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Semi-Coherent Ramblings (a.k.a. - “Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy”)
Informal Bio, or “Why I play music, and why I keep switching
instruments”
 What’s this? An informal bio in the first person? Isn’t that sacrilege?
I hope not. There’s nothing really wrong with formal third person bios
in principle, but in practice they reduce a person’s professional life
to a self-serving blurb for the purpose of establishing professional
credibility in a paragraph or less. Again, that’s fine, and useful in
its own way, but it doesn’t begin to tell the real story. It may well be
that no one really cares to hear more of the story than the formal
blurb, but if anyone does, I’ll try to add a little more info here,
hopefully in a more relaxed manner.
Why do I play music? The simple answer is that for me, the act of
playing music provides me with an environment in which I no longer have
to wonder “why am I here?” , or “what is the meaning of life on this
planet?”. When I’m playing (or perhaps this should be amended to say,
when I’m playing in the correct frame of mind), nothing exists except
the moment at hand and the sounds that fill it - there are no worries
about the past or the future, no wondering if or how I’ll make the next
car payment, no speculation about whether or not my teeth are white
enough or my breath fresh enough, no commercials....you get the point.
When it’s really going right, all of that other stuff just melts away
and there is only sound and the moment. With or without the sound part,
being truly in the moment is the state in which I believe life is meant
to be lived, and music has always been my most consistent inroad into
that state. What better reason could there be to play?
When did I start playing music, and why do I keep switching
instruments? To hear my mother tell it, I started playing between
the ages of two and three. I can’t remember much of this, but according
to her, I used to sit at the piano and try to figure out songs that I’d
heard around the house by plunking around on the white keys until the
song started to emerge. Now, nearly forty years later, I still do the
same thing when composing, the only difference being that these days, I
throw in the occasional black key as well - but I’m getting ahead of
myself. The first instrument was piano, on which I was self taught until
about age five, at which point I had piano lessons for four or five
years from the prototypical “old lady (at least, I thought so then)
piano teacher down the street”. Her name was Carolyn Shapin. Most of her
students called her “Miss Shapin”, although she clearly wasn’t, and at
any rate the double-meaning was completely lost on us then. She was a
good teacher, but I had the attention span of a hyperactive child (for
obvious reason to those who knew me then), and I quit somewhere around
age ten, about halfway through “Fur Elise”, if I recall correctly.
The years from age 10 to about age 18 are mostly a blur, but somewhere
in there I played clarinet in the Brown School band, then switched to
French Horn, which I ended up playing in the Louisville Youth Orchestra
for a year or two. Somewhere around age twelve, I bought an old
Silvertone guitar at a yard sale for $5, and started to teach myself how
to play songs that I had on 45 rpm records. This was a very inexact
science, but much preferable to a hyperactive teenager than studying
classical music on a large, complicated, and very shiny piece of
plumbing attached to a mouthpiece, so it eventually became my first
passion. Besides, guitar was way cooler than French horn back then. To
make a long story short, I was basically self taught on guitar through
high school, played in various garage bands of dubious quality and one
or two that were slightly better, and then when high school was over I
had to make a choice: what was I going to do with my life?
I had no idea, but since I hated everything I tried doing except music,
it seemed like a good bet. Unable to afford to go to a “real” music
school (and most probably unable to get accepted into one at any rate),
I enrolled at Jefferson Community College, and immersed myself in their
small but more than adequate music department. They had a classical
guitar teacher there, Doug Jones, who in addition to his penchant for
standup comedy and self deprecating humor, was a pretty fair guitar
player and teacher in his own right. Looking back on it, that music
department resembled the Land of Misfit Toys more than anything due to
the student base, but in spite of that, I got serious about music for
the first time in my life there, and grew up a lot as a musician. JCC
was also my first introduction to Music Theory, and the theory professor
there, David Doran, was amazingly adept at making what can often be a
very dry subject more interesting than I could have ever imagined.
