Let’s Talk About Music – Stefano Bollani
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
(Back-cover blurb)
The idea that you need a certain cultural background in order to understand music is wrong.
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Music should be part of everyone’s cognitive development. [In Italy, they] teach you how to draw but not how to sing, they teach you to read and to understand visual arts but not to listen to music, they teach you to enjoy the sound of poetry but not the sound of a clarinet, they teach you the history of your own and other countries’ cultures but never talk about the contribution of musicians. I swear I don’t understand why.
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With the passing of time, thanks to computers and cell phones, we prefer more and more to write to each other thinking we’re avoiding misunderstandings… when the usual elusive team of English scientists, which perhaps only exists in the imagination of certain newspaper editors, has informed us that in face-to-face communication, the actual content of our sentences accounts for, say, 20 percent: the rest is body language, smells, sounds, glances, accents.
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A child in the first years of life doesn’t write their language: they use it. And for very specific purposes.
So why not start by playing music, and maybe not alone but with other children? Music is about sharing; sound exists to communicate.
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New age music, pop radio, like soap operas and TV dramas, all aim not to challenge you. TV and the internet have gotten us so hooked on using our eyes that we think we can’t perceive anything unless we see it. […]
As pianist Daniel Barenboim says in one of his books, when we cross the street, the first thing we do is look: we don’t even think of using our ears to catch the sound of a scooter coming.
(ed. something that schizoids and, more generally, introverts, often do)
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(speaking about opera)
The whole thing is very Italian. It’s well known that in Italy, if you cry, you’re forgiven.
Show a bit of sensitivity and we’ll love you, we’ll forgive you.
[…]
When Sergio Zavoli asked the Red Brigades member Mario Moretti to explain the years of terrorism, he replied: “It’s hard, in a country like ours, so used to melodrama, to explain tragedy!” And it’s true.
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The pianist Misha Alperin—another refined humorist—was exaggerating, but not by much, that evening when he confessed to me that he doesn’t like reading novels because they’re always more predictable than life and, essentially, because books tend to tell him what to dream, while he wants to choose his own dreams.
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Ever since I was a child, I struggled with the idea that at some point you had to choose a specific path, in music as in life. That you had to always be serious, or always be the funny guy, or always be the top of the class, or be the troublemaker. But damn it, we’re much more colorful and multifaceted than that, even from a young age!
Alas, once you’ve played the fool, people tend to think you’re a fool for good (“Once an idiot, always an idiot”), and it’s hard to turn that around.
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Then there’s the great risk of trapping yourself, of not knowing how to break out of the style that “works,” of repeating yourself without digging deep to see if there’s something else worth bringing to the surface.
The pop singer is the first to turn into an icon, even before the audience decides it. While working on the first album, meetings are already being held to decide the look, the kind of interview, the attitude… in short, the image.
Then comes the constant fear that the public will turn their back on you, that they won’t recognize you anymore, that they won’t follow your changes, your evolution, your path.
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(about the audience)
Wants simplicity in the roles: I’m sitting here in the audience, you’re there on stage. You express something, I applaud you. I applaud if I relate to it. If you’re a virtuoso. Or if I just don’t feel like thinking too hard about it.
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In the classical concert hall, the opposite happens. You walk in and they hand you the program: you already know what they’re going to play, and it’s taken for granted that they’ll do their best to follow the composer’s instructions, whether he’s alive, dead, or on his last breath.
We already have the plot in hand. We already know whether it’s a comedy or a drama. So we’re ready to feel something at a specific moment, and we risk spending the whole evening just waiting for it (think of the arias in operas… how many endless Toscas we sit through just to finally hear E lucevan le stelle, which Puccini—naughty and cruel—only serves us right at the end).
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But above all, I spent my nights rewatching all of Gene Kelly on YouTube. Because his lightness was the effect I was after. I wanted to give the impression of making no effort, in a piece that actually requires quite a lot, especially from a technical standpoint.
Gene Kelly dances and smiles, but above all, he does incredibly difficult things, not with the cocky air of someone who wants you to notice, but with the enchantment of someone who makes those movements, so meticulously studied, seem simple and natural.
It’s a feeling I had even as a child watching him dance: the movie would end and I’d think I could do it too. I’d walk out of the theater feeling like an acrobat myself.
Just watch the performers from the show Stomp, in Broadway or London, who spend an hour and forty minutes turning anything they can get their hands on into percussion—from a broom to a matchbox, from a lighter to a sink. They’ve rehearsed for hours and hours and hours, it’s obvious, and yet they manage to make us forget that—to make it feel natural. They themselves are the first to delight in what their bodies, their hands, their feet, their talent can do. And without making it feel like a struggle.
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Oh, these great composers of the past… they all seem the same because we’ve lined them all up, all without arms or legs, eternally maimed in a series of busts with their wigs. All of them quite old, all serious, absorbed in their role, making History!
Never young, never touched by doubt, never in a state of change, thus never ALIVE, never PRESENT. Im-mortalized, indeed, in a moment that makes them monuments, and therefore distant from us, who are people that spend Tuesdays undoing what we decided and declared on Monday, constantly trying to take stock of our lives while forgetting to live them.
But they were all very different from one another, these great composers.
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(Concert champĂŞtre by Francis Poulenc)
Except then there’s a recording made by Poulenc himself, and at the point where he wrote “rallentando,” what does he do? Exactly: he speeds up!
This is where certain discussions arise!
“We should follow the recording… the composer is there at the piano… he must know exactly how he wanted it, right?”
“In my opinion, though, he speeded up because on the day of the recording, he felt like it, maybe he was excited.”
“If he wrote it, it’s because he thought about it… let’s stick to what he wrote.”
“Maybe he didn’t write it himself, maybe it was the person who edited the score.”
“Maybe the recording is old, and the record has a problem, and at that point, it plays faster.” (The next step involves interventions from aliens or the sheet music publishers’ lobby, but I’ll spare you that.)
You can keep going for a long time, and usually, you stop from sheer exhaustion.
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12
Music doesn’t exist without empathy
The Brazilian poet VinĂcius de Moraes used to say that life is the art of meeting. The thing is, in life, you don’t choose one by one the people you’ll deal with.
In music, the situation becomes interesting precisely when you play with those you truly want to.
Among improvisers, you enter into total communication for two hours. Two all-encompassing hours, and then maybe you don’t even have dinner together. Or you play for three straight days intensely, and then you don’t see each other for years.
On stage, we try to give and take the best from those we share it with. Common passions flash before us, and so do the directions we can naturally head toward together. By intuition, sensing the air, sniffing out the others. Always seeking connection, dialogue. Not only for our own benefit, but also for the benefit of the audience and, ultimately, for the benefit of the music.
What a beautiful life it is, there, on stage, when everyone steps up with the desire to create something new together, something that’s more than just the simple sum of the elements in play. Of course, there’s the flip side. You step on stage with someone else, and competition is born.
The history of jazz is full of anecdotes where musicians, in front of a newcomer, immediately try to put them in a difficult spot to see if they can handle it, if they can be part of the group, if they’re “one of them.”
Lee Konitz, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not, one evening didn’t tell me the title of the piece he wanted to start with; he whispered it to the bassist, then began. And it was a live recording session, in this case. There are a few choruses without piano because the pianist is trying to figure out what the piece is (Konitz doesn’t even play the melody of the piece, he starts improvising directly on the chords of the song).
Once, in Indonesia, I participated in a jam session and saw Nico Gori, the clarinetist who plays with me in the group I Visionari, lose his patience. There was this French saxophonist, wearing a cap, who started with a “solo,” looking down, playing well. Nico hears the sound, the start of the sound, turns to me and says: “I don’t like this guy.”
He brandishes the clarinet, lifts it like a weapon, steps onto the stage, and when his turn comes, he starts with a “solo.” He takes his time, slow, he gestures to the drummer to leave him alone with the bass, and starts building his “solo.” At some point, the French guy just takes off and leaves…
By the end, the audience was in a frenzy, the French guy had left, and he realized it was aimed at him: a matter of alpha males. Something between the two of them. Very typical of old-school jazz.
