Back in high school, I knew a very gifted electric bassist. He started out by playing along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bootsy Collins, he got himself Louis Johnson’s video instruction series. By the time we graduated, he was starting to get through Jaco Pastorius tunes. Incredible technical virtuosity!
In our early 30’s, he got recruited into a bar band. All his bass lines were simple walking quarter notes on the root, maybe an occasional eighth note run for decoration. As simple as simple could be. Simple enough I could learn to play it.
He told me it’s the music he’s most proud of, that it’s the best music he’d ever made. It was the first time that his ego completely disappeared and the only thing he cared about was serving the songs. The songs needed simple, so he gave them something simple.
Another musician I know had almost the exact same evolution: started out mastering the most complicated techniques, developed incredible virtuosity on their instrument, and then decided one day to just start playing simple. I asked them why:
“I got bored with complicated,” they answered.
You can only do so much of the same thing before you outgrow it and want to move on. When you get bored with complicated, simple is the obvious way to go next. They also said there’s only so far you can go with complexity; past a certain point, most people can’t hear it any more. They compared it to rococo decoration: too much complexity starts to blur into uniformity. It’s like speeding up a metronome until it starts to sound like a buzz and you can no longer perceive the individual clicks.
Simplicity has to be perfect. It gives you nowhere to hide, you can’t distract listeners with awesome technical feats. Simplicity requires nuance, and my friend believes nuance can go farther and deeper than complexity can. Simplicity is much harder!
This friend has turned to composing and the music they write is achingly simple! Simple melodies, simple harmonies, simple structures. It’s focused on nuance and tone. It seeks perfection. They told me writing simple music is the hardest thing they’ve ever done.
This is one of the most common stories we hear in the music world. So many musicians go through a journey like this. Many listeners wonder why these musicians stop playing virtuostically, worry their favorite musicians have lost their skills.
Every musician I know can still play the mind-blowingly complicated stuff of their younger days, they just don’t want to anymore.
Perhaps the most famous of these stories is the jazz legend, Miles Davis. He began his career perfecting bebop, arguably the most technically complex and virtuostic genre ever created. But by the end of his career, he was obsessed with simplicity. He would show up for gigs and play almost nothing the whole show. He’d stand on stage, eye closed, listening to his band, horn on a stand by his feet. He’d occasionally pick up his horn and blow a note, then set it back down, maybe only a few times per show. Legend has it, he once played only two notes total in a festival show that lasted over two hours.
Understandably, this made a lot of people angry. You pay to see Miles Davis in concert and he only plays two notes? What a rip off! It’s just lazy, is what it is!
I saw an interview once with a jazz musician who was at one of those late career shows, and he wept when he recalled it. He said the notes Davis played were the most perfect notes he’d ever heard. He was astounded by the discipline: to know which notes are perfect and to shun all the notes that aren’t. This musician said that in all the years since, he’d never once managed to play any notes as perfect as the few solitary notes he heard Davis play.
You can certainly make a strong argument that this level of simplicity is taking it to a ridiculous level. But I gotta admit:
I really wish I could hear what two perfect notes sound like.
John the Librarian 