ivo said:So here is the real question: what is the actual point of going to music school, or even just getting a musical education in general?
I’m actually going to paste a post I wrote in a different thread over here, specifically as a response to why and how listening to and playing jazz can bring someone true happiness.
"How would I explain to someone why I love jazz and how it can make me happy?
Think about Charlie Parker, one of the most brilliant musicians to ever walk the earth. When you really dive into his solos, studying them note by note, what he played was essentially pure Bach with tiny, subtle variations; plus, his technical execution on the sax—the tone, the dynamics, the articulation—was nothing short of flawless. I once spent three months practicing a single one of his solos for four or five hours every single day, and even then, I couldn't quite nail it the way he did. On the flip side, this man spent about twenty years—out of the thirty-five years he lived—struggling with heroin addiction, living a pretty wild lifestyle, enduring four failed marriages, and facing all the systemic hardships of being a Black man in the USA during the 40s and 50s (he passed away in 1955). He went through absolute hell, yet somehow, through a kind of musical alchemy, he transmuted all that pain into incredibly emotional music.
The conclusion you reach when you study someone like that in detail is this: for something to be truly great, you need a perfect marriage of intellect and emotion.
You see plenty of threads on forums like this asking things like 'is money or love more important?' in various forms. Parker basically told us (indirectly, through his playing) that you absolutely need both. He provided a universal answer to any question regarding whether intellect or feeling holds more weight.
There is also this fantastic book I have about practicing improvisation, where the author mentions that if you possess moderate talent, you need about twenty years of dedicated practice to achieve true mastery in jazz. In other words, for anything that is TRULY worth having, you have to put in a massive amount of work. He also claims that everything—and I mean everything (!) —can be practiced, from your ear and technique to your expressiveness, your intellect, and your soul. Now, he wasn't talking about sex and romance, obviously, but I personally feel like that logic applies there too.
To borrow a thought from Joe Henderson, another incredible saxophonist, who was once asked what kind of sax, mouthpiece, and reed he uses, and he simply replied: "It ain't the arrow, it's the Indian." Essentially, it's the mastery of the player that matters, not the gear. When you stop to think about it, you realize that might apply elsewhere too—like saying 'it isn't about the partner you find, but the person you become.'
So, when you listen to jazz, you stumble upon these deep realizations (which can ultimately be applied to marriage or life in general), though it seems to me that most people just don't quite grasp these truths.
Which brings me back to my question: would people be happier if they actually understood these things, and if so, how many of them would be?
So there 🙂
