Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
I think the other thing that’s important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time.
The muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn’t how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They’re using their whole body to make music, in fact.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
