roachboy

i dunno---something about ashlee simpson makes me think of citizen kane--the musical career of kane's wife (her name escapes me)....i know a number of mediocrities of towering proportions who continue to function as "artists" as a function of trust funds or patrons. the fact of it no longer surprises or interests me.

unless you are doing pop yourself, taking a football halftime gig would be a total waste of time. you have to work without feeling straightjacketed within a number of contraints, from conventional tonality to fixed parts to the 4 minute limit to the prospect of touring as a copy of yourself on record.

if your disposition inclines you that way, then fine---it does not interest me, playing that way, but i often enjoy what the folk do who are working within these constraints. and there is no rule anywhere that stipulates that everyone has to play the same thing, in the same way. there is no consensus on what constitutes musicianship, or even if manipulating sound is self-contained as an activity (or if it links to visual art, for example, and how)
one thing for sure: if you are not working in a straight form, taking a tv gig would do you no good--not at a football game at least. imagine, for example, a great flamenco guitarist playing the fucking orange bowl. it would be a travesty. the situation would be horrific--the scale of it totally out of whack. and no-one-----and i mean no-one---would be listening. not really.


i work in a particular form of music--maybe it is on the basis of long engagement with "experimental" music that i have little sympathy with arguments against downloading, for example. unless you are doing a style that already has mass acceptance, the recordings are basically little more than commercials for performances and it makes little difference from this viewpoint whether people buy cds or download. many of the folk i know who play in this area work at extraordinary levels of virtuosity, but none of them sit around thinking about standards of "musicianship"--where i run into it most often is in conversations about music i have with my brother, who plays bluegrass. for him, this category operates--for me, it means nothing. playing does not refer to itself--it is a means to get to and work from within a particular set of states, and to communicate something of/about/from within these states. where you can get to is in significant measure a function of your control over the instrument--but here too, control is not one thing, there is no coherent standard for understanding it. there are only rules and standards particular to forms which you might take to be binding because you play within that form.

btw--i havent done the marching band thing. i am a pianist. while i might find the idea of being wheeled about on a platform playing a grand piano in the context of a marching band performance to be kinda funny--a very liberace moment----i expect that the folk who had to lift the piano onto the platform and then wheel it around would quickly find the joke wearing thin. it is never fun to play if the tech folk hate you.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite