What are you crazy about now? How have you spent most of your time?
For example, who did you play with in elementary school?
In high school, what were you interested in?
From now on, I'd like you to consider yourselves with my experience and background.
I've been engaged in music since I was five. I played the piano first, and when I
entered Junior High, I began to play the Saxophone.
A few months later, I joined the school's Jazz big band team, and I've been crazy about Jazz since then. What made me so crazy was the flexibility of Jazz.
In classical music, we are to follow the absoluteguidelines and copy the composers' intentions. It is also interesting, and when studying both piano and saxophone, I practiced the basics with classical pieces.
However, I likeJazz better than classics because of the high flexibility.
This allows me to use my sense of music more freely.
In the style of Jazz, I can express my ideas, uniqueness,and originality as "Myself" through improvisation.
However, about a year ago, one Jazz musician gave me a great sensation.
His name is A "Charles Mingus". Charles Mingus was an outstanding Jazz player, who isalso a pianist, a bandleader and a composer. During his childhood in California, he received his earliest musical influences from the church, choir and group singing.After he heard the celebrated pianist, Duke Ellington's playing over the radio at the ageof eight, he came to be interested in Jazz.
Then, he started to study double bass in a formal way while absorbing vermicular music styles from the age's great Jazz masters.
And in his 20's, he began to play as a professional bass player with some other distinguished musicians. "I don't get caught in any one groove." He used to say. "Everything I do is Mingus." He didn't like to use the word, "Jazz". Everything he did was Mingus' music, not Jazz. For him, the category of Jazz was nothing but a restriction toward his sense of freedom. He thought that the capacity of the category was too narrow and limited to express himself. He insisted, "Everything I do is Mingus' music, not Jazz."
I was shocked to hear this. I had been enjoying the flexibility of Jazz, believing that I could do almost anything to express myself, if I play within the category called Jazz. His words that deny the term "Jazz" it self created a stir in my belief of Jazz as a symbol of my flexibility and freedom. At the same time, I noticed that we should give ourselves unlimited fields in doing what we like, like Mingus who rejected confining himself to a limited category.
Today, all of you have something you like, to a greater or lesser extent. It might be sports, art, study, or music. No matter what it is, keep on with it. At the first stage, there are always rules and guidelines. however, as you continue and come to love it,you will find that the range of the category is not broad enough.
So, try to get out of it.
From that moment, you are jumping out of the limit, and if you can do that,everything you do is your music, not others.