Overwhelmed by Talent

 I recently read The Road Home, by Jim Harrison and, during a pause in reading this book, I watched an interview with Pat Metheny. Every once in awhile, everyone is overwhelmed by someone else's Talent. Jim Harrison was the kind of writer that wannabe writers probably should avoid. He was so supremely talented that reading anyone else for attempting to write seems like a pointless exercise.

Pat Metheny, in this interview, described the first time he was around "a real jazz guitarist," (Something that happened to him long after he had recorded albums with Gary Burton and his own groups and had established Pat as a jazz guitarist. To the rest of us, Pat has always been "a real jazz guitarist," but his standards are obviously higher.) At that moment, Pat realized how far he had yet to travel before he considered himself to be the real thing.

I've owned guitars for more than 60 years and even played them off-and-on for that long, but I haven't described myself as "a musician" since the late 60s. I have been around real musicians for much more than 3/4 of my life and I know what they look, sound, and act like. I'm not like them. I'm a music hobbyist, at best. My knowledge of music theory is shallow, my physical abilities and skill are remedial, my willingness to study and practice music is limited, and my natural talent is nearly non-existent. After 2/3 of a century, I have nothing that resembles "a voice" as a musician. I sound like everybody else, at best, and like the worst too often.

Several years ago, I invited a friend, Scott Jarrett, to a local jam session when he was visiting us. Scott is a monster on every instrument I've heard him play and he borrowed a mandolin for that jam session. The group was mostly old guys who either picked up music after retirement or restarted playing at that time and the range of "talent" was pretty narrow. And there was Scott. When we left to find lunch, he commented, "There are three things you need to be a musician: a sense of rhythm, some kind of grip on melody and harmony, and an ability to listen. At the least you need one of those. Those guys don't have any of them." To be honest, most of the time the musical output from our little group could best be called "cacophony." You would have to stretch your imagination to find an artistically redeeming moment in an our of our playing. None of us, except Scott and Brian, would be called "musicians" by any real musician.

Lots of no-talent writers are beating up the "10,000 hours" theory of how you become an expert, but it's pretty clear from reading their "analysis" that becoming an expert writer/author is a long ways out of their grasp. More likely, they aren't even inspired enough to do the work to become expert writers (like me). They just got where they are the old fashioned way: they inherited enough money to work for free or incredibly cheap. Becoming a "musician" is, as Pat described in his interview, a hard road. Most of us just want to be guitar collectors, not musicians.