Playing with fire

The other day I wrote that humans like listening to humans singing more than anything, but I'd like to qualify that by saying that humans also like listening to phenomenal instrumentalists as well.

I do believe that there is a correlation between the finest instrumental work and the quality of human singing, though; a lovely violin solo or even a sublime electric guitar solo have qualities of vocal pyrotechnics to them, and instruments that can't bend or modulate notes have a limited ability to thrill in the same way. Oh, there have been standout piano solos, Mike Garson's brilliant turn in Aladdin Sane, Billy Joel's intro to "New York State of Mind" and Roy Bittan introducing "Jungleland," but the most famous popular piano 'solos' are notable for their simplicity, like Jim Gordon playing the back half of "Layla" or Lennon's workmanlike "Imagine." Piano pieces may subconsciously appeal on the basis of "I could play that," while a truly sublime instrumental testament requires the listener to think, "How does he (or she) do that?!"

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the idea of the church organ with its many stops; I imagined what it would be like to be able to create a whole orchestra of sound with one instrument, using these pipes for brass sounds and those for reed sounds...and then when I grew up it became a reality, with a computer sequencer program 'playing' multi-timbral synthesizer modules. The catch, it turned out, was that there are several instruments that keyboards playing synthesizers are absolutely hopeless at reproducing: trying to make an authentic-sounding solo violin, electric guitar or saxophone is a lost cause. And these are the very instruments whose best players are revered, because they have mastered the millions of micro-adjustments necessary for producing human-vocal-like sounds from these instruments.

Sometimes an instrumental break is just a break, a chance for the singer to catch their breath, a place to fade down and bring up the foreground dialogue in a movie or order another beer in a live show. And sometimes it rivets everyone's attention and makes the hair on the back of everyone's neck stand up. Those players are the ones that inspire, drawing little drops of perfection from their instruments until they have poured a cup of delicious nectar into our ears.

So hats off to the master instrumentalists, and to represent them today, here's Larry Carlton with his extraordinary guitar on Steely Dan's "Don't Take Me Alive."