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cutting sessions...i understand the idea of them, have been in or found myself in some (at times unwittingly)--i never really enjoyed them because--basically--the harmonic structures were always rigid and the rhythm sections usually not able to take things out.
so you were locked in place running scales or whatever one does.
in my experience, these would turn into displays of speed and precision as if both were ends and not means.
so i guess what i would say is that cutting sessions--which can be fun sometimes as ways to get your ears pinned back (i find the same thing when i listen, say, to monk or cecil closely)---are not to only way to develop some fire in your playing. i have found it more useful to put myself in spaces where nothing at all is given in advance with a group of players who are interested in heading out as far as they can go. whatever that means.
these sessions too can be extremely demanding technically--for example you might well find yourself having to fix, divide, subdivide and then reverse a particular motif in real time that you might have had difficulty playing to begin with---if the situation seems to require it. but what i have found most interesting in these kind of sessions is that speed and precision remain means not ends--for myself (more generally)---if folk listening to what i am doing focus on the speed that is required to do it, then the performance fails in a basic way--speed for me is about reaching a place beyond it, where the sound and its ordering slow down. i dont know how to explain this better.
related to this: music is, for me, a kind of highly focussed trance medium--it is not particularly an athletic undertaking---though again it requires a whole arsenal of technical possibilities to be able to work in this kind of space--and the ability to switch in and out of them--and the ability to visualize what you are doing so as to give space for development--and a really good understanding of what development is--all of these things worked to a level that enables you not to think about them but to assume them, to focus on the sound rather than on the means to get to the sound.
i dont know if this is coherent or not, but there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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