My Half Baked Cakes

One of the hardest things for a musical artist to do is define their "voice". The absolute hardest thing to do is to maintain that voice in the face of all the well-intentioned advice meant to make the music more "successful". This is especially true if you are off the beaten path a bit. If I were to grab up a guitar and write some folk songs, I would probably still get some of it, but it would be nothing as I face now.

The primary issue is that what I do is so far out of the realm of what folks find "normal". I play an electric bass and use is as a chordal instrument, to play leads, as a completely solo voice . . . I am not the first to do this stuff, not by a long shot. But, of the people I know locally, I am pretty unique. And then I add to the "strangeness" by going instrumental and improvisational. I cannot begin to count the times I have been told if I would cover this or that song or modify my tunes or performances to make them more like what the bar audiences in Texarkana are used to hearing, that I would go over better.

The problem for me was, in the beginning, I tried to listen to this advice. Someone would make a recommendation and I would try to go that way for a while. Then another recommendation would send me down another path. This went on for years. In fact, to a degree, it still does. I find the temptation to give in to those suggestions quite overbearing. When I sit in the dark, alone, and ask myself why I cave so often and in so many directions, only one answer comes to mind--doubt. I doubt myself. I doubt my worth as an artist. I doubt the worthiness of my music. This doubt makes me second guess what I hear in my heart and turn towards what I'm being told by others.

The largest source of my doubt stems from my skill as a bassist. More specifically, my limited skill. I'm not a virtuoso. I would love to be. I've put in thousands of hours with that as the goal. But, in the end, there is a basic athleticism in my hands that I'm lacking. I'm just not that fast--nor that technical. With practice; lots of practice; I make minor advances in those areas; however, at the rate those advances come, I will have to live to be about 300 years of age to be considered a virtuoso. So, I check out what all the other solo bassists are doing and I realize that I just can't do what they do. Not even close. And that leads to my wondering who am I to be calling myself a real musical artist.

While I still have a way to go in my journey, I have finally started coming to terms with my place in the musical world. I'm not a virtuoso--I never will be. But the music I hear in my mind is very much within my skills to share with the world. And that music, I believe, is worthy of a voice--even if it is a limited voice such as myself. So I record my musical explorations as they come to me--as it makes sense for me to do so. Will everyone get what I do? No. Will most folks get it? Still no. At best, a very small minority of people will get my music. But, for that small group, my music will speak to them in a way that is special to me and that is what I must focus on.

I had my music described as "you are baking a cake--you crack open some eggs and that's it". I thought quite a bit about that as I could see the point being made. Compared to commercial music, my music isn't as "complete" or "polished". But then, I don't intend for it to be. The core of my music is improvisation. I might use a riff or motif I've used before, but I have no desire to mimic a previous performance. Those motifs are just launching pads for a musical journey that is unique for that time and space. It is meant to be different from every other time I played off that motif. So, in short, my response to that comment is simply, "I never claimed to be baking a cake--that was your interpretation of what I was doing."

I'm still working on figuring out who I am as an artist. I have hundreds of ideas in my mind and they do not all fit into a single category or fall along a nice, organized path. My journey of musical exploration will be just as improvised as a performance of my music. And anytime you improvise, if you do it right, you will always end up someplace other than where you started, but most likely not where you thought you were going. And that is so cool. As they say, it is all about the journey, not the destination.