The Moment: Redux

Because several people have been concerned, I would like to clarify my interest in the Pat Martino quote I dropped on May 10.

For me, the reason why I ever got interested in expressing myself as an artist through music was to be able to find, create and exist in "the moment", not necessarily to make recordings (when I first got into music, recording at home consisted of holding the tape recorder close to the guitar - professional home recording then was a snipe hunt). The greatest pleasure and fulfillment I have gotten as “an artist” has been in the creation of music in front of living, breathing people. I continue to find the recording process tiring, contrived and uncreative - it stifles.

I am always moved beyond description when someone finds something special in a recording I have made but at that point it is one-sided communication - a dialog with unreality - speaking with phantoms.

I’ve never had a desire to "share myself with others" through recordings. It's a prostitution of sorts – recording being a necessary evil required to reconcile the world of the living (art) with the realm of the dead (commerce). Does the rest of the world have the right to have access to my heart whenever they wish? I’m interested in sharing real moments (short, controlled periods of time where something shared happens) with people, nothing more.

This is why I’m not a poet, painter or filmmaker *

I do find recording technology fun and I have enjoyed it immensely during different periods but (as I've said before) it is an art form which requires its own dedication and discipline - effort, time and labor that ultimately detracts from the precious little time I currently have to develop/maintain any facility on my instrument. The long-distance collaborative recordings I have made with others pale in comparison to the difference live interaction would have enabled (I deeply miss the fact that my “collaborate-by-mail” projects with others have kept me from recording in the same room, at the same time as them). An improvisational (or otherwise) collaboration done through the mail is a cumbersome process and the result is a sort of lie (an interaction that never really occurred). I wish I could actually hang out and play with Greg Segal, Don Campau, Bret Hart, Rotcod Zzaj, etc. Now THOSE would be some moments! I wish they could happen. I wish you could be there too.

I perform not to "share myself with others", but to share a moment in time with others. There is a difference - one is ego-centered the other is communal. One is "me and you", the other is "us". I don't want to create music as much as I want to create sound-influenced, shared communal experiences.

I will continue to record, I guess, out of necessity but I don't have to like it.

* I’m no storyteller.