At times during this twenty year lapse I would ponder
on the empty shell of this former obsession, but would
quickly shove it aside and move on to life’s more
pressing concerns.
A self-awakening was sparked one weekend morning
about three years ago. It wasn’t like a Buddhist
enlightening, rather it was the chance viewing of an ad
for jazz guitar lessons at the music school where my
daughter has ballet lessons. I’d never thought about
jazz. After all, jazz was nothing more than the ambiance
music in coffee shops. This was the music that bored
me to tears in the back seat of my dad’s car as a teenager.
This was music that, when played live in the right kind
of bar, set the backdrop for higher causes like cocktails
and cigars.
But the thought of exploring a new world was
gripping so I enrolled in the lessons, not really knowing
what to expect. It took little time to realize the treasure
trove that jazz music represents. It was a revolution
that forced me to examine the way I had originally
learned to play guitar in the first place. A lot of us rock
and rollers learned the guitar in a desire to be like the
guitar gods of the 1970s and 1980s that we admired (and
still do). The key was always tricks and technique. If
you wanted to be cool, which generally meant in the
eyes of other guitarists and members of the opposite
sex, then you had to have a bag full of tricks that
included hyper active tapping with the right hand,
screeching harmonics, horse whinnies and rapid fire run
lines all the way down the fretboard like a Gatling gun.
Perhaps it’s due to age, perhaps it is due to a sudden
deep dive into jazz, but I realized that the way I used to
play guitar was not making music, rather it was acrobats.
It was memorizing patterns and chord shapes without
ever giving a thought to why I played it the way I did, no
matter how well I nailed it or how good I made it sound.
It was waiting around for the point in the song where I
could do a high wire trapeze act and then step back into
the boring old chord progressions. In a way, my playing
was like a guy who only waits to talk, and doesn’t listen
to what anyone else has to say in the conversation.
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THE CONE - ISSUE #8 - WINTER 2016