What happens if you get all your vocabulary together, you learn some tunes, then you get up on the stage thinking, I know what to do, but somebody counts the tune off too fast? Now everything that you thought you wanted to play suddenly doesn’t make sense. So you have to figure out how to make that work. There’s something else about that – it’s called flow. Our ability to control things and analyze things is in direct opposition to a mantra that I have: Thought is the enemy of flow. People ask me, „What do you think about when you’re playing?“ The answer is basically nothing. Thought happens in a completely different way out of flow. Out of flow, it’s contemplative and analytical and problem solving. In flow, it’s completely different. It’s like a real-time program running the background that doesn’t interfere with what’s going on. The ability to adapt in a given moment is beyond the scope of another type of focused thought process.
(Vinnie Colaiuta, Drummer)
1 Comment
-
Uli Koch:
That’s exactly the point and it works in an astonishing way backwards too: if you get in the flow thoughts will stop immediately and the ability to react in almost mystical synchronicity emerges out of an unknown somewhere.
Improvised music is as an Indian musician said a child of the moment and when it happens it feels like a very special universal moment. When it ends and the focussed thoughts come back it always seems as returning from a long journey where you have to find out at what places you’ve really been. Just to vary another quotation: you don’t know what you are doing but you’re doing it the whole night ;-)