I’m sitting in a coffee shop listening to music playing in the background. Usually it sounds good, sometimes the mood is inappropriate, sometimes it hits dead on; I suppose what hits you as good depends upon your life condition at the moment. I’ve been in more than a few coffee shops, many of them Starbucks, some of them not Starbucks. I’ve never seen a band play at Starbucks, but sometimes I’ve been able to get a sense of the adrenaline rush that comes from hearing good LIVE music in a setting where it is worth being. I loved going to the Hotel Café in Hollywood before it was ruined by the publicity Carson Daily brought to it; no matter I wasn’t in Hollywood when that day happened, and maybe if I move back “home” someday, the place will fit again.
I have no place to play music at the moment; it’s winter, and the back seat of my car is a limited space. Over the summer, I managed to play in the park nearly each morning, going through a routine of scales and chords and trying to get what I call “on top of the instrument”. On top of the instrument means that the brain processes the notes and chords and the sound that is produced and projected at whatever speed you are playing. In sports, it’s called “in the zone”; even when I was more a sports participant than a musician, I believed that it was possible to practice to the level where “in the zone” was a natural state of mind achieved through effort, repetition, and focus. There were days when I was younger when I was able to hit a baseball from in the zone – I spent two whole seasons hitting near “.500”, but then I lost my ability to do that and turned to golf, where I learned how to think mechanically about body motion at a speed faster than the brain could tell the body while still thinking that the brain was telling the body. Playing music is like that – it often is happening right in front of you at a speed you couldn’t really comprehend if you weren’t in a form of suspended mind body connection that is akin to muscle memory. You’re really hearing a voice tell you about what your body has already done, but you perceive it as being simultaneous. Hopefully, the audience will hear what you think you hear – as that is the test.
That sound, that connection, that is the source of the adrenaline rush – for the listener & the player. It’s worth a cup of coffee … and a place to play in a “music city” …
