REMINISCENCE: BILLY THE BAD-ASS GUITARIST

I have a favorite story concerning the problem with trained musicians.

I am a self-taught guitarist. Many years ago some musician friends and I would get together on the weekends and have long, completely improvisational jam sessions at an old warehouse. We would just find a blues or reggae groove, for instance, and start to play; these sessions often lasted for three hours of so, morphing, uninterrupted, from one genre of music to another.

One day I ran into a guy I went to high school with (I was about two or three years out) that had studied classical guitar for a few years, and I was telling him about our weekend jams. He was very enthused and wanted to participate. I told him "Sure. The more the merrier," and that weekend I met him at his parents' home to take him to the warehouse. Before we left he took me into his bedroom, put on a record by virtuoso jazz/rock fusion guitarist, Allan Holdsworth, and played along with the complex music note for note. I was very impressed.

We got to the warehouse and everyone sat around drinking a few beers and whatever else for a little while, then we went to our instruments to get down to business. We decided to start off with a simple A-D-E blues, you know, the stuff of countless blues, jazz, and rock standards; we start playing and this guy is just kinda standing there fingering his axe! He was lost!
Basically what it came down to is this: with some sheet music in front of him, or with music that he had studied and practiced, he was an incredible musician! But without it?...whole nother story. Basically he had no concept of improvisation!

I decided right then and there that, given the choice between being him or being me, musically that is, I'd take me. After all, I reasoned (and still do), the purpose of music or any art form is to provoke emotion and a sense of empathy in the person receiving the art. One does not have to be classically trained to do so, in fact, it is pretty much impossible to "train" someone to be able to move others with their self-expression. Either you have it, or you don't. No amount of training in the world could teach someone to have the visceral impact of Jimi Hendrix! This is why John Lee Hooker could sit on a stool and sing and play the most rudimentary music and transfix an audience, but Yngwie Malmsteen might impress for a song or two and then find those same people heading for the exit. What good does it do to be able to play incredibly fast, complex music if your audience doesn't really get it? Why try to impress someone with your mastery of the Japanese language if they only speak English? Why regale someone with twenty dollar words and a pretentious show of knowledge when they have a high school education and just wanna talk about the game? I'm no dummy, but most of the time I think I'd prefer to discuss the game than listen to fancy nothingness.