Thoughts, After Reading All

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Talent is the baseline, in my opinion, but you need luck, hard work, and a supportivie environment. Talent alone is nothing.

Talent is a baseline, or in my case a bass line, for creating art but not for success. I’ve heard plenty of successful musicians that actually have no talent for what they are doing, complete frauds really, and yet they are monetarily successful, and I guess when you say “lucky” you are talking about monetary success , because luck has nothing to do with artistic success.

There are people who have great musical talent but who are not entertaining, people who are entertaining but have minimal talent (as true artists) and people who have both artistic talent and entertainment appeal. Of course both of those measures are subjective. Then it is also true that not all people who enter into music related pursuits have the same goals.

All the hustle and the connections and the hard work may make you a living, but they can’t make your artistic voice say something if you don’t have the talent to begin with. What you put value on may not be the same as what society puts value on, just look at television, but when has society been a good judge of art?" Hey Vincent , sell any paintings lately? "

True - but there are also lots of people who have technical talent who aren’t necessarily artists.

No, I’m not really talking about monetary success. Artistic achievement and artistic success seldom happen in a vacuum.

A very interesting topic (probably one worthy of its own thread except that I’ve never started my own thread) as to how we define artistic success. My son is still in school, but he’s had a very wide variety of gigs, some of which have paid very well and others of which have paid not much. Perhaps overgeneralizing, but the gigs where he’s made the most money tend to be on the uninspired side. The musicians have been good and they certainly turn out a good product, but it’s typically an evening of straight ahead jazz standards for some private event. The people hiring them seem to appreciate them, and compensate them well, but from the musicians’ standpoint, they really don’t feel like they’re using all their talents.

In contrast, one of the groups my son plays with is (at least from my standpoint) truly extraordinary in terms of their musicianship, their creativity, their innovation and their inspiration. It’s probably my favorite of the groups he’s involved with, and every time I hear them, I’m blown away. They’ve gotten some gigs at some decent venues, and they do get paid, but he couldn’t make a living on what he gets paid for those gigs (at least so far). Maybe if/as they develop more of a reputation, the pay will increase as well, but to date it’s left my son feeling like there’s a disconnect between making great music and making good money.

Apologies for responding to my own post, but in rereading this morning, a couple of things I said struck me the wrong way so I wanted to clarify/supplement.

First, my son feels incredibly fortunate to be able to play music and have people pay him for doing it. Regardless of the setting or type of gig, he enjoys performing and learns a lot from the musicians he performs with, and they do their best to produce music that’s worthy of being paid for. He’s grateful (and given his goal of making a career in music, I’m grateful) that there are still people who like live music enough to hire musicians to play at their events and venues, and (usually) he feels that they treat the musicians well.

Second, I didn’t mean to suggest any disdain for straight ahead jazz standards. Like the classics of classical music, many of the jazz standards are beautiful pieces of music. Perhaps some are overplayed, but that just leaves the musicians with the challenge of breathing new life into them every time they play them. And, of course, so much of a jazz performance is improv, so the same piece is never exactly the same when performed.

Third, when I think about the musicians that I pay to go hear, both on the classical side and on the jazz side, they are some amazing musicians performing some amazing music. And seem to draw many appreciative listeners who, like me, are ready to pay to hear them play. Now I recognize that for every great musician or orchestra that is drawing audiences who pay to hear them play, there are probably many very talented musicians who are not fortunate enough to be in that position. Not to mention that I think, in most cases, the musicians who garner the most popularity and financial success (pop and country musicians, rappers if you can call them musicians, etc.) don’t have nearly the talent of less well compensated musicians whose music has more of a niche market. But it is possible to make great music and be reasonably compensated for it, and to draw an audience that is there specifically to hear you play (rather than having your music as background). I think that’s what my son and his musician friends aspire to and would find most fulfilling. But, as I said, they’re appreciative of any paying gig, particularly at this age and stage.

Would be interested to hear how this looks from the classical world as well.

