Here’s the thing: I’d like to be more than just a well-trained monkey. This is one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time in situations of “higher learning,” seeking out communities of musicians dedicated to cracking the code. This is a true luxury, I know. Teachers and ensemble situations put a spotlight on strengths and weaknesses and a focus on wood shedding, a musician’s term for practicing things over and over in a solitary setting. The operative term here is higher, as in ascending the rungs of the never ending proverbial ladder, to develop a voice and authenticity beyond imitation. This is easier said than done. Some people are born with God-given artistic voices and realize this at an early age and connect with good teachers and put in the work and they are extremely special. Some days I wake up and can’t tell my ass from my elbow, or Bflat from Dflat, as it were.
Malcolm Gladwell famously proclaimed that it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. That is either a ridiculous underestimation or I am doomed to remain a monkey. In my experience,10,000 hours gets you to the door of the second floor right above Mediocrity. That’s when they hand you the fortune cookie that says the longer you do something, the more you realize how little you know.
Maybe mastery is just the endless pursuit of beginner’s mind. I might have seen that on an episode of “Kung Fu,” a TV series I was hopelessly addicted to in high school. It was about a Shao Lin priest played by David Carradine, who lived in the wild west and performed some serious ass kicking martial arts mainly against white supremacists with a hatred for yellow skinned slanty-eyed Chinamen, even though in reality he was neither yellow skinned nor slanty-eyed. I happily suspended my disbelief, both for the fight scenes and the mystical pap the white eyed sage, Master Po, would teach him in flashbacks from his boyhood days in the monastery. I estimate that young Kwai Chang Caine clocked about 150,000 hours into his priesthood before he lifted the burning hot cauldron to open the temple gates which branded his forearms with the Shao Lin dragons. Granted, he was sleeping some of those hours, which aids the learning process. He also played a bamboo flute.
“When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper, it is time for you to leave.”
The first time I went to the Berklee College of Music I was 50 years young on a sabbatical hoping to be geographically closer to my son who was attending boarding school 3,000 miles across the country at the young age of 14. I clearly remember sitting in an auditorium of young freshman and saying to myself, “My name is Dan, and I am a musician,” like I had just joined AA, which maybe I should consider. It took me many years to unpack what I was taught in just one semester there. Eight years later I find myself back in Berklee, this time at the Valencia, Spain campus, which is quite a different experience.
The first week a guest speaker told us that you become good at what you practice everyday. We were later advised to set some meaningful goals for the next four months (which like an intuitive monkey I had already written out on my own). By vocalizing them to at least three other people, she told us, our odds at accomplishing them would become much greater. Six weeks into the semester I think often about practicing what I want to become good at. Luckily we have teachers and daily classes to keep us honest and reinforce the things we want to avoid becoming bad at. I am also a bit of a studio rat now because what my piano teacher says should take 15 minutes per day in reality takes me an hour. There must be something in the human psyche that draws us to self-improvement formulas which are wildly optimistic and completely delusional.
Because we are in Europe for the year I am doing my best to learn new musical forms and songs in other languages and I am blessed to have some very fine and patient instructors. My Spanish teacher Sal told me about Silvia Perez Cruz, who is one of the most famous singers in Spain and who possibly rivals in goosebump clarity of voice the singing of Eva Cassidy, who died tragically of cancer in her mid-30s and made only a few dozen exquisite recordings. Silvia Perez Cruz is quite celebrated here and there are many YouTube videos of her astonishing music. Here’s her singing the Latin American folk song “Cucurrucucú.”
Guitar players are notoriously bad sight readers and I am no exception. This is especially true in America where most players learn by strumming chords and paint by number like tablature charts rather than taking the more disciplined classical approach of reading music. Most American guitarists grow up in the school of instant gratification which is of course a satisfying way to learn. There are legions of professional rock guitar players earning megabucks who wouldn’t know the Dorian scale if it bit them in the face even while they were playing it.
