Music-related ramblings
Are you in a band? I hear that a lot. Why, yes! I am in a band (currently DOOT!). I have been in other bands. I will be in other bands down the road. None of them play at weddings. Sorry. None of them play at the sports bar. Sorry, again. Long story. Ultimately, I like “M”usic, capital M. All kinds, but not at all times.
Music can mean a wide variety of concepts, and maybe as wide as the number of individuals. It seems that I’ve always embraced the concept of “natural music”, the music of nature, including that of humans. Part of that means not breaking down music too strongly by “label”. Being a westerner, i’ll stick to western music for a bit. Yes, if you want a sonata to work it helps to have music notation and musicians who are adept at reading that notation. It is a common modern notion that you have “serious music” written by guys in wigs and conducted by other guys in wigs, or you have folk music passed down by ear and played by tweedy types and hippies, or “rock music” which can seemingly be played by anyone, but it helps if you are a witless douchebag with a distaste for bathing. Then you have your music of Dance. At one time there was little or no separation between them. Music was for dancing to. That simple. Eventually you had “refined” music or ‘intellectual” music... and dancing was not part of the event. Sure, the composers stole the rhythms and melodies of the common man, but dancing was either not allowed or it was done by troupes led by equally strict taskmasters, and they called it “ballet”. I know this for certain: music certainly predates notation and formal organization. The effect of music can be primal. Music can and does convey emotional information, sometimes forcefully. Minor chords sound have a “sad” sound... and that may be because certain intervals evoke a neural response. You could convey fear, apprehension, joy, and more, all by how you organize musical information. That is central to music everywhere. Even the most impenetrable serial composer is conveying emotion, though it may be the cold isolation of the modern industrial world.
Music that I like tends to be connected by a few central features. One is a meaningful percussive element. That could be Stevie Wonder’s left hand, or an entire Javanese gemelan. I’m a firm believer in “the drum.” The drum is likely to have been the first musical instrument. Maybe it was a log, an animal skull, a rock, the body of the player his/hertself... the conveyance of events in time is, to me, music. I could liberally pepper this with quotes, but I’ll just stick to one from Frank Zappa: “When a note is is more important than what a note is” (i’ll dig that up and transcribe it exactly asap). The other feature is harder to pin down, but it is something like context or coherence. I went as far as to call music a language, so I also deal with musical grammar, punctuation, and devices such as colloquialism, plot, denouement... I like it to make “sense”. Just as I don’t have the cultural basis to make sense out of Chinese opera, I am attracted to concepts that I am culturally prepared for.
My main source of music at an early age was radio, and my parent’s records. I have been a radio nut since i was old enough to have my own transistor portable, which in my house may have been three or four years old. Electronics was the family business and we had a lot of radio and Tv stuff around. I especially liked listening to AM broadcast at night, when there was a huge variety of stations to be heard (there still are a lot, just not as many). Maybe it would be different if I had a child performer like Charlie Haden, but I was mainly a consumer of music. My dad had a few inexpensive instruments and I started playing guitar at abut 9 years old or so. I HATED it. I played in a church group and I was such a spazz that they put me on snare/hi-hat! I did get to hang out with older kids and go on road trips and generally be a nutcase. Why did I hate gee-tar so much? It turned out that my first teacher never showed me that the notes went in an alphabetical order of sorts and I was doing all of these things by rote memorization, which I sucked at then and still do. What I did like doing was playing along with stuff like “The Johnny Cash Songbook” or some other Cash record that was my first LP. The catch was that I played the “low notes” and not the “song”. I still have that guitar, and I still play the low notes and not the song. It took a casual comment from a friend of my dad’s to reveal “your kid is a bass player... why not just get him a bass?” It took a while but at 13 I got a bass and never looked back. Ok, I have looked back a few times because I really do like the guitar and I have made my peace with it as an instrument.
So I play bass. I like playing bass. Sometimes I might even play something you might know on a bass. But I really like the bass because it has a great percussive element and the note layout is logical.
Me playing at Zappanale 17 - finale jam session w/ Adrian Belew
More to come, but now I have to rebuild the DOOT! website. More fun stuff there soon.