This used to happen in Kansas City and other American cities in the ’30s and ’40s, where, late at night, in ballrooms and jazz clubs, battles were fought between people like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster. In the film Bird, the young Charlie Parker steps onto the stage after waiting in line with other hopefuls and finally plays in the jam session. And the drummer dismantles one of the cymbals, throws it, and makes it land right next to him, to the general laughter. Such cruelty.
But the jam session is a competition, you go to stand out, to show that you’re part of the family, that you know the codes.
That evening, in Indonesia, Nico then returned to the table and we resumed our conversation from where we left off. There was no musical need for what happened on stage; it was a matter of putting that guy in his place! He didn’t like him. Period. Just like that. It’s an underground struggle, and every now and then the ego emerges and it comes to blows.
Nico had his good reasons, I must say. The French guy’s attitude was a bit like someone who passed by, and, looking down on the world, dropped his pomposity onto those around him.
In jazz, musicians are chosen for all sorts of reasons: friendship, artistic affinity, interest, chance. What interests me are the person and their creativity: that’s how I choose them, not for the sound they have on the instrument. I play with Antonello Salis because he is Antonello Salis and he’s a genius: if, instead of the accordion, he played the ocarina, it would be the same for me. The same goes for Mirko Guerrini: he decides which sax to play, the important thing is that it’s him. Of course, there are exceptions: when I did a project on Frank Zappa, I absolutely wanted the vibraphone, so I looked for the best vibraphonist.
In the end, it’s the music that matters.
Among jazz musicians, we don’t talk that much about music, as one might suppose. Even less in technical terms. We make it, I think, a matter of magic. As a child, I imagined long discussions, but no, I believe it’s almost an unwritten, unspoken law that says that if the music worked, there’s nothing to discuss, and if it didn’t, there’s no need to go into the details of what didn’t convince us. Simply, it wasn’t a lucky night, and we’ll have another chance.
Musicians offstage don’t open up much. Onstage, we had fun, we said a lot without speaking. Playing. We have one more channel, we’re privileged. If you meet open-minded musicians, you skip the clichés. You immediately enter another level of communication.
The duets with other pianists, for example: I’ve had the chance to play with Martial Solal, a Frenchman, a man who’s over eighty, with monstrous technique, a sort of contemporary Art Tatum: he never does what you expect, he’s always creating, completely skipping over passages that you use in your head to reason through a piece, and you have to follow him. He’s a man with great humor, constantly using irony in music and sidestepping: he’ll play a very melodic phrase and then immediately follow it with a mockery. Then, after the performance, at dinner, you talk about practical, trivial things. Everything has already been said on stage.
With Chick Corea, it’s different: on stage with him, I’m risking more, because if I listen to him too much, I start to imitate him: I’ve been listening to his records since I was a child.
He’s a seventy-year-old man who still talks a lot about music, about records: he listens to what you do, reworks it, thinks about it a lot, and is happy to talk about it even at the dinner table. Most of all, he can spend a lot of time discussing his great passions, which are the musicians he loves.
These kinds of figures, which I would call “generators of empathy”, are fundamental for a musician. One such figure is also Manfred Eicher, the producer of the German label ECM. When you’re in the recording studio and he’s behind the glass, he creates a certain sense of awe. Some of my idols have recorded for him, like Chick Corea, but even earlier, Keith Jarrett; I started recording for him on Enrico Rava’s albums.
Eicher tries to bring out the best in the musician. He tries to bring out something you can do in that moment that you didn’t expect you could do. That’s why he’s a great producer. He wants you to do something that you wouldn’t have done at home. And how does he succeed? By shifting your focus to a detail, offering little tips: it’s easy to get discouraged when, after two hours of playing, you still haven’t brought out anything you like. If he sees you’re struggling with a piece, he’ll tell you to leave it alone. In jazz, there aren’t too many “takes” of the same track, it loses freshness. Eicher has so much charisma that musicians let themselves be influenced by him, and the music takes a certain direction, which is what characterizes all ECM albums. There’s an underlying line that connects the music he produces, from Jan Garbarek’s Norwegian jazz to Dino Saluzzi’s Argentina, or Egberto Gismonti’s Brazil.
