If you don’t have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don’t have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.
The hardest thing about traveling is that mostly you get to a point – and it always happens on every tour – where you can choose between eating and sleeping, but you can’t do both.
In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.
I think it’s a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn’t have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you’re ready to deal with it.
I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice about being on the road and focusing on something you want to do.
So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That’s not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I’m refusing to deal with the problem.
It doesn’t need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.
The point was that the world of music – its language, beauty, and mystery – was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.
Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.
One of Allen Ginsberg’s T-shirts said, “Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.
Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.
If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.
Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn’t have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.
The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.
The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.
In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, “This guy comes with us,” I think it wasn’t just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.
The people there were obsessed with gold. They were convinced they were going to make a fortune, and some of them did, but they also spent it.
And, between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.
At the end of my third year as a full-time student, when I won a $750 prize, I immediately went to a BMW motorcycle shop in the Eighties on the West Side and bought a used BMW R69 500-cc motorcycle, all black and, though used, in great shape.
Truth be told, I was far from horrified by the prospect of “traveling from city to city and living in hotels.” I was rather looking forward eagerly to that – a life filled with music and travel – and completely thrilled with the whole idea.