Without A Map – Zen and the Art of Making Art

In my last article, I explored how it can be hard for artists to summon the guts to give to ourselves the same label – drummer, painter, sculptor – that we give to our heroes.  “How can I possibly share that identity?” we wonder to ourselves, “What have I done to deserve to?”  And yet, I suggested, it’s important for budding artists to do just that — to think of themselves, and to call themselves what they’ve dreamed of becoming.  Why?  Because almost everyone possesses some level of fear about pursuing their dreams.  And that fear, when we allow it to grow, can stifle our creative output, or even cause us to give up and stop creating altogether.  We think we can never measure up, and so we resist setting expectations for ourselves.  The sooner we join our mentors under the same title, and the sooner we take ownership of the identity of what we dream of becoming, the sooner we can get on to the important business of achieving our creative goals.

But just how do we get on with the business of achieving our creative goals?  After we’ve summoned the guts to refer to ourselves as real artists, then what?

It’s common for young artists to believe that at some perfectly ripe time in the future, if they practice enough, read enough books on technique, and talk to the right people, they will arrive.  Consciously or not, they think that one day they’ll wake up with all the tools they need to consistently create legitimate art with ease.  “This,” they imagine, “will be my transition from amateur to pro, and finally I’ll be able to show my work to the world without hesitation.”

Encouraged by schools and universities that promote this notion of arrival, millions of artists pursue their creative goals through formal education, some going so far as earning a formal degree.  Within the world of music, this is particularly true of classical players.  But in the last 20 years, pop and jazz musicians have increasingly sought college degrees.  In the United States alone, schools like Berklee College of Music in Boston, and dozens of music technical colleges across the country, cater to players who want to make a career of contemporary music.

Those of us who have had great teachers know how powerful the lessons of experience can be.  Teachers help us leap ahead much faster than we could on our own.  A great teacher sees our potential, then ignites it by illuminating things that would have taken years to figure out for ourselves, if ever.

But teachers and schools, no matter how good, can’t endow us with the most important skill we need as practicing artists, which is always to maintain, in spite of everything we know, the adventurous curiosity of an amateur.

The truth is that ‘arrival’ for artists, no matter how appealing, is a chimaera.  Arrival doesn’t exist.  It’s an imaginary oasis in the desert of every artist’s lifelong struggle to create interesting things out of the same grains of sand that surround us all.  For sure, teachers and experience will make an artist better and give her skills that make her process easier.  But great artists understand that no amount of learning will, by itself, enable them to graduate to an enlightened realm of consistently good art-making.  Not only are great artists not dependent on a belief that they have arrived, they thrive, consciously or not, on their conviction that they haven’t.  For great artists, it’s all about the quest.  Great artists are children on a treasure hunt without a map, following their gut in the moment, hoping against all odds to unearth something valuable.  Great artists are forever curious amateurs who have submitted to the urge to create, or who can’t help but create, knowing how painstaking the process can be.

Artists Make Art

About a year ago, I heard this definition of an artist: “An artist is someone who makes art.”

Seems pretty self-evident, no?  But what this definition implies is that artists are constantly working on something, either because they can’t help themselves, or because they’ve found a way to overcome all of the practical and psychological obstacles to getting down to work.

I like this definition because it abandons the notion of arrival altogether.  It acknowledges that legitimate art can be created by anyone, at any technical level, with any amount of formal training, famous or not.  I like this definition, too, because it emphasizes something that I believe to be true: that the thing that matters most for artists in the pursuit of their goals is simply the making of art.

The Zen of Amateurs

That successful artists are simply those who manage to make art on a regular basis isn’t some flakey, new age idea.  It can be seen again and again in practice.

The life stories of famous artists that reveal people for whom creating art was simply part of their everyday lives, and for whom success was almost accidental, are ubiquitous.

Joni Mitchell, the 70s folk/rock icon, grew up with dreams of being a professional painter.  For her, music was just a fun hobby when she skyrocketed to songwriting-stardom in her early 20s.  Rod Stewart was working hard at becoming a professional soccer player when he was wooed away by the excitement of the 1960s London music scene.  Bruce Hornsby, the 80s piano-pop songwriter and keyboardist for the Grateful Dead wanted to become an NBA basketball star before giving into his love of music.  Charles Ives, the great American composer, was a successful insurance salesman by day, and wrote all of his masterpieces after 5pm, solely for the enjoyment of it.  Franz Kafka, the great German author, also an insurance man by day, escaped to his writing every evening.  The revolutionary 80s band, The Talking Heads, was composed not of experienced musicians, but of a crew of experimentally-minded art school friends. N*E*R*D, the rap/rock group formed “just for fun” by the famous hip-hop production duo, the Neptunes (and who I drum for), has achieved a level of success the founders never anticipated.

The list of musicians and artists for whom success came, not because they believed they’d arrived and were finally ready to present themselves to the world, but simply as the byproduct of making art for the fun of it, is long.  I’ve witnessed it repeatedly in my own life among artists.  My own band, The Hopefuls, was formed as a playful side project.  But almost as soon as our first record was released, the group because one of the Midwest’s most popular bands.

Fun hobbies have a way of becoming our greatest artistic expressions.  It makes sense when you think about it.  When we do something without self-consciousness and ego, and simply because doing it makes us feel complete, our soul and spirit are clearly reflected far more clearly.  The difference is palpable.  People respond to it and ask us for more.

In this way, great artists are like Zen masters.  In both cases, there is a strong sense of being in the moment: of the rawness, the complexity and unfinished-ness that is the present, not a polished perfection that is an ultimate arrival.

For sure, unlike Zen masters, great artists are often consumed by attachments to things and people in this world.  Yet, their mutual reliance on the moment to feed their souls, to learn lessons, and to tell stories, suggests that there may be other parallels between the disciplines of Zen and art.

There are.  One is that Buddhism acknowledges life’s contradictions, and artists must, too.  The day-to-day work of artists happens within a paradoxical mindset.  On the one hand, their work is driven by an insatiable desire to arrive, to form a concise creative message, to be the best, to create the perfect work.  Yet while artists feel moments of intense satisfaction, that sustained sense of arrival rarely comes.  Because once an artist (who makes art) senses that arrival, she habitually moves on to another treasure hunt.

Successful artists, by and large, tend to agree with Zen Buddhists that life is a long road, filled with ups and downs, and that the truest path to happiness is by approaching it with no singular definition of success, no one sense of what it means to arrive, no treasure map. Reality is too shrewd for our premeditated ambitions.  Far better, I think, is to live as curious amateurs, taking life’s surprises for granted, and turning them into art.

Follow Eric on Twitter @ericfawett

What’s In A Name? – The Guts To Title Yourself Your Passion

I started drumming at the age of seven, when my dad bought me a drum set for Christmas.  For years I’d play almost every day by myself, rockin’ out with my favorite records.  Then in 6th grade I formed my band, Outrage, a group that I played with continuously until I graduated from high school.  I was passionate about drums and drumming, and, like many young musicians, I dreamed of being a rock star someday.

Far right, me at 15. My band's amazing business card.

But in spite of my love for drumming and my commitment to my band, it took me years to get up the guts to call myself a drummer.  “Drummer” was such an intimidating title to me.  I was afraid of applying it to myself.  Owning the word felt like an obligation.  Calling myself a drummer, I thought, meant I had to live up to expectations, both my own and those of others, about what a drummer was. Do I deserve the title?  Do I fit the image of a drummer?  Does being a drummer exclude me from being other things?

It was only after college, when I leaped off the face of Mt. Security and devoted myself to music and my band, Spymob, that I finally started to call myself a drummer.  At first it was awkward.  When someone would ask me what I did for a living, I’d say, with a forced confidence, “I’m a drummer.” And then I’d await their judgment.  Did I measure up?  Did I look the part?  Of course the judgment was only in my head.  I quickly realized that people love meeting people who call themselves drummers.  At the very least, it’s a great conversation starter.  (Is there anything cooler in the world than being a drummer?)  Soon I embraced the title wholeheartedly.  And ever since, I’ve been proud to call myself, above everything else, a drummer.

