Between Tigers

Hanging onto a cliff a cliff face, a tiger above him and more tigers below, the man feels the vine that he is holding onto begin to give way, its roots pulling out of the cliff. There is nothing he can do, but then he notices a beautiful ripe strawberry growing to the side. He reaches over and plucks it. And it is delicious. – The Buddha

Have you ever sabotaged your own success? Maybe you didn’t take the risk that would have given you the opportunity to do something different because it was too frightening or just too uncomfortable? It is only when we get into a situation which is so difficult that we actually value what is presented in that moment. I know from my own life I have turned down the possibility of doing something extraordinary. In one of those instances I went against my better judgement because somebody who I thought would know better told me it wouldn’t work.

At the time I was in a band the son of Roger Moore, Geoffrey had a good voice and the band was really good but this was in the time when the record companies were looking for duos similar to the Pet Shop Boys and not a nine piece rock band.

I thought that we should have taken the band out and gigged, pulling in all the advertising that we could muster which would have been easy because of the celebrity cache of our lead singer. By creating a momentum which could have built upon we could have bootstrapped our way up but I was persuaded that it would not work. Looking back at it I missed a great opportunity.

Take the approach that life is like being sandwiched between two sets of tigers and when it presents you with the beautiful ripe strawberry you need to grasp it and savour it. These events will not change the inevitable but it will make life more wonderful. This brings me to another possibility of this story that any opportunity to live needs to be grasped and sometimes this will mean ignoring the calamity of life in order to  spend  time doing things that are seemingly trivial but nevertheless beautiful like playing a musical instrument.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days at the amazing rock summer school; bookings for next year now being taken

BB King taught me to play the guitar

When the hugely influential guitarist BB King died, there passed an era that will never return in our memory or that of our children or grandchildren.

So many of the events in music are unique such as the arrival of the blues boom in England bands such as the Stones, Animals and the Beatles re exporting the music back to the USA, the uniqueness was not the music but the environment that fostered it coming out of segregation in America the declining British Empire and the aftershocks of war and then the children of the war casting something different in the world.

These events will only happen when comparable scenarios happen in the world. It seems that the context required for new musical innovation has to come out some form of poverty whether that is financial or cultural or even political. The fact many of the innovators in British music came from places that will close to ports is no coincidence. In my conversation with Chas Hodges (of Chas and Dave) on my YouTube site Chas explains how you needed to know someone who was in the merchant navy to be able to get access to recordings from America.

I was lucky because my brother was in the merchant navy and that gave me access to music from America which influenced my musical tastes as a very young boy, however I was lucky that when I was learning to play it was possible to have those albums on import by visiting record shops such as Dobells London to get jazz and blues recordings.

It still meant we had to learn off the record either because the music books did not exist or in the case of the Beatles Complete were completely inaccurate or just misleading. In fact the book should have been renamed the Beatles Complete Rubbish.

Chas also made the comment that on tour with Jerry Lee Lewis as his bass player he learnt to play the piano by watching Jerry Lee each night. I could say exactly the same about working note for note through the guitar solos of BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Rory Gallagher.

I believe that working through the recordings puts the music into the context that the solos are set and therefore we get closer to the original magic of a great guitar player than by staring at a book.

Choose your favourite guitar player and let them teach you how to play.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music magic, booking now for next year

Mentoring

For me mentoring is one of the most effective ways of creating a change in a pupil particularly when they have got to the point of having some grasp of the scales and chords and basic theory: maybe at around grade four.

I have always started from the premise that you need to find out from the pupil what their dreams are and where they currently are in their ability to play. That journey always has to be taken from where they are and not from where you are. I find a lot of teachers spend a lot of time trying to make pupils do what they can do, I personally find this inefficient and the best results from my experience comes from igniting the pupils imagination. This can be rather troublesome and challenging for you as a teacher because there are things that you are less than adequate in, which you have to really brush up on in order to help but I found in the past it enables a pupil to develop very quickly  on their chosen path.

I’ve had great successes with bass players, song writers, singers, virtuoso rock players, classical players, jazz musicians and what we could loosely term as musical artists. This stuff isn’t really coming from me it’s coming from them and for me the thing that tips the balance is their personal motivation to achieve what it is that they really like.

Many of my pupils do gradings and the grades are only a target and an objective on the path to their personal aspirations. Once you have them motivated and they have a goal to work towards then you have to let them get on with it. It is them who climb the mountain, not you. You may have the map but they have got to do the hard work and therefore if they do not achieve what they set out to achieve that is down to them.

One last thing to consider is that your aim is to make them better than you, do not get into the old British management style of employing somebody is not as good as you. You really want them to be the thing that you aspire to.

Most often the pupils will have enough skills of their own that will develop over time, occasionally you will need to instil some new tools to assist them. Apart from musical skills these may be personal skills such as goalsetting time management etc. This is where I use NLP as I find this to be the most effective way of achieving change.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the dates for next year on the website we are currently half full within two weeks of launching the new dates to hurry this is too good to miss.

Creation and destruction, I am dancing for them both.’ Rumi

One of the problems that we experience in today’s society is the mental attitude that anything can be got and anything can be fixed and straight away. When you apply this attitude to something like learning a musical instrument the immediacy that we are used to today does not apply. The idea that constant practice is required to achieve anything of any value is an anathema.

