Twisty, Curvy Roads

Today, (well, actually it was yesterday now that I am getting around to scribbling this), was a very good day musically. Scott Bailey's Second Line Jazz Band, (in which I play clarinet) performed at noon for a community group in Lakeway, Texas. It was an excellent room for music and the house sound man did an outstanding job. It helped a lot that they had a very good grand piano on stage. We play so much with electronic keyboards these days that I forget what a real piano sounds like. It was a packed audience and they were very appreciative. This evening was the Tons Of Fun Jam in Round Rock. In addition to our regulars, a couple of Dan Augustine's friends showed up. Todd Sloan brought his piccolo and a wonderful tubist, Bill (I did not catch his last name) surprised us with some simply excellent ensemble and solo work. After the jam, I was talking with Todd and discovered that his Dad is an old friend and sometimes musical cohort, Dave Sloan. Dave is one of the better string b...

Why I Gave Up Fear And Learned To Love My Metronome Pulse is the most important element in music. "Pulse" and "tempo" are often taken for the same thing. They are not. They are related but not the same concept.  Music is experienced in perceptual time. "Pulse" is the perceptual framework that allows us to experience music.  "Tempo" is the objectification of "pulse". Well, is that clear as mud?? Of course not, mud is much more transparent that the preceding paragraph! Let me try to clarify, "tempo" is a term that describes pulse.  We say that the tempo is "fast", "slow", 120 beats per minute, and so forth.  "Pulse", on the other hand is the regular recurring heart beat that allows us to manipulate the experience of listeners. A performance that ignores pulse is much like a novel or short story that ignores plot. Pulse is related to "time".  We, as humans, experience everything...

Bell-Front Upright Bass Banjo After all of these years, I have finally discovered the "Joy of The Banjo". One of the benefits of becoming more and more deaf is that the sound of the banjo begins to be, if not better, at least more tolerable. Note that I said "better" and "tolerable", not "good"! The photo shows a talented artist performing on a bell-front, upright bass banjo. This wonderful instrument has only one string compared to the four or five strings on the more standard "transverso" banjo. The major benefit of a single string is that it save 75% of the annoyance generated when hearing a four string banjo and a full 80% of the annoyance of listening to a five string banjo. This is a significant health advantage for persons with a musical inclination. It is a little known fact that the banjo was originally intended to have a single string. However banjo enthusiasts begin to gradually add strings, one at a time. Soon, four string b...

MUSIC??? Do ink blots on a piece of paper constitute music? No, printed musical notation is simply a plan, or blue print, that allows musicians  to communicate musical ideas to each other. What each individual musician does with those general musical ideas can be significantly different. Music is a dramatic structure. It is up to the performer to tell a musical story. The performer must engage the listener in the drama just as the author of a novel must engage his readers. The musicians job is to look for musical events and effects that will do just that. 

During my years as a high school band director, I often had a nagging feeling that the tail was wagging the dog. We worked many, many hours preparing for this contest and that contest. We were so busy preparing for contests that there was very little time left to actually teach music. The kids in my band had great technique, they were practically professional - in fact, we spent a lot more time practicing and rehearsing than many professionals do. We won contests, but still there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was not teaching "Music".   I know that some of the kids picked it up because a large number of them went on to become professional musicians and music teachers. But to be truthful, I think that those were the kids that would  have done well at just about anything. Being in the band may have given them some inspiration, but I still do not feel that it was because I was teaching them to understand music. There were other kids who wanted to so badl...

Jazz In New Orleans My impulse is to answer the title question with, "hopefully after the gig is finished!", but why offend the one or two banjo owners who are actually musical? So I will think it but not say it. The musicians job is to create a drama for the audience. The musician tells a story that draws the audience into an experience that is beyond ordinary, day to day life. Obviously the musician must know his instrument. Scales, chords, loud, soft, timbre, articulation..., all of those are necessary. But musicianship goes beyond simple mastery of an instrument. One does not approach "musicianship" until they begin to approach music as a dramatic structure. A horn player just plays notes - a "musician" tells a story. The first step to understanding the dramatic structure of a piece is to decide what is important to the drama and what is not. In gestalt terms, the musician must know what is figure and what is ground. Of course there are sta...

Gestalt psychologists have studied figure and ground extensively as applied to visual presentation, but there has not been a lot of discussion of figure and ground applied to musical performance. In reality, figure and ground is one of the most fundamental musical decisions that a perform must make. It is a decision that must be made in every performance. The classic hag/girl picture to the right is a well know example. You either see an old hag, or you see an attractive young lady. This visual example points out very well the ability that we have for seeing the same thing differently.  Music is filled with ambiguity. Practically every phrase can be interpreted differently. Jazz in particular offers the musician many different expressive possibilities. The most basic of these is whether a particular part should be interpreted as part of the figure or as part of the ground. As a jazz performer, you must constantly decide if what you are doing is figure or ground. If you fa...