Prior to Hurricane Katrina, as most of you probably know, I owned a lot of books. Literally thousands. Between Sunny and I, probably tens of thousands.
One of the books I acquired in the months prior to the great water-log of 2005 was a slim volume by jazz pianist Kenny Werner entitled Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within.
I know I wrote about it, and quoted from it, at the time because it made a definite and deep impression on me, particularly with respect to why we as musicians feel it necessary to play at all, and what drives us to maddening attempts at continual perfection (maddening, for the most part, because these attempts are doomed to failures of varying degree).
I recently reacquired the book, and this time when reading through it, I was struck by a correlation between Kenny's philosophy and that line from Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince:
"...what is essential is invisible to the eye."
There are those that tell you that BB King can convey more with one note than most other guitarists can say in five minutes of scale shredding. I myself have said that playing the blues is about speaking the truth by creating each line of melody as you proceed, rather than simply hinting at it by playing circles around it. I think it comes down to that saying, "Life isn't about finding yourself. It is about creating yourself."
In other words, that one note from BB means more because it is in fact the only note that could be played at that time. It's not a suggestion or potential answer, despite BB's humble apology that it goes "...something like this."
A musician has depth because each note they produce has chiaroscuro, something else I've talked about before:
Nothing holds a shape without its shadow,
that place at the edge where the lines are rough,
and sharp defined shapes blur in a limbo
made of innuendo and the small stuff
that, in shades of gray, fills up silent space,
shifting with the slightest movement of light
to redefine the angle of a face,
moving what was once unseen into sight.
Compared to that substance, that space within the jar that makes the jar useful (to paraphrase a Zen parable), the effort from a predominant number of musicians can seem like a cardboard cut-out, an endless parade of meaningless notes, a cacophony of mind-numbing technical exercises ... a lot of "talkin' loud and sayin' nothin'".
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