9 Jul
What I appreciate in music …
This article from the sidebar of the Free-Jazz Stef blog explains why I appreciate Jan Garbarek but not Kenny G. I couldn't have said it better.
Here are some criteria which I find very important, and true, there may be overlap between them all, but they still have their specific shades and colours of value, and there may be other criteria to add.
1. Authentic: the emotions have to be real, genuine and truthful, the prime objective should be to create good music for the sake of the music itself (not in order to sell, or to show off, or any other thing …). That's why I like improvised music, because the link between emotion, musician, sound and listener is to be found in its purest form. It's your immediate emotion you're transmitting, not someone else's. Paradoxically enough, this also includes "absence of self", as a prerequisite for true interplay, listening skills and communion between band members.
2. Adventurous: the artist/band should be looking for new ways to express what they feel and have to communicate. What's the point for the listener to hear the same kind of approach as others have tried. The surprise element, the creativity, the musical vision are part of the adventure. As a listener I want to be taken along, and explore new musical horizons.
3. Accurate: when you hear the sounds, you must have a reaction of "Yes, that's it!", as the sublime translation of feelings through skills and mastery of the instrument, the total sound created by a band or the newly created musical language. The sound, or just obtaining that single note which encapsulates it all, yes, then you know you've transmitted something as a musician, that you've received something as a listener, that you share something. Doing that requires accuracy and concentration.
4. Artistic: by that I mean the more cerebral aspect of music. There is some concept behind it, which leads to structure, balance, length, interplay, selection of instruments, of musicians, of new approaches. This does not go against improvisation, quite on the contrary : great improvised music is all about artistic vision, clever group interaction.
5. Attention-Grabbing: though music can and should require an effort from the listener, it should also include a factor of entertainment, in the sense of keeping the attention going, of being captivating. Lots of music, and especially during long soloing, contains the risk of losing the listener somewhere along the way, even if the musicians themselves are very intensively busy with interesting things. There is of course lots of music which does not take the listener into account at all…
And doing all those is very difficult, indeed. Composing itself is pretty difficult, and putting the voices are even more difficult… Making proper music is difficult. But nowadays, music is more like about making money and learning the 'right music', isn't it? An irony.
Hi Chicken.
There are very few folk who have a 'natural' talent. What is difficult is getting to the stage when it is natural, when what you do comes from the heart.
Both the winner, Roger Federer, and loser, Andy Murray, at this year's Wimbledon final got there because of the years spent training body and mind.
The group, Brat Pack, who I saw saw last week played different things – together. They'd all met at the Faculty of Jazz at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Sri ‘Aga’ Hanuraga, the pianist has said, “I always think that I’m not one of those players who’s naturally gifted. I’d like to think music as my second nature, as something that I shaped and crafted through hard work and effective methods.”
Before taking up writing as my creative outlet, I painted landscapes. I never quite knew where my pig was headed and took many detours before finally agreeing with myself that I'd finished: my head may have had an idea, but it was the heart which dictated where I went. (Or was it the other way around?)
And now I write. As one of my 'heroes', the late Hunter S. Thompson, said: "Writing is hell. I wish I didn't have to do it."
Sidenote: writer Jay Cowan, whose book A Year of Living Dangerously I've been asked to review, has sent me the biography of HST. In it Jay has written: "J. Your blog sounds like something Hunter would have liked."
I'm immensely flattered, but still empathise with the poet/singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen who once described how he would crawl around the floor in his underpants trying to find a word which rhymed with 'orange'.
Good art is therefore a craft and, as you say, it is unfortunate that so many folk are swayed by trends and fashions created by business folk only interested in 'product' they can sell.
J.K.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before it was accepted; very few musicians have a comfortable retirement from songwriting royalties, and those artists who taken up by the art establishment, e.g. Damien Hirst, end up with little to say.
To sum up, what I really appreciate is integrity.