After graduating from JCC, I went to Berklee College of Music in hopes
of coming to understand something about this mythical music called
“jazz”, which I respected but still didn’t like much , since it didn’t
have the immediacy of blues and rock - my specialties at the time. It
was at Berklee that two important things happened: First, for the first
time I became aware of what a pretentious poser I was in danger of
becoming (remaining?), as I was surrounded by 600 other guitar players,
most of whom also thought that they already knew everything and were
just waiting for their big break; and second, I heard real jazz masters
play in person for the first time - the two that come instantly to mind
were Chick Corea and McCoy Tyner - and for the first time I really “got”
jazz, and the thought that any human being could actually do what these
guys were doing off the top of their heads just completely blew my mind.
Not surprisingly, I also decided during this year that if I wanted to
ever get serious about composition, the piano was where it was at.
The following year I enrolled at UofL, studying composition with Nelson
Keyes, and piano with his wife Doris Keyes. Doris turned out to be the
best teacher I’ve ever had, and Nelson wasn’t far behind. Both were
tremendously influential for many reasons, but most strikingly because
their love for music was so blatantly obvious that you’d have to be
blind, deaf, and dumb to miss it. It was Doris (in person I still can’t
bring myself to call her “Doris” out of respect, going with “Mrs. Keyes”
instead, a name which fortunately implies no disfigurement) who taught
me to always ask the question, “What does THE MUSIC want from you? How
does it want to be played?” This is a question I try to ask myself every
time I play to this day, and is probably the most important lesson I’m
still trying to learn.
During the course of my studies in classical piano with Mrs. Keyes, I
became involved in jazz piano, to the point where it became almost an
obsession for a few years. During this time I ate, breathed, and slept
with a steady diet of Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Kenny Barron, and Keith
Jarrett playing in the background. Somewhere in there, I became a
professional jazz pianist, and for about 10 years, that and teaching
were my primary sources of income. The other instrument that I had
always been fascinated with was the Double Bass, and in July of 1999,
two things happened which changed my life drastically as regards my
choice of primary instrument: 1) more and more clubs in town were either
closing or getting rid of their acoustic pianos, an although I played an
electric keyboard on many gigs, I’ve always hated the sound they make,
and hoped one day to be able to only play acoustic pianos; 2) a student
of mine found an old abandoned upright bass at the University which was
being stripped down for parts. Nobody wanted it because it was in
pieces, so he offered it to me if I wanted to fix it up. I took him up
on it, and $800 later, I had my first Double Bass, a plywood American
Standard from about 1925. I still own it, and to this day I can say that
it’s one of the ugliest basses I’ve ever seen. Still, once I heard THAT
SOUND, I knew that it was the answer to my dilemma. How could I live in
Louisville, KY, and still manage to make a living playing music while
playing a real instrument on every gig? Simple - all I had to do was
switch instruments to one I could carry to the gig myself. As it turns
out, the plan was a good one, for apparently Louisville was so bereft of
bass players at that time that I was able to start gigging within 6
months of getting that bass, and a few months after that I decided to
stop playing piano for five years, sell all of my keyboard gear, and see
what kind of bass player I could become in that amount of time. After
that, I reasoned, I could pick the piano back up if I wanted and split
the practice time on each instrument in half. I’ve got about a year to
go until then, and only time will tell if that’s what will happen. But
in the meantime, I’m just enjoying the ride, and enjoying making music
whenever I can.
Is Music Theory essential if you want to be a good player?
This is a question I’ve been pondering my entire life. I even went to
the trouble to get two degrees in the subject in an effort to answer
this question, and I still go back and forth on the answer. There are
times when it seems that I just couldn’t get along without theory, and
times in which it only seems to get in the way. It’s kind of like a
pendulum thing: On the one hand, I believe that the best music I’ve ever
made has come from the heart as an intuitive reaction to the sound I’m
hearing, and that while making this MSc, nary a thought entered my head
at all; on the other, I wonder how many sounds I’d be hearing at
whatever level I hear them if I hadn’t studied each sound individually
as an independent entity at some point. Which came first, the intuitive
understanding of the sound, or the study of the sound? Chicken or egg?