The latest posts here about talent and luck actually remind me of my profession, and I assume many professions. You can get some lucky assignments. You can be hired when project money is free-flowing. You project can get cancelled. If you are crummy, you might get turned away from several projects, but there will be one to pick you up. A low-talent person could get scooped up on a contract project that offers unlimited paid overtime, while a talented person could be a full-timer working free overtime. Someone could be writing documents, and someone else could be adding their name to it. Hustle can pay off because you found the job lead that wasn’t going to be dropped in your lap. Or you could be not hustling and a friend points out an extra spot for you. And while few of us are “making it” as in being a 7+ figure CEO or Nobel Prize winner, a lot of us are moving right along.

An interesting topic. I’ll add my 2 cents to it particularly related to the college search.

I think parents should spend as much time as they like to research schools, teachers etc, particularly because many of us will be paying the bill. So I think we do have a say.

Still, I would let my kid take the lead in finding the right teacher and environment (even if it doesn’t look the best on a spread sheet). You certainly can point out some good schools and affordable schools. I know I had to get the ball rolling for my D. And I did draw lines on money because I had too.

However, when it came to app and audition time, I backed off a bit. I’m not an artistic person. In watching my D over the years, I’ve noticed she can really flourish with some people. It’s kind of like a marriage. It’s hard to quantify that partnership - some just work and some don’t. There is also the concept of “trust”. Artists (and anyone for that matter) need to trust themselves. It’s a muscle kids have to develop during college…and the college search is the place to put them more and more in the driver’s seat.

These thoughts are just a reflection on the discussion of talent. It is difficult to quantify but I see it most in my D in great partnerships. So even a teacher who may not be the star or the one with the best studio can bring out a lot in a student if it’s the right partnership. They need to feel it somehow. I would encourage that “feeling” during the process - even if it is very fuzzy and slippery.

And, I’ll add I think the teachers can feel it too. That’s why it’s such a maddening process.

But if you are as “honest” as possible in presenting yourself and auditioning, you will get the best result. You don’t have to perfect to find a good fit…just yourself…and open and hopeful for that connection.

@jazzpianodad, we’ve had very similar thoughts/experiences, including everything in your first (#126) post. My S has heard many working pros say how important it is to play every gig as if it’s “important” probably because this is something all jazz musicians have to deal with. My son’s long-time teacher, who is a solid jazz saxophonist and composer, says he makes the best money playing with a really popular retro rock band that plays a lot of big weddings, which he does more and more. It’s been a little sad for me to watch but he’s recently divorced, has custody of young kids… he does what he needs to do, and still appreciate that he can support a family with his horn.

And this is also what I was alluding to when I said that gigging for young musicians can be over-rated in terms of musical progress. Sometimes it’s just a job.

I have been watching YouTube videos of several college jazz bands. Some recording equipment and venues aren’t all the same - that is taken into account. Actually, they all sound good to me. My non-musical self usually picks out bad horn sounds at an average high-school level, but I am not finding college jazz that sounds bad. Am I not picky enough. Do you think it is possible to look at YouTube videos (you know, so you don’t have to travel Everywhere) to detect any distinctions in the level of jazz program at a college?

@GoForth, there are many very good college jazz programs in the country, so if you’re focusing on those in your YouTube search, it’s not surprising that they sound good. I haven’t tried YouTube, but at this point I’ve seen a number of live performances of college jazz groups from good programs, and I enjoy listening to them. I’ve also been to a lot of professional jazz performances at this point and, even though I don’t have a music background, I can hear that they’re better. Not that I could explain the differences articulately, but there’s a richness of sound, complexity and creativity of the music, and just pure technical skill, that are at a different level. The one college performance I’ve heard that I thought was at the level of the professional performances I’ve heard was a Juilliard jazz group I saw last year that just blew me away. So you might see if you can find some YouTube videos of Juilliard jazz groups and see if you hear any difference. If not, then maybe it doesn’t translate on YouTube or maybe the Juilliard group I saw last year was just exceptional. (Or maybe it helped that I saw them in an acoustically perfect space at Juilliard - the facilities there really are extraordinary.) It’s also possible that the lesson to be drawn is that there are many excellent college jazz programs to choose from and it’s not really possible to differentiate them by watching YouTube videos.

