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Music – The great
communication tool |
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Whenever I pick up a guitar or bass magazine – or get into conversations with other musicians, I read or talk about guys that are incredible musicians but don’t have anything worthwhile to say or that they play weird music that nobody wants to hear! This seems to be a universal problem and few people have really stepped back to examine the situation. We are always hearing about music being a form of communication but it seems like there’s not that many of us that are listening. Allow me to try to put you all in the picture. Let’s just have a look at two bands whose cd’s I have at home. Funnily enough, I transferred both of these bands albums onto a cassette to play in the car and it’s this cassette that made me think about all this stuff that I’m about to dump on you. The first band is a band called WINGER. Winger are a three piece band led by Kip Winger who handles Bass duties and does the main vocal. Bassplayer magazine has, in my opinion, unfairly stated that Kip Winger is a singer that holds a bass guitar. The album in question is called PULL. On the other side of the cassette is a Japanese four-piece outfit called CASIOPEA. Now, Casiopea are a band of guys that are extremely proficient on their respective instruments. The album I have is the only one of theirs that I own – it’s a live album that got recorded during a world tour that they had embarked on years ago. The initial differences between these bands that hit you are that all the Winger tunes are songs and all the Casiopea tunes are instrumentals. Winger are a rock band whilst Casiopea are a fusion band. The Winger album doesn’t feature one bass solo whereas the Casiopea album features a few bass and drums things and one hell of a slap bass solo followed by a drum feature towards the end of one of their tracks. Why is it then that I prefer to listen to the Winger album than the Casiopea album? Obviously, songs are a lot easier to digest than instrumental music but then I’m a muso that also only composes instrumental tunes so I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is communication. At the end of each of the Casiopea tracks there’s a huge applause so Casiopea are most definitely communicating with their audience. The Winger album is a studio-recorded disc so you don’t know what other people’s reaction to their music is. Let’s just move away from music for a moment and talk about communication through speech. Now, some of us went to school and really got stuck in and learned everything their brain could absorb. One of those subjects we learned about was our own native language – for some of us it was English, others, Afrikaans, Spanish, German or Zulu. Learning a language is an interesting thing – most of us learn our native tongue by just listening to other people talking and we pick up the new words as we go along. Most of us probably asked the question in our younger days “why must I learn my own language at school, I already know it??!!” Have any of you looked at a dictionary lately of your native tongues and seen how many words there actually are in your language? It’s quite frightening how few words we actually know the meaning of and there are a lot of words that we know the meaning of but can’t really explain to somebody else what they mean. There’s a HUGE difference between knowing how to communicate in a language and mastering it. The problem with mastering a language is that you now move up onto a much higher plane than what other people are on and when you speak to them they can’t understand you because you’re using words they’ve absolutely no conception of!! As you climb up through the levels there are more and more people that are on lower planes than you until you reach the top and you find yourself all alone with nobody to communicate with on the same level. Have you ever spoken to somebody that hasn’t been educated very well, they punctuate all their sentences with swear words in an attempt to try to get themselves listened to. A more educated person will communicate without the blasphemy cluttering up their sentences. Now that we’ve had a little look at language let’s return to the musical arena and the problems facing us there. Music is a universal language but there are more listeners than communicators. Do you have to know how to read and write to be able to speak a language and understand what someone else is saying? No, you don’t and music is a wonderful thing because the listener doesn’t need to know diddly squatt about music to enjoy it. What you will find though, is that those people that know absolutely nothing are perfectly happy listening to three chord boogie or simple pop tunes whereas the more discerning folk wont be happy listening to anything less than the kind of music dished out by Bela Fleck & his Flecktones or Dream Theater. It all comes down to the level of education in the music sphere that the listener has acquired. I’m not saying that I’m a musical genius but for me, listening to three chord boogie is like listening to a child swearing his heart out at me – sometimes I’ll find it entertaining in a strange sort of way and sometimes it’s nothing more than an irritation in my ear. So why, if I’m pretty clued up with what’s what, musically speaking, do I prefer to listen to Winger than Casiopea – surely I would appreciate the more challenging music that the Japanese foursome are dishing out! This is a hard one to answer but I’ll attempt to do so anyway! Of all the music styles that exist in the world today, the one music form I enjoy above all others is rock music – for me, jazz and fusion music may be technically superior but it just seems to lack that energy that I require for my recommended daily intake. I’ve got plenty of Bob James, Fourplay, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, John Patitucci and all the rest of them on cd’s at home and the music is extremely challenging but it just doesn’t hit the spot (NOTE: just because something is musically challenging it doesn’t mean to say it’s good). I tend to think that I would probably feel a little different about each of these artists if I had a live show experience in my memory banks to look back upon, but as yet I haven’t ever been to see any of these artists at a live show. I have never, on the other hand, ever seen Winger live but I’ve been to so many rock shows that I Know EXACTLY what the experience would be like. What I’m saying is, that at the end of the day, it all comes down to personal choice. I’ve educated myself in the musical world enough to appreciate cerebral music of the style that I enjoy most which is why I mostly enjoy listening to Dream Theater, Yes, Kansas, ELP and all the other bands that churn out that kind of entertainment but I also prefer to just get ‘down and dirty’ listening to the same music form performed by less musically educated guys above listening to another music form performed by virtuoso’s. Would any of you want to go to an AWB gathering? Probably not, because you aren’t really interested in what they have to say. Would I go to a Casiopea concert? I doubt it, because I’m not really interested in what they’ve got to say. There will, of course, be plenty of people at AWB rally’s or Casiopea concerts to listen and applaude what they have to say (or play) so they’re communicating with like minded people – they have their place in the world even though they’re not every one’s cup of tea. As I said, it’s all about choice, but education is your key to happiness. With education, you can enjoy so much more because you understand so much more - a wider range becomes available to you, as a listener, to choose from. Now that we’ve looked at the situation from a listener’s standpoint, lets just briefly look at the situation from the artist’s side. Sometimes a very educated person just hasn’t got an interesting thing to say. Some people will spend so much of their lives buried in books and become extremely knowledgeable about a certain subject that when they venture out to meet people they quickly find themselves sitting all alone because they just haven’t acquired the most basic of communication tools. A balance has to be struck somewhere along the line where the bookworm actually goes out and lives life a little and soaks up some of life’s experiences to enable them to have something to say. This problem can develop in the music world. A musician could spend so much time locked away studying everything he or she can and shredding like a demon on their instrument that when they finally come out to show the world what they can do, they haven’t got a single thing to say and all you get out of them is this really phenomenal technique but absolutely nothing is being said – just listen to anything by Paganini, the violinist that apparently sold his soul to the Devil – it’s just scales played at high speed – I for one, don’t hear anything musical in there at all. I once went into a bar in Joubert Park one Christmas eve to see Chris Becker and his buddies playing in a band calling themselves Adverse Edition and all I could hear was technique by all four guys – Chris even slapped his whole way through a 12 bar blues tune – what the hell for? Chris actually slapped his way through every tune they played that evening and after about five or six tunes I found myself sitting up at the bar with my back to them chatting up some chick that, to me, had a lot more appeal than the band had - but during the evening, a couple of youngsters were allowed to get up on stage to entertain us for a few minutes and their primitive playing was the highlight of the whole sorry, boring evening. Well that’s it folks – have a think about what I’ve said and you’ll realise that communication with a musical instrument runs parallel to communication through speech and no matter what musical avenue you decide to take – if you’ve got something worthwhile to say, you will find an audience hanging on your every note. Remember, you don’t HAVE to master music to be able to use it to communicate successfully with other, like minded people. Happy bassin' |
