Talent… addendum

It just occurred to me that when one musician compliments another for his or her skill –or describes another musician to a third person– we never use the word “talented.”

Some Thoughts on Talent

[Published in the May edition of Stanislaus Connections]

I have been told I am talented.  It is a compliment I hope I receive graciously.  I’m not all that good at taking compliments, but the real reason I say, “I hope” because it is a sentiment that holds a basic concept with which I disagree.

Common among dictionary definitions of  “talent” is the idea that some people are born with an ability that makes them superior to most of the rest of us; a sort pre-natal leg up in the world.  Frankly, I don’t buy it.  Repeated studies by psychologists show that the only ability humans are born with is the ability to suckle.

I think we hold to a demonstrably inaccurate belief in “natural ability” because most folks cannot imagine being very skilled at an endeavor that fails to coincide with modern cultural norms of leisure and vocational activities.

Most of us come home from work and engage in a mindless activity.  We turn on the television of the computer.  We watch the creative output of people with whom we have no acquaintance let alone local contact.  The effect is compounded.  First, we consume creative output, we don’t engage in it.  Second, we do not have a lot of exposure to people who do spend their leisure time being creative.  So being in the presence of serious creative output that comes from local people is unusual and incomparable to events in everyday life.

Carrying all that cultural baggage makes the belief in innate advantage a fairly effective strategy for handling information that subtly contradicts our cultural expectations.  “I can’t imagine being that good a guitar player given the life choices I have made.  The musician in front of me is very good and obviously a member of my community, so he or she must have some gift from God that allows such skill to come more easily than it would for me.”

The advent of mass media in the late 1920’s, started this ball rolling.  Prior to radio networks, most entertainment was regional and the regions were small.  Indeed, one of the more popular ways to spend leisure time between about 1890 and the 1920 was to be a member of a local brass band, choir, or mandolin orchestra.

By the 1930s the Benny Goodman Orchestra could be heard on Saturday nights from coast to coast and all you had to do to “be there” was turn on your radio. On one hand this new development was a good thing: musicians exposed to players more skilled than themselves gained an opportunity to improve their skills based on that exposure.  On the other hand people who played music for their own entertainment –local band, choir, and orchestra members– began to prefer to listen and dance rather than play.

The growth and development of radio arrived as the technology for capturing live musical performances and broadcasting them met the law of supply and demand.  Radios that captured broadcasts were produced in ever increasing numbers, driving the price low enough to make ownership of a radio possible for most American households.  These developments continued to drive people away from making music and toward merely consuming it.

The upshot is that prior to 1930 most people actively made music –playing an instrument of some kind– and shared their musical endeavors with neighbors, friends, and family.  After that most people simply consumed music.

Thus the concept of talent arises out of a disbelief in one’s own ability to reach the same skill level as a person who demonstrates a high level of skill in music or a related creative endeavor.  Which means the term, “talent,” is short hand.  People who appear talented are the ones who shake off the cultural cues pointing us in the direction of ever more expensive, detailed, and passive entertainment experiences.  The talented among us spend their disposable income and leisure time learning new things, going after still unattained skills, rather than turning on the television.

In the ancient Greek region of Attica (Athens and its environs) the definition of “talent” was the amount of silver a skilled artisan or laborer could earn in nine years.  This throws a little light on how and why we use the word to denote something that appears God-given.

If you spent years learning a craft and then got paid for nine years to continue to work that craft, you would master it.  Your mastery would be demonstrable in your work; you could make it look effortless. People who were unfamiliar with the amount time you put in to your work would witness your apparent effortlessness and call it “talent.”

I prefer this older definition.  I know how many years of unpaid purposeful effort it has taken me to hone the connection between my ears, my mind, and my hands (30).  But many friends and acquaintances do not know how long I have been working at being a musician.  My apparent effortlessness seems to make these folks think that such skill is beyond them.

Here, then, is the reason I wanted to address this topic.  I want to tell them, and you dear reader, that a high degree of musical skill is not granted by inherited trait.  It is obtained through thousands of hours of effort.  But this is good news: being a good musician is not beyond your capability. All you have to do make a commitment and stick to it.

Tennis Rackets Rock

Published in the April issue of Stanisluas Connections

The rise of the personal computer is often cited as a significant factor in the decline of western civilization.  There is one way in which I think I might agree.  Computer graphics have made toy representations of musical instruments possible, and processing power has made faux musicianship possible as well.  In short, it is a lot easier now than it used to be to pretend to play music.