@ScreenName48105, I think you’ve captured much of what I was trying to say. I don’t want to denigrate “event” gigs that pay well. They can be a lot of fun with some very good musicians, they can certainly be a learning experience for a young musician, and I can already see how they could be an important part of being able to make a decent living as a musician (and it beats waiting tables). But I also think that, if that were the primary focus of one’s music career, it might be less than fulfilling.

I think it depends on whether you know what you’re listening for. That said, I definitely wouldn’t try to evaluate a jazz program based on how their big band plays (if that’s what you mean by “jazz band”).

If you haven’t sat in on a really good ensemble class, I highly recommend that you do. And by “good”, I don’t mean the level of playing but the level of teaching/understanding. Many of the schools we visited have regular masterclasses (may be called “forums” or something like that) when various ensembles play and the teacher/class/guest artist will dissect their performance. Their observations are fascinating and, as a played-piano-when-I-was-young lay person, most of it is over my head. The horns are much more obvious but the nuances of comping for the rhythm section requires a jazz vocabulary. The complexity of the observations says a lot about the teacher/audience and it’s interesting to see which students “get it”, and which schools seem to have that higher level of understanding.

Personally, I liked the programs where, after observing a class like that, my S’s reaction was “I have to learn how to play drums/bass/piano/etc…” To me, it meant that it wasn’t just playing the instrument, but much more about the music as a whole.

I think part of the problem here is without defining terms, what we are talking about can be several different things. It all comes down to terms, and like many things in art, they aren’t all very cut and dried. For example, when we talk about talent, what kind of talent are we talking about? Are we talking the ability to hear tones correctly and have the potential to play music (keyword potential),? If so I think that is what @Glassharmonica is referring to, and I agree with her, that it is a baseline, a potential. There are a lot of people who no matter how hard they practiced, no matter how hard they tried, would never make being a good musician and in that talent is important (as a base).

It also depends the kind of talent you are talking about and the kind of music, too. If you want to make it in pop music in a certain form, you better have a gimmick, be able to shake your booty on stage and such, which isn’t musical talent, but it is required for ‘success’ there. Likewise, Madonna is probably as musically untalented as they come IMO, but she was/is a marketing genius.

Then there are aspects like musicality and inate musical sense, which is a talent, and in that case yes you will need it to do well in music. Anyone around the solist world of the violin can tell you that, you watch these competitions with these incredibly technical musicians, who play the notes perfectly, who make more than a few of the judges happy, yet who are playing the way someone taught them to play, they have very little feel for the music, and those musicians when they hit the ‘real’ world of the performing stage are not going to do well, whereas the ones who do make it have that musical feel, they have the sense of the music, the musicality, and that cannot be taught (teaching students to fake it, as I have seen quite frankly, doesn’t work in the long run).

What @glassharmonica is talking about is that even if you have musicality, even if you have the raw talent to be able to play an instrument, it won’t get you far, that it takes dedication and practice and desire and yes, more than a bit of luck, that talent alone won’t do it for you. I still hear myths about self taught musicians, about how someone was just ‘born that way’ and it is mostly BS (in the fiddling world, that could be true, but the great fiddlers also worked their tail off, you think classical music teachers are tough, fiddlers are worse lol). Luck that you happen to be around when an orchestra has an opening and the day you audition, no one better than you showed up, or luck that the style you have developed/learned is what they were looking for. The NY Phil for example to me seems to draw musicians who are cold and analylitical, they are into precision of the music, but most of the time get called on on lacking passion, so if you audition there, you might be better off if you are technical guru, not someone who musicality bursts forth, the Philadelphia is quite different (these aren’t just my own opinions BTW, these have come up time and again among music critics). So being in the right time and place can make a huge difference.

The funny part is that this is not just in the world of classical music. Working musicians in almost any form, I don’t care if it is rock or jazz or classical or folk or whatnot, put that kind of effort into it. While a classical student is spending hours and house of practice, mastering technique, mastering ensemble playing, mastering the rep of their particular instrument, and theory and ear training and so forth, the rock musician is spending the same time working their craft, putting together bands (that may or may not last), playing venues that pay little or nothing, spending their time on the road, learning how to interact with their audience, build one. Yeah, pop music is full of wonders of engineering and marketing, who wouldn’t exist without lyp synching and auto tune, but those are the exceptions, most do it the old fashioned way.

