Repeating Yourself Repeating Yourself....

I've been really blessed with the best September I've had in NYC...I've been gigging an average of once a week this month. With this unexpected wealth of public performances I've gotten a chance to play with a lot of new musicians in a lot of new situations. I should be happy...and I am. But one thing is really bothering me and that is the nagging feeling that I'm always repeating myself.

This sense of repeating yourself...of always playing the same few solos...is not unique to free jazz. Some fairly well known soloists made entire careers out of rearranging licks and pentatonic scales. Phil Woods comes to mind. I'm not even sure how bad this really is. Gene Harris is one of my favorite straight ahead pianists...noone plays with more joy or life. And yet his solos are really nothing more than beautifully executed blues licks. If the player brings something personal to the sound...puts himself or herself behind the music then it almost doesn't matter if they are licks or not.

But free music is harder in some ways. It's a music in which people pay lip service to the idea of creating totally in the moment. It's about being spontaneous and unpredictable at all times. No small order that!

In reality free jazz is full of licks just like any other music. Licks are another word for language and you have to have a language to make music. Your language may be in the notes, chords and rhythms you choose or it may be based more in sound exploration or non-idiomatic exploration...but we all have a bag of tricks that we have developed through playing, listening and experimenting. That's how you develop personal style.

The issue for me is when I start to find the tricks taking me over rather than me controling the tricks. I notice a similar shape to my solos...they start melodically and with development of musical cells and ideas...but they always end up with clusters and tearing up the piano in some way which to me is the only way a piano player can approximate the overblowing of a sax or the growls of a brass instrument.

The frustration for me is the way this form can get stale...it's like I know it's going to happen before it does. Interestingly, this repetativeness doesn't happen in jam sessions. It's a function of the audience. Sometimes the clusters happen because they have to, but other times I'm aware that I'm giving the audience what they want...a little wild craziness. Often the solos I'm most proud of...the ballad solos...are the ones that get me the least appreciation from the audience. I sometimes feel like I'm grandstanding or dumbing down my music for what I percieve the audience to be expecting or in some weird feeling of competition with horn players.

I don't know the answer to this conundrum except to name it and work on it I think. When I acknowledge that I feel in a rut I might actually be able to harness the tools to get out of the rut. It's related to the Jazz Neurosis that Steve Prozinger wrote about at Brilliant Corners...you are always getting the nagging feeling that you just aren't hitting what you want to be hitting...or that your musical vision isn't quite where you want it to be.

Maybe at long last it's time for me to grow up as a musician and stop worrying about the audience...I dunno. Might bring in a new variation to the work.