Tuesday 31 January 2012

Motivated to Play...by the Music

My personal preferences in music have been formed around the tradition of creative improvised music that is never played the same way twice. I love a good rhythm and a great horn solo and the spontaneous interplay of multiple improvisers. 

Most of my great experiences playing music came after the age of 50. Past the age when Pres and Jug had already left us. An age when cave men would have been long dead, and past a man’s life expectancy in many of the world’s poorest countries today. I never seriously considered playing music professionally full-time since most all the world’s improvising musicians are near destitute – see the heart wrenching video about Kalaparusha 'That's not a horn, it's a starvation box' that appeared on the Guardian web site in 2010 to prove it. Lester Bowie once said that at the height of The Art Ensemble’s worldwide fame, he earned less than his mailman. The great Sam Rivers – whose playing was too advanced for Miles in the 60’s – admitted that he only had two years of steady work in his whole life, and that was when he played in Dizzy’s band in the 80’s (Dizzy, as essential as he is, had more or less stopped innovating by the late 1940’s whereas Sam never stopped). 

As much as I love music, I never had the stomach to teach 8-year-olds forced to take lessons by their dragon mothers who dream of their child on stage at Carnegie Hall, like some of my bandstand compatriots must do to earn a living. Live gigs are few these days when anyone can twiddle up instant entertainment on their hand phone, and good gigs where the creative improvising musician can have full artistic control are even fewer. But those are the gigs we focus on and yes they do exist. I am playing for the creative outlet the music provides, the feeling of flow that can only be achieved through fully-engaged high-performance endeavours (such as race car driving or equestrian sports), to be in the rare mental space created by guys like Sonny, Pres, Mex, Rahsaan, Booker Ervin, Fred Anderson and others sung and unsung, to be behind a bent piece of brass that is one of the most genius inventions of mankind, to be where nobody can get between me and what comes out the other end of the tube, and to preserve and proliferate the tradition of creative improvisation with utter truth and honesty. Maybe even contribute something however small. Oh yes, and for the joy of music. Music needs to be fun; it is not meant to be a painful, complicated, academic experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment