Why is it whenever I make a comment about a player/players it gets interpreted as "they have to do it "my way or the highway?" There is no right or wrong method of performance, there's just "maximum performance" and I don't believe one can deliver that if your attention is focused on a chart or the sheet music rather than totally on an audience. If someone chooses to think differently, that's fine by me. I'm only offering my comments on what I see and don’t see in other performers. That’s all they are are “comments” and NOT “commands.” Goodness, hasn’t anyone been listening to Donny lately.......”we’re all here to learn from each other!”

Last week I went to another outdoor concert to see a band. First of all he had speakers that were so small you couldn’t hear them if they were set up in a telephone booth and you were the only person in there listening to them. Of course, I’m not supposed to comment on that or I'll have him thinking he’s supposed to do it my way, right? Then the mix.......because you couldn’t hear the vocalist (singing through the mini-speakers), the drummer was overpowering her. But Mark, keep your mouth shut.......don’t offer any suggestion that could be misinterpreted!

But, THIS is what I was leading up to. This man, by his own admission, has been playing 50 years.......and he’s still stopping between songs to find where he put the music to the next song. Talk about “dead space.” There was more of it there than you’d find in a cemetery. It gets worse.......never looked at the audience once or spoke to them even. At the end of each song, he turned to the band to discuss the next tune. All this stuff should have been mastered in his head, so he could concentrate on the vibes coming from the audience.

Speaking for myself, when I’m playing a room I don’t walk into that room with music or cue cards or anything but my instrument in hand. I don’t know what I’m going to start with or what I’m going to end with or what I’m going to play in between. I just know I’m going to stay in direct contact with the audience every second, not take my eyes off them to read any music (it's all in my head), not going to distract myself thinking about what I’m going to play next. I’ll wait until almost the last measure of the song I'm playing to determine what song fits in next with the audience. The dynamics of the audience changes from minute to minute. A few weeks ago, I played a great song, but it wasn’t going down well. I was watching the audience getting restless, and so, immediately, I stopped that song and got their attention back with “76 Trombones.” I couldn’t do that if I had to take the time to look up the song.




Answer.......it doesn’t, unless you’re shooting for maximum versatility where you can change your performance the moment the audience changes their listening moods (which is appx every five seconds)



Sometimes yes, sometimes no.



and what do you do if play list #1 doesn’t work and you go to play list #2 and that’s not working either?



me neither.......I don’t believe there’s any mention in the 10 Commandments that you can’t play one song at a time



Agree again, but it really would be nice if (as Donny keeps saying) musicians learned to “discuss and dialogue” and "learn from each other" rather than interpret comments as challenges.

BTW.....I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m anything more than a “big fish in a little pond.” Always have been and always will be. But one thing I consider myself real good at, and that’s in “delivering” music to an audience.......different than just playing music to an audience.

Well, I got all that out of my system. I write this stuff not to hear myself talk but to try and stimulate more personal music conversation among the members…..not just which keyboard is the best. After all, we're finally running out of new keyboards to compare!