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Drop by Drop Upon the Heart: On the Kennedy Center, the Kennedys’ Classics, and What a Nation Owes its Dead

On the afternoon of December 19, 2025, the board of the Kennedy Center voted to put a living president’s name on a dead president’s memorial. By evening, the letters were on the marble. A congresswoman who sits on that board by law tried to speak. They muted her microphone and called the vote unanimous. Chuck Redd, the jazz drummer who had played Christmas Eve at the center for years, saw the new name on the website, then on the building itself. He canceled within hours. Two years of this, in one afternoon: the inheritance retitled behind closed doors, the objection silenced, the musicians out in the cold.

Continue reading → Drop by Drop Upon the Heart: On the Kennedy Center, the Kennedys’ Classics, and What a Nation Owes its Dead

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The Occupied Space from The Empty Space

There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length.

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Back to the Blues!

After a long and fulfilling experience playing fingerstyle Jazz chord harmonies on my Jazz guitars for the past few years, I have slowly been weaning my way back to the fingerstyle Blues that started me on this new musical journey in the first place.

I’m sure the Clapton Martin acoustic and Martin D-42 had something to do with this slow circling back to the center — but I do think it’s more than just that.

There’s a whole rush of intensity and emotion for me when I play the Blues.  I immediately feel connected back to a time of suffering and empathy that I do not always have while playing Rock or Jazz or Country music.

There is a deep and longing sadness in the Blues and it is in those marks of human sacrifice and resurrection that we learn to become kinder and more prescient human beings — at least during the melancholy life of a finger plucked Mississippi Delta Blues song.

So, I’m “Back to the Blues” — but not the “Boles Blues” started in 2009 — that great blog title and content will stay embedded here forever in Boles Blogs.

Continue reading → Back to the Blues!