For me, Music Theory is nothing more and nothing less than the study and
scientific labelling of sounds that have already happened in the past
rather than a means to create sounds which might happen in the future. I
always learn something when I look at theory in the former way, and
always get into trouble when I look at it in the latter. My solution to
this problem is to only think about theory and/or technique issues when
practicing, and to do my best to not think at all while playing and just
react intuitively to the sound. When I’m able to do that, everything
seems to go well. When I’m not able to do that, I notice I tend to play
a lot of contrived crap that doesn’t really fit.
To me, music is about the sound, the whole sound, and nothing but the
sound. I’ve known players who know a lot of great technical stuff
(licks, patterns, etc.) to play and can plug it in all over the place,
and yet still manage to sound as if they are “reciting” stuff they’ve
rehearsed rather than reacting to what’s going on and creating something
they’ve never played exactly quite that way before. While I can never
truly know what’s in another person’s head (and that’s probably a good
thing) at any given moment, I imagine that what people are thinking at
times when I feel they are “reciting” is something along the lines of,
“Well, let’s see...this lick will fit over this chord progression. If I
play this lick here, it’ll look like I know what I’m doing, so I think
I’ll play this lick here”. And if I’m honest, I can cite times in which
I’ve done just that on numerous occasions. But if I’m really honest,
I’ll admit that this strikes me as a really dumb way to play, even
(especially?) when I’m the one doing it, because learning to recite
platitudes and clichés - whether verbal or musical - is not what I
believe life to be about...on the contrary, I believe it’s about living
in the moment and reacting to it in a meaningful way. And “reciting”
doesn’t exactly meet my definition of meaningful. In other words, if I
hear one more player play that tired-*ssed “1-2-3-5 ,1-2-3-5” line over
the opening chords of “Giant Steps”, I may well just lose my lunch from
sticking my finger down my throat. And if anyone ever catches me playing
that same line on a gig, they may as well just shoot me since I’ll
already be brain dead at that point.
Okay, that might be a little extreme, but I hope the point has been
made.
So how can theory be used effectively? I like to think of the human
brain as being similar to a computer in that it has both RAM (Random
Access Memory) and ROM (Read Only Memory). Your RAM is what processes
what’s going on at any given moment, and your ROM is your storage bank
for information you’ve retained from past experience. RAM can dip into
ROM and access its contents in order to react to the moment, but it’s
generally too slow (at least in my case) to learn and program the ROM
while it’s doing something else. What does this have to do with playing
music? For me, it means that if I want to have the energy and resources
to create music on the fly, I need to have all of my RAM free (in other
words, no thinking or running other programs/apps is allowed while
playing) to deal with the sounds I’m hearing at that precise moment, and
I also need need to have a lot of information and experience programmed
similar sounds/progressions/harmonies into my “hard drive” that my RAM
can use to react to the sound that my ears are hearing. In the case of
my own somewhat addled brain, information takes a long time to download
to the hard drive (I must have been born with a 14k phone modem
upstairs), but once it’s there, it can be uploaded to RAM very quickly,
a la broadband...so I feel it’s very important to spend the time
“programming” your own hard drive in the practice room, so that you can
use the information freely while playing without having to think about
it. And it is in this “programming” that I feel that music theory can be
useful - it’s just like a data code for sound.
I guess I could sum this all up by saying that I believe that music
theory is useful in the moments you spend in the practice room, but not
so much in the practice of making music in the moment.
Right. Like I said, I’m still working on this topic...
