Stupid Mail - This Is A Musical Brawl To Warn Those Who Aren't Interested In One

It's not something I take any pride in because it's not something I accomplished by work, it just has been that way, but I've got a good memory.  I remember that it was Erin PDX who, when I recounted an anecdote about Gary Burton being furious with two of his musicians for hanging out behind his improvisation with a lazy-assed back beat, she was the one who called Burton a snob and declared that the back-beat "is my life".   Which is the most I've got to work with in imagining the kind of music she makes.  I have never posted any of my playing online so she has no idea what my music is like.  Not to mention my composition.  I don't do what her good buddy, Simels does and reissue moldy tapes of a garage band.   As if the world needs more d or rather s-list pop shit.

Her accusation that I'm a piano major who "never learned to improvise" is inaccurate,  my degrees are a B. A. in Music and I have an M. A. in Theory and Composition.   My masters adviser wanted me to go on to become a PhD, but I'd grown disenchanted with university life by then and I didn't want to end up as one of the bitter, alcoholic neurotics too many of the faculty were.  I'd have liked to have more access to the resources of a university but not enough to go through a doctoral program or working at one on a daily basis. 

When I say I don't improvise I mean something different than what I suspect Erin does.  I suspect that when she says "improvising" she means doodling on pentatonic or diatonic patterns with a few well-worn chord progressions in the background.  Hell, I can do that but if I want to zone out I'd rather not do it at a keyboard in a way that it would impact my playing.  I don't play on automatic or with cruise control.  When I say I don't improvise, I mean that I don't do what one of the great improvising organists do or what the great jazz players or even the good ones do, the kind of stuff that Lukas Foss's legendary improvisation group did. I mean the music of the kind of players who might get pissed off if their band members start toodling instead of paying attention, the kind she dismissed as a snob.   I've got too much respect for the art of improvisation to call anything less than that by that word.  I've got too much interest in music to turn out the kind of aural wall-paper I suspect she does and I know her buddy Simps does.