January 4. Tonight I had one of those musical insights again, which, when you write it down, sounds harmless, even so that you can’t possibly not have it, but it still took me decades to get there: that you can play scales over chords. I’ve always played a bass on the left and chords on the right, and suspected that I should do more on the left, and make the chords on the right more complex. But the idea of moving the harmonic and rhythmic foundation entirely into the left hand, and thinking in scales on the right, scales that can be in the most diverse relationships to the foundation, has not occurred to me until today.