Paul Bley Rants

Thanks to my friend and piano master Steve Amirault for hipping me to this series of rants from Paul Bley. Amazing how much of the future he saw…….

 1) Practice makes perfect. Imperfect is better.

2) Music paper is senile. Recordings do a better job.

3) Rehersals are counterproductive. Repetition is a downward spiral.

4) Choice of instrumention now determined by the ability of the individual. Since the distribution of a CD lasts only 60 days you will have to make many recordings to be in the pipeline.

5) Each new advance in recording media requires the musician to sustain creativity for an ever increasing length of time, therefore composition is impossible because the next CD length will be 144 minutes per side.

6) The audio only CD has already gone the way of the wax cylinder because Video is here.

7) Record companies will download their music directly to the home via the Internet...

8) Press kits can be ordered 24 hours @ day, internationally for the price of a local phone call.

9) Jam sessions with a master will be on line in real time w/ an Internet headphone mix.

10) Improvisation is brain food for the listener.

11) Live performance can be booked directly by fans in each city.

12) Acoustic instruments are museum pieces of the 20th century.

13) Electronic musical instruments will all have the same appearance - that of a briefcase.

14) The central activity of all artists is the creation of copyrights.

15) A 30 year old artist is 10 years old with another 40 years left to improve.

16) Since you will never like your first 10 copyrights, make them quickly.

17) The record company is your adversary: against their own best interests, they demand loyalty.

18) A biography is a collection of self-serving anecdotes.

19) The piano solo, has always always been a stage wait, in a jazz band.  Nothing new in

Improvisation, was ever created by a pianist.

20) Imitation is a form a flattery, but please.... take only the best & .......omit the rest.

21)You can always tell what a musician will sound like by looking at their record collection.

Surgery is required. Ones favorite recordings must be disposed of.

22) Reverse the proceedures in classical music & you have the ideal jazz education.

23)Not only can one make new music music in real time, one can also write books, make paintings, invent theories & create life.

Here's Paul Bley playing the great Carla Bley composition, "Ida Lupino"