Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
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About Me
- Gregg Brennan
- Gregg Brennan is a composer, drummer, educator, bandleader and painter currently living in Toronto, Canada. He is a graduate of Berklee College of music and has studied with, among others, Bob Moses, Ian Froman, Skip Hadden and Joe Hunt. Gregg has recorded 2 albums with his own bands and has appeared on numerous other co-led and sideman outings. He is co-leader of the Toronto based independent artist consortium and label, Standback Records (www.standbackrecords.com) as well as a member of the International Association for Jazz Education.
Gregg Brennan
In Thought
Kevin Parkinson
In Motion
4 comments:
Agreed - it's when mistakes are repeated troughout a career that I start to wonder though!!
I suppose you are right...ideally it would be great to always be making new mistakes.
The mistakes I was referring to in my other posts had mainly to do with execution ( i.e. you are tyinh to do one thing and another comes out or you mean to give a really subtle shot on your cymbal and it comes out really loud.
The mistakes you are talking about it seems have more to with planning and allowing oneself to be in certain situations. For example, I had a period when I lived with a group of musicians in a house together. This was a very experimental ( e.g. making recordings of saxophone and pop bottles filled with different levels of water ) and perhaps somewhat necessary stage for me, where there was a lot of room to explore even in public.
After a while though, I became rather dissatisfied with the product, which I can relate to a review of a session William Parker was involved with where Fred talks about "sound masses that drift towards no particular destination."
Since I have a natural urge to start somewhere, go somewhere and end somewhere ( i.e. bring something into form ) there are a lot of "free form" situations where it would be a mistake for me to participate in ... so I do stay away from them generally, while remaining open to the fact the beauty can happen anywhere.
Well put - I really should have said 'the same mistakes repeated throughout a career', and agree that new mistakes can be wonderful.
Free improvisation within generally agreed jazz-related structures is my favourite area of music. Some things I've seen over the years however are best left to rehearsals and only called into a performance once they have been tested and evaluated.
I suppose it's the European free improvisation movement that are the worst offenders - performances they claim with a manifesto-like committment to be fresh each time. In reality they adopt similar conventions and the music often only varies at a microscopic level.
Is purely microtonal and indeterminate playing any more valid than playing a 'standard' in a free context just because it is so much harder to evaluate? I don't think so, though sometimes it can be AS valid when things 'come together' and work.
Like a finger print, that kind of music is always going to be unique, but to the naked eye/ear it always looks or sounds very similar.
'As alike or unalike as trees', was the way David Ilic once described the music of AMM, and that says it all really - it's ultimately in the ear of the beholder...
Like you Fred, I like Improvisers who do not limit themselves to one particular type of genre when crafting a spontaneous creation. This is what I think is great about William Parker; he is very open and visibly influenced by most of the music of the world and does not have any problem bringing those sounds in, whether it sounds traditional or not. So, while I don't necessarily like all of William Parker's music, I commend him on being unapologetic in being himself as well as being one of those musicians who I see makes good mistakes.
For another example, and please note that Keith Jarrett is literally one of my musical heroes ( beside John Coltrane ). If you listen to Keith Jarrett's Radiance solo piano concert in Japan, you will hear him going into areas you have rarely heard him do in public. In the documentary "The Art of Improvisation" he mentions that in that concert he experienced his left hand knowing things that he did not, and for that concert, he just let his hands play. The result, in my opinion is a less profound product than I am used to hearing from Jarrett. Kudos to him for challenging his own limits ( which you will find him doing in his trio as of late as well ) but I find myself thinking ( and this is sort of in response to Fred's comment that some things are "best left to rehearsals and only called into a performance once they have been tested and evaluated" ), is this kind of thing appropriate for presenting to a live audience? Then again, I do not like to be one who says "this is the way things should be done", so perhaps it is ok to go to a concert and completely hate it even if you love the artist. The important things is, how did it affect you deep down?
With regard to Fred's comment "I suppose it's the European free improvisation movement that are the worst offenders" of directionless sound fluff, I can see where you are coming from there, but in my experience, there are equal offenders throughout the world.
Is purely micro tonal and indeterminate playing any more valid than playing a 'standard' in a free context just because it is so much harder to evaluate?
No, I do not think so ( although since most ears are attuned to more consonant sounds, most of us are more fond of the standard approach ) but rather it's the qualities that bubble up from the depths, that expand outwards in breadth and that climb to the heights that give perfectness, consonance or dissonance its' real beauty and power, and more often than not that gets put aside in favour of catchy-ness or some texture or a certain style that pleases us personally.
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