Massless

On playing songs many, many times.

It's in the word itself: even in re-creation: a moment of creation. There's a moment just before we start the first song of any set - a moment where the ambient sound in the room is the blank face of an Etch-A-Sketch. Our temporal tabula rasa. We don't exactly know what sound will be produced when the first notes start ... and that's part of the "play" of performance.

I had assumed that only jazz or improvisational musicians would experience "creation-play" in terms of performance ... but I think I do since I lack perfect recall or perfect anticipation even in terms of songs we've played hundreds of times. I like to prolong that too-brief moment - in which so much seems possible - the beginning of some sort of artistic journey.

posted at February 05, 2006, 11:34 PM