EMOTION & MAGIC IN MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Bill Benzon

This document is in two parts.  The first is some experiences I've had
as a musician which give me some insight into how emotion & magic
arise in musical performance.  The second part is a list of passages
on the same issue which I've culled from various sources over the
years.  Enjoy.  If you have any similar experiences, I'd like to know
about them.

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PART 1 PART 1 PART 1 PART 1 PART 1 PART 1

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Mind, body, and music


    This document contains a number of experiences I've had playing
music.  I've tried to include distinctly different experiences.  One
aspect of these experiences which particularly interests me is whether
they are:

     TRANSITION:  Taking you into a sustained state.
     SUSTAINED:  A general mode of playing that holds steady for some period.
     PEAK:  Comes at the end of sustained playing; may be intense but need
            not be cosmically mind blowing.  It is definite.

There's also the general intensity and the emotional quality, which
can be difficult to identify.  And how my body felt and what I did
with it to get the result.


On lizard brain:  animal power

    I was playing with a RnB band at a place called Skinflints.  It
was 2am (ain't it always), we were exhausted after 5 hours, and my
chops were shot.  We were playing "Stormy Monday."  Normally I don't
solo on that tune; but, it's a slow blues, which I dearly love.  So,
despite no chops, I decided to take a chorus.  I started in the lower-
middle register and built by playing more complex lines and moving to
the upper register.  I hit my climax at bar 11, as anticipated, and
could tell that the rhythm section expected me to play another 12.  If
I'd had any sense I'd have ignored them and stopped at the end of my
one chorus.  My lips were crying out in pain.  I absolutely couldn't
remain in the upper register, nor could I drop down and build back up.
And I didn't like the idea of following a good chorus -- which it had
been to that point -- with a mediocre one.  However, in a split-split
second I decided "oh, what the hell" and did a Sonny Rollins, dropping
to the middle register, growling and flutter tonguing to make the
nastiest bluesiest sound I could.  The old lizard brain took over,
captain cat went on the prowl, and I went into overdrive.  I nailed it
to the wall.  Solid.

    Note:  While this account makes it seem like I was doing a lot of
thinking and calculating while playing, that's not so.  For one thing,
there was no time to think; the whole solo couldn't have lasted much
more than a minute and a half (96 beats at, say, 60 per minute).  The
thinking was mostly a matter of a few quick intuitive judgments and
was in music and images more than in words or verbal symbols.  My
initial strategizing before I started playing was simply a decision to
follow an improvisatory strategy I'd followed thousands of times
before, start simple and build from there.  That's a no-brainer.  When
I decided to attempt a second chorus in the manner of Sonny Rollins
what happened was my mind flashed an image of Rollins playing a
concert (which I'd attended at Jacob's Pillow) where he ended one
particular solo, to great effect, by going to the bottom register and
playing with strength, force, and cajones.  The flash of that image
was how I made my decision on how to approach the second 12 bars.
Once I made that decision I had the definite sense of a another force
-- which I call the lizard brain after Dr. Paul MacLean's theory about
brain structure -- working in my playing.  [with Out of Control Rhythm
and Blues Band]

SUSTAINED, perhaps a PEAK.


Lump in the throat

    I was asked to overdub a part on a recording a folkish song called
"A Still, Small Voice".  It was sung by a woman with a basically
small, delicate voice, accompanied by 2 guitars.  As an open trumpet
sound would not blend well, I used a cup mute.

    Before the recording session I worked out the general outlines of
what I wanted to do.  In the session, as I was playing, I could feel a
lump rising in my throat, my eyes tearing slightly.  I bore down with
chest and abdomen and pushed on through.  When I walked in the the
control booth the smiles told me that my playing had gotten to them.
We decided to keep that first take.

