Music, again.

I think about music these days more than anything. I love teaching English; I love playing with concepts; but my favorite thing to do is to play live.

During the summer, I pretty much make a living as a full-time musician. In the interest of absolute correctness, I do teach a couple online classes, for which I'm paid as an adjunct. Which means to survive I can either save money or play a lot of gigs. I do the latter.

I would guess that from June 1st to last weekend I played about 30 gigs. I just came back from a 4 gig/ 3 day run at Myrtle Beach and before that it was a wonderful weekend at my favorite place on the planet: Ocracoke Island. And as I've mentioned before, even though both the singer, myself, and the drummer all write and record original music, we get paid because we play covers well. One day, if you live in bars playing music long enough you realize that you aren't getting paid because you are good. You get paid to make the register ring. This is both frustrating and liberating. If I see it as an artistic performance it hurts my insides. If I see these gigs as a business - an awesome business where you're allowed to drink at work and are also privy from time to time to the perks of rock and roll music than it's the coolest thing ever.

Okay, so the cause for this post is that I often think about what audiences really like when I play covers. Do they like us? Or do they just like the nostalgia of hearing songs that were meaningful to them? Is this a bad question? And so forth. But a couple nights ago I saw a wonderful 3-piece, instrumental cover-band. The covered everything from The Ventures to Danny Gatton's version of Harlem Nocturne.

This reminded me of the days I played exclusively classical music and then jazz. When you play these styles you always play "covers." However, it feels different. Nobody in the classical world says "I covered Bach last night." The say "I performed the Prelude to Bach's first cello suite," or
"We played a great version of Charlie Parker's "Ornithology."

For this post I'd just like to pose the question: What's the difference between covering Tom Petty and covering Charlie Parker? I'm not suggesting there is no difference - my gut tells me there is a difference, but what exactly is that difference, especially if we allow for the fact that we might not cover Tom Petty note for note, choosing rather to do a version of the tune.

(I'm currently listening to My Morning Jacket covering Take My Breath Away, which I think inspired this post.)