So, how was last night?
The soundcheck was promising: this is usually a bad sign. Trey & I wanted to quit while we were ahead, but Tony & Pat kept going so we stayed. Which wasn't a bad thing: ideas flowed and confidence grew, ears became more accustomed to the space and stage.
Caveats of a working musician reporting on the performance of which they have been a part:
1. The player can only describe their personal and subjective view of the performance.
Sometimes this experience may be genuinely other, even ecstatic. This does not necessarily imply that the musical experience available to the audience is also sublime, although the likelihood of this is greater.
2. A "good" performance may not be "good" in purely musical terms.
This a lesson acquired over many years of listening to archive recordings from live performances. Remarkable music, or remarkable performance, may not be recognised or acknowledged by an audience in the moment it flies by. Generally, an audience is governed by expectation, and this expectation must be tweaked to loosen its hold.
3. A "good" performance may be a celebration of favourite performers by the audience; or simply an audience committed to having a "good time".
This is irrespective of an event's purely musical merit.
4. A genuinely remarkable performance will more likely be acknowledged years after the event, when its repercussions have spread out into the larger listening community.
Perhaps someone in the audience has had their life shaped or re-directed by the event, and those resonances continue to move outwards. This is an effect of the "operations of grace" which act through music to convey hope, counter despair, and transmit the qualitative energy to continue in a life of hard conditions and responsibility; to bring us in front of ourselves - perhaps to encourage a young musician to endure a life which for them is inescapable. All these things we recognise so well, but which escape a simplistic description.
These are also the subtleties which escape a "good" professional performance. A "good professional performance" is where everyone gets what they went for. The pity is, they probably don't get what was on offer. But, if we expect a performance to be life changing, the expectation in itself sets up the conditions which prevent our life from being changed. The door to the real world may or may not be closed, but our attention is elsewhere - our eyes are not on the gateway.
Audients and Web-visitors generous enough to have followed an interest in my work may recognise here the dilemma and problematic of Fripp as working musician.
Now, the gig:
The first set was the one for me. The most dangerous, and clearly of the greatest discovery. The first of anything has a power - the power present in the simple fact of the unfolding and emerging. However "bad" the beginning might be, the power of "the first" is always present.
Soundscaping began, Pat joined, then Tony & Trey. And then, after 40 minutes, we left. The second set began with greater sparseness and less continuity. Pat stopped several times, which was a surprise for me. An encore of "VROOOM".
The audience were generous, and offered the players a series of helpful comments and directions throughout the two sets. Bill Jansen, the outstanding saxophone player who has often played with Adrian Belew, visited from Denver to honour the performance.
I am unable to give a detailed review of the music, and look forward to forthcoming reviews from impartial audients, commenting with an engaged sense of critical goodwill.
Audients: the simple rudeness and bad manners of audient individuals continues to amaze me. Twice in conversation with friends, once before and once after the show, audients interrupted. "Excuse me" they say.
What they do not say is: "Excuse me - I am interrupting your conversation with your friends because I want your attention. It is of no concern to me that your attention is being given to your friends - give it to me. I have as little respect or courtesy for your friends as I do for you. And now I have attracted your attention by my pushy and inconsiderate approach, let me suck from you as much of the precious lifeblood of attention that I can by whatever honest, dishonest or manipulative means that I may. I WANT your attention and INSIST that I have it. I have the right because I am enmired and enmeshed in egotism and self-adoration, have bought a ticket with my hard-earned pay, and will argue and present any other equally deceitful lines which come to mind because I MUST HAVE your attention and acknowledgement for the fact that I, ME, exists and is standing in front of you. And I have a question, too".
And to think: we might all have been watching Terton Rinpoche's "Fire Down Below" on HBO.
I have now come to the end of Lawrence Kramer's "Music As Cultural Practice" (1990) (I had a good time reading his "Classical Music & Postmodern Knowledge" at Chez Belewbeloid last year) and am setting off through Andrew Harvey's "Son Of Man", acquired from the Boulder Bookshop on my first day in town. The book is personally signed by the author, but the signature has no resonance. I sense an author with a professional chore to discharge. Many of Ken Wilber's books are also signed (another local author). I have read all his recent work, and the earlier volumes are awaiting me on my shelves at home. Rabbi Cooper's "God Is A Verb" (yet another local author) is on display at Barnes & Noble in its paperback edition.
"If we don't know where we're going, we'll probably get there."
