Here’s a fabulous TED talk, exploring the different between our experiencing selves and our remembering selves.

The implications of this for musicians are huge - how often does our reaction to a recording we make reflect our experiences when the music was actually played?

And for those of us who are improvising musicians, the difference can be even more stark - last week I played as part of an ‘Adventures In Sound’ show for BBC Radio 3, on the last day of the London Jazz Festival. I was in two improvised line-ups – the first was with Otto Fischer on guitar and Tony Buck on drums – I’d met Otto the week before on an improv gig, but hadn’t ever heard of Tony (though I knew of his band The Necks by reputation).

10 minutes of the 30 minutes we played is currently on the iPlayer - it doesn’t feel anything like the music I remember played. I remember the sounds that were made, and some of the shifts between sections, but I don’t recognise the way my body feels when I listen to it. My experiencing self and my remembering self have very different relationships to the music. If you’d asked me to rate the gig out of 10 directly after playing, I’d have marked it significantly lower that I would’ve done after listening back to the recording. That disconnect is SO important for us as musicians, because our ability to understand, process and react to what’s happening in the moment is what makes us functional improvisers, or not.

I’ll write more about it soon, but for now, watch the video above, and have a listen to the concert on the iPlayer – our bit starts 40 minutes in (if you can – it’s UK-only – I’ll post the full gig on Soundcloud at a later date, and update this post when I do).

Feel free to use the comments for your own stories of the connection or disconnection between our experiencing and remembering selves when playing music…

But in the meantime, here’s some smart thinking on music. One of the big mistakes instrumentalists make is to go looking to practitioners of their chosen instrument for wisdom on the subject of music. There’s no reason why bass guitarists should know more about music than anyone else. Truth be told, there’s a heck of a lot more wisdom about music out there by non-bassists than there is by bassists…

So with that in mind, here are three of my favourite interviews with guitarist David Torn. David is both a truly remarkable guitarist/composer/improvisor and a brilliant thinker about the processes around music. Clear-headed, mischievous wisdom that ties music to human-ness. He’s brilliant.  

The first one is in 3 video segments, embedded here. It came out at the time of his last album, and explains some of the improvisation/composition/processing that went on around its creation. Great stuff from a remarkable mind.

Next up is a series of interview segments and demonstrations he did for guitarbandDVD.org - they’re all in this post here.

And finally, three interviews with David from innerviews.org - Anil Prasad (for he is Innerviews) is, to my mind, the finest musician interviewer on the planet. Scholarly, passionate, deep, respectful without sucking up to anyone. He writes about music as a fan, an advocate and an archivist of musical thinking. He manages to get the very best from his interviewees, as evidenced in these three with David Torn:

Recasting Identities.
Fate Is Not Completely Decided.
Every Mind Has To Be Defused.

There’s so much in each of these interviews, you could easily spend a couple of months just processing the ideas and musical processes put forward. Please feel free to comment on any quotes or ideas that particularly resonate with you.

The catalyst was his difficulty in answering questions that required him to fragment his thinking about music – and even detach music from its place within the rest of his being/existence. It wasn’t – it seemed – that he was unwilling to. It was that to do so felt somehow dishonest, especially if the question seemed to be loaded with an expectation that a certain fragment of information – whether it be about a particular technique, bit of music theory or piece of equipment – would somehow prove to be the key that unlocks ‘music’.

The tricky thing when teaching is getting across the way that those fragments – which at one level seem to be discrete from one another – are all parts of the same whole, and that the process of learning music is an ongoing discovery of your relationship with music, what it means to you, and what the music ‘is’ that is part of who you are.

There are two contrasting but complementary sides to the idea: a fluidity that makes it impossible to use any language the implies ‘arrival’, but also an overwhelming sense of just how important the ongoing process is. It’s the action of becoming. At its best it overrides the need to ‘look like a badass’ to a room full of bassists, or to pimp a particular piece of gear, or even to make music that other people like. (not that making unlistenable music is an achievement, just that music is too important to be measured by how many people ‘get it‘.)

So it seems to me that the best expression of that journey towards the integration of who you are and how music reflects and influences that is a pyramid. A pyramid where the lower levels are made up of lots of little things -

•  pieces of equipment
•  techniques
•  ideas about which notes fit with which other note

elements that are learned as discrete entities just to make the processes manageable, but which each time you move up a level merge together.

So with music gear, initial thoughts about brands and types of pedals and cables becomes thought about clarity and tone, which in turn become inclinations towards a transparency of creative intention manifest as musical reality.