These days you can go to a local drug store and purchase a pantomime guitar made of plastic or cardboard.  And you can buy more than one computer game system that will allow you to pretend to play guitar with a very guitar-like game controller.  The problem with these developments (as I see it) is that kids use much less imagination than their parents did, and they are ever more dependent on visual cues to both manipulate and understand the world.

But for me, in 1978, both imagination and intent listening were deeply important to my enjoyment of music.  I did not have the ability to buy a toy guitar at the drug store, and computer games systems were limited to “Pong.”  So in order to pretend to be in a rock band I had to find a suitable guitar-like object with which to play along with my favorite albums.

The process of selecting a guitar-like object was both important and detailed.  My “axe” needed to be roughly the shape of a guitar.  It needed to be proportional in its dimensions, and it needed to be light enough to allow me to fly around my bedroom.  Lack of sharp edges would also be an important factor.  So I scoured the house for a suitable instrument.  Closets, cabinets, and storage spaces could hold no secrets from me.  Tools, cleaning supplies, and sports equipment seemed the best sources of guitar-like shapes.

Long handled garden tools have the right basic shape but they are poorly balanced and a bit too long to be suitable stand-ins for guitar.  Take the shovel as an example.  The length alone forces you to strum somewhere north of the “body” of the guitar.  You end up waving your clenched hand over the spot where the metal meets the wood rather than over the blade of the thing.  The act of strumming the “neck” ruins the illusion.  Plus, I could imagine knocking over a lamp in the middle of a screaming guitar solo and blowing a fuse.  The shovel stayed in the shed.

I left the hoe and the rake alone.  I had the wisdom at 14 to know that guitars should not have blades or tines on them.  I was prepared to bleed for my art, but only figuratively.

So I went into the house to investigate the cleaning supply closet.  The broom is a definite improvement on the garden tools.  It weighs less than the shovel, lacks a blade, and the bristles are much softer than tines.  But the length is still wrong and the proportions are off.  The neck of the guitar would be impossibly long and skinny.   (Broken lamps returned to my imagination.)

Plus, it would be just my luck that someone would come home in the middle of my (OK Jimmy Page’s) solo on “Whole Lotta Love” and need to sweep.  Utter embarrassment and deep frustration at the imposition of reality would have been compounded by a parental order to use the broom for its intended.  I could hear my mother saying, “If you’re going to keep the broom in your room, you’ll have to do all the sweeping.”  The broom stayed in the closet.

Mops, both dust and damp, stayed in the closet too.  In the first place I’m allergic to dust.  I did not want runny eyes to interfere with my macho posturing, and sneezing ruins all but the strongest comedic moods.  In the second place… Eww.  No.

Moving into the coat closet where the sports equipment lurked, begging for the light of day, I found a golf club and a baseball bat.  The club lacked enough body to serve well as a guitar, even though it was a wood.  But the bat was much closer to the right length than any of my previous guitar-like objects had been.  I was getting warm.

The baseball bat got a full 3-song try out.  By the end of the third song, “Toys in the Attic” by Aerosmith, my left hand was tired from holding the bat at a guitar-like angle.   Further, I had realized that it was too rounded to work well.  A guitar has a finger board that is flatter than the back of the neck, a bat is round all the way around.  Nope.  Back to the coat closet.

Down behind decades old army surplus sleeping bags, hanging out next to a pair of rubber overshoes that I had not worn since I had learned to squirm long enough to make my mother throw her hands up in frustration and fear that I would die of a soggy-foot induced bout of pneumonia, I found a tennis racquet.

It was shorter than the bat, but it was light and well balanced.  It was also proportioned decently when viewed as a guitar.  I tried a couple of poses there in the front hall: success!

The tennis racquet passed the audition easily.  Size, proportion, balance, and weight all made this the perfect guitar-like object.  But it had an added dimension of being strung.  I found the strings made the tennis racquet and the guitar conceptually sympathetic.  The final advantage was that my parents’ tennis playing days were long over so no one would interrupt and embarrass me by looking for the missing racquet.

Tennis racquet in hand, I was prepared for the next few years to return home from school and blow off steam by rocking out with my favorite rock bands in my bedroom.

‘Lectrified!

