Play like it was the Apollo at Midnight

One of my nephews has been writing music since he was about 6. He had been composing for several years and had a huge collection of printouts of his tunes when he was invited to a recording session in Oakland. Alligator Records was recording an old R&B club band in a studio there.

If the boy is to be believed, these bluesmen were old enough to be the group who opened gigs for Moses and the Exiles. They set up, ran the sound check, and then ran through their entire playlist in one long session. No false starts, no ego trips, no smashed guitars: they just played.

After the recording session, when the band found out the boy played saxophone and wrote music, they treated him like a fellow musician sitting in on a jam session instead of an 11-year old boy. One of the group, the one who did most of the arranging and composing, gave him a secret that is passed from one generation of musicians to another.

He asked, "You write much, boy?"

The boy proudly said, "Yeah, I've got a whole file cabinet full of songs I wrote."

"You too young to have that much wrote. How much of it is good stuff?"

"I don't know what you mean, sir."

"Boy, what you just heard ain't all I ever wrote. Last week I wrote and throwed out music that was so bad it made dawgs howl clear across the Bay. For fifty years I've been writing and throwing out music some folks thought was good enough for the kind of clubs we play in. But what we been playing today, that's my good stuff. That's what they paying us to play. That's what they gonna remember. I ain't playing them nothing but my good stuff."

The boy sat there, stunned at the thought of throwing music away.

"You want to be a real musician you go on home and give that music of yours a good going through and make sure you ain't keeping no dawg-howlers in there. Don't keep nothing that's just good enough to get by. If it ain't your good stuff, it ain't worth playing and it sure ain't worth keeping."

So the boy did. For weeks he spent every afternoon after school going through his folders of printouts, playing each song once or twice, muttering "dawg-howler", and dropping the sheet of paper into the wastebasket. Rarely, he placed it on top of the piano in a folder marked "good stuff". To this day he plays and replays his compositions, making sure it's the best he can write.

The bluesman told the boy one other secret: "Whenever you play your good stuff, play like it was the Apollo at midnight."

And the boy does.

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Update: The "boy" just took his medical school entrance exams. He was deciding between majoring in music or medicine and came to the conclusion that a doctor can play jazz on weekends without a license, but jazzmen who play doctor on weekends get in trouble.