Improvisation, Fake Breasts, Meticulous Counterpoint or Penile Enlargement?

Improvisation, Fake Breasts, Meticulous Counterpoint or Penile Enlargement?

Gosh, they all give such pleasure, but what is morally right?

Recently I’ve been having some conversations with colleagues about improvisation and composition. Composition, after all, is just controlled improvisation, right? Sure, for your concert pieces or cuts on your next bass harmonica album, you may ruminate ideas for months on end and pen doesn’t hit paper until you have a pretty clear idea of where you’re going. But it’s still improvisation – just done very, very slowly. When it comes to my hired gun work though, for the most part, I have no idea what I will write until I sit down to do it. While getting my 13th cup of coffee I’ll contemplate the purpose of the music, maybe the modes and scales likely to achieve that goal, some basic instrumentation or style considerations and then, I just put my sausage links on the keyboard and plunk away. Controlled improvisation. I’ll try this, try that. Narrow down my choices. Make a million decisions.

And then, every once in a while, I nail it. I write the whole damn cue while I’m playing it, from top to bottom. And it works. Theoretically, with a little added orchestration, I should be done with this cue, moving on to the next, one step closer to sharing some quality time with my family.

But because of my Catholic upbringing, I’ve been taught that nothing great comes from anything less than debilitating sacrifice. Nothing great comes from anything less than being crucified for your egotistical desires to write perfect music. Take the easy way out and you rot in bad music hell forever. So what happens when I play through that cue, improvise my way around the dialog and mood of the scene and when I listen back, it works? What happens when there is no need to do it again? No need to throw myself on the sacrificial fire?

Well, I feel a touch guilty that I got off so easy. I feel dirty. And cheap. And not in a dirty cheap good way. After all, isn’t writing music supposed to be hard? All the time?

Without a doubt, some of it is Catholic guilt. But my research says many others feel the same way. As though they haven’t bled enough for it. As though, if they don’t finish a piece of music battered and bruised, they didn’t work hard enough for it. They don’t deserve to be done this easily, this quickly. We’re musicians - and endless repetition, endless hours of practice, is the name of our game.

The dreaded “it can’t be good because I did it in one take” syndrome. One take. Why do those two words have such a negative connotation?

Years ago, I was a music supervisor for Disney and had the pleasure of overseeing a session with Stan Getz. He’d been brought in to play a solo for the film “The Marrying Man.” We sent a car for him (yeah, you get that kind of shit when you’re a Stan Getz) to bring him to Oceanway Studios. He headed right into the tracking room, opened his case up, blew a few warm up notes, glanced at the chart, and said “Roll it.” No “Hi nice to meet you.” No “let me contemplate life and how my morning bowel activities effect the chord changes on your chart” bullshit. He was here to play. You want to socialize, go to a massage parlor.

The engineer hit play. Stan laid his part down. The track ended. Stan started packing up. The engineer leapt out of his chair like it was lunchtime and frantically grabbed the talkback.

“Uh, Stan? Thought we’d get maybe another take on that, you know, as a . . . , well, backup or something, I mean, shouldn’t we do another take?” He sounded like some very important union rule had been broken and we needed to rectify this dire situation before it caused the end of civilization. His pleading sounded as if he was suggesting “Aren’t we supposed to fuck with this thing, try it every which way from Sunday until everyone is just sick of it and no one has any idea what to cut together?”

Stan said, “No. That one felt good.”

The control room was silent. Stan headed back to his limo.

I suppose you would have handled it differently. You would have contradicted Stan Getz and told him the solo he played didn’t feel good? His solo was great. Fantastic. It was everything the track needed. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure it was a rather straight forward blues track. Nothing strange or out of the realm Stan worked in most of the time. Yes, the changes were ones Stan had probably played 50,000 times in his life. Did he nail it? At his level, there never is a “didn’t nail it” moment. There’s only minute degrees of feel and vibe and self fulfillment. There ain’t any wrong notes on his sax. He put all of the combined knowledge of his 60 years of music into that take. Was it the greatest solo ever played? No. But it wasn’t supposed to be. If it had been the world’s greatest solo, then no one would have noticed Alec Baldwin on the screen acting in a movie. Stan’s solo was brilliantly perfect for the intended use of that particular piece of music.

Stan died a few months later. No retakes on that either.

Writing music is like making the toughest decisions of your life, one after another, all day long. Every note, every rhythm, every nuance must be thought about, evaluated and eventually agreed upon and only then, committed to paper or audio. How long you decide to take making those decisions – is yet, another decision.