SUSTAINED


A well-formed solo

    "Cats' Bossa" is a 32-bar, AABA bossa nova.  At our first
performance of the tune -- after rehearsing it over 2 or 3 weeks -- I
took my solo, a single chorus.  I started improvising with certain
material and elaborated in the initial 16-bars.  Then I introduced
contrasting material for the bridge and followed it through to the end
-- I forget whether or not I linked up with the material I used in the
first 16.  When it was done I had a definite sense of completion, of
having nailed it.  This seemed to be about formal excellence; my
musical ideas all made sense and formed a coherent whole.  [with Out
of Control Rhythm and Blues Band]

SUSTAINED with PEAK of modest intensity, but quite precise.




White-out

    This has happened to me many times and in many context, practicing
along, playing with various ensembles.  The dizziness I describe is
not uncommon among brass players.

    Playing in the upper register can be strenuous and, at times, you
may get dizzy and even faint momentarily.  It has to do, so I've been
told, with constricting the veins in the neck, making it difficult for
old blood to leave the head and thus for new oxygenated blood to get
to the brain.  In any event, whatever the physiological trigger, it's
not that simple.

    At it's most intense I feel dizzy and very light, warm, and bathed
in bright white light.  Then, a few seconds later, I come down.  Still
feeling good, feeling strong and rested.

    Often it does happen when I am playing a sustained upper register
passage, the sort of work that makes the face red, the neck distended.
But it's also happened while playing rapid complex, but not
particularly high, lines.  And, mere effort isn't sufficient.  You
have to be in a groove, they playing must have life and feel natural,
not just playing the notes.  In that context, you can do it.  On a
reasonable number of occasions I've been able to bring down the warmth
and lights simply by playing high, or fast/complex, and bearing down
on the sound, working with with chest and abdomen.  But, without the
groove, it doesn't make any difference what I do; it doesn't happen.

    What interests me here is that this effect seems fairly specific
to brass instruments.  But, to other instruments, and voice, have
physical limitations which can be thus put to psychological use?

When used deliberately, can be TRANSITION or PEAK depending on
placement.


Ego loss

    Two decades ago I'd played for two years with a rock band called
"St. Matthew Passion" -- a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns,
sax, trumpet, trombone.  On "She's Not There" the three horns would
start with a chaotic improvised 3-piece freak-out and then, on cue
from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first
bar of the written arrangement.

    On our last gig it was just me and the sax player, the trombone
couldn't make it.  We started and got more and more intense until
Wham! I felt myself dissolve into pure music.  It felt good.  And I
got scared, tensed up, and it was over.  After the gig the sax player
and I made a few remarks about it, enough to confirm that it had
happened to him too.  One guy from the audience came up to us and
remarked on how fine that section had been.

    That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss
in music.  For a few years I was very ambivalent about that
experience, wanting it again, fearing it.  But the memory's faded &
the ambivalence too.  I'm playing better than I ever did.  What I can
now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.

Had I remained relaxed, would have been SUSTAINED.


Confounded expectations

    I was at the piano working on an arrangement of George Harrison's
"Something".  I was working on the end of the introduction, where I
had a very simple rhythm, quarter note followed by two eights,
starting on the first beat of a 4/4 measure and repeated several
times.  Chords changed on beats 1 and 3.  I decided to see what would
happen if, instead of holding each chord for 2 beats, I would hold
each chord for 3 beats.  Thus, starting from the beginning of this
section:

     beats: 1  2  3  4  1  2  3  4  1  2  3  4
     chord: HHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZXXXXXXXXXKKKKKKKKK

The 3-beat chords no longer changed in synch with the rhythm pattern,
which was built in 2-beat units.

    As soon as I played this sequence tears came to my eyes and I got
choked up.  What caused this emotional reaction?  The chords were
perfectly ordinary dominant 7th chords in a perfectly ordinary
sequence.  The rhythm was equally ordinary.  What triggered this
"opening up" must have been the momentary conflict between the
harmonic rhythm and the basis logic of a 4/4 measure.  But where did
the emotion come from?

    Note that similar effects are used in poetry.

TRANSITION?


    Precise interaction between musicians brings about a groove Or is
it that being in a groove brings about precise interaction?

    The musical situation which brought this lesson home was a
specific one.  There were four of us, as I recall, with Ade Knowles
leading.  Each of us had a bell with two or more heads on it.  Ade
assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play.  Ade then
improvised over the interlocking parts.  Once it got going  melodies
would emerge which no one was playing.  Rather, the tones came from
one bell, then another, and another, and so on.  No one person was
playing the melody; it arose from the "cohesions" which appeared in
the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble.  Depending on
the patterns he played, Ade could "direct" the melody, but the tones
he played weren't necessarily the melody tones.  Rather, they served
to direct the melodic "cohesions" from place to place.

    The tones which were in the foreground, i.e. the melody, shifted
from bell to bell depending of the pitch and temporal relationships
between the tones.  Since three of us were playing the same thing over
and over again, the relationships which obtained between our tones
stayed the same from cycle to cycle.  However, Ade's patterns were
improvised; they were not the same from cycle to cycle.  And the tones
he played didn't simply "float on top" of the tones the rest of us
were playing.  They existed in the same tonal space, and, because of
this, they affected the moment to moment gestalt of tones in that
space.


    Something even more remarkable would occasionally happen. When,
and only  when, we were really locked together in animated playing  we
could hear relatively high-pitched tones which no one was playing.
That is, each bell had a "pitch tendency" (these bells were not
precisely tuned), but these high tones did not match the pitch
tendency of any of the bells. They were distinct tones, but not
directly attributable to any of the bells.

    I don't really know the explanation for this, but I've given it a
little thought.  Roughly, the different bells emit a wide range of
frequencies, some more strongly than others.  Since these bells were
not precisely tuned, each was putting out sounds from several harmonic
series.  With several bells together frequencies which are weak in
each bell individually could interact and become stronger through
constructive interference, strong enough for the ear to pick them out
as definite pitches.  But, to interact so that some frequencies
reinforce one another would, it seems to me, require that the
musicians coordinate their playing to 1/10,000 of a second (the tones
I heard were at least 1000 hz).  That's pretty remarkable.

    This only happened when we were in the state of relaxation
conducive to intense playing, a groove, if you will.  Without the
relaxation, no emergent tones & melodies.  According to Ade, that's
how it always is.  The "magic" of the bell happens only when the
musicians are in a groove.  And so we have a paradox.  In conventional
terms precision goes along with rational control.  In this case, the
precision interaction happens only when there is a bit of "irrational"
emotional control guiding the playing.

    This sort of interaction is, in fact, typical of any African
percussion ensemble I've heard, not just bell ensembles.  But the
effect was most striking with the bells.  The point is that the
interaction is such that patterns move into the perceptual foreground
which aren't being played by any one musician.  The melodic stream,
the foreground, moves from musician to musician.  If you break the
perceived music into perceptually and functionally distinct parts,
those parts will be different from the parts being played by
individual musicians.  This ensemble arrangement is a perfect
metaphor/realization of group consciousness.

    I assume this degree of precision occurs in any group, performing
in any idiom, that's got a good groove going.

SUSTAINED

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PART 2 PART 2 PART 2 PART 2 PART 2 PART 2

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Musicians on Performing



    This document contains mostly statements by a variety of different
musicians-classical, jazz, rock-about what happens in their minds when
performing.  Sources for the statements are indicated.

* * * * *

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, The Firebird -- Suite, Israel
Philharmonic Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein Edition, Deutsche Grammaphon
431 045-2

p. 5 of notes (CD version), Bernstein:

I know when I have achieved a really good statement of a work:  that
is when I have the feeling throughout that I am composing it on stage,
at the event.  If I think at the end, "What a fine piece I wrote,"
then I can be reasonably certain that I have achieved a true and good
document.

    Perhaps the fact of being myself a composer, who works very hard
(and in various styles), gives me the advantageous opportunity to
identify more closely with the Mozarts, Beethovens, Mahlers and
Stravinskys of this world, so that I can at certain points (usually of
intense solitary study) feel that I have become whoever is my alter
ego that day or week.   At least I can occasionally reach one or the
other on our private "Hot Line", and with luck be given the solution
to a problematic passage.  Those are ecstatic times, those moments,
and inform the entire Gestalt with new life.  A new difficulty arises
after giving such a "true" performance of what seems my own music, and
then, suddenly, amidst applause and similar noises, having to become
merely Leonard Bernstein again.

* * * * *

Helen Epstein.  Music Talks:  Conversations with Musicians.  McGraw-
Hill Book Company, 1987.

p. 10, Horowitz talking:  "The moment that I feel that cutaway -- the
moment I am in uniform -- it's like a horse before the races.  You
start to perspire.  You feel already in you some electricity to do
something."

p. 52, Leonard Bernstein talking to conducting students at Tanglewood
about how he had to learn to bring himself under control.  As a young
conductor he once got so wrapped up in conducting -- I think it was a
Tchaikovsky symphony -- that we was afraid he was having a heart
attack.  So, he's had to restrain himself.  Then he gets to ego loss:
"I don't know whether any of you have experienced that but it's what
everyone in the world is always searching for.  When it happens in
conducting, it happens because you identify so completely with the
composer, you've studied him so intently, that it's as though you've
written the piece yourself.  You completely forget who you are or
where you are and you write the piece right there.  You just make it
up as though you never heard it before.  Because you become that
composer.

    "I always know when such a thing has happened because it takes me
so long to come back.  It takes four or five minutes to know what city
I'm in, who the orchestra is, who are the people making all that noise
behind me, who am I?  It's a very great experience and it doesn't
happen often enough.  Ideally it should happen every time, but it
happens about as often in conducting as in any other department where
you lose ego.  Schopenhauer said that music was the only art in which
this could happen and that art was the only area of life in which it
could happen.  Schopenhauer was wrong.  It can happen in religious
ecstasy or meditation.  It can happen in orgasm when you are with
someone you love."

    The students received all this in silence.  Then someone in the
back of the room raised his hand.

    "How do you train yourself to lose your ego?"

Bernstein had nothing to say about training, but made a comment about
relaxed concentration.

p. 73, Dorothy DeLay (violin teacher at Julliard), on teaching:
"People come in with ideas about themselves -- I'm this kind of
person, I can do this, I can never do that -- and they're unhappy with
their self-concept.  If you find a way to bypass that kind of
thinking, they find they're better than they thought they were.  I've
always felt we only use a small part of ourselves."

* * * * *

Manfred Clynes.  Sentics:  The Touch of Emotions.  Garden City, NY:
Anchor Press/Doubleday,  1977.

The following passage isn't a musician reflecting on his own
experience, but, in that it illustrates the precision of musical
feeling, it's relevant:

p. 53  Some years ago, in the house of Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico,
the Master was giving cello master classes.  On this occasion, an
outstanding participant played the theme from the third movement of
the Hayden cello concerto. . . . Those of us there could not help
admiring the grace with which the young master cellist played-probably
as well as one would hear it anywhere.

    Casals listened intently.  "No," he said . . . "that must be
graceful!"  And then he played the same few bars-and it was graceful
as though one had never heard grace before-a hundred times more
graceful-so that the cynicism melted in the hearts of the people who
sat there and listened.  That single phrase penetrated all the
defenses, the armor, the hardness of heart which we mostly carry with
us. . . .

* * * * *

Seymour Bernstein.  With Your Own Two Hands:  Self-Discovery Through
Music.  New York, Schirmer Books:  1981.  [Note:  this book is much
better than the paucity of quotations seems to indicate.]

p.  74 . . . each feeling has a corresponding movement and sensation .
. . All of these sensations are fed into your automatic pilot so that
in time your muscles are trained to reproduce feeling involuntarily.
A good teacher can induce feeling in you by teaching you the correct
physical gestures.

p. 74 . . . in practicing . . . allow the music to reveal its own
beauty.  Once you recognize your response to this beauty, you are
ready to pinpoint everything that contributes to musical expression.
Only then will you be able to control your feeling when you perform
for others.

* * * * *

Yehudi Menuhin.  The Compleat Violinist.  New York:  Summit Books:
1986.

p. 126  There are some artists so completely at one with the music
that the emotion stems from the work and not from any outside
stimulus.  This can happen when playing alone, or when reading a
composition.  The performer's job is to translate whe he sees in a
composition, the ideal image of the score, into the sound.  There is a
wonderful chain of events that happens and reinforces the performance
when everything is smooth and working well, when the acto of
interpretation creates its own momentum and the imagination is
enriched by the very palette that one is using.  It is a cycle which
is benign and fructifying.

p. 127  . . . It may be that one sometimes possesses the genuine
conviction that this is going to be the best performance in the world.
Perhaps it is, and naturally one wishes to recapture at every moment
the perfection of that performance.  But, of course, it is not
possible.  Lucky the artist who knows that feeling once every ten
times he plays a certain piece.  Perhaps once every five, as one gets
more masterly.  With due preparation on tour it may be possible to
achieve it every other time, giving fine performances on five or six
nights in succession.

* * * * *

Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser.  To Be or Not to Bop.  New York:
Doubleday, 1979.

p. 242:  I've often wondered where that element comes from that makes
a phrase or a note coherent, spiritual, and meaningful to someone else
besides yourself.  How does it trip that valve in the listener?  It
could come from the audience, or from the musicians you're playing
with, but sometimes it just hits and everything is just right.  If
you're lucky, that happens once in your lifetime maybe.

p. 491:  Records you can listen to and tell the stature of a musician,
but with many records, not one record. . . . Of course it's very
seldom that you hear a guy who's best on records.  But you can hear
where his mind is going.  Sometimes it gets on records and there's a
masterpiece.  I've never played my really best on records, and I've
only played my best four or five times in my whole career.  But I know
records wasn't one of them-one of those times when everything was
clicking.

* * * * *

Whitney Balliett.  American Musicians:  56 Portraits in Jazz.  New
York, Oxford:  Oxford University Press:  1986.

p. 87,  Earl Hines talking:  I'm like a race horse.  I've been taught
by the old masters -- put everything out of your mind except what you
have to do.  I've been through every sort of disturbance before I go
on the stand, but I never get so upset that it makes the audience
uneasy.  . . .  I always use the assistance of the Man Upstairs before
I go on.  I ask for that and it gives me courage and strength and
personality.  It causes me to blank everything else out, and the mood
comes right down on me no matter how I feel.

p. 151, Art Hodes talking:  Now, you can play the blues and just go
through the changes and not feel it.  That has happened to me for
periods of time, and I can fool anybody but me.  Right now I'm in  a
blues period.  The blues heal you.  When I play, I ignore the
audience.  I bring all my attention to bear on what I'm playing, bring
all me feelings to the front.  I bring my body to bear on the tune.
If it's a fast tune -- a rag -- I have to make my hands be where they
should be. . . . I'm trying to get lost in what I'm doing, and
sometimes I do, and it comes out beautiful.

p. 176, Roy Eldridge talking, about playing the Paramount Theatre with
Gene Krupa:  When the stage stopped and we started to play, I'd fall
to pieces.  The first three or four bars of my first solo, I'd shake
like a leaf, and you could hear it.  Then this light would surround
me, and it would seem as if there wasn't any band there, and I'd go
right through and be all right.  It was something I never understood.

p. 407, Ornette Coleman talking:  I don't think about feeling, seeing,
or thinking.  I try to have the player and the listener have the same
sound experience.  I'm not thinking about mood or emotion.  Emotion
should come into you instead of going out.

p. 187, Mel Powell, talking about Sidney Catlett:  He'd fasten the
Goodman band into the tempo with such power and gentleness that one
night I was absolutely transported by what he was doing.

* * * * *

Philip Booth,  Profile:  Harvey Swartz.  down beat 57, #1:  44-45, Jan
1990.

p.  44  Sheila Jordan:  "I've had 10 great musical highs in my life,
when I totally was out of my body, and five of those were with the
bass; and I've been singing jazz for 40 years."  Swarts is her
favorite bass player.

* * * * *

Ira Sullivan (multi-instrumentalist, saxes, trumpet) in a down beat
(Feb 17, 1992, p. 14) article:

I feel that I'm at my best when I can free myself completely from the
effort of trying to put something out and feel more like I am the
instrument being played - like opening the channel to God, or whatever
it is.  I suddenly get the feeling that I'm standing next to myself,
but I'm not thinking that this is me playing.

* * * * *

Walt Harrington.  Crossings:  A White Man's Journey into Black
America.  New York: HarperCollins, 1982.

p. 196-7 Stephanie Burrous:  She had tried to go commercial with her
singing and failed, so:

    Then came November 25th a year ago, a mild, sunny Sunday. . . .
She wasn't singing that day.  She was playing the drums, just bopping
along, when suddenly she began to cry.  She felt sorry and happy at
once - sorry she'd lost direction but happy that she was now feeling
sorry. . . . Suddenly she found herself standing before the
congregation, with people crowding around her praying, singing, and
proclaiming the glow on her face.  But that is all Stephanie
remembers, becaust at that instant she was gone, touched by the
lightning of the Holy ghost in the ancient way of Saul. . . . From
that day, no more R&B.

p. 198 At her music's deepest, she can forget the audience is even
there, and she can sing not so much to herself but as if there were no
distinction between her mind, her body, and her emotions, as if she
were not so much singing as breathing.  Odd, but it is when she most
forgets her audience that her audience is most touched.  But it can
take a few bars or verses for Stephanie to travel to that private
place - a place inexplicably similar to where she traveled when she
was struck by the Holy Ghost and, for those moments, became totally
devoid of vainglorious self-consciousness, totally within and without
herself at once.  Singing at her best, Stephanie feels as if lshe's
sitting on the back porch of heaven.

pp. 214-215  Terence Blanchard speaking:  My best performances with
Art Blakey sometimes came when I was really tired and didn't have time
to think about what was going on.  I'm always analyzing things.  And
on those occasions when I was too tired to do that, I played my best.
Those were the times I was relaxed and ideas would come to me and my
ego wouldn't block them.  Maurice Andri, the great classical solo
tumpeter in Europe, once said that when he plays he sometimes gets the
impression there's no trumpet.  He feels like he's singing!  I have
yet to experience that.  But when I listen to John Coltrane, I hear
it."

* * * * *

Ian Carr.  Miles Davis.  New York: William Morrow, 1982.p. 184, Teo
Macero talking about the Bitches Brew recording session:

I think Bitches Brew came out of a bitter battle that Miles and I had
in the studio over my secretary.  He wanted me to fire her, and I said
absolutely under no condition would I do so. . . . And he kept on and
on and on and on, until the point where he and I almost had a
fistfight in the studio.  And I told him, I says, "Take you and your
fucking trumpet . . . And your fucking musicians and get outa here! .
. ."   . . . Then finally, Miles came over [they were in the control
room] and he pushed the key down [intercome to the studio] and says,
"I want you to know what the fuck Teo said about you motherfucker
musicians-Get the fuck outa here. . . He doesn't want you". . . I
says, "Well, take your goddam trumpet and go!"  He took his trumpet .
. . went into the studio . . . and I said "Put the machines on . . ."
. . . you know, it was like having a good fight with your wife . . .
but you didn't really mean it . . . and from then on during that whole
session, he kept saying, "Come on out!  Come on out!  I'm going to get
you!  I'm going to kill you!"  So I pushed the key [intercom] and
says, "You make me sick !. . ."  And he made all those fantastic
tracks. . . . it was just one thing after another . . . bam, bam, bam,
bam.  I said, "You sonofabitch, you should be this way all the time-
mean and miserable!"

* * * * *

David Craig.  On Performing.  New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1987.

p. 61 . . . what a performer appears to be is finally all that
matters.

p. 62  We deal with emotion because it is a basic tool of our trade.
But there is a world of difference between experiencing passion in our
private lives and calling it into public display for the purpose of
interpreting the works of playwrights, librettists, composers, and
lyricists.

p. 63  Why can't we open ourselves to passion?  We can, but first we
must be willing to plumb it.  The best starting point I know is to be
willing to place it at the service of song.

p. 64  Many actors, dancers, and singers speak of their feelings as
the mysterious source of their ability to move people.  I have always
been wary of turned-on feelings that turn off my mind and leave me in
the thrall of their insidious power to dominate. . . .

 . . .My distrust of feelings is justified, for when singers busy
themselves exclusively with their feelings, I watch in fascination as
they become the reactor to the song and, by so doing, join the
audience in dangerous partnership.  It is the business of the
performer to conduct the emotional responses of the audience and that
cannot be accomplished when the job is surrendered up to the artist's
own response to his or her singing.

    Further, feelings can be self-destructive.  They can close
throats, make eyes water, shorten breath, and, before performers
realize it, cause them to become the victims of their songs -- done in
by the very weapons that were intended for others.

p. 65  Great performing has its own physical laws.  You get back what
you give.  It is like an electric circuit through which the current
flows without a chance of shorting.

. . . . It is in the specific methods performers employ that feelings
work for rather than against them.  When you find yourself surprised
that, although you have felt deeply what you sang, no one else felt
anything at all, it is a sure bet you have just lived through thirty-
two bars of your musical life unconnected and alone.

p. 134, Lena Horne talking:  And then when they killed [Robert]
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it seemd like a floodgate had opened.
There had been a lot of deaths in my own family. . . . and when I say,
I was different.  I began to "listen" to what I was doing and
thinking.  I listened to the audience.  Even to the quiet.  I had
never listened to it before. . . . I was different because I was
letting something in.  The tone was developing differently.  I could
do what I wanted with it.  I could soften it.  I wasn't afraid to show
the emotion.  I went straight for what I thought the songwriter had
felt at a particular moment because he must have felt what I'd been
feeling or else I couldn't have read that lyric, I couldn't have
understood what he was saying.  And I used my regretfulness and my
cynicism.  But even my cynicism had become not so much that as  . . .
logic.  Yes, life is shit.  Yes, people listen in different ways.
some nights they're unhappy at something that has happened to them.
OK.  I can feel that knot of resistance.  OK.  That's where I'm going
to work to.  . . . And the second "eight" would be different than the
first because the first was feeling it out and the second would change
because I could come in "to my mood." . . . It developed out of this
relaxation . . . a tone that was softer, more liquid.

* * * * *

Norman C. Weinstein.  A Night in Tunisia:  Imagining of Africa in
Jazz.  Scarecrow Press, Inc.:  Metuchen, N.J. & London, 1992.

p. 168  Ronald Shannon Jackson talking about a playing experience at
Texas Southern University:  "I was fooling around one night after some
local musicians and I had played a gig -- and it happened!  Everything
that came to mind musically came off perfectly without me having
constantly to think about it.  I wasn't aware of doing it.  So I
floated to the back of the room and was on the ceiling watching myself
play, and listening and enjoying it.  So I know it could happen on the
bandstand.  But I had no control over how to get to that point."

* * * * * * *

Jenny Boyd, with Holly George-Warren.  Musicians In Tune.  New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1992.

p. 161  Patty Smyth:   "When I have had those experiences, I'm singing
by myself.  I've had those moments when I do feel the voice coming
through me, and I know it's coming from out there.  It's a certain
tone in that voice that makes me feel that way.  It chokes me up."

p. 161-162  Cece Bullard:  "It's like you leave your body.  It's like
you're dizzy and lightheaded and yet right there.  My hands just seem
to throb, like a pulse almost.  It's the best feeling in the world,
bar none.  It took me a lot of singing lessons before I finally
connected with that feeling.  The first time it clicked and I
connected, I nearly fell down, and I started crying>'

p. 164  Siniad O'Conner:  "A lot of times I shake uncontrollably.  I
can't control the shaking, and it's not because I'm nervous, it's
because I'm singing.  It's because it's coming out and it's making me
shake.  It feels like being drunk, it's like an out-of-body
experience.  There are times when I've done gigs - and it doesn't
happen every time you do a show or every time you write something -
but they've told me stuff I've done onstage that I'm not aware I've
done."

p. 173  Branford Marsalis:  "High, you feel high.  It's easy to do it
physically, but it's hard to do it mentally.  I feel that musicians
who say it happens every time they play are full of shit.  The sublime
cannot be routine.  Three times, and you never forget them.  It's with
a combination of musicians, it's never just me."

p. 176  Ringo Starr:  "It feels great; its just a knowing.  It's magic
actually; it is pure magic.  Everyone who is playing at that time
knows where everybody's going.  We all feel like one; wherever you go,
everyone feels that's where we should go.  I would know if Paul was
going to do something, or if George was going to raise it up a bit, or
John would double, or we'd bring it down.  I usually play with my eyes
closed, so you would know when things like that were happening . . .
you've got to trust each other."

p. 185  Eric Clapton:  "It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes
at a certain point.  Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not
something I could experience on my own.  . . . other musicians . . .
an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at
one point.  It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another
musician.  But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience,
where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any
interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle.  They're all
transported toward the same place.  That's not very common, but it
always seems to happen at least once a show."

* * * * *

The following is a personal communication from a semi-professional
jazz musician:

    I had a gig playing piano on New Year's Eve at the cocktail lounge
of the most prestigious resort hotel in town.  I took in my drum/bass
machine, but had to play the house piano, which had been rigged with a
built in computer so it would "play itself" from a special disk drive
when there was no player.  The mechanism that would pull down the keys
in this mode made it extremely difficult to play as an ordinary piano.
For the first half hour of the gig, I struggled with the molasses-like
keys and was about to quit in frustration, when a man at the bar made
a request for a tune I particularly like to play, Monk's "'Round
Midnight."  Suddenly I found that the same stiff keys that were giving
me fits seemed to melt under my touch and I played with great feeling.
The man left, but I continued on my roll; within a half hour, people
who had stepped out of the main ballroom where a big band was playing
began to gather around to listen and dance.  This fueled me further
and I was able to reach even greater heights of performance.  Then the
big band took their break, and suddenly there were 15 or so
professional musician standing around me as I played. Normally I would
have found this an intimidating experience, but on this occasion it
spurred me on.  Even a drunk coming up to request "New York, New York"
didn't slow me up; I played a very hip swinging version of that corny
tune. I was giddy with confidence and inspiration.

    At the end of the night, the hotel manager insisted on paying me
on the spot at 2 am.  He gave me a big bonus. I wasn't in an "altered
state" per se the whole night, but rather, on a contunuum, I was
closer to that transfixed state than not.  By the way, a moderate
amount of alcohol can sometimes facilitate this state, but it can
appear equally when straight sober.


From Cuda Brown, Meanderings # 5:

I play bass with a not-very-good-but-trying-to-get-better jazz combo
on the weekends. Last week I got lost in a solo on a tune I really
love and whose chord changes I know well. Not lost as being in the
wrong place. Lost as in being out there. Being somewhere else. Eyes
closed. Playing what I felt somewhere inside (or was that trying to
feel what I played?). Anyway, it was kind of an emotional experience,
and my band-mates commented that the solo was very good, perhaps my
best solo ever. One asked me how I had approached the solo, what it
was I had done. I didn't have a clue!

I asked them if they had ever, if they could remember hearing a song
that made them cry. Not a vocal whose words might have that effect.
But music, instrumental music. To a man they said no. And kind of
looked at me as if I was crazy. I could only feel sorry for them (and
move on).