WE'VE ALWAYS SAID IT. LOOKS COUNT. AS OR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE MUSIC?

Jazz musicians will hate this, some will hate it a lot.

For an audience, how you look on stage is equally as important as how you play your music - in fact, this serious research study shows that it may even be more important.

If it were not so, then you would expect an audience to be listening with their eyes closed in order to appreciate the music more. But they are wide awake and watching. They look for the interactions between the musicians, the head nods, the chatting between the songs about how they are going to be played, the announcements, and in the case of Alan Barnes, the jokes.

WE ARE IN SHOW BUSINESS EVERYONE. 

This story was in The Times this morning. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences set up a study. The 900 strong sample were asked to identify the winners of prestigious music competitions. A third of the sample were given sound and video recordings. Another third, just sound recordings, the rest just video recordings alone.

People say that the sound is the most important thing in music. But they cannot pick the winners with the sound alone. When listening to the sound alone only 20% could pick the winners. Yet 47% could pick the winners through video-only. You may want to read that sentence again, a couple of times.

There are no really ugly people on stage as musicians. This is probably why.

So, 

1) When you play a beautiful bit, close your eyes. I've seen Nigel Thomas do this.

2) Interact with the others. You might even go so far as to applaud their solo, ever thought of that? Actually our own Andrew Batchelar will usually smile a lot when he hears someone play a nice passage.

3) Pay attention to your image on stage. 

John

PS Musicians will hate this. Some don't have much time for research anyway. Some don't have much time for their audience either. Look at the song list they choose, that will tell you. 

The Jazz Smugglers bands in Sussex

The Jazz Smugglers workshop, Bosham, Sussex

The workshop will be opening again on Sunday September 8th. We can take one extra front line player, possibly. If you would like to try out you would be welcome that evening, but let me know in advance.

This site is to help the Jazz smugglers workshop group and provide informtion about the following weeks work. We will be working on widening our range of playing styles as individuals, working together in a band, and practising the more difficult things. You need to be able to read.

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In this blog We will produce tips for jazz piano, and jazz guitar together with jazz saxophone. We will cover jazz chords, jazz guitar chords, and we will deal with jazz scales. We will cover jazz songs. This site is all about jazz improvisation. you can sign up directly to this blog site as a FOLLOWER, bottom rh side panel, you'll get all the posts.