I’m not sure how to categorize the music of the band I’m in.  We play quintessential California country-rock repertoire with a bit of a Bluegrass tilt in the instrumentation.  Normally, we all go  all-acoustic.  Two of us swap mandolin and guitar duties, we have a rhythm guitar player and a stand-up bass player. The band has no name, but our earth-mother of a bass player loves rabbits, considers rabbits her totem and wants rabbits somewhere in the name of the band. You’d think that a band with two women in it would avoid the imagery of rabbits, but “Iron Bunnies” is what she wants to call the band.  This is probably why the band has no name.

Last night the word came down to bring equipment to plug in.  Lacking a decent acoustic amp, I tossed nearly everything in the car.

• Gig bag containing batteries, cables, tuners, rags (you never know when you’ll need to “wipe up”), extension cords, 2 Shure mics, and a Microvox instrument mic for the Vessel or the Webber
• 2 mic stands
• 3 instrument stands
• Boss effects case/board with a TU-12h tuner, Super Overdrive SD-1, Chorus CE-3, and Flanger BF-3
• Roland CM-30 Cube Monitor (closest thing I have to an acoustic amp/PA)
• Marshall GR15-CD (little 15w solid state, 2 channel guitar amp)
• Vessel F5 mandolin
• Weber Alder #2 mandola (intonated for and tuned to E B F# C#)
• Fender FM-988 (solid body 8 string electric mandolin)
• Rainsong OM-1000
• Fender Stratocaster (Eric Johnson signature model, stock)

I left the SCGC dreadnought at home.  That’s a fully acoustic guitar.  Bluegrass Pure.  When someone says, “Plug in” it stays home.

The Vessel and the Webber did not leave their cases last night.  I decided to use the FM-988 since I was plugging in.  So I pulled out the effects board too.  Then I figured “In for a penny in for a pound” and pulled out the strat.

In the last month I have been thinking that judicious use of electric guitar would be an asset to the sound of the band.  It would provide definition and counter point to our rhythm guitar player’s rather busy right hand.  Plus it fits what we do, which is California Country Rock: Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gram Parsons Grievous Angel, Stones Let It Bleed, etc.  Why not go the whole way?

I love the little Marshall amp.  It’s warmer and sweeter than most solid state amps because it has a nice little replacement transformer. I can get all of the overdriven and clean tones I want without blasting my ears, which means I can play electric in most acoustic settings.

As it turns out I didn’t need the flanger (when did Clarence White ever use a flanger?).  But I used the chorus a teensy bit and the overdrive for leads.

I think I did OK.  No one complained anyway.  Our bass player said, “It’s different, but not bad.”  I had a lot of fun adding in the runs and licks I thought would accent and emphasize parts of the songs.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to bend notes too.

That’s how the whole practice went.  We spent several hours rehearsing two sets worth of material for a gig next weekend.  I swapped e-mando and e-guitar.  The other mando/guitar player stayed acoustic, using her acoustic/electric mandolin and my Rainsong guitar.

After the exertion while we were sitting around eating cold pizza I asked, “So why did we plug in?”  The answer was that audience members had said they were having difficulty hearing us the last time we did this gig (Feb 11).  Then the manager of the venue spoke up (he’s married to the bass player) and said that his liquor license would be violated if we plugged in.  So acoustic is how we’re doing the gig!

Back to the SCGC dreadnought, the Weber mandola, and the Vessel mandolin!  Can’t say I’m disappointed, but by the same token I can’t wait for another opportunity to go electric.

Talent… Your thoughts?

I working on a piece on talent for a future issue of the  Stanislaus Connections.  I have pretty strong opinion about it, but I am interested in what you all think it is.  I’m not talking about dictionary defintions.  I want to know what you think it means to be talented in a given field.

So what is talent?  How do you know it when you experience it?

Thanks!  Daniel

Finding a Voice

[This is a slightly edited version of an article published in the March 2011 Stanislaus Connections]

John Leventhal.  Buddy Miller.  Waddy Wachtel.  Nina Gerber.  If you enjoy the music of Shawn Colvin, Roseanne Cash, Emmy Lou Harris, Stevie Nicks, Dave Alvin, or Karla Bonoff then you have heard Leventhal, Miller, Wachtel, and Gerber.   Their guitars and sometimes backing vocals provide counterpoint to meaty lyrics or sweeten the sound of a sad song.  It was Wachtel who created the one note guitar part that literally propels Stevie Nicks’s huge hit, “The Edge of Seventeen.”