Spymob, c2000

The funny thing is, once I finally adopted the drummer title, it quickly lost its intimidating punch.  Like almost everything we fear, the word stopped being scary when I finally embraced it and ascribed my own meaning to it.  For years I’d been afraid that labeling myself a drummer meant that I had to live up to some idea of what it was to be John, or Neil, or Elvin, or Zigaboo, my childhood idols who gave the word so much significance to me growing up.  I had no idea how I could ever BE those guys.  “Drummer,” I finally realized, could represent something other than some ideal I had in my head, an ideal I could never embody now matter how hard I tried, because it wasn’t who I am.  “Drummer” could simply represent ME and my own particular reasons for hitting the skins.

During all the years I resisted the drummer title, it never crossed my mind that other drummers were resisting it, too.  But once I got over my hang-up with the word, I suddenly began to hear other players hedging, too.  I also began hearing friends who are writers deny the title of “writer,” and friends who were painters deny the title of “painter.”  I realized I wasn’t alone.

But so what?  Does it matter what we call ourselves?  I used to think it didn’t.  Now I think it does.

There’s something about naming a thing that tells the mind, “Go.”  A name endows a thing with meaning and a mission.  A name is a commitment to realizing a thing’s potential.  We name children just as they’re taking their first breaths.  We name ships before they set off to sea, we name schools before they open their doors, and we say “I’ll love you forever” before we get married.

Openly naming a thing that we love can be hard to do if we’re afraid it won’t succeed.  (How disappointed and ashamed we’ll feel if we take that thing seriously and it doesn’t work out!)  Ironically, though, it’s by naming a thing that we increase its chance of success.  Naming a thing enables us to make it our own, to make it be anything we want it to be, and to define what success means for it.

In truth, the title drummer means something different to everyone who claims it.  And this is as it should be, because everyone who calls himself a drummer has his own relationship to the drums, and his own reason for playing them.

I Know Drummers

I know all kinds of drummers. In my thirty years of playing, I’ve learned that no two drummers relate to the instrument the same way.

I know drummers who are gear heads.  My friend, Chris, is one of them.  Chris is a good drummer, but I’ve never been convinced that he loves to play the drums more than he loves to play WITH them.  Chris relates to his drums the way he relates to his 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle – a car that Chris spent ten years of his life restoring to it’s original condition.  Chris’s passion for vintage drum kits is an extension of his love for reviving the beauty of old things.  Chris currently owns fourteen drum sets, in various conditions, and he spends entire days on his computer tracking down old tension rods, hoops and lugs, hoping to revive the past glory of each kit.

I know drummers who are technicians, like my old drum tech, Matt.  Matt has little interest for being in a band.  He’s not a big fan of collaborating with other humans.  He’s also not much into performing live.  But Matt is one of the most technically proficient drummers I’ve ever known, and a brilliant music reader.  Matt was a state-champion snare drummer in his high school marching band, and he’s applied that same clarity and rigor to executing the most intricate rhythms on the drum set.  Matt has no ambition for stardom.  Nor does he seem to have any practical goal as a musician.  Matt is happy being a closet genius.  For him, heaven is five free hours on a Saturday and a brand new book on “Advanced Latin Technique.”

I know drummers who are giggers.  Peter’s a gigger, dividing his time between six or eight groups.  Peter’s too impatient to devote himself to just one band.  But he loves to perform, and he’s great at it.  Bands and solo artists gladly bend to Pete’s hectic performance schedule because, in spite of his well-known disdain for rehearsing, he’s a joy to work with and has incredible energy on stage.  Pete’s no technician, but he is a natural, musical drummer.  His passion for playing is all about connecting with an audience and elevating the performances of everyone on stage, and at that he’s a master.

Let Love Rule

There are many reasons we drum, but usually there’s one thing that drives us to drum above all others.  For some it’s gear, others chops, others performing.  Before I owned the title, drummer, for myself, I felt like I had to love and master all these aspects of drumming, and more.  Surprisingly, once I allowed myself to join the drummer club, I realized that not only did I not have to think like other drummers about the instrument, but that it was better for me not to try.  I realized being the best drummer I could be meant viewing the instrument through my own eyes and approaching it in my own way.

I love the physicality of drumming, I love the feeling and sound of performing a great groove, I love the challenge of arranging the right drum part for a song, and I love performing, too.  But over time I learned that the thing that has kept me interested in playing the drums for so long is the challenge and enjoyment of collaborating with others to build something really cool.  Once I learned that, I stopped kicking myself for not being the flashiest player in the world.  I stopped kicking myself for not keeping up with all the latest gear.  I could finally focus my energy on what I loved most and was best at – uniting a band around a common purpose – and leave things I didn’t really care about to my drumming comrades.

For years I believed that if I started calling myself a drummer, I’d be crippled by the pressure of living up to the title.  Additionally, I believed that by avoiding the title, I would also avoid the possibility of failing at what I loved to do most in the world.  Because, the logic goes, if I don’t think of myself as a drummer, then I can never truly fail at it, right?

You can’t succeed at something if you don’t know why you’re doing it in the first place.  By bravely calling ourselves drummers, even long before we think we deserve to, we take ownership of our art.  Committing to our art in this way pushes us to more quickly define what it is we love most about playing the drums, and what we’re best at.  Knowing these two things, we can define what success means to us, and then finally get down to the business of achieving it.

Twitter @ ericfawcett

Confucius, Capitalism, and Karaoke – How Culture Influences The Way We Hear And Talk About Music

Cultures have always borrowed from one another, only to transform what they borrowed into something uniquely their own.       

In the mid-19^th Century, for example, millions of Brazil’s African slaves officially converted to Catholicism, though for most of them “conversion” involved merely renaming their traditional Yoruba gods using those of Christian saints.  Around the same time, America was transforming pizza into something that its Greek and Italian inventors would have neither recognized nor approved of.  And a few decades later, Chinese restaurants in the United States started offering customers little folded sugar cookies with messages inside, a tradition originating not in China, but in Kyoto, Japan!

I’m a reliable authority on the Japanese origin of fortune cookies, because for the last five months, I’ve been touring China, drumming for the Asian pop star Leehom Wang.  No fortune cookies anywhere!  But in China, other examples of borrowed culture abound, much of it from my own country.  Starbucks, NBA basketball stars on billboards, 7-Eleven stores – they’re everywhere, giving Americans the disconcerting feeling that they haven’t completely left home.

But the longer Westerners stay in China, that homey feeling fades. Soon you discover that, far from diluting Asian culture, all those cultural borrowings are simply new ways for Chinese people to be Chinese. Thus, Starbucks in China sells moon cakes and mountains of tea.  Thus, Shaquille O’Neal is on Shanghai billboards because China’s biggest celebrity, Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets’, has made basketball China’s newest national sport.  Thus, China’s six thousand 7-Eleven convenience stores are all stocked with rice liquor and shredded seaweed snacks, and none sell America’s favorite 7-Eleven treat – the Slurpee.

But of all of the ways that China has retooled Western culture, one of the oldest and most successful is Mando-Pop (short for Mandarin pop), China’s mainstream popular music.  Leehom Wang is one of China’s biggest Mando-Pop performers (he packs stadiums).  Like all Mando-Pop stars, Leehom blends a variety of Western-style popular music with Mandarin lyrics.  The result is a style that, to uneducated Western ears, sounds like a hackneyed version of Western pop.  Ask an American music critic about Mando-Pop and she’ll probably complain that it’s derivative, outdated, incoherent, overly sentimental, and melodramatic.  And from the Western perspective she may be right. Why?  Well, in Mando-Pop, the 80’s sentimental power ballad is still king, complete with soaring guitar solos and a big key change for the final chorus.  In addition to the ubiquitous ballad (every Mando-Pop release has at least a couple), Mando-Pop albums may contain three or four other musical genres, from jazz, to hip hop, to punk-pop, to bubblegum.  And concerts by Mando-Pop artists are epic, three-hour, 60,000 person sing-alongs, with lyrics continuously dancing across Jumbotron screens.  Performances are also technical feats, featuring highly choreographed pyrotechnics, multiple costume changes, dancers, acrobats, magic, and a backing band of eight or more musicians. 

But American hipsters who disapprove of Mando-Pop because it doesn’t conform to their Western definition of “good” are missing the point.  Because while it borrows from Western musical styles, Mando-Pop was born and raised in China, and is therefore a uniquely Chinese musical tradition.  As such, Mando-Pop reflects China’s own culture no less than American pop reflects American culture.

