Chess Improv - Anthem

One of my more esoteric ideas is that the point of performing isn't to play all the right notes its to communicate what you understand about the music.

Understanding here is more than understanding the harmony or the literal meaning of the lyrics. It is a more abstract sense of communing with the material. You have to believe what you are performing.

This does not mean that an actor has to agree with the character they are playing by any means. It doesn't even mean they have to like the song. It means that you have to find something in the material worth sharing.

I think of this as the actual language of music. We can't really talk about it in any but abstract terms. But this is why music is powerful - it communicates otherwise incommunicable meaning within us. It edifies and torments and makes us fall in love.

That is what you have to find when you perform.

To explore this, I like to get out of the literal songs and hang out with the ideas. That can take various forms but usually is free improvisation. So i thought it would be fun to share some of these. They aren’t intended to be perfect (or maybe even coherent at times…). They are my attempts to tease out the things in a song that I believe.