The Sunday Musician

Several weeks ago I did a post about ‘finding moments onstage’, and my friend Evan (who played bass for me many, many times when I was music directing) emailed and suggested I talk more about it. So here we go:

Finding Moments Onstage

Think of a basketball team that’s hot on a particular night, everybody in the right place at the right time, thinking and acting as a unit, sometimes almost presciently anticipating each other’s moves, ball going through the net over and over. Ask them afterward what happened, how it occurred, and the best answer you’ll probably get is that it was a result of all their practice, but beyond that they don’t know. If they did, they’d do it every night.

A musical example of this: Remember the Beatles’ famous press conference on their first visit to the US? If you’re too young to remember (sigh…this is happening to me more and more), they were asked by reporters to explain their popularity. John Lennon said something like, “If we knew, we’d become managers and make all the money.”

The point here is: you can’t force the moment. You can’t manufacture it or conjure it up whenever you want it. You can’t make it happen—the best you can do is let it happen.

All right then; how do you let it? You have to foster the right conditions. Work at it, and you’ll find more and more of these moments popping up.

The first condition is this:

The musicians (let’s include singers in this too) have to be completely comfortable with the material.

If you’re struggling to just get through the chart, you’ll never, ever find yourself suddenly playing the greatest little thing you ever played, or locking up with the drummer like you’re identical twins. The material has to be either very familiar to you, or—and this important—the material has to be easy enough that you relax in it. Not overly simple, but if every time the chorus comes around you just know you’re going to miss that anticipated downbeat…well, you’re going to play the rest of the song sort of locked up, waiting for it to come around. And if you keep flubbing it, your fellow bandmates will be waiting for it, maybe dreading it, and then nothing happens except rote playing.

This is not my finger in your face, shaming you into more practice. In fact, just the opposite: a part you have to practice and practice and practice will never be a part of the elusive moment. You’ll simply be too preoccupied to notice it, or to let it happen.

Two people share the responsibility for your comfort with the material—you and the music director. The MD should know his/her musicians well enough not to throw material at them that’s out of their comfort range. That’s just begging for automatonic, boring playing, and the biggest loser is the audience. The other person is you. Take it upon yourself to simplify your part enough that you’re at ease with it. There are lots of ways to do this, but that’s yet another post. I’m a pretty good player, but I always stick to what I know when I’m onstage.

So: play within your ability, and well within your ability. If you do so, you can begin to play as an ensemble member. Remember: this is not classical music, where every note and nuance is either pre-ordained, or handed to you by the director. You’re deciding as an ensemble how to play the song, and under the best circumstances, you’re doing this moment by moment, and at a level (if you’ve never done it before) that will feel downright microscopic. But it’s worth the hassle—totally, completely worth it, once you’ve experienced it. It will keep you coming back for more.

This is pretty much my prescription for good ensemble playing in general. It’s within this kind of playing that you’ll find the ‘moments’ we’re talking about here. Play comfortably within your ability as an ensemble, and your relaxed attitude will be immediately apparent in the actual sound of your band. A relaxed band is a fun band to listen to.

This is not to say there’s no merit in working out something cool at rehearsal. If there’s a potentially great little part, some thing you all feel you can pull off, then take a couple of minutes and try it. (I’m assuming here you have a fairly rushed rehearsal schedule, as do most church bands. Nobody gets two nights to rehearse, do they?)

And this is also not to say that the music can’t be good unless there are these ‘moments’. On the contrary—almost all the music you play onstage will NOT fall into the ‘moment’ category, and it can still be great music. But that magic moment (great…now I have Jay & The American’s ‘This Magic Moment’ stuck in my head) is worth pursuing. I think there’s more than a little of the Divine in it. As children of God, we’ve inherited a family trait—creating something out of nothing. For us Sunday Musicians, that’s music.