photo credit: Matt McGee
I used to pitch in little league baseball. I wasn’t a great pitcher. Pete Byers, our first call, was a great pitcher. I was the reliever. Normally I played third base; I was a pretty good third baseman. Third base is all about the turnaround – like the guy on first, you have to be able to catch anything in your general vicinity, but then you have to turn it around FAST and accurate to make the double-play.
Pitching is different. Pitching is psychological. Pitching is about speed and control, yes, but it’s also about confounding expectations – faking the batter out. You have to be as fast and accurate as a laser, yes, you have to know exactly where you want to put the ball and be able to nail it every time, like a Zen archer… but you also have to give it a twist, change it up, do something just a little unexpected.
The second chapter of Music Success in Nine Weeks (here we go) is about crafting the perfect pitch, and although we are talking about marketing here, a subject into which I claim no special insight, I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that the lessons of the baseball mound might very well apply.
I think that like many musicians, I have always suffered from precisely the limitation that Ariel identifies first: the inability to own my influences. I have always drawn on a pretty eclectic mixture of them, and I have also worked in a wide variety of genres, so it’s not easy to isolate the ones worth mentioning – but I think it’s more than that – it comes from a desire to be perceived as original.
It’s interesting to be told, by someone in a position to know, that this is one of the basic flaws of most musicians’ presentations, is sobering. Perhaps wanting to be seen as original is getting in the way of being noticed at all – in which case all that originality doesn’t do anyone much good.
So, I am going to step up. Here are some major influences (this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it hones in on the aspects of the music that seem important – and marketable):
So what exactly is it that you do here?
First, I play long-form improvised solo piano, blending jazz, classical and new age flavours. To pretend that this was not initially inspired by the works of Keith Jarrett would be disingenuous at best. There are others, but Keith owns this space – and rightly so. He’s also restless, iconoclast and a jazz titan, so he covers a lot of bases. I do, mind you, try to keep the groaning down a bit more…
I also make moody electronic and ambient music (sometimes with piano and other instruments in there too) that is as much textural as compositional, and somewhat experimental. Brian Eno can represent this zone, though I’m slightly reticent as he is a bit highbrow for some. We’ll leave him for now; maybe I can find a way to humanize him a bit…
Third, I have a very soft spot for melancholic beauty; what is sometimes called ‘decadent music’. Cocteau twins were an early influence, but I’m going to change the reference to something more modern and relevant to the more acoustic and instrumental (or at least wordless) zone I like to occupy: Sigur Ros gets the nod for this one.
Finally, I have done a lot of soundtrack work and much of it is rather dark and full of menace that never quite manifests itself. Rarely loud or angry, however; I like to create intensity in more subtle ways. In keeping with my baseball metaphor, instead of referencing a soundtrack composer here I’m going to go change it up, go straight to the source and name-check the king of creep himself, David Lynch.
There are so many more crucially important artists that I could name, but in the spirit of keeping it simple, let’s see what we can do with those 4.
combine all ingredients, mix well and season to taste
Now before I put this all together, I have also been thinking it should include a kind of mission statement, my musical Prime Directive as it were. I’ve been pondering this for a while and one word keeps coming up that seems to encapsulate what I want my music to do and to be known for:
Fascination.
I want to create fascination, I want my music to fascinate people, get under their skin, make them want to listen over and over and uncover new layers of meaning and emotion. This is not just a marketing buzzword, either; it’s a kind of personal credo. I want to be creatively fascinated myself. It is the state of mind that has generated all of my best music, and one of my ever-present goals is to stay in that space as much as possible, be able to step into it instantly and easily, like a second skin. I want to keep it close, so I’m building it into the brand.
So where does that leave me? After some tweaking and twiddling:
Pianist and composer tobias tinker is on a musical mission: to Create Fascination. Sigur Ros and Keith Jarrett watching Twin Peaks, with Brian Eno serving Mojitos…
What do people think? Strike? Ball? Foul?
(I’m going to run this by the Mastermind gang before I start spraypainting it on the subway walls.)
