My father enlisted in the Navy in 1945, the peak of the Big Band era, and was classified as a musician since he played the piano.  Soon he found himself in a band made up of recently graduated music majors from the University of Washington.

He told me they gave him “charts” of the tunes they were going to play and to his dismay, these charts had no notes written on them.  Instead they had the names of the chords and he was expected to know what the notes of those chords were.  He had never seen a chart before and had no idea what a Dm7#9 was.  So he just relied on his ear and managed to invent piano parts on the spot.  He said it was a “sink or swim” situation.

He taught me to play jazz bass the same way.  I badgered him for months to get me a bass guitar and when he finally did he taught me what the notes were and then sat me down to play with him.  I was expected to figure out which notes to play, just as he had in the Navy.

I ended up in another sink or swim situation last week when I found myself playing bass with two of the best jazz players on the scene today, flutist Ali Ryerson and guitarist Stan Smith.  The Arts Council had hired Ali to do a two day residency at the school followed by a concert for the public.  Ali assumed she would be able to hire a bassist and guitarist in Omaha or Lincoln and they could come with her to work in Albion.  Unfortunately, though she’s played all over the world, she’d never been to Nebraska before and discovered about a week before the concert that the few jazz players Nebraska has either couldn’t – or wouldn’t – come to Albion.

So she asked her friend Stan to play guitar.  Stan, head of the jazz department at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, rearranged his schedule and drove 15 hours straight to be here in time for a first-thing Monday school concert.  Ali completed her combo by asking me to play bass and my 15-year-old son, Thomas, to help out on drums.

I had never played with musicians like Ali and Stan and hadn’t played at all for nearly three years.  And Thomas had never done anything like this before.  We did the school concert without rehearsal.  Monday evening Stan taught Thomas a variety of jazz drumming patterns and techniques, Thomas’ first-ever lesson in jazz drums.

Jazz is an improvised and interactive music where the musicians feed off one another’s ideas and energy.  Performing with Ali and Stan was an incredible example of this. Playing with such skilled musicians brought out the very best in both Thomas and me, and though we were neither one perfect, we both played way above our pay grade.

Stan and Ali’s ability to bring out the best in other musicians was really on display as they worked with grades 4 through 12.  In practically no time Ali had every group she worked with improvising, and it was really something to see the students’ faces light up as they began finding their own unique musical voices.  All were thrown into the water, and every one of them was able to swim — it’s a real testament to Boone Central’s music program that their students had the foundation necessary to rise to the challenge Ali and Stan gave them with such confidence and ability.

In an interesting first, researchers at the University of Ottawa have scanned the brain of a female psychology student as she underwent an out-of-body experience.

Out-of-body experiences involve a sense of one’s consciousness becoming separated from one’s body.  This often enables the person having the experience to look down from above at their body, and is frequently reported in connection with near-death experiences.  Many people brought back from the edge of death report having watched doctors and nurses from above as they worked on the person’s physical body.

Other people report these experiences – abbreviated as “OBEs” – without being at the brink of physical death.  The woman scanned in Ottawa can enter this state at will and sometimes does so just before going to sleep.  This was a lucky break for the researchers; most OBEs appear to either be triggered by trauma or to happen by chance, thus making it very difficult to study someone’s brain during this experience.

Researchers say that while they still have much to learn, there were definitely changes taking place in this woman’s brain that corresponded with her experiencing the world in a very different way.

The woman in this experiment said she’d been able to do this at will since childhood and expressed surprise that other people can’t.  The Ottawa researchers speculate that possibly many children can do this but lose the ability over time.

I don’t know how common it is, but I had experiences like this when I was a child.  They provided me a way to defy my mother at nap time.  Though physically confined to my bed, I was still able to move about my room “in spirit.”

I won’t say this was a frequent experience, and I couldn’t do it all the time, but it was common enough that I just took it for granted.  That is, until one day when I was 6.  I remember walking down the sidewalk when I noticed that I was watching myself from above and behind.  It suddenly occurred to me that this was impossible.  Instantly I was back in my body and I didn’t leave again for a long time.

Twenty-some years later, on a cold November morning, I crawled back into bed for warmth.  As I lay there it felt like my body went back to sleep while my mind stayed awake.  I then suddenly felt as though I was shaking violently.  I had read about OBEs and knew that this was how they often began (though this had never happened to me as a child), so I fought off some initial alarm and went with the experience.

I soon felt I was no longer in my body, though instead of seeing myself from above I found myself in a place I’d never been before.  I was still “me” in how I thought and felt – just without physical form.  This wasn’t a dream; I observed my circumstances carefully and even took time to consider the implications of my situation for my previously held beliefs.

I won’t pretend to understand the mechanisms behind an OBE; all I know is that to me this was very real.  I know a few other people who’ve had similar experiences and they agree that OBEs seem as real as ordinary life.  I’m pleased that researchers are gaining insight into OBEs and hope this will lead to a deeper appreciation of what our minds are capable of doing.  And while it can be argued that an OBE is an illusion caused by changes in the brain, my experiences have given me a different perspective on life.