About the Players:
Harry Pickens and Musical Joy
My relationship with Harry is an interesting one, as he started out as a musical idol and guru, morphed into a musical confidant and part-time spiritual advisor, and in later years has ended up as peer and friend (although I use the term “peer” generously for my part in this instance). Regardless of which “stage” is under discussion, Harry has been a giant figure in the musical and spiritual landscape of the last decade of my life. His most important lesson as teacher is a holistic one: namely, that in order to become a better musician, you need to start by accepting who you are and embracing it. Then, and only then, can you go about the business of truly molding the shape of where you want to go. Another great lesson is the notion that if you want to sound a certain way in any given moment, you would be best served to try to be that way in that moment. For instance, I once asked him what he thought I could do to sound more like Ray Brown, and how I could get closer to that pure musical joy that Ray had…you know, that kind of groove Ray could always lay down where every person in the room is smiling and moving their neck to the beat? Harry just laughed and suggested that if I wanted to sound happy, I might want to start by being happy. “Try smiling more when you play”, he said.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Isn’t that the most precious, tree-hugging, granola-chewing bunch of California self-help psychobabble you ever heard in your life”? And maybe it is, except for one small detail: It works, folks…and believe me, no one was more surprised to discover this than I was. I mean, wouldn’t it have been cool if I could have done something easy in my pursuit of “Rayness”, something like playing transcribed solos with a metronome, or stealing a bunch of Ray’s licks and playing them in 12 keys or something concrete like that? Or if all I had to do was pretend to be happy, and I’d sound “happy”? What Harry taught me, both directly and indirectly, is that if you want to sound “joyful” or “Joyous”, the easiest way to get there is to just be full of joy when you play. Okay. So, uh…how do you do that? While I can’t say that I’ve got this one completely figured out, I think I can say that so far it seems to be about getting your ego out of your way enough to not let your creative flow be choked by your fears and insecurities; in other words, to give up the notion that it’s a good idea to be afraid of making a mistake. If I were a sportscaster, I’d sum it all up by saying that it’s about “playing to win” rather than “playing not to lose”. Of course, if I were really a sportscaster, I’d have to continue by making some stupid remark about how “in the big games, the big time players step up and make big time plays” (or some equally vapid **** like that), and then we’d all just have to roll our eyes and change the channel (which is yet one more reason I am infinitely glad I’m a musician instead of a sportscaster). So I’ll just let that analogy rest with “playing to win”.
As corny as all of this sounds, any doubts anyone might have about these nebulous descriptions I’m fumbling around with here can be easily laid to rest by just watching Harry play. Like most great musicians I know, he exudes a powerful aura of sincere belief in what he’s doing, and what’s more, it’s clear within a few seconds of his playing that he really loves what he’s doing at the moment he’s doing it. And if you are lucky enough (as I have been) to get the opportunity to play with him, you quickly discover that this love and this joy are contagious as hell…and that’s a good thing. For one thing, it allows you to ride the wave of someone else’s joy into the realm where you quickly find your own, as if the emotion of the other person has led you to some kind of “universal wellspring” of that particular feeling that you can then tap into on your own. For another, your inability to easily find your way back to that “wellspring” (in my case, anyway) as soon as you are not in the presence of the person who originally led you there is a clear indication of the next major goal you’ll want to go about pursuing. And it’s always nice to have that next crystal-clear large scale goal in mind, isn’t it? These are the kinds of things that knowing Harry makes me think about and pursue, and I can’t help but think that in the end, I’ll be a much better person for having been lucky enough to know him.
Todd Hildreth: Hip Like Todd
I’ve known Todd for forever and a day, so it’s hard to know where to start. I guess the most defining aspect of our relationship is the fact that we are the closest thing to true musical peers I’ve ever experienced, which is odd since we are polar opposites in so many ways: I’m a neat freak, he’s a slob; I like organization, he likes loosely controlled chaos; I’m a quasi-vegetarian, and he’s a total carnivore…the list goes on. In spite of all of this – or perhaps because of it – we’ve always had a very immediate and easy musical connection that requires very little verbal communication save for our constant and ruthless personal insult contest, which has been going on for coming up on 20 years now. It’s kind of a “family” thing, if that makes any sense.
The most important things I’ve learned from Todd are that everything can be funny if you look at it the right way, that you have to have let go of the reins if you want to explore new territory, and that even people with diametrically opposed approaches to rhythm can play well together if they will only listen. We’ve played together on so many projects that I’ve lost count, but some of the best recordings I’ve ever made have involved playing with Todd.
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