Well, it’s been a while. Please be assured, there’ll be some Beyond Bass Camp news coming very soon. I promise 🙂

But in the meantime, here’s some smart thinking on music. One of the big mistakes instrumentalists make is to go looking to practitioners of their chosen instrument for wisdom on the subject of music. There’s no reason why bass guitarists should know more about music than anyone else. Truth be told, there’s a heck of a lot more wisdom about music out there by non-bassists than there is by bassists…

So with that in mind, here are three of my favourite interviews with guitarist David Torn. David is both a truly remarkable guitarist/composer/improvisor and a brilliant thinker about the processes around music. Clear-headed, mischievous wisdom that ties music to human-ness. He’s brilliant.  

The first one is in 3 video segments, embedded here. It came out at the time of his last album, and explains some of the improvisation/composition/processing that went on around its creation. Great stuff from a remarkable mind.

Next up is a series of interview segments and demonstrations he did for guitarbandDVD.org – they’re all in this post here.

And finally, three interviews with David from innerviews.org – Anil Prasad (for he is Innerviews) is, to my mind, the finest musician interviewer on the planet. Scholarly, passionate, deep, respectful without sucking up to anyone. He writes about music as a fan, an advocate and an archivist of musical thinking. He manages to get the very best from his interviewees, as evidenced in these three with David Torn:

Recasting Identities.
Fate Is Not Completely Decided.
Every Mind Has To Be Defused.

There’s so much in each of these interviews, you could easily spend a couple of months just processing the ideas and musical processes put forward. Please feel free to comment on any quotes or ideas that particularly resonate with you.

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