The Magnifying Mirror

I abhor advertisements that show women tugging at their faces while looking in the mirror, grimacing at all their perceived cosmetic defects. Of course, there's a whole industry around that concept, ready to sell you a cream or a surgical procedure that will fix the problem. Wouldn't it be better to declare, "Don't ever tug at your skin and point out your flaws! Love what you see! Throw out that magnifying mirror! Get rid of the scale!"

My goal in performance is to be alive, to be in the flow of feeling and composition, listening as the music and rhythm create an irrepressible response in my body and soul. But it hasn't always been that way -- when I was younger, I never listened to lyrics. All I cared about was the resonant qualities of the female voice. And I had a lot of fear -- terrible stage fright, in fact. During one performance with a chamber choir, I sang a solo while my entire body alternated between rigidity and spasmodic trembling. After the show, some of my choir mates praised me for my bravery -- they could see my hands clenched behind me as I tried to keep it all together and remain vertical.

As I've grown artistically and gained experience, I've come into my own uniqueness. That means that I have much less fear, though for whatever reason I have always been a person who appeared to radiate confidence even when it was the last thing I felt. The challenge of music is, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. As I continue to work with my own music and with other bands, the challenges grow too. After each gig, provided it didn't suck royally (generally meaning at a dive bar in front of morose transvestites who want you to sing show tunes, or with angry Nation of Islam guards staring down the white devil on stage, or with paunchy bikers who like their women big-busted and small-brained), I think about what needed improvement and make a list.

Last week, the morning after my San Jose Jazz Festival performance, I was feeling good, until I looked at some videos a friend took of the show. I know that videos and board mixes (recordings made straight off the inputs on the sound board, meaning no ambient blend of the instruments/voices and imbalances in volume) are dangerous things to listen to/view. However, they are quite valuable at times. Ideally, I'd say don't mess with your positive memory of a show until a few days have gone by. But on occasion I have listened to a board mix (OK, twice) immediately after a show and liked what I heard.

This was not to be the case last week. I felt like I did a great job as a performer and band leader. I was supremely organized coming into the gig, doing a number of things for my band mates that in the past I would have let fall through the cracks. Of course, there's always more that can be done, but in terms of rehearsals, set list and charts, I nailed it. The morning of the gig, as I left for San Jose, I told my husband how much I wished this day were already over. It's something I often say before a gig.

Once on stage, however, I was in heaven. Cracking jokes that people actually laughed at, running through the arrangements perfectly, and dancing as freely as I like to (I view myself as the Mick Jagger of latin jazz. The dancing may not be great, but it is enthusiastic!).

The point of all this is that the disconnect between my mental picture and the few clips the video captured was painful, once it was revealed. Granted, I did not have a board mix of the entire show, and that would probably have caught more of the best moments as well as the worst (by the way, I did not post the worst videos online! The two that I put up seemed passable, and I was especially proud of my pandeiro playing).

In a culture of recording, of constant digital capture, where everything is retouched to perfection, we suffer from the magnifying mirror effect. When we went to Cuba in 2003, some of our travel mates spent the entire time with video camera viewfinders pressed to their eyes. My husband and I wanted to experience Cuba, not film it.

I don't record myself much when I practice. As I wrote recently, perhaps I should. But I'm not a person who tends to go back and listen much to what I've recorded. By the same token, I have occasionally kept journals a la Artist's Way, for free writing exercises. These can be useful for songwriting, but I keep meaning to throw them away -- I subscribe to Mae West's dictum, "keep a diary and someday your diary will keep you!"

The other problem of recording is that it feeds that pernicious problem of comparison and external validation. I came across this blog recently by classical pianist Grace Nikae:

We are constantly looking at others, vicariously reading personal blogs and watching reality television, competing against others, somehow trying to find some validation externally rather than internally. There seems to be an inability to determine and understand for ourselves what it means to search for and pursue a deeper quality in one’s music and life, and a certain lack of self-responsibility and awareness. My advice to young musicians has always been the same - first, and foremost, you must always be looking within yourself. How can I improve? How do I keep searching, reaching, and developing as an artist? How do I keep asking questions that challenge me to keep growing? When I go back to play a piece from a year ago, do I take the easy way out and go on auto-pilot and play it the same way as I did then? Or do I dig deeper, and keep searching to discover new things in the music that I didn’t see before? How can I understand myself better? These are questions that only you can ask yourself. The death of any artist is the day they stop growing - the search should continue to the last day of your life, until the last breath you take. And of course, I don’t mean simply locking yourself up in a practice room and looking only at scores for the rest of your life - although there are many people who believe this is what is meant by growing and improving. One has to grow consistently as a human being, in all facets - emotionally, mentally, spiritually - because this is what will always color the lens through which one can perceive and understand humanity, and thereby deepen one’s relationship and understanding to the nature of music and art itself.


Further, she points out that the perfection of recordings today leads audiences to expect that same technical ease on stage. I'd add to that the sense that musicians like myself have, of trying to match the bar of our recordings, many of which were made line-by-line and even electronically pitch-corrected in spots, in live performance. Did Ella Fitzgerald sing this way? Of course not. I heard Nancy Wilson give a talk in which she said the advent of 24-track recording was "the day the music died."

Several fans and friends have written to me since San Jose, having read my self-critical blog. I am deeply indebted to them for their kind words, many of which I will treasure. What they gave me wasn't meaningless reassurances. No, they reflected back to me the picture of unique energy that I experienced on stage. As audiences do, they picked up on so much more than the precision of notes or the overall balance of sound. That gives me hope and renewed passion for practicing the things I want to improve. I want to make clear that I was not looking for pity. And I also want the performers out there to bear in mind that it's generally not a good idea to reveal your mistakes during or after the show. Audiences want the emotional connection with your music. If you can give that to them while achieving technical perfection, so be it, but if not, don't destroy their memory of an emotional high. That's what music is for.