Motivation is the more assertive cousin of willingness, and the emotional component of assertiveness. While the willing person will act if necessary, the motivated person seeks to act.
Real
True Narratives
- Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon & Schuster, 2018): a “rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion”.
- Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press, 2018): “Boully addresses the impulse to write”.
Imaginary
Film and Stage
- Chariots of Fire, about two Olympic athletes with disparate motivations to succeed
- Fitzcarraldo, about an “obsessed impresario . . . whose foremost desire in life is to bring both Enrico Caruso and an opera house to the deepest jungles of South America”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
John Coltrane is an iconic figure in contemporary jazz. His hard-driving bop and post-bop jazz set a standard.
- “Blue Train” album (1957)
- “Dakar” album (1957)
- “Lush Life” album (1957)
- “Stardust” album (1958)
- “Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings” box set
- “Giant Steps” album (1959)
- “Olé Coltrane” album (1961)
- “Africa/Brass” album (1961)
- “Ballads” album (1962)
- “Crescent” album (1964)
- “The Believer” album (1963)
- “Black Pearls” album (1964)
- “A Love Supreme” album (1964)
- “Transition” album (1965)
- “Ascension” album (1965)
- “Meditations” album (1966)
- “Live in Japan” (1966)
- “Expression” album (1967)
- “Afro Blue Impressions” album (1977)
- “The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings”
- “Live Trane: The European Tours” box set
- “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings”
- “Blue World” album
- Live at The Jazz Gallery, New York City, 1960
- Live in Copenhagen, 1963
- Last performance at Newport, July 2, 1966
- On the making of “A Love Supreme”
Woody Shaw was a jazz trumpeter who drove forward relentlessly in his playing. He did not play at ultra-high volume or in high-pitch stratospheres as Maynard Ferguson did, but he never let up on the gas.
- “The Essential Woody Shaw: The Columbia Years”
- “In the Beginning” album (1965)
- “Blackstone Legacy” album (1970)
- “The Moontrane” album (1974)
- “Concert Ensemble at the Berliner Jazztage” album (1976)
- “The Tour, Volume 1” album
- “The Tour, Volume 2” album (1976-77)
- “Quintet, Lousanne” album, with Louis Hayes (1977)
- “Rosewood” album (1978)
- “Stepping Stones: Live at the Village Vanguard” album (1979)
- The Woody Shaw Wuintet in France, live (1979)
- “Tokyo ’81”
- “Lotus Flower” album (1982)
- “The Time Is Right” album (1983)
- “Night Music” album (1983)
- Woody Shaw Quintet, Eurojazzfestival, Ivrea, Italy (1985)
- “Solid”, live (1986)
- “Bemsha Swing” album (1986)
- “In My Own Sweet Way” album (1987)
- “Imagination” album (1987)
- “Woody Shaw Live, Volume 1” album
George Adams was a champion of hard-driving, straight-ahead jazz.
- The George Adams – Don Pullen Quartet live at the Subway, 1986
- “Live at the Village Vanguard” album, Volume 2
Other albums:
- Peter Brötzmann, “PICA PICA”
- Noah Haidu, “Infinite Distances”
- Tom Harrell, “Infinity”
- Aaron Seeber, “First Move” (2022): hard-driving, straight-ahead jazz
Poetry
Out of a cell into this darkened space—
The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!
[Edgar Lee Masters, “Frank Drummer”]