C: Well, improvisation is your main thing, right? S: Yeah. That's my favorite thing to do---improvise. C: Can I ask you a crazy question? How do you start? Hardest thing to do, usually. Is it based on your mood? S: Mood isn't a note choice. C: Some people say certain chords make them feel certain ways.. S: I don't know if I agree with that---for me, I mean. If you did have a place to start, and the basis of where to start was predicated entirely on rational reductionist absolute musical thing where you'd go, " I'm in this key, and the song is being played in this style...What are the elements of that style? I only have 24 bars within which to make my statement. I know that at this point in the musical presentation of the evening that if I'm going on a 1-10 energy scale, this should be a four or five because I've got a long way to go...so already you're down to very few notes and 24 bars might be a relatively long time to play that if you're going to start somewhere and go somewhere maybe you should start low and go high. So you've got your givens---you're in the key of G, your first note isn't going to be E flat; it would be a chord tone at least, and in the lower register etc. If you started from there and then said OK, now I'm going to apply some basic phraseology to the thing and go up an interval, and I'll call that a melodic cell, and then down and call that a melodic cell. Then you're going up and down and you wind up with some other overall form, and you've gone up to a higher rung where your old rules for putting the thing together don't tell you how to end the phrase cause you've created another bigger phrase, right? Then some other kind of reasoning has to take over and you'd go--- OK, in order to balance that phrase...because I've done this... maybe I'll add some guitaristic kind of excitement here, where you can pull off some notes and people think it's hot or whatever, then you can change positions and go into the higher register. So you've gone past the narrow vision, made some noise, changed registers, maybe call and response, go back and forth with that a little bit. Add a little dynamic tension near the end, so you play a high note, or bend a note or some other guitaristic device---scraping noise or something. Then you're out of there. Now that overall thing has created something that your original didn't have rules to cover, and you've gone up to another level and maybe it's given you a feeling. Oh, that felt good. Or that was spooky. Or I suck . Whatever it is you're feeling---that takes you up another rung. Doesn't matter where you get on those rungs, you have to be using all those things and conscious of the fact that it going to go all the way around and you can get on at any point. But for it to be any good, you've got to get through all those things. Before I played I got a feeling from music, and I dug the feeling enough to check it out. And I checked it out hard enough that I learned something about it.

C: You're basically training yourself how to think quickly. Because you're using all types of tools and techniques that you don't really have time to think about.

S: Right. That's exactly right. I do. I don't know if anybody else does. I'm sure people must, because I don't see any other way to trulytdo it. But you train yourself so you can react immediately to a situation, like some martial arts or sports thing, knock the balll away. you don't hitnk, "Should I knock the ball away?" You'd get burned every time you did that.

C: When you play with other people...how does that change things? People you're familiar with-- and people you've never played with. What kind of adjustments, if any, does that require? Like when you meet someone new, you have to adjust...

S: There's a little pushing and pulling that goes on. Everyone needs to go to the song that's being played, though.

C: Does it ever get competitive?

S: Yeah.

C: Is it all friendly competition?

S: Not always. I don't feel that I'm a very competitive player---anymore. I mean, when I was a kid I was real competitive, because... you know, it's a thing if you're a guitar player. A lot of really bad really competitive guitar players. And it's just a bunch of horseshit, because there's just absolutely no place for that kind of attitude, I think. It's just not musical at all.

Size:267 K Format: .au Time:24 sec Channles: Mono	Format: RealAudio Time:24 sec Channles: Mono

On American MusicConversation