In the area of song writing you are going to produce a lot of frogs before you produce a prince I liken this to sifting through the attic; a lot of the stuff that you will come to first of all will be junk until underneath you will find a lost gem.

I am currently in the middle of producing a new album, which is a collaboration between professional musicians and complete amateurs. The idea of this recording is to put me on my back foot so that I actually create something different from the sort of habitual music making that I would otherwise do. So far the songs have taken interesting forms from the obvious Rock to the not so obvious Ska and Reggae mixed with strange Jazz and Oriental flavours.

Once you embrace the expected and the unexpected the good and the bad the easy and the complicated without making any judgements there is a uniqueness to the creative process because you are not falling into the type of habitual pattern that your practice has taken you to. In other words you have to hear in your head before you play or write.

We have just finished our ninth Bluescamp summer school which was an amazing success. Each year improves on the last however I always caution team members and other campers who regularly visit that we cannot always get better and sometimes we have to face something that really didn’t work. Otherwise you become a slave to chasing your own tail, chasing the elusive butterfly of success to mix metaphors and this actually doesn’t help because it lessens the risk taking that I believe that you have to have in order to continue creative situations.

One other aspect of the above is that sometimes we have to destroy the thing that seems to be part of us and part of what we do. I had a friend who was a writer and deep thinker and he would run very successful groups and meetings and then every now and again when they were really going well he would stop doing them. This used to shock and upset people but I understand what he was up to that sometimes you just can’t get any better and sometimes you need to change otherwise it just becomes a habit and you’re going through the motions.

So maybe it’s time to write a song for Rumi’s dance in one or two areas of your life.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  or visit https://www.facebook.com/BluCampUK/ and check out what people are saying …………

Sea of Tears

Science has liberated us ‘cogs’ from the religious machine and revealed our complexity. We are now shiny drops reflecting the world around us in all our individual glory. But science, with its acceleration of communication, has also brought us to the ocean. I see myself as a drop-an individual with a vital message to give to the world-but when I tried to express it I am brought face-to-face with the fact that I am one of millions of unwanted writers clogging up the in trays of thousands of unwanted publishers when all that the world really needs is a steady flow of bestsellers from leading celebrities published by a couple of top publishers. The same is true for everyone -hopeful pop stars, bright-eyed school leavers, revolutionaries, inventors…. We all feel our enormous value as shining drops, but when we approach the ocean we just melt into insignificance. Science has given us a cruelly indifferent universe……….  Ramsey Dukes

As a musician and teacher I am constantly aware of the problem of the rationalist aspect of education and the general media babble. Much of this, from the media especially, is loosely scientific and maybe best put as pseudoscientific. Stories that knock unscientific thought abound in the media and particularly in the hallowed halls of the BBC where they will quite happily knock alternative thought but quite happily embrace some religious programme in the guise of free speech.

What I would like to do is to look at this from the point of view of the artist and musician and that scientific thinking is not conducive to creativity. The above quote by Ramsey Dukes is a good example of this because anybody who wanted to start a band only has to look at the statistical possibility of having any form of success is so remote you may as well become a professional lottery player.

However because people are irrational and illogical we have art and we have music with new musical bands and solo artists of which the United Kingdom is truly blessed. So being naïve is probably a gift for the young, for the irrational, no rules, and no holds barred sensibility of the artist.

The scientific viewpoint as pictured in the above quote is intriguingly homeopathic, where a small droplet in the ocean can make the significant difference in somebody’s health. This is of course poo-pooed by science but strangely seems to work for people since the time of Hahnemann back in the 18^th century and intriguingly also works for animals. Hey but according to science doesn’t work.

If we look at the world of computer programming we find no problem with a small program acting as a virus that can destroy complex computers and this is the attitude that we need to adopt as an artist that something that we do which in the scheme things will be incredibly small will have a vast impact in the sea of human consciousness.

So be brave and irrational adopt a state of mind this is egotistical and naïve and create something beautiful. Remember small is beautiful.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  musical magic, book for next year

No boundaries on your knowledge increase the size of your map; make things less defined.

Dark light, good bad, happy sad, right wrong we have a world of opposites and this in its way causes boundaries to our knowing and ability to learn new things. They do create the topography of the maps that we create in our minds but they do also in turn stop us learning new things and there are moments when we need to turn them off in order to redesign the map and introduce new things that transcend the limits of what we currently know.

A good example of this is playing ‘outside’, in the jazz context being outside the scale or key and much of our perception of right and wrong are the boundaries that we create due to the presence of scales and chords.

Spend time doing the chromatic notes against a backing that is sitting on one or two chords and become family with all of the notes and how they sound, turn off the boundaries and hear the note as part of the chord and the chord as being part of the note and make the sound familiar in the way it is either relaxed or tense.

Listen to the possibilities of different pieces of music happening at once and allow them to co-exist. When they do how about making that happen in your playing? You can try this by playing two or three songs simultaneously on radios and computers etc.and become familiar with the feeling.

Other boundaries may include musical genres and by mixing these structures and patterns seeing what you get. Many different musical styles started like this from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin so see what you can find.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk next year’s dates are available, make sure that you book in