June 11, 2006
What about Musicianship!
By Jonathan (The Tinkerer)
Where's the musicianship.
Today i wanted to talk about musicianship. Every time i listen to the radio I get upset, very upset, knowing the type of music we're capable of making and yet listening to what people are doing has me very concerned. Are the current crop of musicians just lazy or are the current crop of producers just too cheap to hire good musicians. I realize that today's music is based on technology, but does that mean that all of the music that we listen to has to be loops. I get so pissed off when people call me and ask “do you make beats”. Unfortunately that's what most of today's music is based, looped beats. In my opinion that is exactly why the music industry is suffering and the music that we all know and love is stagnant and stale.Back in my day.
The influences that helped me become a good musician i got from listening to the radio. The radio was where we learned who was doing what and how they were doing it. No bull crap top forty on FM back in those days. Every time we listened to radio we heard new songs, new artists, new riffs and licks that we wanted to copy, this was in the early '70s during the jazz fusion movement. Recently I was going through some old LPs looking for music to put on new black music.net internet radio. I came across all of my Bob James albums and Ronnie and Herbert Laws, the Crusaders and Weather Report, Chuck Mangione, Hugh Masekela, Mongo Santamaria and a whole bunch of other artists.
If you don't know who these people are and you are a producer or musician then you need to get their music and learn something. Just to give the paint brush of your own musical art more colors to work with. YOU DIG!.
We listened to James Brown, Parliament, Kool and the gang, and all of the great R&B soul groups. Radio at that time had all of this music available for us to listen to all on the same station. In new york it was WBLS and WRVR FM.We soaked it up, copied it and became good.That's how we became good musicians. It seems like today people are not trying to become great musicians, they just want to use beats that they get from their local music store, this makes all the music sound the same.
Another factor in the music becoming so bland is the removal of music in the schools for many school districts. In my view this has been a devastating factor in the state of our music. Young people have very creative minds. If they combined real musicianship with today's technology, I'm sure the result would be astounding, and beyond anything us old guys could do.Hey you producers out there.
I'm sure many of you call yourself producers and yet you can't play an instrument, that's cool. Did it ever occur to you that when you're sitting around putting those beats together like a jigsaw puzzle that maybe it might be good to have a real musician playing on top of the beats. Just add a little flavor and spice to the music in the beats. There are so many places now where you could hire a musician cheap. Just look on www.Craigslist.Org or the www.VillageVoice.com or any of the local music newspapers. It's not hard, it's not rocket science, and it's not expensive. Most musicians don't charge a lot of money for a local studio session gig. There's also many old School gospel and R&B keyboard players around, have them come into the session and sit them down in front of your Yamaha motif or Roland fantom or korg triton, and watch the sparks fly. What is interesting is, if you listen to a lot of early Mary j Blige material, you'll hear there was a lot of live musicianship going on behind those beats.
IN CONCLUSION.
We have to live up to the legacy of those who came before us.We have to carry on and keep on keep’in on, keep on truck’in as we used to say.Let's think about the legacy that we are going to leave behind.What are people going to say about the music of this generation a hundred years from now. Let's remember our music and our images go out all over the world and is a major part of our black American cultural influence. The importance of this can be seen when you look at the level of honor and respect that were given to dizzie and bird and monk and all of the other greats by the entire European music intelligentsia. Though we can never match the greatness of those musicians, I’m sure they would want us to continue to produce art that continues to bring respect and honor for OUR MUSIC.The Tinkerer