Personally, between you and me, coming up with new ideas and sounds and executing them nicely, is the biggest rush that I receive from playing music. I think that to be creative you must attempt it often, not just in your music, but in your overall life. I call this, ‘Life on Jazz.’
Now, I’ve termed this column, ‘creativity,’ but it’s not going to be limited to the literal sense of that word. The process of being creative involves numerous subjects. Although from time to time I will be discussing various aspects of ‘creativity’ in the “Playing/Improvisation’ section of this site and also within the ‘Player Well Being’ section, I think that it is a broad enough and important enough topic that the dividends of its pursuit are worthy of a separate section.
Simply stated, creativity can be viewed as a mental process that produces new ideas, concepts, or alterations of existing ideas and concepts. Aligned with this, either as a complimentary component or as subsequent process, is the concept of innovation. Innovation is something that can occur in degrees or by great bounds. In the development and creation of music, I encourage both.
One might view creativity as a simple concept and superficially that may be so. However, psychologists, scientists, philosophers, historians, economists, design professionals, business people and engineers have all studied aspects of creativity in an attempt to master what it really is. During the age of enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the concept of creativity was linked to the concept of imagination. This was especially true as it concerned art.
When reflecting on my own life, my biggest obstacle and hurdle was lack of self- confidence and negativity. While I could write a book on this whole phenomenon and probably should, for now I will attempt to present some of my knowledge and beliefs.
As it applies to trumpet players, the most important aspect of having a successful life and playing well is developing the proper attitude. When I say attitude, I mean having faith in oneself and always looking at your playing with a positive attitude.
Although I never met or studied with Bill Adam, from what I can tell he really was a true master of trumpet playing. On the subject of the mental side of trumpet playing, Bill basically said this:
If you pick up your horn and play something and say, “Holy mackerel! That stinks!” Well the first thing you are doing is programming your sensory mind in a negative way. And so, when you allow that to happen you only build upon that negative perception. “Now, if that tone doesn’t sound the way you want it to sound, what you do is, you say……..NOTHING about it. You don’t even think anything about it. And you re-program a beautiful sound in your mind, and the first thing you know, that starts to take over. But that’s what you have to watch when you’re playing the trumpet. If articulation isn’t there, or this or that or the other thing, you’ve got to watch your programming. Feeling sorry for yourself causes all these programming things to go to your head. So we’re going to program ourselves for all those good things that are necessary to have when you play.”
Now before we get to deep into any of this creative stuff, let’s be clear that in order to be successful we have to have a plan of some sort. While its easier to start off each day in neutral and simply react to what comes our way, that will simply lead to inertia and that will not make you good trumpet players. Live life like you mean it! Play like you mean it! A great place to start is with a positive mental attitude.
The master motivator, Earl Nightingale said this, “Success or failure as a human being is not a matter of luck, or circumstance, or fate, or the breaks, or who you know or any of the other tiresome, old myths and clichés by which the ignorant tend to excuse themselves. It’s a matter of following a commonsense paradigm of rules — guidelines anyone can follow.”
Now go play something pretty for me!!