Lurking at the distant edges of available writing techniques are:

1 - OCD anal retentive, pain in the ass types who will never be satisfied with anything – writing, rewriting, editing, throwing out, fucking with, fucking up, fixing, substituting, polishing, refining, second guessing, pissing on, etc, etc until their original concept is obliterated and unrecognizable and they end up with shit. Or brilliance.

2 – The lazy ass mother fuckers who throw any old damn thing down and just go with it, nary an edit, fix, redo, Mulligan or gimme to be found. This “easy road” leads to absolutely uninspired dreck. Or brilliance.

Before any of you go thinking you’re doing it the wrong way, most of us swing our respective meters between these two extremes - frequently, and without thought, and probably only because swinging our meters feels good. The great thing about art is that the end product has absolutely nothing to do with the process and conditions with which you choose to get there. Whether you feel it necessary to gnaw your tongue off and swallow it in order to get some decent notes on the page or whether smoking a joint and noodling on the piano for 10 minutes is your magic potion for greatness, it doesn’t matter. But we all must choose a path, Grasshopper. Each and every time we create. This has always intrigued me so I’ve spent a shitload of time contemplating my work methods. Graphing, plotting, analyzing, running the equations. Doing all of the dirty work for you lazy fuckers. Lifetimes of research to find out whether more time equals better music.

And the answer I’ve come up with is –

and BTW, you’re getting this wisdom for free here – yeah, you didn’t have to climb some fucking mountain in Tibet and sit with some smelly bearded old fart for it – all you had to do was plop your fat ass down and read some worthless blogs on the internet – do we live in a wonderful world or what?

And the answer is . . . “Who the fuck knows??!!!”

We need to avoid thinking we have only two choices of looking at what we create. If we only put our noses to the table and examine the tiniest of details of our work, deal exclusively with fermi and planck, ensuring that the nuclei of our creations are all in perfect order, we miss what happens when we step away, go all the way to the other side of the room and have a gander at our little bundle of joy. And maybe see the forest.

Chick Corea releases records that are recordings of actual events. He played this music live, no edits, no fixes. If you were there when he played it, you would hear that performance on the CD. Note for note. Glenn Gould chose to edit the shit out of his recordings. Instead of documenting his performance at a particular stage in his life, he perhaps was thinking long term, and wanted what he considered a “perfect” performance to last through the ages.

Who’s right? And if someone is right, that makes someone else wrong? Right?

No. And why do you have to be so argumentative? Can’t you discuss something without getting all pissy? Cuddle up with your anger asshole, you’re sleeping on the fucking couch tonight.

I have some perspective now on some of my early music. What I’ve noticed is that none of the shit that bothered the living hell out of me, at the time I wrote and recorded them, bugs me now. None of it. Amazing! I used to lose sleep over the shit! Stomach aches, Diarrhea, Vomiting. (OK, those last two might have been me screwing up the dosages of my meds). But, heartache. Definitely heartache. Here was my big revelation about my old music . . .

I got a whole NEW set of shit that bugs the living hell out of me.

I’ve grown. Gotten better. Things I didn’t hear before that I hear loud and clear now. Maybe I had my nose resting on the damn manuscript paper and missed the big picture. Maybe I wasn’t experienced enough. But I’ll tell you this, the shit that bugs me now is more encompassing. It’s less miniscule and more esoteric. Things like feel, overall vibe, form, pacing, and development of ideas rather than slight pitch problems, snare EQ, one note in a passage or a vintage spring reverb setting. I can see now where I went wrong in the composition itself. I can see how to make the piece of music 50% better by taking shit out – Yes – I finally learned that the eraser is the composer’s greatest tool! (Thanks Lloyd!)

How good is good enough? Is too good unemotional? Is perfect robotic and inhuman? Do flaws and imperfections make us who we are? Is that sloppy, pattern based, repetitive hard rock guitar solo viewed 732,512 times on YouTube more honest than a 100% quantized synth arpeggiator randomly generating tones?

The important thing in all of this creating, is to be aware of what works when. If we insist on labeling ourselves as the perfectionist who never prints his take until the 11th hour, we set ourselves up to miss the happy accidents, the rare quirks that break old habits, the nuggets of gold in the river, the once in a lifetime Stan Getz solo. Because in the end, when you look back on the hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of creations you had a hand in, when you have essentially stepped back away from your baby the equivalent of the expanse of the universe, the teeny details of how, how long and by what means these were created will have shrunk to imperceptible levels. And you’ll be left with the music.

And good will be good. And bad will be bad. And I hope to God we all have a little bit of both in there.