Discover Top Posts Tagged with #wrong notes

playing in front of the whole class

me: *finally has a few measures of the music down and can play them perfectly*

band director: Hey could you play that for the class?

me: yeah, sure, *plays in a completely different key, with the incorrect style, notes, and rhythms. everything is wrong*

#concert band #bassoon #band #music #wrong notes

#miles davis #davis #wrong notes #jazz #improvvisazione #note #music #musica

Life Is Pretty Good

Submitted by Jesse Joseph: To me, jazz, like many other intellectual pursuits, is akin to field of onions. You can peel one down, cook it a zillion different ways, but no matter what you’ve figured out about that one individual onion, the others are all going to be slightly different. You can spend your whole life in that field and never hear about another one, let alone another kind of onion altogether. “Cipollinis ain’t got nuthin’ on me, mutherfucker! I do Pearl!” etc…

If you were not acclimated to jazz as a child, the discovery of it as an adult can be a magical, transformative experience. That’s been the case for me. It’s changed my life 100% for the better. Now, it doesn’t feed me today – and it may never do that – so, I may never experience the tremendous, protracted grief that Henry has been going through. Sure, the closer I get to proficiency at my instrument the more difficult it becomes to tolerate mediocre players without dynamic control or the all-too-common less-than-improvisational musical situations that I seem to continually find myself in. (I just really, really like to play.) I guess I could bitch and moan about all that, but you guys have hit that nail pretty hard already.

Special props to Steve’s Dark Nebulous Tone Zone. That was probably my favorite post on here so far. Most of the time I’m one of the guys with that “intense gettin’ down look of pleasure” on my face and other times I’m Steve. I guess I’m lucky: playing music is just so damn fun for me that I can’t get too pushed out of shape over a guy missing a note or two. Shit, at some point I’m gonna miss one, too. Then what? I can safely guarantee that I will not disembowel myself or anyone else on the bandstand. Maybe I need a few more decades of playing gigs for $6 and a slap on the back to get there.

Reading all this negative stuff that often goes unsaid at the club, but still supplies an unpleasant subtext at the gig has had a remarkably therapeutic effect on me. No matter how unhappy I’ll ever get playing music, it’s nice to know that Steve will always be twice as pissed over a bassist playing a D instead of an A.

Henry, thanks for bring this treasure of a blog into the world!

Until next time,

The Joyous Drummer

Henry: Hey Jesse, you seem to be having a little too much fun with music. Maybe you do need a few more decades of $6 dive bar gigs (where the scotch is infested with fruit flies and the patrons are all half-crazed hobos) so you can experience the profound pain and deep self loathing that I wallow in each and every day of my misbegotten life.

I’m kidding, of course. I love to play too. And I’ve never been one to be bothered by an occasional wrong note or dropped form. If the music feels good and the musicians are positive and doing their best for the greater musical good, I’m happy.

I was on a gig once with a jam band. We were playing a funk version of the Thelonious Monk tune Well You Needn’t when the bass player dropped an A section and went to the bridge too early. The guitar player screamed at the top of his lungs–nooo! A fist fight almost broke out on stage.

Some people take themselves a little too seriously. (Not referring to Steve. I sympathize with his situation and he’s dealing with it admirably and in a civilized manner.) But to the atavistic rhythm sections players (drummers, bassists, guitarists) willing to throw down over a mere ill-placed note or dropped beat, come on? As the jazz pianist Kenny Werner has said, it’s only music. For God’s sake, no one needs to get hurt over it.

It sounds like you’re in a great place with your music. And you’ve got the most important thing down: how to enjoy it.

#wrong notes #jazz #jazzruinedmylife #submission

*passive-aggresively places a pencil on your music stand*

#music #wrong notes #please fix them brah #band #orchestra

Meeting out of time

I was wandering familiar hallways at work. It was an office building with many doors along endless hallways. It was kind of like school, but really was just work.

I found the correct door and went inside. The room was dark and there was a lecture starting. There were only a few people attending and were scattered around the room in random chairs or tables.

I sat at a table at the far end of the room and started to take notes on the meeting. We reached a break and the instructor stepped out, leaving the lights dimmed. I started to read my notes and found they were noted from an actual classroom I had been in some years ago.

None of the notes I had taken in the meeting were anywhere to be found. This was disappointing. How was I supposed to remember anything for later?

To the side of me was an ancient overhead transparency projector.

The instructor came back in but didn’t start to lecture. He was near to me so I got his attention and tried to talk him into getting a better projector.

The one I was speaking about appeared in place of the ancient one.

It was all silver and flat and had four little arms that stuck up from the sides and had a single little arm on top. It was made so that something could be placed on the flat base and the four arms had high-intensity lights that would shine on it, and on top was a tiny reflector or imager that would project the image.

I wanted to show how it would work with something other than paper, though, and pulled out my cell phone. I would simply pull up an image and set the phone on the tray so it could show.

Except the images on my phone were not work appropriate. They were not bad or adult. They were just not something to show at work. I kept going through files and directories.

Time was getting short. I had to come up with something quickly before it was too late.

I found an image and quickly put the phone on the tray.

And the alarm clock woke me.