The Single Most Important Piece of Advice Any Artist Will Ever Get
September 13 2010

Influence.

Every artist experiences influence. We need influence. We thrive on it. We grow on it.

Northrop Frye, one of the Pianobabbler's mind gurus along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Glenn Gould, bull's-eyed the principle. He was speaking about literary critics, but I paraphrase his thought, adapting it to artists:

I think it advisable for every artist proposing to devote his life to art to pick a major artist as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his art. (Spiritus Mundi, p. 104)

Clark Terry reduced it to a tricolon:

Imitate. Assimilate. Innovate.

But, as with nature's elements- water and floods, wind and typhoons -so with influence: the nasty dwells in the necessary.

Influence can asphyxiate. Its nourishing atmosphere can imperceptibly turn into an imperceptible confining bubble.

It does not lie beneath influence to kidnap the mind's ear and eye, confine them, and hold them hostage to an outer reality wholly divorced from the victim artist's inner gifts.

Art Tatum. Oh Lord. A solar storm of musical genius (see Pianobabbler 49). From the moment I first heard him, stunned like a cow before the slaughter, I felt the power of his sound. The rightness of his invention. The perfect beauty of his music's beauty. The perfect excitement of its excitement. The perfection of its perfection.

And so the Pianobabbler began his pursuit of Tatum's perfection. He imitated Tatum. He assimilated Tatum. The innovating, however, stayed locked in Tatum's gravitational pull. The Pianobabbler's sound curved away from his own invention.

It took years to break free. Years to climb into my own innovation. Even then, I remained and remain at risk of falling back into the Tatumverse.

The Pianobabbler eventually broke free. Thank goodness. Music history is littered with the silenced careers of those who have followed their masters' voices. Pat Flowers wore the successor's mantle to the sublime Fats Waller. Sonny Stitt to Charlie Parker. Erik Friedman to Jascha Heifetz. Badfinger to the Beatles.

Ever heard or heard of the first-named? Didn't think so.

And so we come to the promise of this post's title, the single most important piece of advice any artist will ever get: Follow at all costs, but at all costs stop following.

Climb up the ladder, then kick it out from under you.

Play someone else. Then only play yourself.

Jean Paul Sartre divided his autobiography, The Words, into two chapters: 1. Reading 2. Writing. Divide your artistic life into two parts: 1. Receiving 2. Transmitting.

Be influenced. Then don't be.

Listen to the Pianobabbler. Or not.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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