I have no idea why, but I have always wanted to be like Leventhal, Miller, Wachtel, and Gerber.  They are the musicians in backing bands who serve as the foil for the singer-songwriter; the kind of player whose work you miss when it’s not there.  I wanted to be Danny Kortchmar rather than James Taylor.

Thing is… I am a mediocre guitar player.  At best.  Seriously.  I have very little ability to do what John Leventhal, Buddy Miller, Waddy Wachtel, and Nina Gerber do.  I taught myself guitar as a teenager.  Learning only enough to accompany my voice and write songs.  I never dreamed I could play lead guitar, and I always relied on band members to play lead for me.  Thirty years after my first strum, I’m still not a good lead guitar player and I suppose I never will be.

In the early 1990s I picked up the mandolin as an option for jamming when there were already too many guitar players.  I took to it quickly.  The tuning seemed natural, my hand seemed to find melodies and riffs all by itself.  Indeed I taught myself “Premier Suite des Symphonies” (which you might know better as the theme to Masterpiece Theater) while trying to teach myself the well-known fiddle tune, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”  The fact that “Premier…” just came to me as I tried to find the other tune changed my sense of myself as a musician. From that moment on I have believed that I don’t need to sing a song to have a voice.  I can make the mandolin my voice; I can play the melodies I hear in my head.

As my mandolin skills grew the fantasy of being the genius behind the singer-songwriter continued to slumber despite the fact that I could play at increasingly advanced skill levels.  The problem is, no models for sideman-extraordinaire on mandolin exist.  The closest is probably Sam Bush, a mandolinist whose career has included a significant stint as band leader for Emmy Lou Harris’s Nash Ramblers.  Indeed Bush even plays electric mandolin, but he uses that mainly as an amusing departure from his more middle-of-the-[mandolin]-road work.  Further, Bush now leads his own band, preferring to support himself rather than someone else.

Leventhal, Miller, Wachtel, and Gerber are primarily –if not solely– guitar players.  They stick to guitar because the guitar is as close to an instrumental sine qua non as pop music will ever have.  It is a cultural icon, and the normative instrument for all popular music in America.  On the other hand, public perception of the mandolin is often colored by preconceived notions of its capabilities.  These notions have been developed in most listener’s minds by infrequent exposure to Bluegrass, a genre almost single-handedly invented by a Kentucky mandolin player named Bill Monroe.   Mandolin’s reputation as a hillbilly instrument has had a broad and lasting effect in the music industry.  For example, Bluegrass legend, Alison Krauss, dismissed mandolinist Adam Steffy from her band, Union Station, in the late 1990s.  Then she hired mandolinist Dan Tyminski and asked him to play guitar.

Still my dream started to enter my waking hours when two things happened.  1) I heard Chris Thile play both with Nickel Creek and as a solo act. His virtuosity showed me that mandolin could step into popular music without saying to the listener, “We’re playing Bluegrass now.”  2) I bought a solid body electric mandolin: two hundred dollars worth of 4 string fire and gold sparkle paint.  The pop and rock songs that have been rolling around in my head for 30 years started falling out of my hands.  Yes, they were usually an octave higher than the original guitar parts, but they were still there.

I eagerly, maybe gleefully, dug old guitar effects boxes out of storage, dusted off the old amplifier, plugged everything in, and started experimenting.  After a few months I settled on a few tones and treatments that I felt were interesting, useful, versatile, and still constituted a personal voice.

Finally I needed to address the issue of amplification.  On a trip to San Diego a few years ago I stumbled across a little Marshall GR15R-CD.  Designed specifically to get excellent tone at low volume, it sounds so good that I can easily play in completely acoustic settings without overpowering an acoustic guitar or a voice.  Bonus #1: this amplifier has solid-state circuitry rather than tube circuitry, so it’s small and light as a feather.  Bonus #2: it has an output jack that allows me to plug it into a PA should I need volume suitable for a larger audience.  I’m ready to roll.

New Year’s Eve and a Bodhran

[A slightly edited version of this article appears in the February issue of the Stanislaus Connections]

 

On New Year’s Eve I was at home in my still not-completely-unpacked apartment.  I was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent on my computer with a cat on my lap.  A good movie and a warm cat in somewhat drafty apartment can give the most intrepid seeker of new musical experiences second thoughts about venturing into the night, no matter what night of the year it is.