Likewise theory starts as a disparate collection of notes, scales, arpeggios, chords with ‘rules’ which when explored in context become a series of idiomatic experiences, as you learn what jazz/punk/latin/reggae ‘feels’ like as much as what it’s made up of, which in turn feeds into your mapping of sounds to emotions, experiences, shared cultural reference points and dispositions as music starts to represent who you are and how you see the world.

And finally technique – what starts as a series of stylistically-driven concepts – slap for funk, plectrum for punk and metal, fingerstyle for jazz, palm-muting for reggae – becomes what Michael Manring describes a gestalt – a way of engaging with and experiencing the bass as a whole, (or your instrument of choice) based on understanding its physical parameters and how your manual dexterity unlocks the potential within those parameters for creating sounds that combine with the theory and equipment in the service of expression.

All of the elements that we initially saw as discrete entities still exist. Just as when you talk in your first language as an adult, you think about communicating, not about nouns and adjectives, or how your accent influences people’s perception of you, or whether or not different degrees of vernacular expression are appropriate to the surroundings. You just talk, and completely subconsciously respond to where you are and who you’re talking to, with communication being your goal.

It’s not ‘wrong’ to focus on whatever specific element needs work, just as it’s not wrong to learn a new language, or to try and absorb new concepts and ideas in your first language. The pyramid isn’t a pejorative one, it’s about orientation. The Australian theologian and agitator Dave Andrews is want to say, ‘It’s not where you are, it’s where you’re heading that matters’, and that’s what music learning – and therefor teaching – is all about. Orienting yourself towards that place of integration – of integrity – where music and self and all the elements that contribute towards that are combined. Where the process of making music is one of getting out of the way of the music happening.

It’s not a ‘destination’ – it’s all a journey, and your impression of what the ‘horizon’ is will keep changing as you progress. Embracing that is the first step towards integration, towards convergence.

The process of explaining that can often end up with the people you’re talking to thinking you’re bull-shitting them, trying to come up with some zen bad-ass routine to make yourself look deep. It’s why the format for Beyond Bass Camp fits my teaching approach so well – it’s not one conversation in which I try to explain all of this stuff. It’s 5 days of exploration, that are in and of themselves part of the practice of convergence. Learning by doing, and finding within the structure of the day one of the main convergence points, the place where practice, performance, composition and improvisation all just become the action of making music.

OK, this is one of the best presentations on learning music I’ve seen in ages.

I got to play with Evelyn Glennie a few years back, in her studio – she had been talking to Rick Turner about electro-acoustic music, and he’d advised her to talk to me about looping. I went to meet her and talk to her about looping and processing, and demo the Looperlative for her. Her sensitivity to everything we played, every processed element I added to her percussion, was incredible. Her profound deafness was certainly no impediment to her musical performance or her ability to collaborate. Given just how quickly she reacted to every change, and how sensitive her touch was, one could just as easily suggest it was an advantage, based on experiential evidence alone.

What certainly is advantageous is the way that Evelyn has used her profile as a musician and her unique history in studying and performing music to speak about learning music, and learning in general, across the globe. Including the talk embedded below from the Ted Conference.

It’s no overstatement to say that this is one of the finest presentations I’ve ever seen on learning an instrument. Evelyn demonstrates and explains so clearly many of the things I talk about when teaching, particularly the point about learning music in the context of playing music, rather than what I refer to as ‘practicing practicing’ – getting good at musical exercises without rooting them in the magic of playing actual music.

Watch, learn, be inspired:

One of the points I keep stressing to my students is to take 5 or 10 minutes at the beginning of a practice session to decide what’s important for that day –

• Are there obviously technical or theoretical obstacles that have been getting in the way of you playing the music you want to play of late?
• If there are, can you think of a useful exercise that’ll help you focus on those elements, rather than just playing the offending song in question over and over again, entraining your brain and muscles to remember the mistake as part of the song?
• Or are there perhaps ideas about what’s ‘ok’ to do as a musician that are holding you back?
• Are you crippled by other people’s expectations of what you should be doing with your music?
• Are you playing the things you ‘ought’ to know, rather than the music you love? (this is most evident amongst bassists in their tendency to try and learn bebop melodies before learning to play walking bass, or without having any real interest in listening to jazz, or playing in a jazz setting… It’s just one of those things you ‘ought’ to do – a pox be upon whoever it was who transcribed the Charlie Parker Omnibook in bass-clef! )

So making up your mind about the things that matter to you, deciding what you REALLY want to play and what the skills are that will get you there, and regularly revisiting them, even keeping a diary or a blog of where you’re up to can make all the difference to your satisfaction with your musical journey.

