I have a clear childhood memory of the occasion when I first met someone who spoke a foreign language fluently. I still remember the excitement of discovering that this person could understand my simple schoolboy French and that I could understand her replies. Language came alive for me at that moment.
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Music is another language, a form of communication which speaks to us through the medium of sound. Musicians ‘talk’ to each other and to their audiences in appropriate musical phrases, with varying degrees of originality and sophistication. A melody may be experienced as exciting or lyrical, a musical phrase as inventive, sophisticated, conservative or progressive – and we may think of a commonly used lick as a cliché. Such concepts apply to all forms of music. One of the delights of listening to a good jazz group is hearing the musical conversations going on, and the same applies to a performance of the Bach B minor Mass.
As a musician you are communicating every time you practise your instrument. You are thinking about what you want to say musically, creating the sound physically and listening to what your instrument is saying back to you. And just as we spend a lot of time talking to each other, so do musicians enjoy playing with other people in bands, groups or orchestras.
Earl Scruggs wrote at length in his instruction manual about how he had learned to play the banjo at home as a child. He reminisced, “I can’t remember anything more satisfying and more pleasurable than the banjo. I remember looking forward to getting up early to build a fire in the fireplace and in our wood cook stove, just to sit before it and pick a few numbers before it was time to go to school or to work on the farm. Some days I might be picking away on a song and some new run or pattern might spring up.” Picking with three fingers rather than two came to him around the age of 10. “I was picking away and suddenly discovered I was using the thumb, index and middle finger, rather than the usual two. The number I was playing at the time was ‘Reuben’. For an entire week I played that tune and nothing else. I kept playing it over and over in order to become accustomed to using the middle finger on the notes. After that I was able to use the same technique on other songs.”
This is the essence of learning to play. Recognise what sounds right – you may hear it by accident when you happen on a different lick, or your fingers slip to a different place from where you intended – and memorise what you have done so you can repeat the sound at another time. This stuff is the vocabulary and grammar of music. Don Reno thought of musical phrases as fish in a river. They are often slippery and you have to catch them as best you can!
Murphy Henry, in one of her columns in Banjo Newsletter, once asked the rhetorical question, what do bluegrass musicians do when they come off stage? Answer, they start a jam session. It seems we can’t get enough of playing our music with and for other people. It’s one of life’s essentials for us, as necessary as breathing. Playing with others is an important step in becoming a competent musician. For me the musical equivalent of my rudimentary skill in communicating in French came some years later when I found I could play simple chords in a folk music group with friends. I well remember discovering that the guitar chords of ‘Kumbaya’ sounded more interesting when played as arpeggios by the right hand fingers. We also learned to sing simple harmonies, and the results seemed to be at any rate acceptable to our audiences!
The business of learning new stuff and playing with other musicians is a natural creative activity for so many of us. I’d go so far as to say that if you have an inclination to play or sing you owe it to yourself to find the time and space to work hard and see what you can achieve. If you don’t try you’ll never know. You probably won’t end up sounding like Earl but you will be pleased, and perhaps surprised, by the skills you have managed to acquire and the friendships you have made along the way with all the other folks who are learning, just like you!
John Baldry
March 2021
