the hovercraft

The first truly warm day of the year; I'm feeling the way I only feel when I've had a day outside in the sun. I've just noticed a doe outside, staring at me with craned neck and cocked head. As if she overheard me thinking. I feel good.

Had a show last night. Played a set of solo material, and then a set with my trio. There were five extremely good musicians in the audience, plus two friends from my distant past, and perhaps 15 or more people I didn't know who weren't there to hear my music. The talkers out-weighed the non-talkers so the solo set was a challenge. It was good practice to have to dig down and find a place of focus and calm to play from, in the midst of all that noise and distraction. It is no easy thing. I couldn't hear my keyboard properly so it was hard to regulate my dynamics and it was dark so it was hard to read my music. (This was material I haven't been playing - older tunes revisited and new tunes - so I needed my charts.) I am so keenly aware now of what a hindrance it is to be sight-reading in performance. I'm determined to get this swath of music memorized quickly so I can eliminate that handicap altogether. I think I played fairly well, but I was very aware of the lack of polish - the kind of polish that only comes with memorizing and completely internalizing the music, playing it hundreds of times until it becomes not so much a piece to play as a state to exist in and communicate from.

The trio set, on the other hand, was a fucking thrill. We blasted through the loud-talkers, blasted them to kingdom-come. I love love LOVE my band. Going from solo to trio is like going from a dinghy to a hovercraft. Especially when your bass player and drummer are the creme de la creme of experimental avante-garde and genre-slaying, face-blasting, mathy-rhythmic, beautiful-yet-disturbing Art Rock. (I just made that up because there are no real terms for what they do. It's just how I'd really like my music to be described.) Playing with them gives me an incredible sense of confidence, substance, significance and... well, power. They fill out the context of my music and give it a magnitude of colour and depth that I can't even believe.

There's no room for slacking off in a trio - each point of the triangle as important as the others. Our live set is really starting to settle; achieving the details and technicalities is much less of a conscious effort. This means we're listening more and interacting more, paying attention to the whole sound and not to the individual elements. Such an amazing feeling, one I'll never get tired of and will never stop looking for. I swear it's one of the most intense varieties of human connection - an absolute phenomenon of synergy and unstoppable momentum. Hoooo-ah, I love it!

It was great to have those musicians in the audience. I take their feedback very seriously, and it makes me so happy that musicians I revere are responding so well to my music. It's exciting and encouraging. I've realized that I don't care very much about the opinion of the general public. I still don't know how accessible my music is, but that's becoming less and less relevant. I would be so honoured to be a Musician's musician. Even more honoured if non-musicians could love my music too. But I don't want that to influence my work too much. [A topic for another day: Who is Your Audience and How Much Does it Matter?]

I'm so looking forward to this tour in May. It's going to turn this triangle into a circle, I think. And in the meantime, I'm going to be practicing my ass off... Hoooo-ah!

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