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being true to the art
Jun. 13th, 2005 05:29 amTwo isolated events inspired a minor existential crisis with my music recently. The first was the receipt of an e-mail from a friend and musician whose opinion I quite respect, which indicated that those recordings we made a few weeks ago didn't measure up. Like, they really didn't measure up: in his opinion, we should just go back to playing jazz standards instead of trying to pull off this funk jazz hip-hop fusion stuff, because it just wasn't happening. The second event was that gig we had a week ago where we each made a disappointing $37.50 for a full night's work.
The minor crisis these events inspired was predictable: if the actual music itself (i.e. the groove, the beats, and the playing) was second-rate and we couldn't even make a reasonable amount of bread on a monthly gig, then why was I doing this? Maybe what we're playing really isn't as good as it seems to me, and maybe there's no real future in it. Furthermore, if I think really hard about the music we're playing, it's not actually all that original right now. Who hasn't seen a live band cover 60s funk tunes before? And who cares if it's a live jazz band who's also improvising on these tunes and transforming them into something different? I mean, does anyone really care about that? And is there actually going to be a decent audience for this stuff?
I resolved these questions over the past week not by coming up with convincing answers to them, but simply by letting them fall away in the face of my own self-confidence as an artist. I told myself, and I hope I'm right, that I'm putting the cart before the horse right now in worrying about whether or not what we're doing is astoundingly original or if we can make any money with it. What we need to focus on is the music itself, and we need to play it as well as we possibly can and put every bit of energy into that all the time. I believe that if we're true to the music for its own sake and if we trust our collective artistic vision, then the product of that collaboration will be worthwhile, and hopefully other folks will think so too. In other words, I'll worry about the "other folks" later.
I suspect that many writers, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and other creative people have all faced these same questions in their careers, and my intuition tells me that the best ones have taken a similar approach to what I just described: closing out external distractions, they just stayed true to their inner artistic vision and let the chips fall where they may.
The minor crisis these events inspired was predictable: if the actual music itself (i.e. the groove, the beats, and the playing) was second-rate and we couldn't even make a reasonable amount of bread on a monthly gig, then why was I doing this? Maybe what we're playing really isn't as good as it seems to me, and maybe there's no real future in it. Furthermore, if I think really hard about the music we're playing, it's not actually all that original right now. Who hasn't seen a live band cover 60s funk tunes before? And who cares if it's a live jazz band who's also improvising on these tunes and transforming them into something different? I mean, does anyone really care about that? And is there actually going to be a decent audience for this stuff?
I resolved these questions over the past week not by coming up with convincing answers to them, but simply by letting them fall away in the face of my own self-confidence as an artist. I told myself, and I hope I'm right, that I'm putting the cart before the horse right now in worrying about whether or not what we're doing is astoundingly original or if we can make any money with it. What we need to focus on is the music itself, and we need to play it as well as we possibly can and put every bit of energy into that all the time. I believe that if we're true to the music for its own sake and if we trust our collective artistic vision, then the product of that collaboration will be worthwhile, and hopefully other folks will think so too. In other words, I'll worry about the "other folks" later.
I suspect that many writers, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and other creative people have all faced these same questions in their careers, and my intuition tells me that the best ones have taken a similar approach to what I just described: closing out external distractions, they just stayed true to their inner artistic vision and let the chips fall where they may.