Then, too, there are elements like stagecraft that far too many in the classical world pooh pooh (the people who for example promote some piece of composition as genius, ‘art’, that 12 people will listen to, and will dismiss a piece like “Pictures at an Exhibition” as ‘popular fluff’…pictures at an exhibition is more than 100 years old and is continually played, many of the ‘genius’ pieces are played once and disappear…). Joshua Bell or Lang Lang take a lot of heat because they are very ‘dionysian’ yet both of them are accomplished musicians on all scales who also attract an audience. Yehudi Menuhin as an adult had his struggles with his technique, the critics routinely trashed him, but audiences absolutely loved him, because of what he put up on that stage, whereas violinists who technically put him to shame wilted on the vine…

The way to look at it is that music is a combination of things, and that no one thing is going to help someone achieve what they want. It could be someone does well who is more the technical artist, someone else because they are connected with an audience more, but they all still have a mixed bag of things that are inate and others that happen because of hard work and doggedness and luck and the other factors. In almost any form of music talent alone, inate talent, whether it is musicality, the ability to learn to play an instrument/physical ability, won’t get you very far, and all the hard work in the world won’t do it if you don’t have something there musically to offer. I think one of the posts was looking at phenomena like the ‘pop tarts’, who mostly are the creation of engineers and producers, but that is a relatively small subset of music, one that generally fails to last over time (yesterday’s pop sensation is todays page 6 item of someone hitting bottom).

Interesting that you would pick her out… she started at Michigan’s SMTD, but as a dance major, I believe, and local lore is that everybody immediately knew that she was special and didn’t belong in a midwestern college classroom. People who knew her back then (she’s only a few years older than I am and my mother was a prof at Mich) will most likely disagree with you about her talent.

And as for Joshua Bell… I have two friends who knew him at IU. One was getting her masters in violin there and another who was also a prodigy, like Bell, studying with Josef Gingold. I met and heard Bell play in his early 20’s and regardless of the unconventional paths he’s perceived to have taken, I don’t think there’s any question about his talent. And he’s certainly “successful” in all aspects of the word, including the one about being happy with his life and career.

I didn’t say Joshua Bell was untalented, I happen to have a lot of respect for him, my point was that mainstream music critics in the classical world often slam people like Joshua Bell and Lang Lang because they do have stagecraft,stage presence, but the critics resent it being so ‘overt’ and such.

My comments on Madonna were about the music, Madonna musically is more the realm of slick producing and marketing then the music itself. Put it this way, visualize Madonna in the pre MTV world and ask yourself if she would have become as famous as she did relying strictly on her music on the albums, without the videos and the dancing and such, I didn’t say she wasn’t talented in other things, simply saying musically she isn’t.

Yes, and of course, I’m not also saying that someone like Joshua Bell, or even your own child, isn’t talented; only that talent alone isn’t enough. I’ve been around the proverbial block enough times to see prodigiously talented people in various disciplines not achieve success (monetary or artistic). It takes talent, yes, and it takes more than talent. Even for exceptionally talented people. Given the same set of circumstances, a more talented person will likely achieve more artistically than a less talented person. But circumstances are rarely identical.

@glassharmonica:
Well put, you and I have seen more than a few kids in the violin world like that, who were these ‘prodigies’, who were soloing with various orchestras after winning competitions, had the top notch teacher in pre college, went on to the prestigious conservatory, and found out that and 2.75 could get them mugged on the subway. There is so much that goes into success that talent alone won’t do it (there is another factor, too, attitude, you can have all the talent in the world, but if you won’t work with people, if you don’t recognize others for their gifts, if you live in the bubble of thinking you are the best in the world and everyone else is garbage, gonna crash and burn mighty fast). It might be argued that the ability to work hard, to concentrate on a goal, to network, to persevere, are talents as well (and they are, of course) but those are likely taught, the kind of talent in the original post was presumed to be inborn.