Or, perhaps ‘he made up his fingers
to never play one single note that lives in his mind.’
Blues sucks for folks with limited
extrapolation skills, much like frames suck for landscape artists who lack a compositional
eye and nets suck for tennis players who can’t control spin.
Question: if one is to completely avoid clichés,
couldn’t one simply defeat the A440 tonal reference first, then the
twelve tone scale secondly? That would leave only clichés in rhythm, perhaps
the hardest to discard of all, yes? Even amputations probably wouldn’t
solve this issue.
Still, clichés are like oft-repeated words
that serve as landmarks in a conversation. One could simply launch a monolog
composed of entirely original words and sounds. Any listeners might comment
favorably on delivery, tone of voice and expression, but no one would have much
sense of what was being said. John Coltrane was a master at taking a
recognizable phrase, surrounding it with instantly composed motifs, which when
combined with the cliché phrase granted infrastructure to the solo. Then he’d
surround these little islands with sheets of open water, sounds that bore no
relationship to the first two elements beyond geographical existence in the
same solo. The result was a previously unmapped tour that took the listener
from a familiar starting point on a journey across uncharted passages to ports
of call that were not familiar, yet were still enticing of attention.
I guess I am pre-supposing that listeners
are still important to those fleeing clichés…
This is somewhat akin to
Trey Gunn intentionally tuning his Warr guitar in such a way as to never have
'reflexive' blues notes 'available' to his muscle memory, as he finds the
patterns thereof too 'cliched'. (Mind you, I'm paraphrasing. I think he said
that he thinks 'Blues sucks' or something like that.)
He made up his mind to never play one single note that
"lives in his fingers".
--
