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!”