None of this was obvious to me when I began working with Leehom years ago.  Understanding Mando-Pop required traveling to China and experiencing that culture first hand. More specifically, it required a long night in a Shanghai karaoke bar with some close Chinese friends.

Confucius Sings Karoake

Karaoke, the form of entertainment in which participants sing along with hits of the past, was born in Japan in the 1970s.  Today, karaoke is popular the world over, and, as I discovered one long night in Shanghai, every culture approaches the entertainment differently.

When Americans sing karaoke in a bar, we do so with our tongue firmly in our cheek. To us karaoke is kind of a joke, so when we get up to the mic we may try our best, but afterwards we expect to have a good laugh at ourselves.

Yet at that Shanghai karaoke bar, I noticed that karaoke is taken far more seriously.  It’s still entertainment, but participants tend to be a lot more earnest.  And when someone does a good job and really puts their heart into singing, their friends respond with a reverent round of applause.

I thought it was strange that our cultures approached karaoke so differently, so I asked my Chinese friends, Lisa and Ying Ying, why they thought this was.  Their answer was interesting, delving deep into China’s past.  In order to understand Asia’s approach to karaoke, they explained, I first had to know something about the Confucian philosophical underpinnings of Asian culture.  Whoa.

Confucius (5^th Century B.C.) was a Chinese philosopher whose teachings have shaped modern Asian societies more than any other tradition, secular or religious.  Among other things, Confucius taught that the individual person is far less important than the group as a whole, and, therefore, that the concerns of the individual are less important than the concerns of the group.  My friends explained that these teachings have helped create a mindset throughout Asia in which individuals tend not to express themselves very openly, even with their families.  Revealing one’s emotions, whether positive or negative, is considered a selfish indulgence, and as such it is frowned upon.

Within a Confucian society, Karaoke is a rare, culturally accepted outlet to express oneself.  In the security of a group, it’s ok to express your craziest feelings in the form of a popular song.  And even though the song isn’t your own, your performance and emotions are taken seriously.  Why?  Because from the Confucian perspective, that famous song belongs to the group, not solely to the songwriter who originally conceived it.  By virtue of becoming popular, the song has become part of the group’s common experience and is therefore believed to reflect every individual’s feelings in some legitimate way.

This explanation was a revelation, helping me to understand not only Asia’s more earnest take on karaoke, but also to understand Mando-Pop itself – its overt sentimentality, and the extreme collective experience of its live performances.  I reflected on why we in the West don’t have the very same expectations of our pop stars.  I went deep and considered my own culture’s philosophical underpinnings.

Adam Smith Sings Karaoke

In contrast to the East’s Confucian emphasis on the group, the West, particularly America, is obsessed with the individual.  The autonomous individual, who turns brilliant ideas into valuable things, is the building block of Adam Smith’s 18^th Century vision of the free market that so defines who we are as a culture – Capitalists!

The economic theory of Capitalism has significantly shaped Western beliefs and attitudes, not only about financial matters, but about practically everything, including art.  In the West, the individual is supreme, not the group.  So it is that recording artists who write their own songs get far more respect than ones who don’t.  If you want to be taken seriously as a Western musician, your song must come from your own heart, not from the heart of some ghostwriter behind the scenes.  Nor should your music sound like another artist’s.  Bands who are believed to borrow too heavily from others are quickly labeled “derivative” and torn apart by hipsters.

In a world in which copycats get no respect, there’s no way that karaoke can be taken seriously.  Which is why when we sing karaoke, no matter of how much we may or may not identify with the song we’re performing, no matter how hard we try to sing well, we chuckle, lest others think we’re taking ourselves too seriously.

Art, Culture, Conversation

Great art is a dialogue.  The meaning in every piece of music is derived not from the song in a vacuum, but in the living conversation between the song itself and the world it was born into.

It’s tempting to dismiss an artist or a genre based on partial information, in part because it’s easier to do so than to take the time to truly understand it.  But the reward for making the effort to evaluate unfamiliar art in its full cultural context is a deeper appreciation for your own culture and the art it produces. 

Sacred Space, Sacred Time – How I Learned To Love Practicing

The Pain Of Practicing

Every musician wants to become better, and every musician knows that the best way to become better is by practicing.  Still, sitting down to practice can be the most difficult thing for a musician to do.

When I was a kid, practice was drudgery, a chore I avoided at all costs.  I remember like it was yesterday – George Stone’s classic rudiment book, Stick Control For The Snare Drummer, glaring at me from the music stand, my teacher’s detailed directions scrawled in the margin.  Classic or not, I detested that book, and I know others did, too.

To get us to practice, our parents bribed us, or they punished us, or both.  It’s not that our parents didn’t understand what we were feeling, they did: their parents had to force them to practice, too.  That’s the one thing we all agreed on – practicing bites.  And unfortunately, our childhood resistance to practicing often doesn’t fade when we become adults.

But why, if we love drumming so much, should we dislike spending hours behind the kit trying to get better?  The most common reason we give is that “practicing is boring.”  Repeating rudiments ad nauseam may sometimes be boring, but boredom can’t account for our serious resistance to practicing. No, the real reason we don’t like to practice is that every time we sit down with our exercise book we come face to face with our technical limitations, and that’s a really hard thing to do.

The essence of practicing is confronting weaknesses in our playing in order to overcome them through repetition.  But this confrontation often makes us very uncomfortable.  With every pass at an unfamiliar pattern we’re reminded, “this is something I can’t do.”  Afraid to acknowledge a limitation, we rebel in the form of denial.  We adjust the metronome to a more comfortable tempo.  Or we lead only with our dominant hand (because in the real world we never lead with our weak hand, right?).  Or we simply move on to an easier exercise – such as watching reruns of the Simpsons.

Other times our fear leads us to self-loathing.  We convince ourselves that we’ll never master a new technique.  Worse, in a single practice our fear can grow to be so acute and so irrational that we generalize our insecurity, convincing ourselves that we’re “a horrible drummer.”  Depressed and angry, we close our exercise book more resistant to return to it the next day, if we return to it at all.

Fear isn’t the only thing that discourages us from practicing.  Another is the frustration we feel when we don’t see our practice paying off in a predictable way.  Even with the best practice regimen, mastery happens on it’s own clock.  Sometimes we acquire new skills easily, other times only after years of work.  Plateaus – those annoying periods when it seems we can do nothing to improve our playing – can last months or years, then be overcome in a single practice.

Progress is also maddeningly mysterious. I’ve spent months trying and failing to master, say, a hi-hat technique, only to find my left foot performing it perfectly during a show a year later.

With so much to discourage us from practicing, it’s easy to understand why we shirk it.  Yet when our commitment to drumming is serious, and when we want to improve in marked ways, a dedication to disciplined practicing is unavoidable.

I myself realized this when, finally, after college, I decided to make music my full time job. For me, this meant establishing an entirely new relationship with practicing, one that required me to be honest about my limitations, and one that encouraged me to sustain a practice schedule for a long time.

Letting Ego Go

I never consciously tried to create a new mindset toward practicing.  Rather, my new perspective toward practicing was the natural result of a new perspective toward my own playing.

My first teacher after college was a great jazz drummer named Phil Hey.  I knew that there was no use in studying with a teacher like Phil if I continued to fear my imperfection.  So, in my first lesson I asked him to assume that in spite of my twelve years of playing and performing, I knew nothing.  The request surprised Phil, but he agreed, and we started that day at page one: how to hold the sticks.

Phil deduced my actual skill level within our first few meetings, but that first lesson was a turning point in my relationship with practicing.  By inviting my teacher to assume nothing about my abilities, I was really inviting myself to do the same thing.  Suddenly I felt equally free to make mistakes and to play brilliantly, which is the foundation of any healthy approach to practicing.

Sacred Space, Sacred Time

My new ability to be egoless in my lessons quickly transferred to my practices and the effect was immediate and profound.  For the first time in my life, I was relishing my daily practice sessions, which soon grew to be five or six hours long (and because of my day-job, often didn’t start until nine at night).  I made a plan for every practice, and I kept journal of my progress – coordination exercises I’d grown comfortable with, patterns I’d learned, tempos I’d conquered.  I’m not particularly religious, but there was something undeniably sacred about my practices – the daily ceremony of throwing myself into the fire.  And soon enough, the windowless, rundown practice room I rented came to feel something like a sanctuary.

