The art of participation

I was watching a program about electric guitar players. Gods. I like many of these men and women, I like music, but I am not sure on their originality. Individuality. Which doesn’t mean much: Scotty Moore, Elvis’s guitar player seems to come from forever, like the tradition he plays in has just absorbed all that came before him. And his rhythm is almost like comic timing. My skills on guitar amount to plunking, happy plunking, and chant more than sing, it is the rhythm of poetry that infects me more than anything.  I am very grateful for this rudimentary skill and connection. And have spent hours in ecstasy, in it. Eric Clapton is mighty to me. Because I am not a serious player I can be free of snobbery and judgement. My favorite musical times have been in bars listening to unknowns. Whole evenings of covers of oldies, and the guitarist using one guitar and it gives a whole new meaning to ignorance is bliss. Just me and my simple bliss. And there is a lot of cool dudeness about guitar playing. Mark Knopfler and Clapton seem like the wisest of elders now. I think it is because they have effortless focus on an unconscious  skill, they tap into that great intuitive night we all have, their intelligence is very different from the scientific or academic, which are also very different from each other. There is some fusion, conversations with great non classical musicians I find are the deepest. Maybe they have a temperament. I was told years ago that the Slavs were the greatest ballet dancers because they could submit to the crushing discipline of that discipline and not lose their individuality. Other cultures were crushed. I suspect that the wise peoples of the earth are artists and they stay relatively quiet, protecting something, because they know teaching is fruitless, that we must find our own way and that is devilish hard. Perhaps even a journey to the cross roads. In these insane times I am reminded how cumbersome is the conventional mind. And how homicidal. We don’t heed the troubadour, enough. It is great to know Bob Dylan has been recognized for what he has brought from his unconscious forays, across the low stone wall into the forbidden places and that there was a tradition that could carry him, like some ship or steed, shelter from the storm.

     The great blue grass and Rockabilly guitars are my favorite. And on rare nights jazz, din’t ask me which, but there was a magic night a decade ago, a big band, with a Spanish trumpet player, that cannot never be caught in a recording. This performance space is where we should go for wisdoms. Blend it’s drugs with our strifes. No wonder every Sly Stone calls it the Universal language.  The spectator participates and does half the work at least, this is theatre, it is all theatre. The spectator or listener is altered by the player. I think it is humanities greatest gift to itself. After soap. ANd every body must get stoned…. More.

African guitar players. It is my ignorance that has me say African because the styles are regional, and everything else that should apply, like Mississippi blues players. Ali Farka Toure is magnificent, I found him through Jeff Beck.