Being The Best: A New York Tale of Yes You Can
January 17 2011

Every restaurant here has been named The Best.

Aha!, thought the Pianobabbler, that's the answer.

The question?

The Pianobabbler spent the past week in New York City. The West Village. Rehearsals for a show in Philadelphia.

The Pianobabbler has stayed in this great city may times. He loves it. Who doesn't?

One irritant, however. Despite his love for New York, the Pianobabbler pulses with pride for his home city Toronto. Toronto: teeming with life, intelligence, talent, culture. And jazz.

No word of a lie: Toronto ranks as one of the top two or three jazz cities in the world. Toronto attracts gifted musicians from across the country. At the same time, it produces (as one JPEC board member told me) 400 graduates from university and college jazz programs every year. Every. Year. 400.

True Toronto jazz clubs have been withering, or flying in and out of existence like so many puffy goatsbeard seed parachutes blowing in the wind. But the talent remains. A wealth of great musicians (including the two I discussed in Pianobabbler 139.)

Yet: how many times has the Pianobabbler had to endure talk of musicians as opposed to New York musicians, where by New York the speaker means superior?

Grrrr. Of course New York houses many great musicians. But that does not subordinate Toronto musos. Great is great, be it Toronto great, New York great, Cucamonga great.

No news, this. Music does not segregate musicians by residence. Nor do music lovers. Their likes and dislikes know no postal code boundaries.

And so, the question which prompted the Pianobabbler's Aha! above: why do we crown New York musicians with the nimbus of greatness, but withhold it from geographical others, equally great?

I began this babble observing that every restaurant in Manhattan seems to have been named The Best. An impossibility, of course. The best of anything cannot exist without its inferior referent. No more than everyone in Lake Wobegon can be above average.

It hardly matters, however. What restaurants are doing is projecting an image of being the best. A belief in their bestness. An assertion, literal or not, that you will not dine better anywhere else.

And that's what New York musicians do. They play their best. They radiate real belief in their best. They tell you by deed and demeanour that they are the best. And behold, the public treats them as... the best.

In Toronto, as in other places I have visited throughout the world, this belief in oneself, and its projection, are nowhere as strong. Great players don't feel entitled to assert greatness. Whether the inhibition emanates from personal modesty or cultural abnegation, the result remains the same: they attract the respect and attention greatness merits less readily than their New York colleagues.

The lesson: we musicians must open ourselves to attaining superlative levels of our art. We must believe we are doing so. We must then let the superlative shine through. Listeners need to feel they are getting the best. Art is a form of persuasion. We need to make listeners feel they are getting the best. The Best.

Like our New York colleagues, we should all be and perhaps are, The Best.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabbler.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the Mailing List link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

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