Practice For Life

My era of mad practicing lasted about three years before Spymob gigs started to take a serious bite out of my hallowed practice schedule.  Later, I got married and had children, both serious obstacles to unrestricted hours in the woodshed.  Today I still practice, even many times a week, but now it’s usually in the form of preparing for an upcoming session or performance.  Nevertheless, those years taught me lessons about practicing that I’ll use all my life.

I learned that words like forgiveness, ritual, and faith – a trio often reserved for religious contexts – are at the heart of every effective and enjoyable practicing regimen.

Technical growth requires the constancy of honest self-examination.  Honest self-examination in-turn requires a player not only to forgive himself for not being perfect, but also to embrace his limitations as opportunities for improvement.

Growth thrives on a ritual of regular, focused practices.  Five hours of paradiddles in front of the television isn’t half as effective as fifteen minutes of the same exercise, three times a week, with a metronome, in a quiet room.

And because your improvement happens in ways that are often difficult to see, growth takes faith.  There will practices when you feel like you’re flying, and practices when you feel like you can’t do a dang thing, but these impressions are unreliable indicators of your improvement.  Growth is a slow, mysterious process, and investing too much in your impressions of any one practice can cause you to disinvest in practicing long term.  Instead, a good practice is simply one you show up to, focused and happy to be there.

No Disgrace – The Gift Of A Good Day Job

The Life We Hide

When musicians bump into one another at shows or parties, we like to catch up on each other’s lives:

Musician #1: “Hey mate, how’s it goin’?”

Musician #2: “Amazing!  The Jerry Rigs just sold out The Turf last Saturday. Completely bonkers!  How ‘bout you?”

Musician #1: “Great! Zippers Down just won Manchester’s best new band contest at The Roadhouse!”

Musician #2: “Fantastic!  So it’s all brilliant then?”

Musician #1: “Yeah, and for you too!”

Sound familiar?  This kind of victory volley is customary between scenesters; it’s a friendly way for us promote our bands and ourselves.  We want our peers to know that we’re in demand, and we’re careful always to make the best pitch.

But even our most truthful pitch is a highly edited version of our actual life story, and there’s one chapter in particular that we almost always leave out: our day job.    

Musicians wear their day jobs like braces on their teeth – awkward, painful things they hide by keeping their mouth shut.  Our day job reminds us that we haven’t yet “made it.”  And we worry we’ll lose credibility with our peers if they find out how much time we spend behind a cash register.  So unless we’re scheduling rehearsals or recording sessions, we don’t talk about our day job.  We’d rather let the world believe that for us, every day is a boundless creative adventure, and that music is our only livelihood.

Day Jobs Are Like Bellybuttons

But why should the topic of day jobs be taboo?  Far from disgraceful things, day jobs are life-giving umbilical cords that nourish the nascent dreams of creative risk-takers.  The Wright Brothers had day jobs – bicycle repairmen – while they worked out their design for the world’s first airplane.  The American Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Charles Ives, was a lifelong insurance salesman, writing all his masterpieces after five and on weekends.  The great Czech writer, Franz Kafka was an insurance man too.  Kafka was known to spend entire nights writing, and returning sleepless the next morning to what he derisively referred to as his brotberuf – a German word meaning “bread job.”

Artists are notoriously conflicted about their day jobs.  We know we need them in order to do the thing we love most, but we resent them all the same.  We dream of the day when we no longer need our brotberuf, when we can spend all our time doing only what we love.

In truth, however, that day rarely, if ever, comes.  Sure, we can get to a point in our artistic careers when we no longer have to flip burgers – and that’s a happy day, indeed!  But if “day job” is defined as the work we do for cash so we can afford to follow our bliss, then even the world’s most successful artists take on day jobs, and do so throughout their careers.

Professional artists always have made creative compromises in exchange for well paying work.  For centuries, artists like Michelangelo made their livings creating art for the Roman Catholic Church, which always had the final say over how the artist’s work should be presented.  Today, famous architects often are forced to cut corners in their precious designs in order to accommodate a building’s practical requirements, and top sculptors accept tasteless assignments from wealthy patrons.  Within the music industry, recording artists routinely sign contracts that give their labels the power to reject tracks that “don’t meet minimum standards of commercial viability,” and every day, big name producers make records with flash-in-the-pan groups they know are destined for the bargain bin.

Artists almost never get to the point where they can create whatever, however, and whenever they want.  In order to feed our families, we’re constantly balancing creative freedom with commercial compromise, and the situation is the same for professionals and non-professionals alike.

For musicians, day jobs are like belly buttons – we know everyone has one, even if we can’t see it through their trendy t-shirt.  Understanding this, it’s easier for us to feel ok about our own day job, and we can begin to appreciate the various ways our brotberuf benefits our creative life.

The Value Of A Day Job

Naturally, most of us would rather suffer the creative compromises that success brings than work the opening shift at Starbucks.  But there’s no shame in slinging coffee.  In fact, our day job, no matter how menial, enriches our creative lives in important ways.

First, our day job feeds our creative process.  Musicians are reclusive by nature, but our creative process craves real life experience to thrive.  Our day job ensures we stay connected with the living, breathing world.  We observe co-workers and customers, we see how they use language, how they dress, what’s they think is hip, what books they read, and what music they listen to.  Along the way we gain a wider perspective on life.  Our day job helps to make us a well-rounded person, which in turn helps to make us a well-rounded musician.

Our day job also injects much needed structure and discipline into our creative lives.  Musicians often complain that their day job interferes with their musical pursuits.  In fact, it usually has the opposite effect.  The regularity of our day job forces us to establish rigorous practice, rehearsal, and recording schedules. In order to work around our day job, we’re forced to learn how to focus and to manage our time, two essential skills for any player who hopes to make music their livelihood.

Finally, our day job tests our ability to persevere in a difficult industry like ours.  Fulfilling as it can be to be a full-time musician, there are days, weeks, and months when the work feels, well, a lot like a day job.  Muddling through layers and layers of record label bureaucracy, the tedium of promoting your group’s music and yourself, the endless hustle for gigs, changing tires on the tour van, coping with rejection – these are the situations in which you find yourself asking, “Is it all worth it?”  You can learn a lot about your capacity to overcome these inevitable frustrations simply by examining your attitude toward your current day job.  If you’re in the habit of showing up late to work and often have a negative attitude, you’ll bring the same defeatist approach to overcoming the challenges you face as a professional musician.  On the other hand, if you find that you’re able to sustain a positive mind-set while, say, cleaning septic tanks five days a week, you’ll probably do just fine in the this business.

Eyes On The Prize

Day jobs exist to help creative people realize their dream job.  This is a good thing to remember.  Sometimes musicians take on what they call a day job, but it’s actually a safety net, a plan-B if the music thing doesn’t work out.  If a player takes on a safety net job understanding full well that’s what it is, great.  But many times, musicians who are trying consciously to prioritize their creative career are drawn subconsciously to safety net jobs, because they’re so afraid of failing as an artist.

The problem with safety net jobs is that rather than facilitating an artist’s creative life, they compete with it.  Telltale signs that a job is a safety net are that it involves lots of responsibility, it has fixed hours, and it pays really well. These qualities don’t make for a good day job.  Musicians require flexibility in our work schedule, and the more money we make in our day job, the more likely we’ll be lured away from our long-term passion by a short-term reward.

So while the dullness of our day job embarrasses us in the eyes of other hipsters, that very quality is what makes our day job so compatible with our dream chasing.  The perfect day job is more of a life raft than a yacht – it ain’t stylish, and it may even leak a little, but it offers us all the support we need while we wait for our ship to come in.

Diving For Pearls – Identity, Soul & The Origins Of Style

“I think having one’s own sound is the most fundamental kind of identity in music.  But it’s a very touchy thing how one arrives at that. It has to be something that comes from inside, and it’s a long-term process. It’s a product of a total personality.”

- Bill Evans

 

A drummer’s personal style evolves over the course of his musical lifetime, developing along two separate but interweaving paths.  Growth along one path is purposeful, guided by the image we keep in our head of the player we hope to become.  Along this path we decide who our mentors are, how to hold our sticks, and what musical styles to play.  Growth along the other path is unconscious, guided by impulses deep inside our mind and body.  Along this path our playing acquires its most distinctive qualities, peculiarities that betray our unique artistic identity in any musical situation.

