I’ve been contentedly working harder than I ever have before on music these past couple weeks. I feel my creative energy flowing freely from and towards my many musical and artistic outlets of lessons, rehearsals, practice, performance, composition, recording, morning pages, and this blog. I understand that I have the rare opportunity to make a living making music, and I feel the need now more than ever before to work unceasingly at this task. Though I am realizing (and experiencing) that total artistic fulfillment is perhaps rare in the life of a working musician, I can think of few jobs I would rather have and am enormously grateful for this chance to make a livelihood out of my passion.

Yesterday morning I was transcribing (i.e. writing down the notes of a recorded piece of music) and practicing the Jim Hall/Ron Carter rendition of the Jazz standard “I’ll Remember April” from their excellent album Alone Together. Finally being liberated from the demands of school (and now bound by the economic demands of the “real world”) I feel a new level of urgency to hone my craft. I practice more diligently now because I see a clear path unfolding: The better at guitar I get, the better gigs I will get, the better paid I will get, the better I will be able to pursue the musical ventures that I am truly passionate about. I labored for two hours to correctly transcribe every note and rhythm of Jim Hall’s rich and deceptively complex guitar playing (only finishing about 1 minute out of the nearly seven minute piece). My brainpower was basically spent at this point, and so I moved on to something a little less taxing: figuring out the song “Little Black Submarines” by the Black Keys. I think it took me about ten minutes to learn entirety of the song, which I plan to teach to one of my students later this week.

With Hall’s melodies still in my head, I laid down for my normal afternoon nap around 2:00 and quickly slipped into an outpouring of half-asleep abstractions and mind-movies. Chief among them was a dreamy comparison and fusion of melodic musical phrases and verbal conversation. In most of the settings in which I have played or seen Jazz (art galleries, parties, fundraisers, bars, etc.) people have been talking and socializing during the music. This used to bother me— I thought more attention and respect should be payed to this intricate and difficult music— but I realize now that Jazz musicians are having an intimate and satisfying conversation all their own on stage, making it absolutely acceptable in my mind for people in the crowd to do the same. Furthermore, many of the same principles are at play in both arenas: a pleasing tone, clarity of statements, appropriate space between phrases, and the repetition/reciprocation/expansion of ideas make for both a good Jazz solo and a good conversation.

I had a vivid dream image of the common convention in blues and jazz improvisation of making a melodic statement, repeating it, then repeating it again and expanding it. I heard a descending minor, bluesy motif stated twice by a piano, then repeated and expanded into an ascending major sounding motif by a trumpet. This to me was an exact metaphor for a conversation in which two people take the same premise but extrapolate it to different ends (one gloomy, the other hopeful). I think that the bare experiential facts of life are neither innately good or bad— people (consciously or not) variably color them as such through evolving discourse. Music, especially good improvised Jazz, vividly illustrates and playfully explores the natural fluidity of ideas.

Last night I began composing a piece of music based on these ideas and my dream motif. I’ll share it soon…