 

I had accepted an invitation to play mandolin and join in the fun at the monthly Contra Dance in Sonora at Aronos Hall, so I felt obligated to go.  Still I could not find a way out of the doldrums.  Nothing seemed worth doing except sitting in my apartment with my cat and a movie.

 

In a moment of action I shook off the enervation.  Callie, whose name is short for Calliope, Califia, Calaban, or Calico depending upon her mood, felt the sting of cool air on her paws as I simply got up out of my chair and deposited her unceremoniously on the floor.  At the moment she landed, I would bet her mood shifted to Califia, dark Queen of the mythological island of California.  If she could speak she would have said, “We are not amused” or maybe, “Off with his head.”

 

Sometimes it is best not to think but to do. Without actually deciding, I just got up, grabbed my mandolins, and walked out the door.  The fifty-mile drive from Modesto to Sonora provided ample time for reflection on my situation, my future, and my past.  None of my conclusions are worth mentioning here. I have forgotten them.  But I do remember what I did that night.

 

I arrived a little late, but no one seemed to mind.  My instrument cases announced my intention to join the band, and I quickly found Steve near the center of the action on the stage, with a London cabbie’s hat on his head and a fiddle under his chin. He gestured for me to join him, so I entered the hall and quickly ensconced myself among my fellow musicians.

 

The band was pretty big by American traditional folk music standards, consisting three fiddle players, two mandolin players (including yours truly), two bodhran players, a flute player, a harmonica player, a guitar player and a banjo player.

 

(A bodhran is a Celtic drum with a single head usually about 12” to 14” in diameter.  Right handed players rest the edge of the bodhran on their left knee in a seated position, manipulate the tone of the drum with their left hands, and strike the head of the drum with various beaters held in their right hands.  It is a very expressive instrument when played well.  But playing it well is much more difficult than it looks.  The techniques used to strike the drum are difficult to master.  Thus bad bodhran players abound, and the bodhran has become the subject of nearly as many jokes as the banjo.  It does not help that the proper pronunciation of bodhran rhymes with moron.)

 

The instrumental content was definitely a liberal mix of Celtic musicians and what is known among players of other traditional American folk music as “Old Timey.”  For me this was a treat.  I got to learn some more about playing Celtic music while using some of my current repertoire.  Indeed I discovered that Old Timey and Celtic music use the same tune structure: everyone plays the melody in unison usually three times through a 32 bar tune.

 

Playing mandolin affords me the luxury of 1) helping with the melody when I know it or can reasonably mimic it in time or 2) playing chords in support of the melody.  I did plenty of both but was happiest playing along with the melody.  Dancers like the tempos on the quick side, and some of those tunes take some skill.  So playing them for dancers was excellent practice.

 

Dances were directed by “callers.”  These were folks who named the dance, explained the movements, led all of the dances through a practice round, and then shepherded the dancers through the first few sets of steps.  From the stage, the dances looked fun and tended to create interesting visual patterns.  I tried taking photos of the dancers with my cell phone, but still images cannot convey the sometimes kaleidoscopic effect of the coordinated movements of more than two dozen people.  Instead the photos make the whole process look confused and sloppy rather than coordinated and fairly precise.

 

The event ran from 8pm to just after midnight.  We saw the New Year in with balloon popping, some hooting and hollering, followed by a very folky rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

 

Most of the musicians and callers had decided continue their celebrations past the time that the hall was available.  So we relocated to a private home in Sonora.  In the new location, more traditional forms of New Year’s celebration aids appeared (alcohol was not allowed in Aronos Hall) and instrument cases opened once again to reveal their contents.  We played music long into the night passing around the opportunity to call a tune.  But it was more party than jam, and at 2 in the morning my fatigue level indicated it was time to roll back down the hill.

 

Singing is an excellent way of staying awake on the road.  But make sure the songs you pick are songs you know well.  Choose music you loved as teenager, stuff that calls up times and places you remember fondly.  Your mind will stay engaged and your eyes will stay open.  I listened and sang to Dan Fogelberg’s Souvenirs and Donald Fagen’s The Night Fly.  They kept me engaged the whole way home and staved off droopy eyelids.

 

I returned to her majesty’s kingdom at about 3:30 in the morning, though at that time of night/morning Callie is more Calico than Califia.  She was curled up in the chair we had been sharing before I so abruptly departed.  I greeted my furry flat-mate, dropped my instrument cases inside the door, locked it behind me, and hit the bed feeling utterly exhausted and satisfied with another evening’s musical adventure.