The more we understand and respect each of these paths, the better we are at cultivating our individual artistic voice.

Heroes & Idols

Our first creative personas are almost always borrowed.  Long before we ever sat behind a set of drums, most of us already had a clear idea of the drummer we wanted to become.  In my case, that drummer wore tights, platform boots, and cat make-up.

Like lots of drummers my age, my first major influence was Peter Criss of the legendary cartoon-glam rock band Kiss.  Truth be told, I wanted to BE Peter Criss. I even suggested to my guitarist friend, Joe, that we form a band called Kiss 2.  Joe thought that plan had dicey legal implications, so we settled for enlisting two buddies to join us in a lip sync performance of all four sides of Kiss Alive II, complete with sequined costumes, face paint, a drum set made from foil-covered ice cream containers, and low tech pyro.

My next guiding light was that paragon of prog rock percussing, “The Professor,” Neil Peart.  I was in 6^th grade when Neil entered my life, and soon after I formed my first band, Outrage – a power trio, just like Peart’s band, Rush.  Our three-man set-up was no coincidence; we were all Rush-heads, and we did everything we could to look and sound like the group we loved.  Our bassist played a black Rickenbacker 4001, and our guitarist played a blonde Telecaster, just like Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson did.  Our set-up included a set of Moog Taurus Pedals – an exotic foot-activated synthesizer made popular by its featured role in the Rush hit, “Tom Sawyer.”  Thanks to an early Christmas present of Remo Roto Toms, my kit ballooned to 8 pieces (more than half way to Neil’s 15!), and each drum was fitted with the very same Evans heads my idol used.  I played only Zildjian cymbals, as Neil did.  I crafted a set of chromatic chimes out of copper pipes so Outrage could play “Closer To The Heart” authentically.  And when Neil went electronic in the late 80s, I did too, incorporating a single SDS1 Simmons pad.

Emulation and imitation are how we first find our way around our instrument.  More than that, impersonation is a first draft at defining our own style. Modeling our playing after our heroes is like playing dress-up as a kid – with every new outfit we discover what feels right to us and what doesn’t.  The more players we try on, the more we learn what we want our own playing to sound like.

We can learn all kinds of things by mimicking our heroes, and not only when we’re beginners, but throughout our entire musical lives.  But copying at a distance has his limitations.  At some point, most of us seek out a good teacher who can explain to us one-on-one how to pull off all the crazy things we hear our idols’ playing.

Teachers

A guitarist I once met told me that he would never take formal lessons because he was afraid his teacher would suck all “individuality” from his playing.  It’s a common fear, but it’s unfounded.  The only person who can silence your creative voice is you.  In fact, deciding to take lessons from a good teacher is an important step in developing your personal playing style.

For one thing, a good teacher will make sure that you have a solid grasp of technique.  Tempo, meter, syncopation, dynamics, composition, melody, coordination, endurance – the more skills and understanding you possess, the more creative options you have to express yourself in your own way.

Also, a teacher can help refine your style by educating you about your instrument – about the musical potential of each element of a drum set, about how the material a drum or cymbal is made of influences the instrument’s tone, about how striking drums and cymbals in different ways elicits different sounds.

A drummer’s creative identity can develop a lot with the help of a teacher’s input.  A good teacher understands that technique and knowledge aren’t ends in themselves, but rather exist to serve a player’s individual artistic vision  A good teacher also understands that in order for a drummer to fully realize his personal playing style, there are some things he must figure out all alone.

Going Deep

Teachers help us realize our artistic vision by making sure that we grasp the fundamentals of our art, and by showing us the capabilities of our instrument.  But even great teachers have a hard time seeing what makes a student’s playing truly distinctive.  In part, this is because the very quirks that make a musician’s playing special are frequently diagnosed by teachers as technical shortcomings, and understandably so.  We can easily imagine Keith Moon’s teacher preaching the merits of restraint to the rambunctious young drummer, or B.B. King’s teacher complaining that the blues prodigy spends too much time wailing away on the root note, or Bob Dillon’s vocal coach suggesting straight up, “Bob, perhaps you should stick to the harmonica.”

The most compelling elements of personal style are not learned in a conscious way.  Instead, the qualities that define a musician’s sound emerge as a bi-product of years of rigorous practicing and performing.  Ironically, the longer we strive to become that perfect player we imagine in our heads, the more we become something much more special – a player with personality and soul. Bill Evans, the great jazz pianist, put it this way:

“I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.”

Like Bill Evans, most musicians set out for one creative destination, only to arrive somewhere different, somewhere closer to home.  Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin wanted only to make music that sounded like the black American blues giants they idolized – Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf.  Instead, they revolutionized rock and roll by coming up with a new way of interpreting the blues, a hybrid of American blues and British popular music.

Style is not something you can force.  The distinctive traits that become the hallmark of an artist’s style originate deep down in his subconscious psyche and in his bones.  They develop like pearls, little irritations in the artist’s soul that grow more exquisite the longer they fester.  And like pearls, an artist’s unique qualities are imperfect gems, rugged formations that tell the story about the hidden place from which they came.

Your artistic identity is not something you choose, it’s something you expose to light over the course of a creative lifetime.  Beware – you won’t always recognize your stylistic eccentricities as the gems they are.  Very often, the qualities that make your drumming special are the things that make you cringe when you hear them on playback.  Be careful what you erase from your playing.  It might be your soul.

Bloom – Trusting Your Muse

Last Saturday I drove 250 miles in order to attend a reunion of family members I’d never met.  These were my grandmother’s surviving brothers and sisters.  My father’s mother, who passed away a few years ago at a ripe old age, grew up on a big farm in the tiny town of Manchester, Iowa, the oldest of sixteen children.  Life on the farm was rough, and my exceedingly independent grandmother left Iowa before the age of eighteen, moving east and starting her own family. After her departure my grandmother lost touch with her Manchester roots, including a number of her siblings.  This meant that if I were ever going to meet her family, I’d have to do it on my own initiative.

So there I was, a shaggy-haired, city-dwelling rocker in a room full of rural farmers.  Yet different as we seemed, I smiled every time I witnessed the undeniable ways in which these were, in fact, my people. I saw it in their eyes and their noses, in the sound of their voices.  We were clearly made of the same stuff.  And out of that connection poured stories that helped fill some of the gaps in what I knew about where I’d come from.  But of all the stories I heard that day, it was the story I heard about my great-uncle Forest’s peonies that struck me most.

Peonies – four-foot bushes that produce huge, vibrant flowers – are common in Iowa.  So when my great-uncle inherited the family farm in the 1930s, it wasn’t unusual that the sprawling property already featured a few of the plants.  But by the time he died last year, my uncle had cultivated an entire grove of peonies, hundreds of bushes that filled the expansive east lawn of the property.

Peony blossoms from my uncle's yard

My grandmother's siblings after she moved east, circa 1928. Forest upper left.

 

On my way out of town after the reunion, I passed the old farm and saw the peonies for myself, row after row after row of them.  Coincidentally, the date of the reunion coincided with the peak of the peony flowering season, and from the two-lane road in front of the property, the peony blooms were a breathtaking sea of pink, violet and white.

On my five-hour drive home that night, my thoughts kept returning to my great-uncle’s not-so-secret indulgence. In the manly farming culture in which Forest lived and worked – a harsh and uncertain world that prospers or perishes on the whims of capricious weather patterns – stoics and tough-guys are the norm.  My uncle was no pansy, yet he seemed quite clearly obsessed with peonies. I loved this apparent contradiction.  I found it interesting and artful, even courageous.  What in the world moved Forest to spend his precious free time filling his yard with these pretty plants?  Did his buddies ever tease him in town about his big prissy flower patch?  If they did, he obviously couldn’t have cared less.

Oddly, thinking about my uncle’s eccentric hobby led me to consider the way I approach my life as an artist.  In particular it made me think about the way my peers and I make decisions about the kind of music we create. We grew up in the habit of always aspiring to be part of the next big thing.  We tried to hate disco but secretly practiced those amazing four-on-the-floor grooves. We bought enormous drum kits to meet the challenge of prog rock.  We exchanged our big kits for drum machines and keyboards when New Wave rolled in. We stole mom’s hairspray for the cause of heavy metal.  And grunge got us to tune up our drums and make them sing.  With the dawn of each movement we all asked, How can I fit in and be part of this?