Becoming more than just a well-trained monkey means understanding chord theory, knowing all the notes on the fretboard (which is 6 X 12 and then it repeats), and attaining a baseline of reading fluency. Think of something that is good for you which you would rather not do. Multiply it by ten and you can sense the average monkey’s scale of suffering when trying to sight read on guitar. Because the guitar has six strings, the challenge is knowing exactly where to start. A melody can progress so quickly that you lose your place and can’t think fast enough to recover unless you truly know your instrument. It’s like being on a rock face when you can’t see a hand or toe hold. The good news is that a little practice everyday yields progress.
James Taylor gave a seminar at Berklee many years ago which was a musical conversation between he and his brother Livingston. After detailed discussions about guitar tuning with capos and right hand nail care, James started playing a “wheel” of chords he said he frequently explored. The chords folded beautifully into one another between major and minor with a few unexpected moves, connected by James’ tasty bass lines and intricate straight-8 fingerpicking style. Much of his early playing was influenced, he told us, by playing out of hymnbooks while at boarding school. At any rate, he has impeccable tone and timing and eventually he sang “Carolina on My Mind” and “Sweet Baby James.” While he mainly only played within the first five or six frets, he seemed to use every single note and knew them all intimately. They were like dear friends that he could summon at any time to paint the dark and light celestial colors he is so gifted at.
Something as seemingly instinctual as singing is also not so simple. You think it’s done in your throat but it’s really about your abdomen and breathing and proper technique and accessing the resonant spaces in your body, particularly your skull. Mind games and mental images help. You think down to sing higher, think high to sing low notes, think “o” to sing “ah” and “u” to sing “oh.” You sing on the vowels with streams of steadily forward flowing breath. If any of this sounds counterintuitive, that’s because it is. Difficult notes cause you to reflexively tense up so all of this requires a lot of mental preparation and self hypnosis. My teacher, who is a tall Spanish woman with a gorgeously precise voice and a lovely smile, stresses that there is a lot of resonating structure in your mouth and you can access it by yawning or by putting your hands on your cheeks and pulling your jaw down while you sing. She shows me a video of the Italian pop singer, Lucio Dalla. “He dies every time he sings,” she says. I think I may be dead before I ever learn to sing.
A young man in one of my classes told me about a pilgrimage he made last weekend. It was the anniversary of the death of Paco de Lucia and he wanted to play guitar at the beloved Flamenco artist’s grave. He left Valencia at midnight on a 13-hour bus ride to the city of Algeciras on the Andalusian coast. The young man has black curly hair and deep dark eyes and an earnest voice that quavered slightly when he spoke of his musical offering and of looking out onto the rock of Gibraltar and the glimmering ocean beyond and the deep appreciation he had for a man who was born to master the Spanish guitar. Here is Paco’s bass player, Carlos Benavent playing “De Perdidios al Río”:
Having spent a great deal of time with young musicians over the past decade, I often find it heartening how much they know about and revere former generations of players. The leader of my ensemble is a young Slovenian who plays a vicious trumpet and has a reputation for being one of the very best in Spain on his instrument. He seems to know intimately every note Miles Davis ever recorded and the exact arrangement of musicians on each song. After deciding he was going to be a jazz musician at the age of six, he spent his formative years in Holland achieving his dream. He always has a palette of Miles related anecdotes at the ready. A few years back I read Miles’ self-named autobiography in which “motherfucker” appears in nearly every sentence and sometimes more than once because he used it for such a wide variety of meanings, so I can assure you the stories are colorful.
The best thing about his class is when he encourages us to start playing with no written music or direction. Someone starts, then others slowly begin to follow, eventually a groove is established, and then a form develops with the drums and bass locking in. The moment the ensemble begins to feel comfortable is precisely when the magic evaporates and we stop listening to one another so intently.
Being lost and finding your way back can be a blast. I imagine monkeys in the wild do that on a daily basis.
