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Looper's Delight
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rich wrote: "In my opinion, there are deeper currents of why we feel we 'come up short'., but that's a long winded thread that is terribly off topic and probably too personal for the wonder that is the internet." Quite frankly, Rich, I think that western culture is steeped in low self esteem and that it radically reduces the creative and artistic output of the lion share of it's artists. I think this is actually a vitally important thing to talk about here at Loopers Delight and on the internet. We also, in this country, seem to be very uncomfortable talking about feelings and emotions in public (and especially in an internet forum such as this). This is precisely why I think it should be a topic of conversation. In my experience (having taught over 2500 private students and played with hundreds of different kinds of musicians) there is a kind of 'Olympic' mentality that tends to pervade music. You know, this is reflected in the "If I"m not going to be the best or at the very top of all the musicians doing the kind of thing that I do, then it just isn't worth all the effort to try and learn how to play" kind of attitude. Brian Eno's notion that 6 billion humans would make 6 billion completely idiosyncratic red crayon/white paper drawings of a house and a tree is really germane here. It is easy to forget in our 'Grammy' award winning mass culture, that the impetus to be creative seems to be universal. Many cultures like the vastly creative Balinese culture don't even have words for Art in their vocabulary, simply because everyone in the artist goes home after work and does something creative. What I have loved about the live looping community is that the technology seems to have some kind of liberating effect on musicians. Lots of other technologies and styles of musics have a similar effect so I'm not claiming anything extraordinary for our community here, but viewing all of the artists, newbies and pros alike, at the Y2K4 festival really inspired me and reaffirmed my faith that everyone has the ability to be unique and creative artistically. It could be me just being an old fart (cue up the old geezer saying, "In my day, we bled for our art and we LOVED IT!") but as a teacher I have noticed a very dramatic decline in the interest level of young musicians in the past ten years. In my experience, students are less 'gung ho', less educated (by a large factor), less inclined to take chances with creativity than they were say 15 or 20 years ago. There are a lot of reasons for this (if it is, indeed true, and I can't prove it more than anecdotally): the advent of Video games, massive amounts of entertainment to be viewed, 400 stations on television, much faster editing styles in Videos leading to much lower attention spans. The attention span of my typical students is about ten minutes an hour less than it used to be. I'm finding a lot of students are overwhelmed by a 40 minute lesson whereas 20 years ago, it was barely enough time to cover what needed to be covered. I think a lot of all of this is directly attributable to low self esteem. Don't get me wrong, I have just as much of it as anyone (you should have seen my knees shaking when I did my live looping presentation at PASIC this last week as a confirmation) but I think this is something that we need to start talking about as artists and musicians and loopers. I think the mutual support is incredibly important and one thing I hear more than anything is how inspiring creatively it is to be around 50 loopers for a weekend, just because everyone: newbies and pros alike all feel really supported. What do y'all think about this (can you tell I"ve been in Nashville for a week)? yours, Rick ps by the way and apropos of absolutely nothing, I got to shake Aretha Franklin's hand after her performance on Sunday at a Casino outside of Memphis, Tennessee. I want to publicly thank the generosity, love and support of Tom Roady for hosting me in the past fantastic week. You should have seen him playing with Aretha, with the legendary Roger Hawkins (of Muscle Shoals fame) and I looking on. He was incredible!! And dammit!!!!! He's a live looper! LOL. I talked to a lot of young percussionists who are planning on going out and buying their first DL 4 or Boss Loopstation to get into looping for the first time. It's totally down to Tom for giving me the opportunity to evangelize like that. Thanks brother!!!!