Lightly does it.

There is a lot of talk about bees and the falling numbers of butterflies and general degradation of wild life and many of us wring our hands and say that we support conservation BUT we do nothing about it.
What is needed, and this is not just my opinion, is that people should do nothing! Just leave their gardens uncut and let the wild flowers take over and then the flowers needed for the insect life would return and the biodiversity would rebalance. HOWEVER we would incur the wrath of …. the neighbours.
Where I live, the profusion of wild flowers if left is mind boggling but the people who live in the villages are often fighting a war with the weeds and the insects that although critical to the eco system are not the ones liked by the villagers. Weeds, gnats, wasps, snakes, flies and mice are essential food for the birds bats and other hunters however if they poison everything in sight then we are going to destroy what we want; such is human stupidity.
We are now aware that saving one species requires the saving of many others and in the final analysis if we lose the lower layers of the food chain the top layers will collapse, hello that is us!
For me, my interests in music come from a deeper interest in life in general it is where I get my inspiration and this is what I encourage others to do; to find theirs. Apart from the Bluescampuk courses where people are taught the tricks of the trade so that they can play and write songs I also do more abstract courses in woodlands where we go back to older forms of music and its inspiration; that of nature both in the natural word and the esoteric because for our ancestors nature was divine. For them the trees and plants were sentient beings and along with the animal spirits they could be communicated with and used as allies, and for this they would use music.
This sounds to the modern ear rather crazy but the basic plot of altered realities are the biggest sellers in movie and song so there is still a desire for that way of thinking even if it is just a creative dream.
Many musicians and artists become passionate about conservation but I am suggesting that we can go better than that we can be revisionists’ getting back some of what we have lost but to do this we need to change our minds. I think that we are doing this in many ways and if you look back over the past 100 years many things have got better. I am not suggesting that we need to go back to mud huts but we need to use our humanness and our technology to fit back into nature because there really is no way we can carry on like this and change when it comes will be very fast. We have already seen this with regard to the collapse of the banking sector, it was not a slow thing it was almost overnight.
Again I am giving the general attitude a kicking as I often do, normally it is education but I would also say that we have a mind-set that the experts of got it under control. Well they had experts organising the banks, we have experts in the government and experts in the health sector so I think I will leave with two quotes, one from a sage and one from an Emperor.
Napoleon first; someone was put up for promotion to Marshall because he was such an expert in tactics and leadership. Napoleon was unimpressed by how much of an expert this gentleman was, what he wanted to know was ‘Is he lucky’. So much for logic!
The Taoist sage Lao Tzu said that people should be governed as you would cook a small fish; lightly. This may be true for gardening as well.
Vic
 
 
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One word of caution

‘My one word of caution is that a cow chewing contentedly in a field, once you have looked over the wall and seen what is out there, chewing the same old grass never seems quite so satisfying again.’ – Nigel Twinn

At one of the schools in which I teach they have introduced a scheme through the pupil premium where the pupils can have music lessons to develop their self-esteem. I am teaching either guitar or singing and there is also a drum teacher.

This seems to be an enlightened idea and I know that if they are able to acquire a skill that means they achieve something, maybe performing or passing a grade they will have something different and positive in their school lives which quite honestly they are not getting at the moment.

Over the years that I have taught I have often heard from past pupils that music has been something very special and it has really changed the way they view the world. For some they realised that the teachers at school who told them that they were spending too long on music and should be working on their science had got it wrong. In one case this was viewed from the stage of the Hollywood bowl and he reflected that the best thing he ever did was to stop doing science.

I have also a number of pupils who would say that music has become a religion or certainly a spiritual experience which informs them about life on a deep level. I spend a lot of time listening to great musicians and I would say that this is something that figures significantly for many deepening their experience and adding something that ordinary life does not give them

So maybe they need to heed the warning that music will change one’s life in ways that you cannot see in this moment making you realise that you are special so special that you are a musician.

Vic

 

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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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Be lazy like a fox’. Linus Torvalds

This is similar in many ways to ‘Do not reinvent the wheel’ the solutions are out there and some have been used over and over again throughout history so look for the answer that is staring you in the face. Sometimes this answer is to be found in someone that you know you just need to ask around.

I have found that many people that I teach have skills that I need, whether that is fixing a computer, sorting out software problems, advice on building websites, finding somewhere to live, advice on gardening or fixing the car, but in all of these cases I would not have known unless I asked and also suggested swapped lessons for their time and knowledge.