Beyond Bass Camp will be a place were those kind of questions are encouraged and explored, where goals can be refined, and bespoke musical paths defined and resourced.

Q: So, what are you working on at the moment? What are the obstacles? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way?

I have certain pre-arranged responses to some of the questions and comments I get about my music.

One of my favourites to throw out is to comments like “hey, Steve, you should do a whole ambient record” or “I really like the funky tunes, you should do more of that“, or any other ‘you should‘-type comments. My response is invariably “no, YOU should, cos it’s you that wants to hear it!”

The implication is not that the other person’s desire for something other than what I’ve released is invalid, just that I can’t possibly be expected to be able to make music to order for my audience. It’s a recipe for really banal music.

See, the only person whose taste I really know is my own. Even my wife surprises me with what she likes and doesn’t like. The better I get to know her, the more I can guess whether or not she’ll like something I’ve played, but even then, I’m listening back to it and guessing, rather than futilely trying to meet her expectations.

The initial comment also belies the notion that every bit of music should conform to my preconceived notions of what it ought to be, rather than me being open to those preconceptions being wrong, and finding in the work of artists I respect new avenues for musical appreciation.

So for me as an artist, it means I’m constantly in a process of refining my own vision for what my music should be. There are LOADS of influences on the way I perceive music. Here’s a partial list:

• Music I already love
• New music I hear (and my reaction to it)
• The opinion of those who’ve demonstrated that they “get” what I do (I have an unofficial ‘council of reference’ who act as ad-hoc producers when I need it)
• Music as soundtrack
• Beautiful noise
• Other art forms (sometimes painting or architecture can imply a creative process that I’d not previously thought about exploring in music)
• Audience feedback*

This last one seems to be at odds with what I’ve said at the beginning, so I guess I should qualify it. The way that my audience’s feedback influences me is

• understanding the *effect* of music, and the shape of a set
• the times when someone tells me what my music means to them, and it contains accidental insight.

I’m not closed off to the influence of anyone, but I am well aware that the final arbiter of value when I’m making my music has to be my own taste. I’m aware of my limitations, of the things I don’t understand, and know that my understanding of music is still growing, as is my ability to take that understand and turn it into the music I hear in my head.

As a teacher, these observations influence everything I do. Almost everyone I’ve ever met has grown up surrounded by music. It may have been a specific kind of music, but it’s there, front and centre in all of our lives (I had a friend at school who didn’t discover pop music til well into their teens, and so despite having a really nuanced knowledge of orchestral music, gravitated towards the saccharin sounds of Stock Aitken and Waterman, having none of the historical perspective on what makes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pop music…)

So I try to take that knowledge and awareness that we all have of the music around us, and harness it, label it, describe it and channel it into a way of thinking about and playing music. If you have ‘taste’ (not ‘good’ taste, just taste) you have an ear for music, you have things that make sense to you and things that don’t. That’s musical, and can be turned into a desire to play, and a path to creating your own music, your own soundtrack, your own expression. That is what Beyond Bass Camp is all about.

Because so much that happens in music education is based on a model established for teaching classical repertoire, the emphasis is hugely on “Is It Right?” - the notes on the page are the right notes, any other notes are wrong notes, and there are pre-established measures of what are the ‘right‘ ways to play a piece, what are the ‘right‘ techniques to use… The fact that at some point they were were established as ‘right‘ because of someone’s idea of ‘good‘ has been lost somewhere down the years – the subjective aesthetic assessment of a piece of music by the person playing it is no longer a factor in deciding whether the performance is worthwhile, meaningful, pleasing or anything else…

Which, if you’re playing your own music – be it rock, jazz, pop, funk, soul, folk or open improv – is clearly nonsense. The question of “Is It Good?” is far more important than some externally imposed notion of ‘right’. The history of musical innovation is full of people doing the ‘wrong‘ thing and finding that it was ‘good‘… Better in fact than when they tried to play it ‘right‘. But in the classical tradition, that space for innovation was the sole preserve of that lofty class of musician; the composer. In truth, we’re all composers.

Composition and improvisation are very much a part of a healthy beginning in music - in fact, even kids learning orchestral instruments often write music of their own until the culture they operate in impresses upon them that they should really be playing the music of the ‘masters’, not trifling themselves with writing ‘inferior’ music. For too long, composition has been something that people grow into, or are ‘allowed’ to do once they reach a certain point. Rather than seeing writing and improvising music as two strands in the thread of musical development, they’ve been hijacked as destinations.

