I was being interviewed before my trio gig last night, have a read if you’re interested :-) Q: How do you come across Jazz music? Why do you find Jazz interesting? A: I was exposed to jazz music pretty late. When I studied music degree at USM, that was the first time ever for me to listen to jazz music live. My music mentor: Razif Mohd@ Jeep (USM lecturer) was playing with his trio, and I remember vividly that the sound struck me like a bullet right between my eyes. Straight away I knew that, “THIS is the type of music I wanna play!” Jazz is fascinating to me due to its colourful harmonies, improvisation and most importantly, the interaction between musicians. Jazz is arguably the most interactive type of music. Q: Improvisation is a very important element in Jazz music, when you improvise, do you try to convey a message and in what state of mind that you are at? A: In my opinion, improvisation is a process to convey your current feelings through playing music. It has this very special ability to convey it without saying a single word. In the musical slang, we are trying to “tell a story” (hopefully an interesting one) when we improvise. Q: How do you define creativity in music? How to make ones creativity to manifest to its highest potential? A: When it comes to creativity in music, typically there are 3 stages involved. Imitation --- Internalization --- Innovation. I call it 3Is (LOL). Imitation means to listen to your favourite music and try to copy it by playing the same way on your instrument, internalization is absorbing what you have learnt, while innovation is to create something new based on something old that you are already familiar with. Without input, there would be no output. In order to create something new, one has to listen to a lot of music and learn the musical “language” first. Q: What are your compositions about? A: Most of my compositions were inspired by incidents in my life, as I like to record them using music. You can sense that just by their titles: Take a Break, Toothache, Destinations Seeking, Profoundness of Nature, Daybreak, Mutual Understanding, etc. Q: What does it take to become a great musician? A: There are two types of musicians: those who play their own music and those who play others’ music. Singer-songwriters and bands fall into the first category while the latter are known as sessionists. For the first type, originality is the key. You don’t want to write a song that sounds like ANOTHER song. For the second type, you have to be as versatile as possible, since sessionists are musical mercenaries. They are being paid for providing musical service. In most scenarios, nobody cares about your musical righteousness/artistic values since sessionists typically play commercial music. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means a sessionist should fulfill musical orders from the employers no matter the orders are aesthetically beautiful or not. Q: Can you educate our audience how to appreciate Jazz music? A: Jazz has been developed for more than a century today, there are a lot of different sub-genres within this umbrella term by the name of “jazz.” I would suggest to buy a jazz compilation album, and get exposed to different types of jazz first. After that, you could try to listen to singers/musicians/bands from the similar era that sound appealing to you. For live jazz performances, observing the interaction between musicians is a fun thing to do. Ultimately, the purpose of playing music is to communicate. Jazz music is very communicative when it comes to this. Q: Do you think Jazz music can contribute to the well-being for the society? A: I think music (whether it is jazz or not) has the power to enrich people’s mind and spirit; without music, one’s life would be extremely dull. There is this saying that children who play music won’t turn bad as well (they only turn BAD ASS). In many ways, I believe music helps to develop one’s personality for a better result, therefore contributes to the well-being for the society (sounds like student who studies logic XD).
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 08:26:11 +0000
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