While at the Manhattan School of Music, he becam. Effortless Mastery -- 20th Anniversary Edition. This special limited edition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the profound text that inspired thousands of musicians to reach that place in their music where.
JazzTimes has been published continuously since and is the recipient of numerous awards for journalisim and graphic design. A large crossection of music af. Musicking Shakespeare. Demonstrates how Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten, responding to Shakespeare's juxtaposition of contrasting theatrical styles, devised music dramas that cal. The creators of this series are united by passion for literature and driven by the intention of making all p.
Being a musician can often be a paradoxical experience. So if you're going to rate it leave a dang review explaining the 5 or even 1 star rating you've given this. A 5 star review means it has helped you achieve incredible facility and creativeness.
A 1 star meaning its practically fraudulent. Whatever your case, both are deserving of a review!!! Apple Books Preview. Publisher Description. Customer Reviews. More Books by Kenny Werner. The Kenny Werner Collection Songbook. In America, where the drums were prohibited for many generations, this legacy of possession- trance dance rhythm was 9Hart, Mickey. Even the conqueror in war what is he looking for?
No matter how much of the world he rules during his life, he will have to surrender it when he dies. So what is he really after? When a musician superficially craves security in the level of his playing, what is he really after?
It is said that one drop of ecstasy tasted from the self, the God inside us, renders all other pursuits insignificant. At that point, the seeker has found everything he has sought. Every song is either praise or an entreatment for more connection with the beloved. As enslaved peoples are separated from their religion, the lyrics of the song change. The cry is for sense pleasures: more sex, money, alcohol. How many blues and rock and roll songs speak about that?
But the cry is still there, even if man no longer knows for what. Finally, jazz visionaries revive it as an Indian Tala and ascend on its numeric highway. Artists who can enter this state are the most focused performers, the most accomplished at what they do, and they usually give us the most memorable concerts. How does one achieve that level of musicianship of humanness? How does one evolve into a riveting presence so worthy of praise?
This is a paradox that most people can prove through their own experience. Musicians Who Care Too Much Think of a time when you really needed to sound good. At that moment you wanted to play so good!
How well did you play under those circumstances? How did that sound? You were grooving! Playing great and having a great time! Now what happened the next night? You thought about how good you had played the night before, and you wanted to do it again! How did this gig go? Usually, a bad gig follows a good gig for the following reason: you are thinking about how you made it happen the other night, and you want to do it again. That expectation causes the gig to go sour, and you play lousy. At insecure times in the day after a good gig, your mind can spin back to that special solo, and your calmness is restored.
The feeling is similar to taking a cruise on a sinking ship! Think about it. What does that mean? It is a startling realization. This is the opposite of what has always been thought of as true. By not caring, you play better! No matter how much people are intellectually aware, they will not be able to control their concern once they start to play.
You will still be consumed with how good you sound! How many people are willing to get up on stage, play their instruments, and sound awful? A person who is not afraid to fail, succeeds.
And a person who is not afraid to sound terrible may sound great. Afraid of Sounding Bad When you approach your instrument, no matter what lofty goals you say you have, wanting to sound good will predominate and render you impotent.
Why is that? A really deep breath is going to add tone and weight to the next phrase, but the horn player is not sure about that next phrase.
Tardier, Inc , p. Reason gives birth to doubt, which destroys the thought-power before it is able to fulfill its destiny. At that moment, the absolute necessity to exhale would override any trepidation about the musicality of the phrase. Fear takes away the strength of what you are doing. Pianists often show their fear in raised shoulders, stiff necks and tense minds. The result is anemic tone and rhythm. In this way their fears are manifested.
You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure. Piano playing feels good to the muscles if you play freely. Once, while sitting in on a conducting class with Gunther Schuller, I noticed that a similar neurosis exists in the act of conducting. As the students in the class came up to conduct, their bodies would assume artificial postures. Their faces would reflect an austerity not relevant to the situation. I noticed that they showed a great concern for what they were doing, and this caused a stiffness in their whole persona.
Some students would get up on their toes to emphasize the dynamics. Gunther would make comments to them about the extra effort they were making, and how it broke the fluidity of motion. Gunther invited him to enjoy the music. He kept replying that he was not sad, but concentrating. Both conductors are famous for their simplicity, and it is a testimony to the power of self-assurance that these conductors can get more response from an orchestra with a subtle wave of a hand than others can with extraneous body-english and over-emphasis.
What makes that happen? It is the drawing power of the inner self. From a technical point of view, conducting and piano playing are similar in that the rhythm must be entirely in the hand.
Body-english is fine if it reflects joy or spirit, but if it is needed to make the hands work, it is detrimental. When Gunther got the students to relax the rest of their bodies, even a little bit, the crispness of the beat was somewhat lost because of their reliance on tension.