Being inspired by an exciting trend is natural, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But as musicians we can be so worried about being out of sync with NOW that we doubt our own muse – our inner creative voice that exists largely out of time.  Instead of putting faith in making music we love, we can rely too much on what we think others think is cool.  While we’re busy thinking, we overlook the fact that the most successful and most enduring art has been made by people who’ve tended to ignore trends.  These are artists who – like my uncle Forest – had the boldness to act on the kinds of strange and mysterious whims that set them apart from everyone else.

 

Rethinking Cool

The day after the reunion I went to see the legendary Canadian prog rock group, Rush.  Interestingly, the concert confirmed for me that as a musician trying to make a living from their art, trying to be cool and current is a dead end, a waste of precious effort.

Like many drummers my age, when I was in elementary school Rush was my favorite band. To be perfectly honest, for a year or two I was so obsessed with Rush and the drumming of Neil Peart, I didn’t listen to any other bands.  I’ve been out of touch with Rush since middle school, so seeing the group live after all these years was an experience oozing with nostalgia.  But it was also a hugely educational experience.

Standing there in the 8^th row, surrounded by thousands of people who look like they don’t see the sun very much, it struck me that Rush just may be the most uncool band ever. Throughout the band’s epic thirty-five year career, Rush never enjoyed the status of “hip.”  Even in prog rock’s glory days, Rush was different. The power trio existed on the fringes – farther out than even Genesis and Yes.  They took “high-concept” to new heights.  As a result, popular culture never embraced them.  But it also couldn’t ignore them.  In spite of the band’s extreme geekiness – exhibited in songs with names like “Didacts and Narpets,” and in songs about trees that engage in warfare with one another, not to mention in their many ten-minute instrumentals – Rush got mountains of airplay, and still does today.

The truth is that Rush was never any good at being cool or “relevant.”  But then again, they didn’t need to be. Rush was only good at being Rush. And at that they were, and still are, unreal!  And make no mistake – it’s not the group’s much-lauded technical virtuosity that made them so unique.  There are a thousand groups whose members can play their instruments as well or better.  No.  What has made Rush so singular is the group’s dedication to their peculiar, nerd-o-rific creative vision.  Love it or hate it, this vision has made the group one of the most commercially successful, longest surviving bands in history.

Rush serves as an inspiring example for every artist with commercial aspirations.  The trio is living proof that an adoring audience can be the reward for having the courage to follow your heart to the honest and sometimes-strange places it takes your creativity.

Follow Your Heart…To The Bank

Now more than ever it makes better business sense for an artist to dedicate herself to her own muse rather than to jump on some prefabricated musical bandwagon.  Why?  Because with the slow death of big record companies, and the decline of radio as an effective way to promote an artist, the machine that once created the trends has broken down. The wheels have fallen off the bandwagon.

Happily, we’re now in an era that discourages sameness and rewards art that’s far more personal. In the impatient age of YouTube, the way to get noticed is to create an original statement, something that sounds like nothing else – something, that is, that only YOU would do.  If you’re good, if you promote yourself well, and if you have the patience to stick with it, eventually your own oddball vision will be feeding you and your family.  And there’s no better feeling in the world than that.

Bloom

Back at that reunion, it was interesting to observe the kinds stories people chose to tell me about my deceased relatives.  Surprisingly, I hardly ever heard about predictable and seemingly important things, like how someone made their living.  Apparently a person’s career was trite compared to tales that provided a juicy glimpse into what made them tick, what made them uniquely them.  So instead of hearing about how my uncle Forest managed the complexities of operating a large farm, I heard about something more revealing – his unusual fondness for peonies.

The story about Forest and his peonies reminded me that it’s the things we do out of love and passion, not the things we do out of a sense of obligation, that endure.  Great art blooms from the heartfelt, illogical, sometimes even embarrassing impulses we harbor.  When we mess with those impulses too much, when we censor them, smooth the edges, and try to conform them to something we presume people will like, we destroy the vitality that makes our work compelling.

Evolve Or Die – The Value Of Taking Chances In Your Creative Process

I recently worked on a record that included a song-writing collaboration between a pop band and a rap producer.  The project was born out of the enormous mutual respect that the artists had for one another’s work.  Also, each was fascinated by each other’s very different musical universe.  In the days leading up to the session everyone was super pumped about mixing it up with songwriters who made music so different, and so differently, than they did.

But when the musicians finally got down to actually making music together, the positive, easygoing vibe between them evaporated.  All the excitement they’d felt was replaced by an obvious uneasiness about the work ahead.

Going into the collaboration each camp had assumed that the other made music roughly in the same way they did.  This assumption couldn’t have been further from truth. The pop band made music in a highly calculated way. The group would spend days or weeks writing music for a song.  Later, lyrics would be written (and re-written) to accompany the music. Then an arrangement would be worked out. And all of this would happen long before the band entered a studio.  The rapper, on the other hand, was used to working at light-speed, composing a beat in an afternoon and recording a verse over it (often improvised at the mic) after dinner.  One creative process is methodical, the other impulsive.  One process puts its faith in a taking-ones-time-to-do-it-right approach to songwriting, the other puts faith in the inspired moment.

There in the studio, the artists were paralyzed by the thought of composing music in a different way, and a collective fear of trying something new shut down the entire collaboration. Each artist had achieved success working in their own way, and now neither was comfortable leaving their comfort zone.  Reaching across the creative divide was an act of faith that neither side seemed willing to commit.

My experience with the pop band and the rapper illustrates the kind of impasse creative partnerships can encounter when they’re forced to find a new way of being productive.  In fact, roadblocks like this happen all the time within groups of seemingly like-minded artists, artists within the same genre, even between artists who have worked together successfully for years.

It happens a lot – a group will be prolific for a long time, then one day the tried-and-true approach doesn’t work anymore and the music stops.  Maybe a band’s key songwriter gets writer’s block.  Or maybe the band’s line-up changes.  Or maybe the band consciously decides to change its creative direction, to significantly alter its sound. Whatever the interruption, suddenly the group’s old ways of making music no longer work and the members either learn to create in a new way or the fire dies.  In order to realize its potential, a band, like any creative partnership, must be willing and must have the courage to work in new ways. In other words, a group must be willing to evolve.

Evolution Requires Taking Chances 

The most successful organisms and organizations continue to innovate even after they’ve proven themselves to be viable.  In nature, plants and animals are always experimenting with more effective ways of putting themselves together, thanks to the random accidents of natural selection. In the history of ideas, the world’s major religions continue to be relevant and win new followers thousands of years after their humble beginnings, thanks to constant reinterpretation of scripture by adherents.  And in the realm of big business, Apple Computer, after pushing the frontiers of personal computing for 25 years, now pushes the frontiers of our own music industry, thanks to the chance-taking ingenuity of Steve Jobs.

The organisms and organizations that are most successful are the ones that dare to ask “What if?”  What if primates were able to walk upright?  What if “crusade” and “jihad” weren’t justifications for murdering non-believers, but rather merely metaphors for the importance of preserving a faith’s core principles?  What if your mobile phone could contain and playback your entire record collection? 

The revolutionary potential of “What if” applies equally to creative partnerships.  In your band, what if everyone agreed to write a song a week (including the members who’d never written a song in their life)? What if everyone committed to becoming proficient on another instrument?  What if your group began every rehearsal listening to a song and discussing why it’s great or why it’s not? What if your band’s non-singers each sang lead on a song? What if your band spent fifteen minutes of every rehearsal improvising and you recorded it to gather song ideas? What if you asked other bands to co-write songs with you – maybe a pop band, maybe a rapper?  What if?!

Evolution Is Scary

The truth is that the vast majority “What if” questions lead to nowhere.  So it is that the history of natural selection is littered with countless biological oddities that were doomed to early extinction, and that most religious systems are short-lived and attract only a small number of devotees, and that for all his successes, Steve Jobs is responsible for some of the biggest product flops in the tech sector. 

Hyper-aware of this risk of failure, we humans resist chance taking in our everyday lives (this despite the fact that human beings are themselves the extraordinary result of spectacularly successful chance “accidents”!).  We find what works, and we stick to it.

