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BANGS_CHOPS

                                             June 13, 2010


Lester Bangs, "Free Jazz, Punk Rock"
http://www.notbored.org/bangs.html

  "I'm discounting chops and the technical end because as far as
   I'm concerned that sort of thing has basically nothing to do
   with what's in a player's heart, and expression of passion was
   basically why music was invented in the first place. A lot of
   people don't see it in quite those terms, of course; their
   absolutism takes another form: they think you have to 'know
   how to play' your instrument according to some preset and as
   far as I can see arbitrary standards before anyone can even
   begin to take you seriously. They further think that the more
   technically proficient a player you become, ipso facto the
   better music maker, or let's say maker of better music you
   become. Why do they nurse this curious notion? Probably
   because they have been brainwashed, but who picked up the
   first bar of soap? It seems to me that this kind of thinking
   is by definition quantitative rather than qualitative: you can
   sling arpeggios all over the place, you can freeze the baby in
   the bathwater and mail the ice to Siberia, but the fact
   remains that if you take one note, any note, and let two
   different people play it, what comes out of one's axe just
   might be nothing more than the note, whereas through some
   magic the other's note might be just a little more expressive,
   probably because there was something, a kind of inner urgency
   and yearning, behind it. And all the conservatories and theory
   books and virtuoso chop-flashings in the world aren't gonna
   make one iota of difference in regard to that one humble note."


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