Why are you afraid to sound bad? One of the cats! The sad fact is that most musicians judge their value as a person by their level of playing. Therein lies an unhealthy linkage between musical proficiency and selfworth. It raises the stakes for what it means to play badly or well. This puts undue pressure on the act of playing and as we just proved with the examples in our own lives, when the pressure is on to sound good we play worse and so on and so forth.
Perhaps they have a sense of humor about it. But for most musicians, music students, and teachers, the musical life is pressure, even depression! Does the following sound familiar? You think about your life all day long, your mind filled with issues. Should I move to New York? Should I stay in school? Should I become a teacher, or should I try and make it? If I got out of school, I could shed practice more, maybe get better.
Music is not supposed to be a source of depression! Music is a gift. Music is ecstasy. But, you have to discover a reason for living that is more important than playing! You need a sense of self that is stable, durable and not attached to your last solo. And, paradoxically, that makes you play better!
It removes the consequences and puts everything in perspective. The pressure is gone It takes more than knowing that intellectually in order to change. Going Beyond Music, unencumbered by unhealthy constraints, induces a state of ecstasy in the musician and audience.
Music is there for our enjoyment and enrichment. Music is literally the sound of joy and devotion. It is a gift from God to allow us to express the incredible ecstasy of our inner nature. Falling short of that, music lays itself at our feet for expressing any of the countless feelings associated with the human condition.
All other goals are limited goals. My fouryear-old daughter can walk over to the piano and enjoy herself more than ninety-five percent of the professional pianists.
Have you ever played an instrument other than your own, whether it be a saxophonist playing piano, or a pianist playing drums? The harder you try, the worse you play. Remember that your own experiences bear this out. New York: Pantheon, In a relatively comfortable society like ours, musicians get caught up in mundane issues. You wake up in your little world and wonder how good you sound. How do I sound now? But in music, people exert real effort, withholding love from themselves and others, just trying to sound good.
What a foolish waste of a life! When you have those good nights and you use the memory of them to feel secure, your sense of security is coming from outside you. You already are great. Did you know that? If you play from that perspective, your music will become deeper. You will see beyond the limited goal of sounding good. Playing can be a joyous celebration of who you are.
When I play, I try to ignore the mundane considerations in my head and focus on the truth. Thanks for this job in life.
There are certainly many jobs that are less pleasant. Here is a very simple test to prove that music is not that important: Go to the kitchen and get a plastic bag. Place it over your head, tying the opening snugly around your neck so that no air can get through.
By the count of twenty, let me ask you: how important is music? Is Charlie Parker important? By the count of 35, would you be debating whether or not bebop was the real music? We lose sight of reality very easily because of the little dictator in our heads: the mind. For the people in Somalia, food, not bebop, is important. The absence of pain is important. Food, shelter, clean air, clean water, clothes to wear: these are more important than musical concerns, if not music itself.
Music is not the cake. It is one of the enjoyments provided for us on this planet, in this life. In the overall scheme of things, your level of proficiency is not important. But music played under those circumstances tends to be the kind that matters, not the mundane kind that exists in the mind only. People without real problems can dwell too much in their thoughts. They may be consumed with their egotistical need to sound good.
There is no ecstasy, love or spiritual sustenance. Who Cares? Who cares if you ever play another note of music? No one. What global purpose are you fulfilling?
What burning need? Do you think that there is a shortage of good jazz musicians? There are holes in the ozone and the ozone layer is depleting. The seas are getting more polluted every year. There are fewer and fewer places where you can turn on the tap and drink the water.
There are serious food shortages around the globe. A lot of them! Thousands come out of schools and universities every year.
They multiply like coat hangers in your closet. Did you ever notice how you always have more and more coat hangers without ever buying one? Has anyone ever bought a coat hanger? They can play fast. They can burn. They can play blues and rhythm changes. We get more of these people every year.
So your participation is not important. Go back to your homes and start a new life! Expression What do we need? Artists take all that technology, all that language, and say something. They express something from very deep in their soul, or their deepest thoughts, political statements, love of homeland, love of self and of others, or just something that needs to be said!
Such people are not caught up in the petty issues of the day, but keep their eyes fixed on the truth as they know it. They may be visionaries, luminaries that light the way for the rest of us. They give us art from the soul, or the genitals, or from whatever drives them.
When Ben Webster or Lester Young played a ballad, the atmosphere was supercharged. Their ballads were emotional, sexual or spiritual statements. We need to hear the process of a musician working on himself. They have the opportunity to tell us a story and make us feel its meaning, but they miss the point.
We hear all this, but where is that voice, that original voice, that individual, primal need? Where is Miles? Where is the music? Bebop is a language, for example. If you strip away the romantic folklore about heroin, Harlem, and 52nd Street, it comes down to being a rhythmic and melodic language.