The encounter in music is as fundamental as it is delicate. When I play in a classical setting, I try to adapt to the situation I find; sometimes I feel like I’m being observed with the gaze of an entomologist. Occasionally, there’s the orchestral musician who immediately comes to shake my hand and tells me that he likes jazz and gets terribly bored playing in the orchestra. Other times, there are those who don’t even look at you, and the interaction remains strictly formal.
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I prefer surprises.
And the musicians who surprise me the most are the ones furthest from me, from my training, like Rava, who is self-taught and, when he improvises on a structure, thinks differently than I do, since I learned, as a good child, which scale works over which chord, which chord works over which melody, and so on.
When we played together with Pat Metheny, I was surprised that he didn’t particularly like reading music: he preferred to learn the pieces by ear, just like Salis does, and then he remembers them for years, and I have no idea how he does it!
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In an old and fabulous television sketch from the 1960s British TV, Dudley Moore plays a rocker singing a little song in American slang, full of sexual innuendos, and ultimately, mostly just random rhymes thrown together to sound good and accompany the dance (“Groovin’ the bag, Mama”).
Peter Cook, playing the very British journalist, sits down with him to analyze the lyrics, searching for meaning, so he can then explain it to the listeners, as if this kind of analysis could help the British audience better understand the spirit of the song. The result is a brilliant comedic gag.
Ed. Even funnier is this other sketch, though unrelated to music:
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Johann Sebastian Bach didn’t even touch the harpsichord to compose! In fact, he despised those who did, calling them “the knights of the keyboard”. For people like Bach, composition was essentially a logical exercise, a clarity of the mind.
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Before the 1950s, the category of “youth” didn’t even exist. It was invented—and still persists—for consumerist purposes.
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The rebellion of a surrealist was against an imaginary father, against Nietzsche, whereas the “youth” twenty years later rebelled much more simply against the real father who wouldn’t let them go out to dance, which, you’ll agree, is a far more trivial thing.
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(in Brazil)
The heart of the story is this. At one point, the boy looks at me and says: “For me, it all started when I was fifteen as a game (and also as a legitimate outlet, considering the degraded situation you grew up in, I’d add, but I kept quiet). Now, this person comes along, who they tell me is an important gentleman, and he explains that it’s Art. I don’t know. All I know is that, if I start thinking it’s Art, I won’t enjoy it anymore, so I’ll just keep thinking that I’m playing a game.”
You, as Europeans who have to perform there the next day, arriving with the grand piano, the band, the equipment, and the press office from Umbria Jazz, with the BBC following you, and the hotel in Copacabana: how would you have felt?
The least I can do at this point—and it really is the least—is to keep in mind the phrase and the way it was entrusted to me by that boy. And try to apply it to how I live music. Now that I’ve written it down, I read it again, and it sounds wiser and wiser.
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1970s guru Tom Robbins had rightly said: “The only reason why God tolerates us is our talent for bullshit.”
That is when we can surprise him. Not when we engage in religion, science, reasoning, but when we devote ourselves to useless things. When we establish a movement for the liberation of the garden dwarfs. When we spend our nights blowing into a horn or banging on a keyboard trying to use our bunch of egos to find a lost harmony, or even better to create a new one, even if for a few moments of happiness only (like when jazz musicians raise their heads simultaneously and smile at each other).
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(on pop music)
And above all, they talk about love. And there’s no escaping that. And that’s why instrumental music is so much freer.
It’s not obliged to refer to the usual old theme of the beloved person, desired, often and frequently unreachable.
An ancient theme, but once again, not as global as we imagine.
The “amor de lonh” (“love from afar”) sung by the troubadours of Provence then passed into Romanticism and still haunts us; but in much of the world, outside this little Europe that we consider the center of everything, people rarely opened their mouths to sing about their personal turmoil for a beautiful girl or a handsome boy. In Africa, traditional choirs almost never do that. And they don’t create new songs to sell records.