The same is true for creative partnerships, particularly when a group has had success working in a particular way in the past.  Soon after a band forms, the process by which it makes its art takes shape, determined by a number of factors including the members’ unique personality types, members’ various apparent talents, and the nature of the members’ pre-existing friendships.  If the resulting creative process bears no fruit, the group isn’t likely to last long.  But if the band finds success – wins a competition, gets a song on the radio, attracts a zillion friends on MySpace – then the creative process that led to that success gets validated.  And once validated, the group’s way of doing things tends to get set in stone and the members no longer challenge it.

Understandably, as long as a band is successful and happy, members feel no need to work any other way.  The danger with becoming attached to one way of working, though, is that even when that way is no longer fruitful, or when circumstances change, members find they’re unable to imagine doing things another way.  And when we can’t imagine doing something differently, we usually don’t.

Evolution is Egoless

Overcoming our innate hesitation to take chances can be difficult. It usually entails a major shift in thinking. It requires us to suspend, at least temporarily, our opinion about a right way and a wrong way to get from A to B.  Often it requires us to let go of our traditional role in a group. It requires a group to cultivate a supportive working environment, one in which people are encouraged to voice radical opinions and make suggestions that may at first seem bizarre, and may very well lead to nowhere.  And importantly, since we know that many “What if” questions do lead nowhere, it also requires members to have the wisdom to know which innovative suggestion lights the way to a new frontier, and which is simply a harebrained idea.

In other words, evolution is an egoless process, uncovering better ways of doing things by trial and error, free from the bias and engrained habits that characterize the process of doing things the same old way.

Evolution Unlocks Potential

Back in the studio with the pop band and the rapper, the standoff seemed, from the outside, to exist between the artists.  But we know that the artists were fans of one another, and that they respected and were fascinated by each other’s unique way of working. In fact the actual standoff was between the artists and their own personal fears of what they had to lose by trying to approach an unfamiliar situation in an inventive way.  No one wanted to look like a fool, so the camps retreated to their respective corners and expected the other to follow.

We resist taking chances because we can’t see the potentially beneficial result ahead of time, and because we lack faith in our own ingenuity. Run DMC and Aerosmith might have ruined their careers remaking “Walk This Way” together in 1985.  Public Enemy and Anthrax might have done the same releasing “Bring The Noise” in 1991. The artists involved in both of these unlikely collaborations braced themselves for ridicule.  Instead, both projects earned the artists a whole new level of respect among fans and critics.  

When allowed to take its course, evolution unlocks hidden potential in an organism or a group. Key to unlocking that potential is having the courage to take chances.

For The Good Of The Group – Listening In Performance

Listening To A Mime: A True Story

When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, I had a band called Outrage with two friends who were brothers, Robb and Jeff.  We were a power-trio specializing in Rush covers, and for years we practiced almost every night of the week in Robb and Jeff’s basement, driven to become the greatest musicians.  One night, as part of our unceasing quest for musical perfection, someone invited a mime to band practice, believing he could teach us a thing or two about live performance.   That’s right, a professional white-faced mime.

Now, I can’t remember who invited that mime to our practice, or why they thought a silent artist who specializes in climbing in and out of invisible boxes could school three young prog-rockers in the art of musical performance.  But school us he did.

How?  First, he spent fifteen minutes just listening to us jam.  Afterwards he silently stood up, reached theatrically into his oversized pocket and dramatically pulled out a long chain of rainbow-colored handkerchiefs.  Then he untied three of them, threw one to each of us, and motioned that we should blindfold ourselves and resume playing.

So that’s what we did, and immediately things felt – and according to Robb and Jeff’s parents, things also sounded – different.  Right then and there we began to understand that making great music as a group means listening beyond our own instrument to take in the sound of everyone playing together.  And right then and there we began to care less about being the world’s greatest individual musicians and to care more about becoming the world’s greatest band.

The Wine In The Potato

How strange that a performer who works in complete silence taught me, a rock drummer, my first great lesson about listening when I play with others.  Or maybe it’s not so strange.  With the ability to act out entire scenes without uttering a word, a great mime has learned to communicate a lot more in the visual world then we typically do in our day to day lives.  The mime who visited my band understood that great musicians do something similar in the world of sound, and he showed us that, by heightening our sensitivity to the players around us, we can use the energy of the entire group to blend many parts into a single, unified voice.

Blending – the process of bringing separate elements seamlessly together – is a skill that great artists of all kinds develop.  A painter thinks about it when mixing colors.  A sculptor thinks about it when accurately representing the proportions of a human body.  A writer thinks about it when maintaining cohesiveness in an essay or book.

Musicians in a group also must figure out how to bring all the pieces together, and the challenge is the same whether you are part of a rock group or a huge orchestra.

Sarah Fishgo is an arts journalist for a weekly NPR radio program, and she recently looked into how orchestral musicians create unity out of so many parts.  “It’s the orchestral paradox,” Sarah says, “making sure it sounds the way you want it to sound, and listening to everyone else around you at the same time, to blend it.” 

I listened to Ms. Fishgo’s piece on my kitchen radio a few months ago while concocting one of my favorite winter recipes – Spanish beef stew.  I couldn’t help but notice the parallels of her story with what was happening on my stovetop.  The trick to making a great stew is getting each ingredient to absorb a bit of the flavor of every other ingredient, and with Spanish beef stew the specific challenge is getting the sharp tang of the green olives and the Spanish red wine to mellow out a bit by penetrating the hard vegetables – the carrots and the potatoes.  The magic happens only when the various ingredients cast their flavor throughout the entire stew.  When the blend is right, your mouth knows it. 

Musicians on a stage are just like the ingredients in a big stew pot – every component is important because of how it interacts with the others, not how it exists on its own.  So whether it’s a Klezmer band, a barbershop quartet, or the Sex Pistols, the musical purpose of performance is always the same – for musicians to come together as one, to create a single experience for the audience out of many parts.

The Anatomy Of “Tight”

People commonly praise a good live band by saying they are “tight.”  When a fan tells me that my band is “tight,” I know it’s meant to be flattering.  But to me, “tight” implies something rigid or tense – something I hope my band is not – so I always have to do a quick translation in my head before I smile and say, “Hey, thanks.”

So what are people hearing when they call a band “tight?”  I think they’re hearing a group whose members sound connected because they pay attention to subtle shifts in time and dynamics, thereby moving through the music together.  Benny Goodman’s amazing big band did this, as did classic funk bands like James Brown & the J.B.’s and The Meters/

These groups are known for their unbelievable shows. How did they do it?  On stage these guys never sleepwalked through shows.  They were present in every moment, constantly playing off each other musically. The members of a great band are connected by sound.  They are planets in a solar system, each vibrating at a different frequency but bound by the common gravity of the music.  The result of this interplay is that a band’s songs continue to feel alive and exciting to the audience even after the group has played them a thousand times. 

There’s something else, too, that can help unite a band’s sound – instruments with complimentary tonal qualities.  As the sound of a group evolves over time, certain kinds of drums, guitars, and keyboards sound better together than others.  In my band, Spymob, for example, a lot of our songwriting was inspired by the popular music of the 60s and 70s, so it’s no coincidence that over the years we all gravitated toward instruments that evoke the sound of music made in those eras: vintage Ludwig drums, darker K Zildjian cymbals, vintage Fender guitars, a vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano, and old low watt tube amps.  In the context of Spymob, it just wouldn’t have made sense for me to play a loud new kit with thin shells and screaming cymbals; I would have overpowered my band mates and the group’s tonal blend would have suffered.

The decisions we make about the brand and design of our instrument are often very personal, which is the way it should be – our instrument is our musical voice.  However, as the member of a group we must be open to trying something different if our sound is somehow detracting from the cohesiveness of the whole.

Self-Mixing

From time to time, my band will play a show in which the sound on stage is so good, and we can hear each other so well, that it feels like there’s a mysterious force on stage weaving us together.  But on other nights, when the sound isn’t so good, we can feel completely out of touch with each other.  The only good remedy for bad stage sound is self-mixing – that is, turning yourself down until you can hear what the other guys on stage are doing.

It’s always fun to rock out, but when there’s too much volume on stage to hear each other clearly, it’s unlikely the audience is going to see a great show.  The more you achieve a natural balance on stage, the more your band’s performance will resonate with the inspiration zipping from player to player on stage.