If you relate to it as language, and not style, you can personalize it more easily. If you master that language, you can use it to say anything you want. If you master the English language, does that make you a poet? Being able to speak in complete sentences is not an art, but a technical skill. Being a poet, a playwright or lyricist that is art. Looking at it this way resolves a long-standing controversy about technique versus creativity.
What could the poet or playwright write without command of language? Of course not. It all depends on what you say with language. Helps the Planet Music never dies in terrible times.
To the contrary, it flourishes. At those times, the essence of what music can provide really comes through. Ultimately, musicians of the world must come to realize the potential of their calling. Like the shamans, we may serve as healers, metaphysicians, inciters, exciters, spiritual guides and sources of inspiration.
If the musician is illumined from within, he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps. Then he is serving as a vehicle for the healing ocean of sound to wash over our planet and its people, healing what ails us. Such music is truly important. But this fear is quite irrational. Enslaved by ego, we are encased in fear. What are the consequences of playing poorly? Nothing really, compared with the consequences of, say, jumping off a cliff.
Yet if you ask some classical musicians to improvise, they might behave as if you were pushing them off a cliff! Why is this so? As stated before, many of us have formed an unhealthy linkage between who we are and how we play. We fear being inadequate and that leads to ineffective playing, practicing, and listening. Fear closes all doors to the true self, that brilliant center where the ecstasy lies.
On the other hand, without excess mental baggage, playing music produces a feeling more exquisite than the sweetest nectar this world has to offer. It is the sound, smell and taste of grace. It may seem like a fairy tale, but this is the experience.
However, the mechanism of fear makes such ecstasy unimaginable. He points out that fear of speaking before an assembly may seem light compared with the others, but we may take that to mean speaking up, or performing. Or it could literally be ghosts; the legacy of music left by the great masters. People who have unusual difficulty learning and playing might have been told at an early age that playing music is very difficult, or that they were untalented. Once that is believed, it becomes very hard to progress.
I see that in so many students. The drive to assuage those fears derails the quest for mastery. Where does fear originate? From the mind? Tardier, Inc. Separateness invites comparison and competition. By contrast, dissolution of the ego and union with the divine is the goal of Indian music.
Tyrannized by our egos, we live in a state the Hindus call maya, or delusion. We think we need so much. Desires multiply, and we know nothing of real inner happiness.
Fear sabotages us at every turn. Taking an honest inventory of our musicianship is difficult. Some feel more comfortable condemning themselves totally than accurately assessing their strengths and weaknesses. They are usually defeated by a sense of futility before they play the first note. Others believe themselves to be better than they are, not wanting to face the gaps they need to work on. Their performances tend to hit or miss, but they rationalize that their best performances are how they really play, and their worst performances are flukes.
In this way they avoid fixing and cleaning up what needs to be fixed and cleaned. In either case, the disclosure of flaws in their playing hurts. Because there is so much emotion attached to the flaws, the latter group would try to overlook them, and the former would use them as evidence that they stink. Improvement is delayed for years, or perhaps forever.
The Music of India. New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc. I have to play hipper. This should burn more. It has to be more complex You start thumping your feet, trying to coerce music out of yourself, or sing along for emphasis. It sounds nervous, and the tone is lost. Perhaps you start rushing or over-playing and just then you might get lost in the form or in the time. Sound familiar? Fear of inadequacy causes you to ignore the ideas that want to come naturally. Trapped in thought, you cannot groove.
Believing that playing is a difficult, painful process, we shun anything that seems easy. So ready or not, you will play it! You have fallen into an ego trap and sound terrible. Had the piece you were practicing been fully absorbed, it would have come out naturally and enhanced your performance. You might have very well given up practicing that item, either because you thought you had it, or because you were completely fed up waiting for it to work.
In your delusion, you think that you must know eighty-five styles of music. Have you? It may not be an original style, but it is the style he has embraced. You may think that you can never repeat yourself, but jazz is not total improvisation. Sometimes they are even playing the same things in the same places. The improvisational aspect is the juxtaposition of those phrases, but the notes within the phrases are often the same.
Those are the ones that groove. Fear of ghosts is so common in young players. That would be like shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to be funky and rhythmic, thinking of Herbie Hancock would inhibit that.
Listening to a Miles Davis quintet album from the sixties before you go to the gig could be a disaster. At those moments your shoulders go up, your neck strains, your face crumples up into a prune as you try to be somebody else.
Most of us would settle for being able to recreate these musicians, but since most of us are not on that level of proficiency, we probably could never do it convincingly and would overextend ourselves trying.
