Musical high: Free, rockin’ and tight as a frog’s bottom

This is cobbled together from notes and from out-takes from my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, and my personal notes.

Zoom!!!

How are we to weigh and understand the following testimony, the first by Branford Marsalis, the second by Eric Clapton?

High, you feel high. It's easy to do it physically, but it's hard to do it mentally. I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit. The sublime cannot be routine. Three times, and you never forget them. It's with a combination of musicians, it's never just me.

It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes at a certain point. Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not something I could experience on my own. . . . other musicians . . . an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at one point. It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another musician. But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They're all transported toward the same place. That's not very common, but it always seems to happen at least once a show [1].

Are these guys talking about the same thing? Branford’s experience happened only three times whereas Clapton’s seems quite common and almost predictable, despite his disclaimer. Is one a better musician than the other? Or do rock and jazz make different demands and give different rewards? All of the above?

As for myself, I had a powerful experience in my mid-20s. During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns, sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement. On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn't make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.

That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memory's faded & the ambivalence too. I'm playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.

Still, there are gigs and there are gigs.

Group Grok

For about a decade near the end of the previous century I played with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band in upstate New York. We had about three or four gigs a month—mostly local clubs, private parties, and weddings. In my six or seven years with the band two gigs stand out above all the others, and one of the two was just a bit better than the other one. We played these gigs within the space of a month—I believe, in fact, they were no more than a week or two apart. The gigs were in very different venues. The first one was for a Parent’s Day dance at Skidmore College, an exclusive private school in Saratoga Springs. The second gig, the better of the two, was a club date in a sports bar in North Troy that had a large biker clientele that nite. Two very different venues, two different crowds, but both were dancing crowds, which certainly affected the band’s performance.

Band personel shifted from year to year, but none of the players were full-time professional musicians. During the period in question the band consisted of a lawyer, an advertising executive, a commercial photographer, a car salesman, two men who drove trucks for beverage distributors, and me, a freelance technical writer and independent scholar. I don’t know whether the other players judge these gigs as highly as I do—though they certainly felt they were good at the time. And I should emphasize that my judgement of these gigs is not a judgement about my own playing. I got a fair amount of solo space in general, and I had my usual slots for these gigs. However, I don’t remember anything outstanding in my performance at these particular gigs—that’s a different list. I remember these gigs because the band felt loose, free, rockin’ and tight as a frog’s bottom. We were in synch, among ourselves and with the crowd.

I do not know whether or not anyone in that band was ecstatic on either of these nights. I certainly was not. Nor do I think it matters much, aesthetically, morally. Intellectually, that’s a different matter. That’s about understanding what happens. We’ve hardly even begun that journey.

Transcending

Every athelete and every musician has her routine game. And at some point in her life, and maybe more than one, she plays above her routine level. Most of us have had an experience in some sphere of our lives that lifts us out of ourselves and thereby becomes a touchstone against which we measure our lives. If we live long enough and well enough we may even grow beyond measuring our lives against those moments while still treasuring them and telling stories about them, to our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, to our friends and their children. Those story-tellings are themselves moments of sympathetic communion with our fellows and the connected tissue of those tellings is one of the means by which we preserve and assert our values.

Reference 

[1] These passages are from Jenny Boyd, Musicians In Tune, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, pp. 173 and 185 respectively