Versatility

Here is something I've been thinking about a lot. One of the things a musician working in a city like London becomes aware of very quickly is that is they want to pay their bills, they need to be prepared to play a variety of gigs often at very short notice.

The classic advice to the new in town is 'say yes to anything.' So, that means if you are a guitar player and you get a call to play bass guitar, banjo, ukelele or mandolin, say, and it is remotely possible to do the gig, you say yes. If you normally play rock and you get a call to play jazz, you say yes. If you get called for a reading gig, you read, get called for a gig with a musician who has never read or written a chart in their life, you use your ears.

Musicians are educated with varying levels of success to prepare for these eventualities. FWIW, the graduates of jazz degrees seem to be well suited to this kind of jobbing around, probably because they had to be already technically and musically highly proficient to be able to get into the best colleges, and most of their time at college has involved hanging out and playing complicated music with similar high caliber musicians. 

Often when I talk to my fellow guitarists about playing and practice the emphasis is on developing versatility - some is based around cultivating and improving basic musical skills - reading, time, ear training - but I have noticed that the London scene seems to produce a lot of players who sound kind of similar. In many cases, after a little, while gigging around their playing will vary widely depending on what gig they are doing. For these players it can be hard to get a fix on who they are. They are BB King, Steve Cropper, Wes Montgomery or Django - whatever you need that night.

This happened to me. A fellow musician used to my electric jazz and fusion playing said that if he had heard me playing Gypsy Jazz he wouldn't have recognised my playing. He meant this as a compliment, how much I had assimilated the style, and I took at as one, but it did get me thinking. What did it mean that I was capable of playing two (possibly more) completely independent styles and languages? How was this affecting my creativity and freedom on my instrument? Shouldn't things be more joined up?

What happens to a lot of players a few years into gigging is that their playing slowly gets stereotyped by other musicians. We all do it. If you play a lot of funk gigs you will tend to only get funk gigs, for example. What had happened to me was that I had become stereotyped as a Django style player - which was odd because I hadn't played that style for long and hadn't thought of myself that way or even that I was particularly good at that style (compared to some of the monsters around in this genre!)

So in a sense in the music world it seems that the tendency is naturally to go from being more versatile to less versatile. You become a product.

However, it bothered me - what about this other stuff I like playing - the bebop language and the contemporary stuff? Obviously I could push hard to get gigs in this area but I'd still have the 'two styles' split.

The answer is really simple, and I suspect some reading this will have come to it themselves. 

Don't care. Don't ever try to play a style on a gig. 

Practice what you practice, learn the songs you need to learn for the gig. Then just play your instrument on the gig itself.

Styles are rubbish anyway, don't you think? Styles are like hats, in one year out the next. Styles of music are for record collectors and music journalists, not musicians. They are for hipsters with unfortunate face furniture.  It's for people who talk about 'the music' rather than simply 'music.'

All this by the way is about what you do 'on the gig.' In your practice room, you might well be aiming to play exactly in the style of Bleeding Gums Murphy in Paris, 1958. That's a valid practice goal. It's not a valid gigging mentality.

If people like it the way you play, you will get the gig, if they don't, they don't. If you are really getting no gigs, the chances are your playing is not there yet, or you are really annoying people around you. Or both :-P

As soon as I realised that I started enjoying gigs a 100x more. I'm not sure if I'm playing better, and in a sense I don't really care. I'm sure it makes me more fun to be around, on the other hand.

Furthermore, by doing this you are actually taking charge of your product. Your playing will get stereotyped anyway, so it's better not to fall into someone else's stereotype and end up miserable and repressed. Unless you are happy doing anything.

Lots of musicians have said this - Kenny Werner is probably the most famous. I read his book and understood it intellectually (and disagreed with some of it) but it wasn't enough to grasp what he meant in a meaningful way.

My wife's cello teacher said it best: 'f**k you, this is my sound.'

It's a very counterintuitive mindset, because many freelancers are understandably terrified of not working. What you have to do to be a free musician and not merely a badly paid craftsperson is to laugh in the face of your fears. Ultimately these fears have to do with the fear of death; either physical or psychological. They are not trivial fears. It's probably for the reason that Lennie Tristano suggested that students who were dedicated to working on their music to the highest level should get a day job. However I believe that it's possible to work in the commercial domain while still being yourself.

Ultimately, in self help/management guru terms this would be classed 'playing to your strengths.' What are often encouraged to do as musicians is to work on our weaknesses. While certain skills - reading, good time and good ear - are necessary for professional music and some - familiarity with the neck, clean, comfortable technique and a good sound - are vital for the guitar itself, many other things we think of as important - chord/scales, chord voicings, fusion 'hot licks', fancy techniques, bebop language and anything else 'stylistic', are in fact optional extras.

That's what I think versatility actually is - not the ability to pastiche different styles, but the musicianship to play a gig intuitively and well. After all, I never thought John Scofield would sound good playing 'I Will Fly Away.' But he does.