Guitar

Why I Play Guitar

I love playing guitar
It’s something I do for me
I don’t do it for some kind of money or fortune
It’s not my career
I don’t do it to try to achieve fame
I don’t do it to impress anyone
I do it to have fun, to fuel my passion, to learn new things, to experiment with new sounds and rhythms – sometimes to try and reproduce sounds and songs to find my own sound and style.

I play guitar because I find absolute escape from everything else around me – I feel like I escape time. Focus, contentment, excitement. There is nothing like a good strum of a bar chord played loud! I can only imagine how elevated it could be on a large stage in front of a ton of people feeling their energy.

It is a never ending learning and discovery journey. There is no single destination – only short stops of exploration and new joys along the way.

Musicians

Courtesy: Rodney Jones, New York.

Everyone starts from somewhere…

Every musician, that you have ever heard started from, or passed through, the same place that you are starting from or passing thru right now. Although you may feel that you alone are having a hard time putting it all together, and that the language and performance of jazz (or pop, funk, classical, etc.) is some insurmountable mountain, the truth is that odds are that you can do it.

Some musicians may have a talent for chords, while others excel at lines. Some may develop quickly and taper off later, while some musicians learn at a slow and steady pace. Don’t worry about the speed of your progress, put your attention instead on the quality of your progress.

All musicians want to express themselves, but how can you express yourself if you don’t know yourself? This is not a matter of philosophy, but a practical issue that all persons, musicians included, must confront. Freedom, for me, is freedom of choice. The point of all this is that to be a great player you have to do some personal work.

Don’t every stop growing as a whole person not just a musician. Grow your mind and heart and find a way to live with balance and grace. I believe that when you do this, your music will have a different resonance that is something that people can feel.

Safe Journeys,Rodney

FreeSkies

To be Free

Freedom is an expression of mind, emotion and sometimes physicality.

When you feel it, do not stifle it.

Being free to think whatever comes to mind, to strategise those thoughts toward a goal, or to allow them to ramble uncontrolled.

To speak your mind, to have free speech… and to remember that everybody else has that same right, and be open to their views and paradigms, as you need to see your own views are mere paradigms from your experiences.

To act, as yourself and with others, to pursue a higher level of experiential knowledge.

To breathe…

Freedom is the journey, not the end game.

Freedom comes with many restrictions, limitations, or consequences.

To be free, to say what you want, do what you want, when you want, how you want … Sounds great, yeah?

But what if that conflicts with other’s free speech or action?

True freedom can not lie at an individual level, it needs to be a collective ideal, where free actions are performed in harmony with the collective.

“All actions have an equal and opposite reaction” (Newton).

The freedom of a hunter to kill his prey, is contrasted by that prey’s loss of all life’s options.

Doesn’t sound like freedom to me…

Rather than striving for Freedom, the end game should be Happiness and tolerance.

Success through Happiness in this recent post from Richard Branson explains it quite well.

Do you like Jazz ?

I sincerely hope this post will evoke the right responses, for genuine reasons.

The link below is for a phenomenal young UK Jazz guitarist whose playing has received great acclaim from playing in UK, Europe, South Africa, Malaysia and USA.

Now in his final semester for a Masters degree at Manhattan School of Music, he needs some help to complete the course, as 2017 was not kind to his health.

In his own words.

 

If anyone reading this post feels genuinely willing to help us ensure he can complete his time, all offers would be very gratefully received.  Thank you.

 

‘brilliant’

A word of many meanings, with as many synonyms.

‘brilliant‘ can be used to describe something as small as a glistening dewdrop on a tiny daisy in the fresh morning sun, or to an idea realised, and now in use on 30% of websites globally.

Where the dewdrop provides the essential life giving force to that daisy, so WordPress enables the creative life force to flow between millions of people, each sharing their experiences and expression of knowledge.

May brilliant things forever cause intrigue and wonder.