I have got the point that I am quite lazy and I always look for the simple ways to deal with problems which are often cheaper, this has led me to looking into recycling and what is now termed upcycling. This is something that can be used for electric guitars, taking knackered instruments and rebuilding them incorporating parts of other guitars or ‘junk’ like old vinyl LPs for scratch plates, or making plectrums from old credit cards.

We need to consider that people in the past were as clever and in many ways cleverer than we are today, some experiments suggest that the Victorians had higher IQ’s than we do so look back to see the solutions that previous generations adopted for solutions as their main resource was ideas.   

Vic

Focus on what you want not on what you do not

Listen to the news, there is always a focus and analysis on what we do not like, want or desire and virtually nothing on want we really value or wish for. We give this negative aspect our added attention and we mull over this and run it over and over until it becomes a habit. The glass becomes half empty in fact you are feeling that someone else is about to steal it or it is full of so many chemicals that it is not safe to drink.

If we turn these things around life can be so much better, we do not focus on the bad we focus on the things that we want, this means that we start to make more interesting choices and when life gives us lemons we make lemonade. For us as teachers we look not at the exam nerves or performance anxiety but we look at the opportunity to play to someone that we have not seen before and enjoy the feeling of making music.

Great art is often forged in visiting dark places but better to do this as an observer; there is a point where we can put some sort of emotional charge into what we focus on and it becomes part of our belief system but if you are the actor then you can distance yourself from the emotional feelings. I have met a number of people who have become rather screwed up by what they do but not every actor that plays an evil character becomes a murderer! However there are some roles in the theatre which are infamous for their negative impact on the psyche of the actor like the role of Lady Macbeth or one of the witches.

By focusing on what you want and not on what you do not want we can make sure that your pupils believe in their ability to learn and develop and that all things are possible and in that way they will achieve great things.

Vic

 

So let us use our limitations to be creative.

‘Then one day in 1965, he came by my house to say goodbye before leaving for Hong Kong where he said he intended to become the biggest star in films. “You remember our talk about limitations?” he asked “well, I'm limited by my size and difficultly in English and the fact that I am Chinese, and there never has been a big Chinese star in America films. But I have spent the last three years studying movies and I think that the time is ripe for a good martial arts film - and I am the best qualified to star in it. My capabilities exceed my limitations”.

This was a small man whose right leg was an inch shorter than his left and was seriously short sighted which for a martial artist was rather a handicap but got over this by wearing contact lenses which in the 1960's where not the most comfortable!

The man in question was Bruce Lee and this story comes from Joe Hyams who wrote a book called ‘Zen in the martial arts’.

Bruce Lee made a point of saying that because he was sort sighted he trained first in close quarter Wu Shu and then when he got contact lenses learnt to fight from a distance. For his short leg he formulated and perfected a stance which led to his powerful kicking technique.

The history of achievement is full of people that started with a disadvantage and because of their determination to be as good as others the skills that they developed from their disability meant they surpassed their rivals.

For me the great example is that of Django Reinhardt probably the greatest jazz guitarist of all time. Django an illiterate gypsy was so brilliant  that after hearing a piece of Bach once could play it back on the guitar; his playing was truly amazing but Django only had two fully functional fingers on his fretboard hand so the licks that he played that seem impossible anyway were played by someone with a crippled hand.

So let us use our limitations to be creative.

 

Vic

 

Its a pentatonic scale Jim, but not as we know it.

A few years ago I was at a guitar show in London doing a number of sessions for the RGT about the guitar exams and in one of the breaks I was hanging around the stalls looking at the guitars. The noise at these shows is incredible with hundreds of people playing on the instruments and what you hear is a sort of pentatonic hell where the twiddling fingers of young males are shredding their way to some chaotic frenzy.

I reflected that they were using the same scale as used by Hendrix, Clapton and just about every other rock guitarist yet none of them sounded that good because quite simply just as the meaning of language is more than just the words the meaning of music is more than just the notes.

The great blues players were able to get great music from one chord and a few notes and we miss that in the race to complexity and therefore going back to the roots players for any form of music be it the roots of gospel, soul, reggae, African township or folk will give you an insight into what really works in the musical form.

I have four years of guitar magazines that are unread sitting in the teaching room with loads of technical stuff in them, however  going back to simple songs and solos has given me fresh insights into the things that got me interested in the first place and helped to add something to the music that I do now.

I think it is a very valuable life lesson.

Vic

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