Good or just good for their age?
I admit it; I'm an Idol Junkie. I watch American and Canadian Idol. Sometimes I wonder why as it often frustrates the hell out of me. The latest Canadian Idol episode did that. It featured Tony Bennett as the inspiration for the contestants to sing the standards. Perhaps this hits close to home because of my musical direction for the past few years. Watching these kids try to make sense of these incredibly well crafted songs was excrutiating. Yes, they sang the notes...mostly. Yes they had a great back up band, including Tony's own quartet for a couple of trainwrecks. But, it was amateur talent night...nothing better than you would see from a good high school production. The audience was as enthusiastic as proud parents would be at said production and it was embarressing. The judges weren't much better, forgeting all of their previous advice about making songs yor own or really getting inside the lyrics and projecting emotion to the audience. There was none of that from the contestants and you could tell that they had absolutely no identification with the songs.
Tony Bennett's perfomances were not technically fantastic, but holy crap does that guy own a song! Tony has the incredible ability to make you believe that he's conversing with you spontaneiously in the song...just making up the words as he goes along just like one would in an impromptu dialogue. Now, Tony seems to get better and better at this, but he has had this ability for a long, long time. Which brings me to the title of this blog....
One of the judges kept harping on the young age of the contestants as if that should matter. There is a large part of our North American society that is impressed with the child prodigy. "Wow and he/she is only 4 years old!". Why do we care? Yes, it's great that young folk can pick up on a skill quickly, but is it good or just good for their age? If we didn't know the age of the prodigy would we still be gushing over the quality? I say, with few exceptions,"no". There are the Mozarts and the Frankie Lymons, but for the most part true quality music,music with emotion and understanding,music with honesty and depth takes time and life to develope. A guitarist I worked with, Alan Kingstone, told me that he had to live with a new tune for a few months before he felt comfortable performing it. He could learn the notes quickly enough, but the depth and meaning of the tune needed more time. He needed living time with the tune to gain so much comfort with it that it could seem real and honest not regurgitory. Sax player Dewey Redmond was famous for his improvisations sounding so natural that he must have played them a thousand times before. Dewey Redmond practiced so much that chances are he had played it before and his improv was a natural language rather than a selection of notes.
Great musicians make you forget about the notes. They take you beyond notes and into a realm of emotion and experience, whether it be a conversation with an old friend or an encounter with a catastrophic tragedy; it's not the notes.The notes are part of the language and that language needs life experience to be able to tell a good story.
Being a good musician is not all about singing or playing the right notes. Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan were and are great musicians regardless of there ability to sing the perfect notes. They have the ability to convey something other than the notes. They have the ability to convey life through there music. Now I'm not saying that playing the perfect notes is wrong or even undesirable. What I am saying is that there is an intangible to great music that goes beyond technique and I don't believe that there are many young musicians that have that intangible.
Tony Bennett's perfomances were not technically fantastic, but holy crap does that guy own a song! Tony has the incredible ability to make you believe that he's conversing with you spontaneiously in the song...just making up the words as he goes along just like one would in an impromptu dialogue. Now, Tony seems to get better and better at this, but he has had this ability for a long, long time. Which brings me to the title of this blog....
One of the judges kept harping on the young age of the contestants as if that should matter. There is a large part of our North American society that is impressed with the child prodigy. "Wow and he/she is only 4 years old!". Why do we care? Yes, it's great that young folk can pick up on a skill quickly, but is it good or just good for their age? If we didn't know the age of the prodigy would we still be gushing over the quality? I say, with few exceptions,"no". There are the Mozarts and the Frankie Lymons, but for the most part true quality music,music with emotion and understanding,music with honesty and depth takes time and life to develope. A guitarist I worked with, Alan Kingstone, told me that he had to live with a new tune for a few months before he felt comfortable performing it. He could learn the notes quickly enough, but the depth and meaning of the tune needed more time. He needed living time with the tune to gain so much comfort with it that it could seem real and honest not regurgitory. Sax player Dewey Redmond was famous for his improvisations sounding so natural that he must have played them a thousand times before. Dewey Redmond practiced so much that chances are he had played it before and his improv was a natural language rather than a selection of notes.
Great musicians make you forget about the notes. They take you beyond notes and into a realm of emotion and experience, whether it be a conversation with an old friend or an encounter with a catastrophic tragedy; it's not the notes.The notes are part of the language and that language needs life experience to be able to tell a good story.
Being a good musician is not all about singing or playing the right notes. Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan were and are great musicians regardless of there ability to sing the perfect notes. They have the ability to convey something other than the notes. They have the ability to convey life through there music. Now I'm not saying that playing the perfect notes is wrong or even undesirable. What I am saying is that there is an intangible to great music that goes beyond technique and I don't believe that there are many young musicians that have that intangible.
posted by Colin Darling | 8:39 AM
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