Music and Magic

I’ve always found a great deal of inspiration and a sense of wonder in music, both as a performer and sat in the audience. Music has a transcendent quality, able to get beyond language to express something of soul. I’ll listen to almost anything so long as its live performance. When it comes to recorded music I’m more picky, because there isn’t that experience of something shared in the moment.

I’ve had some incredible times sharing music with people. It’s not an easy thing to explain, but when there is openness and flow between players, a certain kind of magic occurs. With the right person, it doesn’t matter even if I have never heard the song before, I can just get in there and play. There are certain people I could follow anywhere, and very gladly did when opportunities arose.

There’s a lot of emotional intensity to that kind of playing. Only the moment, the music and the other performers exist for me at times like that. I barely know what I’m doing, only that music is pouring through me. The feedback for such music has been positive though.

For me, something happens beyond the normal joys of music when people are open to each other. It is like opening a door to another place, and letting something in. It has been one of the most potent ways of connecting with another person that I’ve experienced. Sometimes that’s happened in jamming sessions with people I did not see before, or since. It’s also one of the spaces where I am at my most raw, immediate and real. There is no doing this kind of music without emotional honesty, at least for me, and it also requires and generates high levels of trust.

There’s a lot that can be done between people in terms of non-verbal communication, and sharing music always calls for that. Alert to each other’s body language, to cues of facial expression and movement that say where we will be going next. Singing with someone often means breathing with someone, and that’s a very intimate thing to be doing. But there’s also another level, something that goes beyond the readily explained, sometimes. To write about that would be like trying to explain a dance form through the medium of cake. But I can at least allude to it, because those other levels of being and sharing are hugely important to me.

To those of you I have shared music with along the way, my deep thanks. Hopefully there will be more in the future.