So it’s something that’s integral to the way I teach – encouraging students to make their own assessment of whether what they are doing is ‘good’, and developing better listening skills to be able to really hear what that are playing rather than what they think they are playing. It’s one of the huge gifts I’ve had from looping – when what you play loops round and comes back at you as part of the music you’re performing at the time, you get pretty good pretty quick at assessing it, adjusting it, and making sure that it is ‘good’ – you’re going to be hearing it a lot!

And it was also a big part of the motivation behind The Recycle Collective; my currently-on-hiatus improv music night, in which I brought together different musicians to play improvised music together, with no notion of what was ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’, just a shared desire that what we do be ‘good’. In that situation anything I choose to play is about adding to, shaping, building and moving the music towards an evolving shared idea of what ‘good’ is. It too was one of the best learning environments I’ve ever been in.

At the Beyond Bass Camp masterclasses, there’ll be plenty of time and space to consider what we think is good, get better at listening and develop the control to make happen that which we’ve decided is ‘the best‘.

I’d not actually seen or heard her sing, or speak, or anything until yesterday, when a friend who was deeply moved by her performance sent me a link to her singing on YouTube.

Her voice is fine – she’s not the greatest singer ever, but singing over someone else’s arrangement of a show tune, she made a more than fair fist of it, in the way you’d expect someone singing in a semi-pro or touring production of the show to do. Nothing original, no twists, no surprises, just good ole fashioned show tune singing of the Elaine Paige/Barbara Dixon variety. Nothing wrong with that at all.

What was deeply wrong was the way the ‘surprise’ was set up – see, she’s a middle aged frumpy looking lady, she’s not supposed to have a voice. All the beautiful people are the singers, aren’t they? After all, the same genes that control looks control singing talent. Frumpy people are only there to laugh at.

But no! The surprise was, she turned out to be ‘incredible’ ‘amazing’ ‘breath-taking’… yada yada. I’m not taking anything away from her. If I walked into a bar and she was singing with a piano, I’d clap, probably comment on how good the singer was, but thus far, all we’ve seen her do is karaoke. She’s singing to backing tracks on TV.

So what does that say? Steve Dixon, @rotassator on twitter, posted a link to this quote the other day -

If everything is “good,” then nothing really can be. Relativism is great, to a point, and then it just gets in the way of honest judgment; the result is a celebration of ubiquitous mediocrity.
— Timothy Samara, Design Elements—A Graphic Style Manual

I’m not suggesting that Susan Boyle is mediocre. But I’m also not willing to be hoodwinked into thinking she’s better than she is just because a bunch of TV talent show hosts were shocked that the usual haul of utterly banal wannabe models were upstaged by an older woman, with no tv presentation skills, who could sing well to a backing track.

Her sudden fame is the product of a TV production company desperate for ratings, and willing to use Susan’s desire to be a professional singer to make it look like she’s sensational. They’re lying to Susan that her dreams will be fulfilled on the daytime TV circuit, peddling an album of show-tunes, and they’re lying to us by telling us that having a good singing voice is the pinnacle of what music has to offer, and the ultimate reward for having a decent voice is to move Piers “no credentials as a music A&R man” Morgan close to tears.

Singing cover tunes isn’t bad; it’s not qualitatively worse than singing your own music, if that’s what motivates you. But you’re telling your story through someone else’s words, and being given the room to grow and learn how to tell your own story, to write your own music, to arrange the songs yourself, to make your own decisions about what’s good and bad is a journey that should be encouraged. Encouraged for its own sake, for the artist to dig deep into themselves, to continuously re-evaluate, to be allowed to spend a lifetime making a deeper connection between how we see things and how we put music to that perception.

And that doesn’t happen through the fairy-tales of TV talent shows. I wish Susan Boyle all the best. I hope she makes enough money out of what she’s doing to spend time learning more about music, learning more about the world through the process of playing music. I hope she gets to write some songs – I’d love to hear what she’d come up with. But I hate to think of her being marketed as ‘the frumpy lady with the big voice’, like some kind of sentimental freak show.

It’s easy for music education to play to these myths, to sell people music lessons on the premise that they’ll fulfill their superstar dreams. But that’s selling music short. It’s not about what you play it’s about why. I’m as happy teaching kids to play along with Green Day tracks as I am teaching people to write and arrange their own music. It’s all about developing a love for music, and a love for self expression through music. Being inspired by famous musicians is great. Playing solely because you want to be like them is tragic.