Why you're judging yourself by the wrong criteria.....

by Minim ^Pro @ 2011-01-31
Somebody comes up to you after a gig and tells you how good you are and how much they enjoyed your playing. You thank them and tell them that you're glad they enjoyed it but inside your head you're really saying.

"You enjoyed that? Wow, you really should listen to some proper stuff at some stage. If you think that was good, you want to listen to {INSERT NAME OF JAZZ GREATS HERE}. It's very kind of this person to say so and everything but I know compared to the greats I'm nothing. Either they're simply trying to be nice or this person is obviously not a jazz fan and doesn't really know what they're listening to. If they had heard the music I have, they wouldn't think I was so hot"

This internal conversation, and many others like it, plagues the majority of jazz musicians for pretty much all of their musical lives. Sometimes it can be hard to accept that anybody other than the musically uneducated or naïve could enjoy the meagre fare that we serve up when they could be at home listening to Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong or Ornette Coleman.

However, when we do this, it is us who are being naïve and the mistake we are making is confusing technical ability and the craft of music making with the art of connecting with people. Why aren't we as a good as our musical heroes? What can they do that we can't?

If you are a jazz musician and you attempt to answer those questions, I bet the first things that spring to your mind are technical considerations – things like their vocabulary is bigger, they make fewer mistakes, they are more versatile and better able to deal with any harmony, they have more instrumental fluency, their tone is better, their sense of rhythm is amazing, their timing impeccable... and on and on it goes.

When you think about why you aren't as good as your heroes, I bet the answer that's not top of your list is 'because they move and connect with more people'. This is a tragedy, because it should be.

Have you ever seen a musician who you knew to be technically excellent but found that their music left you cold? Of course you have, it happens all the time. The only consideration that really matters in music is whether you connect and resonate with your audience and if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how 'good' a player you are.

And the thing is that people are all different, with different personalities and different emotional buttons that can be pressed and the very players that leave you cold are the ones that other people might find the most artistically profound and communicative.

So the next time somebody pays you a compliment after hearing you play, don't dismiss it. It's true that your music may not reach and move as many people as that of your heroes, but it's also perfectly possible that today it did reach and move at least one person – the one who is standing in front of you telling you so.
And it's just possible that they know you're not as good as the dead greats - and they still enjoyed it anyway.

From: http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2011/01/31/why-you-re-judging-yourself-by-the-wrong-criteria-10477913/