Has anyone here read this?
I bought it on a whim a few days ago and boogied through it. It's pretty interesting. He takes a Carlos Castaneda approach in presenting a fictional/mythical character who taught him in a very unconventional and "new age" sense how to really play after years of practicing formal theory and working through music in a very traditional way that wasn't really getting him anywhere.
In a lot of ways this is somewhat anathema to the way I teach and learn, but it has definite value as an addendum to all of that in the way he talks about it.
Through the first few chapters I was ready to toss the book entirely. It's a lot of spiritual claptrap with the old zen koan formula: Teacher presents question or provocation to student, student answers, teacher redresses the answer with some correction/clarification or another. The teacher is a sort of neo-Byronic entity: Piercing eyes, long black hair, rides around on a skateboard, all sorts of silly BS. I still don't really like that style of teaching and don't respond to things very well that are outside of very clear-cut language and pedagogic narrative, but (!) after digesting the whole thing it really started to grow on me quite a bit. I still don't think he's a great writer or anything, but his musicality is compelling enough for me to have wanted to make my way through it and see what he had to say.
And he says a lot. One of the more interesting ideas is that music is almost always taught in terms of notes themselves as some sort of ultimate primary factor. I don't really agree on this completely, but theory-wise, he's right in that it's pretty much the only way I've ever really thought about it.
He suggests, among other things, trying sometime to jam out music without regard to the notes at all - play completely atonally but with as much emphasis as you can on all the other aspects, without fearing the "wrongness" of the notes you're playing, but paying intense attention to everything else. I've done this over the past 10 days or so quite a lot, and it's been really fun. I put on 'Kind of Blue' the other day and just paid attention to the rhythms and groove and general feel, then let my fingers splash about anywhere they wanted to (but still in time and feel with the music I was hearing) without any attention to playing the right notes at all - sometimes it worked out anyway. It was really quite liberating though, and I can see where doing this extensively will free me up in some way or another and even present new ideas for digital patterns, cultivation of a more naturalistic approach, etcetera.
He offers up very early in the book 10 different things to pay attention to, and they're pretty obvious and known entities to all of us:
1. Notes.
2. Articulation.
3. Technique.
4. "Feel"
5. Dynamics.
6. Rhythm/tempo.
7. Tone.
8. Phrasing.
9. Space (rests, breaths in between phrases, etcetera)
10. Listening.
He then goes about digging into these things chapter by chapter in a way that is again quite outside the general ways in which they are taught or learned. Some of it is successful, some not so much (with me, anyway), but all of it is part of a very interesting holistic approach.
At any rate, I'll go ahead and recommend it to anyone here who is interested, even if you're not into his playing that much. It's about the only book I've ever read on music with quite this same approach, and it's worth looking into.
Hope you're all doing well. Later!
I bought it on a whim a few days ago and boogied through it. It's pretty interesting. He takes a Carlos Castaneda approach in presenting a fictional/mythical character who taught him in a very unconventional and "new age" sense how to really play after years of practicing formal theory and working through music in a very traditional way that wasn't really getting him anywhere.
In a lot of ways this is somewhat anathema to the way I teach and learn, but it has definite value as an addendum to all of that in the way he talks about it.
Through the first few chapters I was ready to toss the book entirely. It's a lot of spiritual claptrap with the old zen koan formula: Teacher presents question or provocation to student, student answers, teacher redresses the answer with some correction/clarification or another. The teacher is a sort of neo-Byronic entity: Piercing eyes, long black hair, rides around on a skateboard, all sorts of silly BS. I still don't really like that style of teaching and don't respond to things very well that are outside of very clear-cut language and pedagogic narrative, but (!) after digesting the whole thing it really started to grow on me quite a bit. I still don't think he's a great writer or anything, but his musicality is compelling enough for me to have wanted to make my way through it and see what he had to say.
And he says a lot. One of the more interesting ideas is that music is almost always taught in terms of notes themselves as some sort of ultimate primary factor. I don't really agree on this completely, but theory-wise, he's right in that it's pretty much the only way I've ever really thought about it.
He suggests, among other things, trying sometime to jam out music without regard to the notes at all - play completely atonally but with as much emphasis as you can on all the other aspects, without fearing the "wrongness" of the notes you're playing, but paying intense attention to everything else. I've done this over the past 10 days or so quite a lot, and it's been really fun. I put on 'Kind of Blue' the other day and just paid attention to the rhythms and groove and general feel, then let my fingers splash about anywhere they wanted to (but still in time and feel with the music I was hearing) without any attention to playing the right notes at all - sometimes it worked out anyway. It was really quite liberating though, and I can see where doing this extensively will free me up in some way or another and even present new ideas for digital patterns, cultivation of a more naturalistic approach, etcetera.
He offers up very early in the book 10 different things to pay attention to, and they're pretty obvious and known entities to all of us:
1. Notes.
2. Articulation.
3. Technique.
4. "Feel"
5. Dynamics.
6. Rhythm/tempo.
7. Tone.
8. Phrasing.
9. Space (rests, breaths in between phrases, etcetera)
10. Listening.
He then goes about digging into these things chapter by chapter in a way that is again quite outside the general ways in which they are taught or learned. Some of it is successful, some not so much (with me, anyway), but all of it is part of a very interesting holistic approach.
At any rate, I'll go ahead and recommend it to anyone here who is interested, even if you're not into his playing that much. It's about the only book I've ever read on music with quite this same approach, and it's worth looking into.
Hope you're all doing well. Later!