lowquality.net

So, as some of you know, I’ve been listening to Wayne Shorter a lot lately. I’m not really a Jazz musician, but I like to study it because I feel like it makes me a better musician when I play “easier” music. I think of it like training for a marathon, you practice with weights on your feet so you’ll be faster when you do the real thing. Jazz is like weights on me feet, at least academically.

But whenever I get into a musician or band– and this has been the case since I was a teenage metalhead– I like to know more about the people that play it. I guess largely this is due to the conception that knowing what experiences may have evoked the feelings captured in a song, or lyric or whatever, will make me perform the song better. I guess that’s mostly true. So, anyway, I got Kim to track down the Wayne Shorter biography at the library and I’ve been flipping through it here and there.

Wayne, apparently, likes to play word games with people in conversation. For example, when some of the members of the Miles Davis Quintet were discussing the measurements of some women who had passed by, Wayne started in about Astrophysics and planetary dimensions. Many of his bandmates thought he was crazy, it’s not that the associations are totally unrelated, but they’re kind of a stretch (and I don’t think a better description could exsit for the music he was making with the Quintet).

He does this to interviewers frequently, answering direct questions with references to broad cosmic philosophies and spiritual observations. He seems to leave the interviewer feeling somewhat confused and a tad overwhelmed but, as even Herbie Hancock says, it can have a quality of making a simple question seem so much more than it was intended to be.

Herbie also says Wayne plays the horn the same way. That he can make so much more out of a small idea…. and this is what I have been thinking about.

Conversation, dialouge. That’s what Jazz is all about. When Wayne Shorter is answering a question with an obscure movie quote, he may as well be quoting a Charlie Parker melody in the middle of one of his solos.. it’s the same idea. The context of the quotation may determine how fitting or profound, or obscure it is. But it’s the same process.

So I’ve been observing my own conversations and attempting to answer my musicial questions by reframing them in a social situation, and, actually, doing the opposite as well. I have a talent in that I can change the subject of a conversation without it being too obvious, I have been trying to figure out how to do that in music. I have a quick wit, a penchant for puns and word-swapping humor, and I wonder how I can work THAT into my playing.

I can see how I would want to make my playing more like my speaking, but in some cases it’s already there. The more I have observed my playing with this philosophy the more I find that my social idiosyncracies carry over into my playing.. I tend to repeat my stories, I stammer on occasion, I try to say too much in a short amount of time.

I have observed the same habits in others as well.. some musicians I know are the type to interrupt you constantly or just stand there, blankly waiting for their turn to talk, are the same folks who trample all over your solos or don’t provide any support while you are playing. Some people have nothing to say, but keep talking anyway. Then it occurs to me that these guys go in a practice room and beat their heads against the wall for hours and hours and they come out and they are still the same rude, insensitive, inattentive people intent on showing off and hogging the conversation. This is why practicing with bands is better than practicing alone! This is EXACTLY the reason. No amount of self-study will make you THINK differently.. in order to do that you have to, like in the real world, be exposed to people with different, and, perhaps, conflicting ideas. It’s like making Rudy Giuliani live in a homeless shelter.

The notion that I can use my strengths socially to improve my weaknesses musically (and vice versa) is pretty exciting. At the very least, I have become more aware of my actions in both environments. Just being aware of my bad habits in each situation is helping me to alter my behaviour and take some risks and experimenting with the other “band members.”