Every time I've heard any of them individually I have been moved and strengthened. However, what I will dig over the next week or so tops everything that's come before. (I am writing this part retrospectively.) Over the coming days of concerts, we'll discover each man playing at the very top of the game, far beyond the already masterful playing we're all used to hearing from them - inspired, as they'd each admit, by their time with Wayne and by his musical and personal example. Each one steps into the freedom and play of the concept the band is pursuing in such a way that the whole band is improvising as a unified consciousness, as one single, strong gesture after another. Such freedom, mastery and trust creates the ultimate in tension and release; the build and wreck, chase, catch and let go of improvised music at its highest level - tossing waves of color all over the place, with energies bouncing and caroming off and to and through the people listening. "This is IT," I say to Laurence, breathlessly, when we finally get through hearing them play. "The very END. The MOST. The reason they invented the word MOST."

I am not mistaken: the whole world must hear this band.

Two of my favorite things seen on Japanese TV in the late-at-night hotel room:

1-What I though was a reality/talk show featuring a couple of youngish, long-haired "regular guys" in jeans and tee-shirts as the hosts going to a pet store to buy a snake. Here they are talking to the old clerk and joking around as she pulls out different snakes from different drawers built into a wall-sized cabinet. However, once they choose a snake, something about a yard long, they don't put it in a bag or an aquarium. Oh, no. Instead, they sit down to a dining room table in the next room and squeamishly watch the clerk expertly "bleed" the snake into their soup bowls.

That's right. A live snake has just been cut open on national TV and its blood dripped into little cups of what looks to be room temperature vinegar for these cats to eat. More jokes and more close-ups as the proprietrix (for what else can you call her) takes a meat scissors and cuts off the snake's head, upending the snake & squeezing its body like a toothpaste tube into the bowls. As a further culinary gross-out, she laughingly puts the severed head on the white tablecloth, so it can watch itself be eaten and create more fodder for joking over dinner. The cats can hardly take it. They double-dog dare each other to down the stuff (as they know they must, this being the Japanese version of "Jackass").

SURPRISE! They hate it.

2 - "Lets Sing!" : A tiny, middle aged woman in a yellow t-shirt with sparkly blue bears tries to coach two housewife types on the finer points of delivering "The Tennessee Waltz" in English, in tune and with conviction. Two other ladies - I guess the talk show hosts - ask questions and encourage the singers with applause in between tries. They all try writing out phonetic pronunciations on big white cue cards & the coach uses a blue pen to show accents. They try it over and over again while she stops and starts them.

When they get the pronunciation vaguely right, the coach pulls out magnets of little suns, rain clouds and, of all things, Tinkerbell figures and puts them on the cue cards in different places to indicate interpretation possibilities. The singing itself is, well, interesting.

The coach finishes out the half-hour show by accompanying herself at the piano and squeezing out her version of her very favorite song - eyes clamped shut with passion, her delicate touch at the keyboard just about creating intimacy, tension and velocity, her squeaky voice fairly crackling with emotion. She sings, you guessed it, "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman".

It is truly terrible.

Oceans churning. A fox hunt - first from the mind of the fox, briefly, then from that of the fastest hound. Then spirals of paisleys. A forced flow of colors spinning and tumbling over the people and up the ultra-green mountainside. New worlds come next, and also new tendernesses. All this and more in spite of a terrible and deafening, punishing feedback cutting everyone on stage during Wayne's first set.

Him keeps a fight up - a fight? No. A consistent and positive energy flow. In fact, they all do it. Here's Danilo laughing, whistling and calling out. Here's Brian with his hammering, liquid intensity. Here's Patitucci pounding and dancing away - all graciously over the piercing needle of feedback. This is Big Buddha energy.

"Yeah," says Danilo afterward, smiling and sweating. "One time we came off the stage and we were all complaining about the sound, you know, something similar, and Wayne said, 'What are you complaining about? This is the struggle to make music. It's always the same. Don't cry about it. This is what we do - we struggle to make music. It doesn't matter what the struggle is specifically against - it's all the same. Feedback is just one more attack from the stuff that wants us to stop.'

"And that was a big lesson, and I'll never forget it. It's the only time he's really gotten mad at us, you know? I mean, shit, man. We're playing with Wayne! What do we have to complain about? He's playing more shit now than he's played in years, and we're the band! And he's laughing all the time!"

It's true. At one point in the set, when everyone has been covering painful ears over and over because of the intense feedback, Wayne squints like he's blowing and fingering his axe, but no sound comes out. At first all of us who are looking on furrow our brows together and think, "Oh No! Now his mic's gone out. But that's not it.

He's miming. Cat is clowning. He's playing like he's blowing lightning licks, but with a twinkle in his eye because he's not really playing at all. He's just tweaking the situation and give the cats a boost - laughing at the challenge.

So now everyone in the band is laughing, because they dig. Cats on the side stages notice, and they start laughing, too. Then people in the front rows start laughing. Then, basically everybody - everybody overcoming at once. Laughing at the puny feedback. Laughing at the thought of being here, now. Hearing the music. Laughing with Wayne.

The next two days, Wayne and the cats played tremendously, thunderously, leaping and gliding. They gave it away as a matter of course to a crowd culturally educated, and ready to receive such a blessing. The people were all ages. They were all open. Older weekenders sat on their red blankets, accepting. Little kids put down their shovels and sand pails and waited, wide-eyed in little yellow hats. Long-haired hipster young people in shorts & hemp shoes stood still and watched, or sat, allowing themselves to be led. Beautiful people.

On stage, Wayne created from an unimagined space with the same hooded, Buddha eyes Kerouac reports having seen on Bird when he played - looking nowhere but within. Eyes which say, neutrally, "All is well". Same ultimate genius intensity. Same relaxed and masterful power surge. Not seeing any one thing - seeing many things at once. Giant-eye view.

Thick fog came in during the last set and silently covered the grass, the people, the tents, the speakers, the roof of the stage and all the mountain, so that it all disappeared. And pretty soon nothing was taller than Wayne and his band and his Buddha eyes.

Ok, a few days off, I'm afraid. Who has the time for reflective journaling? It almost always ends up being lists anyway - lists if phone calls to make, of thank-you notes to be written, tasks to execute or plan, what needs to go with me on the plane. In fact, and I've heard this from other cats too, the airplane can be the most productive place you have - if only because nobody can call you on the phone there. (I wonder if there is a keyboard somewhere small enough to fit on your lap in coach with headphones & maybe a Pro-tools or Finale hook up?)

Had a great listening party last night at this place "Maxim's". This was for record buyers form Border's, Sam Goody, et al. Also came cats from EMI Distribution (hello Dave Saunders!), press people & friends. My friends Tony Karman, Mike Orlove and I have been working on this gig for a while & could only afford the space because of Mike's and my connections downtown. Also Henry Peters from EMD and Saul Shapiro from Blue Note. Tony even hooked up great hors'd vours from Blue Plate catering. All of this represents many, many phone calls and meetings - especially by Tony Karman.

This stuff doesn't happen on its own, as they say, nor does it pay for itself. A two-and-a-half hour hang of respectable proportions takes a month or more to put together. And now there are more thank-you notes to be done. More music work from it, though - i talk of a more extensive Borders tour in the Chicago suburbs. Also corporate date possibilities from the room manager, not to mention excitement over the recording itself.

The great young EMI staff (who you need to have on your team - just imagine how many artists they are told to push every month to their record stores!) - you need these people