Re: "Noodling" at Sessions
Originally Posted by
JeffD
The main question is "what can I do if I don't know the tunes". The real answer is "learn the tunes". Not meant harshly, or trying to make newbies more uncomfortable, not at all. I bend over backwards to be welcoming. But in what other endeavor can one plan to participate without knowing what one is doing. "How do you fly the plane if you don't know how to fly a plane?" You learn to fly the plane.
In my experience, most things in life you learn by participating before you know what you're doing. Activities like flying a plane and performing surgery are exceptions. Sports, arts and crafts, cooking, building, farming, camping, riding horses, birdwatching, foot racing, reading, writing, singing, sewing, telling stories, making jokes -- I learned these skills by trying them out with or observing others before I knew what I was doing. I know many musicians who started the same way. I became pretty good at some of these activities, not so much at others. By and large, that's how people learn. On the farm, starting when I was about twelve, I even learned to drive by trial and error. (Of course, I had to pass a test to drive on roads legally.).
Among people playing traditional music in both Atlantic Canada, where I was born, and the Ottawa Valley, where I now live, I've found most musicians to be nothing but encouraging. Not coincidentally, traditional music is alive and well in these places. No one is complaining that young people aren't taking up the music. It's only in the last couple of decades that I've run across people who felt that going into a public place, sitting in a tight circle with your back to everyone, playing music for yourselves, and excluding everyone else was somehow "entertainment" that should be advertised and for which musicians should be paid. Tight-knit communities in Ireland have their own cultural rules that may work well there, but this kind of session does very little to encourage budding musicians in my country. I'm not objecting to sessions or jams having rules and levels. I know a bit about playing hockey, but I wouldn't turn up at an NHL game in my skates, expecting to play. I respect the right of the best musicians to get together at times -- at home, if they have to -- and exclude the learners. I also like the idea of a jam that gets more complex and exclusive as the afternoon or evening goes on, with the best musicians playing by themselves at the end. However, If you want to create or encourage a musical tradition, you won't have much success by encouraging exclusivity.
If noodling means making sounds with your instrument continually throughout a session, I'd put myself on the anti-noodling camp.
Robert Johnson's mother, describing blues musicians:
"I never did have no trouble with him until he got big enough to be round with bigger boys and off from home. Then he used to follow all these harp blowers, mandoleen (sic) and guitar players."
Lomax, Alan, The Land where The Blues Began, NY: Pantheon, 1993, p.14.
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