If you listen to those early recordings, Miles sounds as if he were struggling a bit. With the force of Gillespie still ringing in his ears, he had not yet found his center of power. It was only later, when Miles found his own approach, that his voice, tempo, style, power and grace emerged. Without fear of sounding bad, you are free to be real. Fear lurks in the mind. If you want to be free, master your mind. Once you conquer that basic fear, when you are able to make that leap from one note to the next without thinking or preparing for it, then you are improvising.
On the contrary. They are more objective,in what they hear than the musician. A fearless improviser who likes to turn himself on in public will have an impact on any audience.
In fact, I would often rely more on the judgment of the sensitive layman than that of a professional, since a professional, because of his constant involvement with the mechanics of music, must fight to preserve the naivete that the layman already possesses.
In fear, we expect; with love, we accept. Rhapsody Films Inc. Ralph Waldo Emerson Just as fear pollutes the environment for creativity, it also inhibits effective study. The mind wreaks havoc, and the ego has a picnic. For example, you want to be a great jazz player, and your mind tells you that you must succeed by a certain age. You feel as though there is a huge workload ahead of you with so little time. You see, fear has ruined your practicing by rushing you through the material, rendering you unable to absorb anything.
You try to cover too much ground every time you practice, barely skimming the surface of each item, and then moving on. You ignore the fact that you can barely execute the material, because you have no time to notice that. Nothing is mastered. Hearing yourself play the exercise correctly once or twice, you rationalize that you have it.
You are practicing many things, but nothing is sinking in, and nothing you practice is surfacing when you play. You never stop to think that you should be playing better for all this practice. Spending enough time learning something would feel interminably slow, but that is the way of true growth. It takes what it takes. Then you will truly be wasting your time! Even while focusing on one thing, the mind is exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure with the thought of the other things that need tending to.
This creates a very anxious and insecure feeling. When you skim the surface, you acquire many bad habits with regard to tempo, fingering and other details. Repetition of these bad habits causes them to grow ingrained ever more deeply into your subconscious, so that you are actually doing what I call negative practice.
In this way, one hour of practicing is better than two, thirty minutes is better than an hour, and no practicing at all would be preferable to that kind of negative practice! Many musicians are so fixated on complex elements that they fail to spend enough time on the basics.
As a result, they tend to have all sorts of glitches basic gaps in their playing. For example, if basic chord progressions are not fully digested, you will struggle with most standard tunes.
Eighty percent of all jazz standards are comprised of the II-V-I progression, a succession of chords. But before mastering this fundamental progression, your restless mind may have already driven you to study more exotic ones.
You move on, leaving the previous material in an unusable state. And you never become a great player. Your mind has played a trick on you. Dysfunctional practicing is one by-product of fear and ego. If this is you, be kind to yourself. Maybe after lunch. Now you need to cool out. I need to digest for a while. You procrastinated the whole day away. Perhaps some drug is part of the diversion. Real practicing never takes place, and you go to bed disappointed in yourself again.
This feeds the fire of self-loathing. It is your overactive mind that cannot concentrate maybe if you wake up an hour earlier, you might accomplish something before your mind wakes up! Instead of moving forward a tiny bit each day and evolving, you spend most of the day in your head obsessing about your life.
I joke with students in my clinics, saying that I want them to borrow five minutes from those hours they spend each day obsessing about themselves, and use that time to practice! Why does one do nothing when one cares so passionately about playing music? It is not laziness; it is a sense of being overwhelmed. You need to know this. Five-minute interludes center the mind.
Their anxiety is caused by two quandaries: how long should they practice, and what should they begin with. These people are trapped in their heads. Being afflicted by the inability to act, you feel locked out of a glass-enclosed world of functioning musicians.
You bang on the glass with scattered practice habits, but nobody hears you. All your attempts to enter are futile. Fear of not becoming great has kept you from becoming great. To find a way out of this dilemma, a thorough re-programming of your mind is necessary. This is an important point. It is common practice to give weekly assignments rather than support the student in understanding the material.
I firmly believe that educators should rethink this approach. Burying the student in assignments will often sink him. Sometimes it is necessary to discontinue lessons until the student regains his bearings.
But since many were taught this way, as a result, they teach this way. Fear and anxiety are passed on from generation to generation. Also there are those who occupy positions of authority, but are incompetent and that too causes fear. The world is blessed with many accomplished, even inspired, teachers, but there are also many teachers that fit the description above. Too many. Tarcher, Inc.
The student knows something is wrong, but may not realize that his teacher is also in the dark. I want to reiterate that there are many great and effective teachers. However, I am not referring to them at the moment. The reason I am talking about poor teachers is that we need to articulate all barriers to mastery and, if possible, to restore clarity.
A frustrated teacher has a self-loathing problem that grows over time. He might appear to be generally disgruntled. He is conspicuously absent from important musical events, such as when a great player comes to town. Sometimes a student comes along who plays well and forces the teacher to confront his own ego.
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