Yielding to What Wants to be Said with Kenny Warner

Kenny Warner offers invaluable reprogramming for musicians, particularly improvisers. But his advice is equally applicable to other exploratory creative artists.

This summary of points is (paraphrased) from a clinic he gave at the Blue Note. The entertaining, humorous, and inspirational 97-minute talk is available here.

• Find balance by not asserting yourself.
  Sit down with no agenda and the notes will start to organize themselves.

• You can melt into the sound of the instrument if you love the sound of the instrument.
  Don't let it be conditional.
  Because it is always possible to find a reason to dislike the instrument, or the gig, or the moment in life, but that wastes the opportunity.

• Yield to what wants to be said.
  Don't let what you want to play get in the way.

• Love the sound. Before it comes out.

• Every sound must feel like a salve or a warm shower: enveloping, nurturing. Train your mind not to spin looking for intellectual justifications or references for a sound you've made.

• Cherish what you hear! Always.

• Practice staying out of your way. Feel like the music is playing itself and that you're a spectator.
  {Promoting dissociation…} "There is nothing wrong with being crazy, if the way you're crazy makes you more effective."

• Music is basically the flow of notes. And wherever the brain doesn't try to control it, it's perfect. Music is already there and is perfect. Humans screw it up.

• If we loved ourselves unconditionally we wouldn't need the affirmation that comes from sounding good.

• The need to sound good keeps you from sounding good.
  
  Think of a time you felt you really needed to sound good.
  How did you play?
  
  Now think of a time when you didn't really care how you played. Maybe you were hanging out with friends, laughing a lot, weren't caring. Isn't that usually the better performance?

• Often we do something ideally when we aren't trying.
  And then fail and fail attempting to recreate that experience.

• Show up at a gig {and forget where it is (the prestige)... Forget who it is with... Forget who's in the audience. Don't make these distinctions.} And leave like it never happened. The less you respect the circumstances (and the gig) the better you can play. The respect can keep you from reaching the high levels you wish to achieve.

• I prefer to go right out the back door and walk or go window shopping immediately from stage. Don't allow your sense of self-worth to be fickle, to be dominated by your perceived success or failure in a musical circumstance.

• Jazz is suffering because we're too respectful of the institution of jazz. As a consequence it has little of the danger that it used to have. Many of those who used to play it were so outside-of-the-box of society. They were so interesting. Now jazz feels like the box that we have to get outside of to play anything real.
  
  We have such respect for the original creators of it that we can't feel we share any of that seed of creativity. Institutions teach us that the best we can do is a tribute to another who came before us.
  
  Honoring traditions as institutions (just as with religions or classical music) externalizes them. These movements are started by beings who don't respect institutions, who were suffocating under the previous institutions.
  
  Religions start as all music, then decay into speeches, and finally the last stage is all fundraising.
  
  Things need to be funded when they become irrelevant to the society. The history that oppresses us is (ironically) people who struggled to not be oppressed by history or institutions.

• The real tradition of jazz is innovation.

• Better to imagine: jazz is so easy anybody can play it. If you're going to grasp onto something subjective it might as well be unrealistically positive rather than unrealistically negative.

• Better to imagine every sound you make has never been made before than to constantly scan for historical precedents, explanations, justifications.

• When we yield, we surrender to a force more powerful than ourselves. The higher parts of ourselves are accessed through surrender, not control.

• When practicing—carefully study.
  Identify inadequacies in control of rhythm, tempo, harmony, melody, etc.
  Find ten solutions for a rough spot.
  Never to continue practicing mistakes or bad ticks.
  But in performance—have no criticisms!

• Challenges are like nutrients. Every element practiced is the elimination of an unknown and its replacement with an understanding.

• It is better to receive music from that place {from the unrestricted unconscious, being in the zone} than to have a 'good' performance!

• If you ask, "am I playing the right thing for this audience?" you will never be satisfied with the performance.

• When the performer feels the music (hasn't had humanity beaten out of their playing), the audience feels it too. If audience doesn't get the music it isn't their ignorance, it's the performer's fault.

• Trust that what moves you as a player can move an audience.

• Making judgements about music based on its style/genre is as superficial as judging a person by the clothes they wear.

• There are already so many great playing musicians today. We don't need any more!
  
  What we need are profound presences, who dare to feel and be lost in their sounds and help audiences get lost in the sound.
  
  Today's audiences need it. We are all numb from media. We are living in a technological revolution, masking dark ages for humanity.

• This one minute (34:36-35:29) is too perfect to be paraphrased. And it serves as a good introduction to Kenny's informal and engaging presentation style.
  
  
  This has a lot of implications beyond music:
  Do you fight where you are, or do you merge with your circumstances?