Hey, there's roomm for *everybody*.

I love music.

Lots of the guys and gals I play with frequently don't understand that concept these days, it seems. The heavy jazz players look with disdain towards playing or listening to *anything* else, as do the garage band players, as do the folk singers, as do the lounge lizards, as do the practitioners of R&B, Country, Bluegrass, etc. etc. etc.

I enjoy most all genres, some more than others.

I learn from most all genres.

I enjoy listening to the good, the bad and the ugly, the virtuosos as well as the beginners.

I generally will have suggestions to all on how I think they can improve, too.

"Keep listening. Never become so self-important that you can't listen to other players. Live cleanly....Do right....You can improve as a player by improving as a person. It's a duty we owe to ourselves." --John Coltrane

Music is a life long endeavor.

To paraphrase the late great Andres Segovia, on his 80th birthday, who, when brought up to the mic, stated that for his 80th birthday all he wanted was "another 80 years to try to master the thing" -- there is a humbling nature to the ones who are truly great at it. The Muse keeps it that way.

As with any subject, "Knowledge is Power".

The jazz cats at the Musician's Union Local in NYC back in the day couldn't understand why the great Charlie "Bird" Parker, jazz saxophonist extraordinaire who was one of the early inventors of Bebop and Modern Jazz theory, understanding and practice would put money into the jukebox in the Local Hall's bar and then select Country or Country Western songs, which at that time were more commonly known and identifed by the music publishers of the day as, "Hillbilly Music". They wrote that Bird would just look at them innocently when they would bitch and say, "Man, listen to the *stories*!"

Exactly.


Whether you can only strum a few open "folk" chords on a guitar or can fly up and down the neck with ease, you can still create MAGIC or you can sound not-so-pleasant-to-hear.

Whether you can hold a few basic triads with your LH on an accompaniment keyboard while punching out a few base melodies with RH or singing, or you can sit a grand piano by yourself and play the whole thing manually can be bad in both cases or good in both cases.

PERFORMANCE.

No matter what kind of music you attempt to play, no matter the level of complexity of that music -- or not -- everyone gotta work on their PERFORMANCE.

One last quote:

"Pracice? Sure I practice. If I miss one day of practice, I know it. If I miss two days of practice, my wife knows it. But if I miss THREE days of practice, the whole damn world knows it!" --Vladimir Horowitz


My late father used to tell me the above quote when I was a wee lad learning to blow my trumpet and tinkel those ivories. And he would RE-tell it as needed.

Thank you, Mac. That (and your earlier instructive post) are the best things I've read in this forum for a long time.

Good post, Mac!



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Bill in Dayton

Mac...Chas...Bill, Taike and others. This kind of discourse is wonderful; a major benefit of serious involvement in the enjoyment, creation and evolution of music.


Thanks to all...


Russ

"When I was a child, I played with the things of a child, when I became a man, I put away childish things."

That's somewhere in Proverbs.

Heck, when I was a lot younger I didn't want to delve that deeply into music theory either. And I didn't.

Nothing wrong with being young. Nothing at all.

The youth of today will all too soon be the adults of tomorrow. As long as some few of them learn that the easy and wide path is often the road to destruction, we can count on those few to take the straight and narrow instead. That will assure a "Steely Dan" situation happens for each succeeding generation.

And it is indeed the rarity of the thing that imparts a lot of its value.


--Mac