies, no committee decisions about what resonates with "our demographic."

This is what creative freedom looks like: 1,400 readers who chose depth over noise, who value the complete thought over the perfect soundbite.

I’m not just growing a following, but demonstrating something vital. That excellence still discovers its people. That independent creators can flourish without institutional backing. That the gatekeepers who promise to bridge artists and audiences often just create obstacles instead.

The Coltrane book marks the start of something bigger. I'm creating a lasting creative foundation that honors the work itself, not the platform's demands. Books, essays, AI videos—all emerging from the same wellspring, all connecting with people who crave authenticity.

If you're here, you're experiencing something uncommon: an unmediated connection between maker and audience, free from algorithmic interference or focus group findings. You're seeing a new creative framework take shape, one that prioritizes the work above all else.

The wonder isn't arriving tomorrow. The wonder is breathing right here, in this exchange, between these phrases and your awareness. Once more, endless appreciation. May your journey swing with the same rhythm that brought us together.

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Until we meet again, let your conscience be your guide.