Who Do You Play For?

As I dive more into the music scene here in Boston, I am discovering an interesting phenomenon that I think speaks a lot for what it means to truly be a musician.

I don't listen popular music, as jazz hasn't been popular music for a long time, but on top of that, I listen a lot of free/avant-garde/experimental jazz. The kind of music that is the fringe of the fringe. Given that, you can imagine that when I go to a concert, it isn't at a big hall or arena. The two places I go the most are: Brookline Tai-Chi and the Lilypad, and for the most part, there are almost as many musicians as there are audience members, sometimes more.

A couple weeks back, I was the only person at the show until almost 15 minutes after it was supposed to start, and even then, the audience wasn't large and consisted mostly of people that were friends of the people playing. But regardless, they played the hell out of their instruments for about an hour and a half of free improvisation. It was an amazing performance. At times, the only way to describe it would 
be violent, with the drummer roaring and sax and trumpet blazing at the tips of their 
registers. It was the sort of thing that leaves you silent for the sheer power of it.

When you are playing music like that or most any improvised music, you aren't just speaking music (assuming that you are really playing) but evoking 
everything inside you at the moment. Frustrations are heard, sadness is heard, joy is heard.
 There is a rawness to the sound --I can't just say music because it isn't always like that, sometimes you strive for just pure 
sound to try and speak about those ineffable emotions that we all keep bottled inside. For 
me that's what music is for. In addition to pure enjoyment and entertainment, it is sometimes 
the only way you can really express what you want to say.

I don't really know where I rambled to here, but what I'm trying to say is that if you go out playing music for yourself, then you're doing something right. If you play only for others, I don't think that you're doing yourself or anyone else a favor.

Addendum: While at the Blue Note last night (see another post for details), I was talking with a free jazz pianist, Randall Moore, and he definitely ascribes to this philosophy. He'll only play his music. He does catering/bar tending to pay the rent and he was telling a story about a wedding he did at some fancy mansion in the Hamptons where there was an ancient out-of-tune Steinway, and the musician playing the gig was sitting there playing the piano while talking on his cell phone. I don't know about you, but it seems that there's something fundamentally wrong with that. If you can just coast through the music that you're playing like that, then why bother? Leave those gigs to the young kids that are still cutting their teeth trying to figure things out, such that they'll actually care about the music that they are playing.