After all, when the show is over, no audience member is going to remember if the drummer dropped a stick or if the singer hit a few flat notes.  But they will remember if the energy was good on stage.  If it was, your fans will love you for it, and they might even track you down after the show to tell you themselves.  “Yo, you guys are tight!”

 

It Won’t Mean A Thing…If You Ain’t Listening

In my last post I looked at how self-consciousness turns a musician inward, limiting their expressive potential and closing them off from their audience and the musicians with whom they’re playing.  Overcoming self-consciousness both in practice and performance allows a player finally to do what they were meant to do all along: listen.  In the couple entries I look at how listening shapes our playing, first in the process of learning, and then in performance.

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How do we learn to play in an unfamiliar style, or to incorporate new techniques into our playing?  I’ve seen books on the market that claim to be able to “get you playing real funk drums in less than a week!”  No way.  Mastering the nuances of a particular style requires years of practice.  It requires something else, as well: immersive listening.

 

Motion and Meaning

In 1932, jazz composers Irving Mills and Duke Ellington declared, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”  Fifty-two years later, Dee Snider of the 80s ultra-glam metal band, Twisted Sister, screamed, “I wanna rock!”  Now, these songwriters could hardly be more different, but on this they would agree: music’s gotta’ move.  The key to making music move is understanding the rhythmic and dynamic subtleties that give that style its distinct character, its deeper musical meaning.

Whether it’s jazz or rock, hip hop or funk, at the heart of every musical style is a signature rhythm, and every signature rhythm has a unique “swing”: a distinctive way of dividing time.  This means that it’s not enough for musicians simply to play in time; musicians must learn to play with time in the manner determined by the style.

Let’s look at samba.  In Brazil, I took weekly samba lessons on a traditional drum called a repique from an old, illiterate man named Miguel.  In my first lesson, Miguel explained to me that the essence of samba is contained within a single bar of time.  So for the next five weeks I practiced one, 2/4 rhythm – over and over and over.  At the end of each week, I took a long dusty bus ride back out to Miguel’s miserable shack, only to hear him tell me, “No, Eric, not quite right.  Watch me again, and listen!”

And listen I did, because even if Miguel could write, it wouldn’t have helped me.  Here’s why: the heart and soul of samba’s signature rhythm is its peculiar swing, and no conventional musical notation can adequately illustrate it.  The time signature of samba is typically represented as 2/4, and each quarter note of time does contain four short notes.  However – and this is the key to samba – six of the eight notes don’t land near enough to 16^th note markers to be depicted honestly as straight 16^th notes.  In fact, both because of where the notes land and because of which notes get emphasized, the rhythm can sometimes sound as much triple as it does duple, as much 3/4 as it does 2/4.

 

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This image is from an actual recording of a samba instrument called a tamborim playing samba’s 2/4 signature rhythm as it should be played.  Note how the performed notes do not line up with the equidistant grid marks of the frame.

 

Samba is the rhythm of a nation, reflecting its beauty and complexity.  Brazil’s stories are told and its dances swing on samba’s slippery skip.  Samba without it’s distinctive motion simply is not samba – and Brazilians will tell you so!  The way I eventually grasped the essential subtleties of samba was by listening to as many samba records as I could get my hands on, and later, by actually going to Brazil to watch and to listen to the musicians whose day-to-day lives are reflected in the rhythms they play.

 

The Peculiar Power of Listening

Mastering samba’s swing on my repique took me months of listening and active practice.  But mysteriously, sometimes listening by itself is sufficient to influence, even revolutionize, our playing.

A few years ago, my band, Spymob, performed with N.E.R.D on a t.v. show here in the States called “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”  The band leader for “Late Night” is the great drummer, Max Weinberg, from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.  Growing up, I loved Max’s rock drumming with Bruce, but on “Late Night” he’s always played a lot more jazz than rock, and he swings really well.

After taping our show, I asked him if he’d been a closet jazzer all his life.  “No,” he told me. “I never actually played any swing music until I started this gig with Conan.”  He went on: “But I’ve been a huge jazz fan my whole life, and when I became well-known with the E Street Band, I got to know Buddy Rich pretty well.  Buddy would always let me sit right behind him at gigs and watch.  I saw him play lots of shows.  I honestly don’t know how I made the physical transition to jazz.  I’m sure that watching and listening to Buddy had a lot to do with it.”

Max’s story is not typical, to be sure; in most cases, a transition like the one Max made would require much practice, regardless of a lifelong love of jazz.  Still, the power of even passive listening can’t be denied.  In his great book, Effortless Mastery (1996, Jamey Aebersold Jazz), pianist Kenny Werner tells this story:

There is a radio station in New York City that celebrates the birthdays of various musicians by playing their music all say, or sometimes all week.  One time they were playing Art Blakey for several days.  I had the radio on that station all weekend.  Day and night, listening or not, Art Blakey was drifting through my ears…Monday night, on my way to the Village Vanguard for my regular gig with the Mel Lewis Orchestra, I was still listening to him on the car radio.

When we started to play, I noticed that everything felt different.  I had automatically absorbed Blakey’s groove, and I was playing things with a different gait.  Others in the band acknowledged the change in feeling.  Effortless listening is like breathing.  I nourishes you without your even knowing it.

Kenny’s story is one many of us can relate to.  Listening, however active or passive, rewires our body and mind.  Suddenly we hear new musical possibilities and, mysteriously, we find ourselves playing something we’ve never practiced before.

 

Xerox Listening

Sometimes when we listen to learn something new, we’re not trying to comprehend such fine points as motion and meaning – all we want to know is “what the #$%@ is this player doing!?”  Basic copying is crucial to our musical growth, opening our mind and limbs to new ways of thinking and moving is the first valuable step in learning new technique.  And if you’re not listening closely, it’s easy to get it wrong – perhaps missing the very thing that makes the original great.

Here’s an example.  Like a lot of young drummers growing up in the 80s, I idolized Neil Peart, the drummer of Rush.  My rock band in middle school performed more than 20 Rush songs, and I tried hard to copy every lick of Neil’s I could.  In high school I became interested in other bands and I completely stopped listening to Rush.  One day in college I was feeling nostalgic, so I put on some of my favorite Rush records, and the more I listened to Rush that day, the more I realized I had never really listened closely to Neil’s playing before.

As a kid, I was very aware that Neil Peart was one of the world’s most technically advanced drummers.  In my futile effort to be equally impressive, I cluttered my renderings of Neil’s parts with additional fireworks in almost every bar.  All those years later, I realized – to my great surprise – that Neil often plays very simply, just laying down time (though it may be in 11/8!).

Because I had listened so selectively as a kid, I heard only Neil’s mind-boggling fills and I wrongly took them to be the constant of his entire style.  As a result, I failed to learn what really makes Neil a great drummer: it’s not the complexity of his playing, but his thoughtful contrast of simplicity and complexity.

Precise copying may be the greatest learning tool for the development of your own style.  It’s difficult to do, and you might be tempted to ignore or alter what you think is easy.  Don’t.  It may be the thing you learn from most.

 

Roadmap for Learning

As musicians, our possibilities for learning are, literally, endless.  We constantly have to make difficult choices about what we need to know and what we don’t – there just isn’t time to learn it all!  Our natural listening preferences are like a flashlight on our map of learning – they show us where to go, because when we’re learning about something we love, we learn the most.

Conversely, no matter how much you may listen to something, if you’re not interested in it, you won’t grasp the heart and soul of it, and you won’t therefore be able to incorporate its essence into your playing.  So though you may feel bad that you’re not a great jazz drummer, or though you may wish you were a better reggae drummer, if you don’t like jazz or reggae, spinning all the records of Miles and Marley won’t help your playing.  And so what?  For most of us, our musical interest extends to just a few styles, and that’s just fine – most of our favorite musicians also have had limited stylistic ambitions.

Now, it is important to listen to musical styles that are unfamiliar to you, as well as to styles that you once thought you didn’t like: doing so you might discover some amazing music, or realize your tastes have changed.  But forcing yourself to listen to music you have no interest in is an educational dead end.  Listening long and deep to the music you love and admire will, over time and with much practice, allow you to fully absorb vital subtleties which you can then incorporate into your own playing.