Montreux Jazz Festival: out of my hands

James Swaby

Montreux Jazz Festival

It was around half two in the morning in Montreux. By this point, I had jammed (what is essentially a made-up piece of music on the spot within a band) every day until 5 am for almost two weeks. I was basically jumping at every moment to play at these jams. I had probably performed around thirty so far; there are not many of a similar type at university, so I did loads of it in Switzerland. Eventually, I became more and more bored with the music and the sessions themselves

 As I was listening to the music, a guitarist whom I saw jamming the previous night, named Alex Mak, caught my eye. Alex was a great player, truly bending genres together.

I went over, and a fascinating conversation began on the philosophy of music. ‘It’s out of my hands,’ he said after finishing a solo. Through the last few nights, it had been getting on my nerves slightly how the audience only really started to appreciate the drum solo when the cymbals started raining thunder, or only at the end of a piano solo when the player’s hands got faster. His response was such an elegant expression of the artistic process. Once he has played it, that’s the art itself, and then it gets filtered through the subjective lens of each audience member.  

I started my piano solo restrained after having that conversation with Alex, almost deliberately playing badly; I had a change in perspective. I played fewer notes than usual to cultivate and practise this non-attachment. I find it interesting how Buddhist concepts can manifest in the music. 

It seems as though by starting simple, you develop something that you would have been only adequately happy with otherwise. It is analogous to meditation in some ways, how one becomes comfortable doing something that is apparently mundane, following the breath, for example, just to shift your perspective and appreciate everything slightly more.  

The power of perspective is very important and a key theme in the interpretation of music. There is no good music, no bad music. Perspective colours it.  

Alex picks up all my side-slipping harmonic ideas that I implemented during my solo and develops them into his solo. He recognises my harmonic language and, therefore, communicates through the jam in a language that I can speak.  

Attachment to outcomes, I realised, was the problem, and getting attached to the emotional value of a particular way of playing. Over the last year, I have been thinking deeply about the artistic process and have come to realise that the tension within it is from when one starts becoming attached to other people’s perspectives on the music, forgetting one’s own artistic sensibilities and ideas in preference for the ear of the other. One attaches to how the audience reacts rather than how one reacts. The best artists dive solely into the canyon of their own interests and forget about others’ opinions.

To cultivate non-attachment, you must get used to what you don’t like. What Alex and I had been talking about before the solo rejuvenated me. Since this interaction, I have tried to play more for myself and less for others.