I had the good fortune to meet Mario Sgambelluri and Roger Park of IMediaCommunications at the recent IMedia Agency Summit. Mario I've known via email for a while, Roger I met for the first time. In the course of dinner and drinks, Mario, Roger and I discovered we share a love of music, both listening to and performing. We kind of promised each other that we'd bring our instruments to the next IMedia conclave, so this post's for them.One of my neighbors happens to be a jazz guitarist who's toured internationally (he's very well known in Europe and the Far East, not so much so here in the States, and isn't that always the way?). I've been after Gerhardt (okay, maybe that has to do with his popularity overseas) for a while to help me get beyond my current plateau.
Plateaus are something I've heard from every musician. You get to a point where you're playing very well but can't improve even though you know you have it in you. Sit down with someone who is your master and they show you something so danged simple it's a cross between a "Duh!" and "aHA!" and in either case you're off climbing again. The last time this happened was when my oboe teacher (Hi, Sue!) told me to change my breathing pattern slightly. Whoosh!
Yesterday, while walking back from my morning walk with my dog, I saw Gerhardt and his darling wife, Andrea, outside. We chatted, Susan (my wife, partner, etc) and I invited them over for a Solstice drink, and then I asked Gerhardt again if he'd be willing to give me an hour of his time.
This time the stars were in the right constellations. Later in the day he came over and we had a killer session. We did some arpeggiations, some neck work, some really beautiful duets (alright, I played rhythm, he crawled up and down the neck and made me sound good, okay?), ... every once in a while Gerhardt would just go into that musical space all students crave for and come back, smile at me a little embarrassed, and the lesson would continue. When he came back I'd call out to Susan (she was in the living room, we were in our music room), "Hey, I'm going to let Gerry play for a while now" and we'd all laugh.
But what really blew me away was the language Gerhardt was using to describe his experience and how he thought while playing. Yes, it was a very rich language, but it was also such an exquisite showcase of how his brain's wiring has modified itself in order to be the musician he so obviously is. More than that, he provided a motherlode of cross-referential information that spanned several recent posts! Without realizing it (oh, if he knew what he was doing I'd really have to just hang it up and go die somewhere, I would) he was describing the sonoric equivalents of color vision, memory, spatial reference, conceptual integration, multidimensional thinking, ...
Hey, T'is the season...Thanks for gifts, one and all. - Joseph
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Tracked on: December 11, 2006 1:40 PM | Permalink to Trackback