“Audiences are rarely on the same wavelength as performers. In fact, two very different things are going on at once. The musician is wondering how to get from the second eight bars into the bridge, and the audience is in pursuit of emotional energy. The musician is struggling, and the audience is making up dreamlike opinions about the music that may have nothing at all to do with what the musician is thinking or doing musically. If audiences knew what humdrum, daylight things most musicians think when they play, they’d probably never come.”
Dick Wellstood (quoted in Whitney Balliett, American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog