petals

uhh… we talked about this a little bit last week… it kind of, first of all, when you listen to music, particularly as a musician, it kind of goes through your ego, you know, and there’s a lot of factors that detract from actually the listening experience- and that’s, oh, like, “I want to be able to do that”, “ooh if I can do that I can do this” and “how does he do that” and all these things that are… instead of just sitting down and enjoying a musical experience. And there’s also judgments, you know, like, uh, “oh that’s not very good” or “why, I don’t think this is very good music” or “this is much better music”, and judgments that get made like, “this is a certain kind of music” or “I know this about this music”, but it’s really hard to sit down and listen and I think my first listening experience was probably in about ’92 when I sat down with a great trumpet kind of guru who was then at the University of Illinois, Ray Sasaki. And I watched him listen to something, and it was like, “wow he’s getting a lot more out of this than I am”. And, uh, it was like he kind of showed me how to listen to music. In a strange way, I watched and learned how to listen. And it was a wonderful experience, because I had been missing out on a whole lot of things. Now, granted I listened to music to a certain extent, but this was the first time I really identified with really listening in a kind of a new way that kind of totally changed… and now I listen even more intensely and get more out of it, but, that was the kind of the breakthrough moment as far as listening. So, that album that kind of did that, was an album by the vocalist Carmen McCrae, and it’s called, um, American Songbook… Great American Songbook. And it’s an excellent album- he had it on album. And it’s a double album, and you get to hear her talk and stuff… And it was really good because, because of, you know, it was able to draw me in very easily because she’s a singer, and so you are already connecting on one level with her language- English. And then that kind of draws you more into the musical language. I think one of the difficulties with listening to jazz a lot of times is maybe it’s not necessarily a vocal, and you don’t have that immediate… like, at least you can listen to the words and pick up on… But, um, Carmen kind of helped me there- get locked into jazz sounds through her vocals and how she treated the words and stuff. Um, but um, really, before that of course, I’d already gone through five years of college, and I was quite versed in all the bebop players and had recordings of them all. You know, if I heard it, I could identify it and that sort of thing. So, they were kind of peripherally influential- in that, it wasn’t a real conscious assuming of a particular style, but that’s just one thing about music, and you play, and you just hear it, you starting imitating some of the things you hear even though you are not aware of it. So there was kind of peripheral influence from all the players you study about in school. But I would say after the point I really began listening, probably the next most influential after Carmen was Chet Baker. And I really got into listening to Chet Baker because I kind of went through a phase of wanting to learn more about playing music by ear- I had always been kind of taught that, you know, that wasn’t necessarily a good approach to learning music; especially with my piano teacher, it was always like, “no no no no”. And, uh, I realized that it was a completely legitimate conception and, uh, I kind of found a way to learn music and a way to perform music through the eyes of Chet Baker, who was a great vocalist- once again drawn in by his vocals- and a great trumpet player, who hardly read music at all and yet was one of the biggest known jazz trumpet stars, ever. So, I