There are 3 kinds of musicians, song writers, jammers and re-enactors. Song writers slave meticulously over composing a piece from beginning to end. They are always considering the endless possibilities of the convalescence of rhythms, melodies, lyrics and how these tools can adequately express what’s inside.
Then there are jammers, they make music on the spot for the moment. They have little idea of what they just played or are going to play. Whatever musical instrument around them is the vehicle that guides how the creation will unfold. The momentary mood is the driver, equipped with sonar, night vision, telescopes and microscopes to fit the changing world that surrounds, a world that has no idea where it came from or where it is going, but knows where it is.
Not to be forgotten are re-enactors. Record player players. They have no creativity of their own so they rely on others. Either they were never required or never enquired to create something on their own, so they don’t. They worked their asses off to earn the skill to execute music from others, because so often that is what people want to hear.
These musicians shape the world around us, the world within us and they are us, because life is music. A pure jammer cannot write a constitution, a pure song writer cannot fly a plane and neither can put together a computer.
I’ll pause to let you consider who you are.
Whether our strengths are synthesis, improvisation, or re-enactment , let us not use one but all. It is thinking about how things have been done that allowed us to plant crops as our forefathers did to survive the winter. It is thinking on our feet that allowed us to survive the Ice Age. It’s thinking outside the box that got us out of the cave and onto the moon.
Let us create and be created, let us change life and let life change us. Let us not reinvent the wheel, unless it makes more sense to invent a hovercraft. Let us give ourselves wings and wing it, find, write and jam a good song and sing it. Make a new feel and feel it, find a good steal and steal it.
Let us give credit where credit is due because Beetoven, Jimi Hendrix, and Nine Inch Nails deserve credit just like Newton, Tesla and Ben Franklin do. They, with us are notes in the seemingly infinite symphonies, ragas and jam sessions we call life on earth.
This world is too complex to fit in to one song, so let us all make music, in more ways than one.
