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Looper's Delight
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Christo wrote:. > What I can recommend anyway is, that it is very helpful to be open-minded > and have a still mind if you are playing your music. I hear what you are saying Christo, but I also like something the Dalai Lama once said (when applied to music and badly paraphrased): "Be what you are in the moment. If you are happy, be happy. If you are angry, be angry" I had an amazing set at the Boise Creative and Improvisational Music Festival a couple of weeks ago where every single major piece of gear that I own went south on me (even the mic stand broke and the mics failed twice on me) where I had no control over what was going on. I was really angry about it, but I used that anger and surfed it and the result was one of my better shows (or so several people told me). I think the one of the points of zen in a way is to be present in the moment..........to watch ourselves and be aware of our surroundings. I'm not a practising buddhist so I need to leave this to people like Michael Peters who have put tremendous amount of time and energy into following this path, but that's what I take from it all. I find that if I really try to be aware of my musical surrounding; the state of the audience as much as I'm able to perceive it; the consciousness and innercommunication between musicians, that music can be created with great meaning and depth. It's what I call 'deep listening' when I am talking to my students. I've noticed that a lot of musicians are not present when they play. Frequently, I think we have a tendency to project onto our playing. Because we intend to play something we hear it happening when , in reality we may be far from it. Because rhythm has been my deepest area of study, I really notice this tendency in rhythmical errors made by musicians. Looping actually is one of the great teachers of listening I have found. When your loop is lumpy, boy , it's lumpy, no matter how much you tried to not make it be that way. Emotional states also carry different temporal feels with them. When you are anxious, you are more likely to anticipate and play ahead of the beat. When you are really tired or depressed there is a tendency to drag tempos. I have tried to get students (and myself) to imagine different emotional states when attempting to play ahead or behind the metronome when practising so as to cultivate the ability to play either side of the rhythmic 'feel'. Buy imagining that your are anxious or frustrated; depressed or tired, it is possible to effect how accurately you play to a metronomic pulse (on either side of the 'perfect' beat). When one is deeply agitated or chemically impaired (or both!!), you can use these emotional projections to counteract the normal place that you might play the beat. You can also manipulate someone who is dragging or rushing by cultivating a 'faux' emotional state that has the opposite effect as their rhythmic tendency. All human beings have a tendency to entrain, so they will unconciously change their rhythmic feel just to be 'together' with you, rhythmically. It's subtle but definitely cultivateable. In the 80's I learned how to do this with both drunk and/or coke freak musicians. On the clock as a studio musician, I needed to be able to affect the entire feel of the rhythm section if there was one musician who was a bit out of control, rhythmically speaking. Christo also wrote: > I also like musicians/artists biographies a lot. Recently read the bio of > the great british DJ John Peel. Very funny and entertaining. Ahhhhh, cool, I want to read that. One of the greatest thrills in my life was when Bill's and my new wave band, Tao Chemical, had our album played on John Peel's show in the UK. I still have a cassette recording of that. He was an amazing man and an incredibly powerful force in promoting creativity and community in the new music scene. He is missed by millions.