Play like you don’t know. - Miles Davis

This is a story that Santana tells about Miles talking with Eric Clapton, for me it gives us an insight into the workings of the mind of a genius. We have gone so far down the road of the clever clogs where we anal-ise the hell out of everything that we end up with a sterile piece of sound. There is a joke about the similarity between analysing a joke and dissecting a frog to see how it works; the result, you end up with a dead frog.

Miles came to music from a line that said it is not the technique or the knowledge that mattered it is the feeling, as he would of said playing ‘from the heart not the head’. But is that not true of everything, education, medicine, relationships, politics? We have become too clever by half, lots of things can be a lot simpler and far more effective and this is so true for the art of music making.

So sit down and listen to some Muddy Waters and feel what is going on because it sure damn well isn’t in the number of notes or the complexity of the scales and chords.

Vic

 

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