A friend recently satirized my music in a mock-review.  I won’t reprint it here, because, although it is funny if you know me personally, it would be kind a yawn, otherwise. One thing in it got me thinking, though. The “reviewer” mentioned the tedium of a “forty-minute drum solo” that he imagined my music would contain, owing to the fact that I am a drummer. Forty-minute drum solos — or drums solos at all — are the farthest thing from my mind, these days; however, it occurred to me that in drum solos, we might be able to see, pretty clearly, three distinct types of artistic approaches: 1) unsubstantial  crowd-pleasing popular art; 2) excellent, competent, yet still popularly accessible art and 3) experimental, outstandingly skilled art that leaves the general audience behind in its brilliance. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo by Chris Matarazzo
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You know what I am sick of? George Lucas bashing. That’s what I am sick of. That said, I don’t think George Lucas is the Jesus of movie makers. I like Star Wars well enough. I really like Indiana Jones. The guy is great, but I’m not going to declare him the Shakespeare of Hollywood. He makes good, entertaining films with enough depth that they hold up for numerous viewings. What more can you ask?

But can we admit something, please? The original Star Wars trilogy is not the apex of film-making. Are those films the equals of Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia or, heck — Schindler’s List? No. Of course they are not. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, movies by Chris Matarazzo
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Well, I’m there.  I’m at that place a lot of artists dread — that place at which a big project has just been completed.  I am looking at the Herculean effort that is sometimes required to get another one going.  For a little more than two years, I have been writing, arranging and recording. The project is on the presses as we speak.

All of us creative types have been in this position. [Read more →]

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Once, I had a music teacher.  I will not name him, but, let it suffice to say that he disliked me. There are a few good reasons for this. The first is that when he came, during my eighth grade year, to “recruit” me to play trumpet in the high school band, I asked if I could just be in the “stage band” instead of marching. He said no; so, so did I, informing him that I refused to walk around wearing those ridiculous outfits.  Then, when I had him as a teacher in high school in music theory, I would often enrage him by changing his questions which, in my teenaged opinion, often amounted to strictly academic musical possibilities, not ones which would appear in “real” music. [Read more →]

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I’ve been going back in time. As I have said before, I’m a real believer in the potential of pop music, though I’m a lover of modern orchestral music and classical. I think pop is the music with the most creative potential, even if it is the area in which the least creative potential is realized, as things stand. Anyway, I have been going back in time to check out the the particular tunes of the pop greats that we don’t usually hear.

My latest purchase is Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. (It’s really, really good. But this isn’t a music review. I hate music reviews.) [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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“And I wasn’t looking for heaven or Hell

Just someone to listen to stories I tell.” 

~ Glen Phillips (Toad the Wet Sprocket)

My wife meditates and she does Yoga. I think it is pretty interesting stuff, but I haven’t tried either activity for myself. She is always telling me how good it feels to meditate and to have meditated. I believe it. But I think I already do that, with music. I wonder if artists of every kind aren’t doing their own kind of meditation, after all. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, religion & philosophy by Chris Matarazzo
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If, say, Descartes were to come back from the grave and host a talk show, I would watch it, daily. I would also occasionally watch an episode of Jerry Springer, but I would never watch Oprah, may her show rest in peace.

I have nothing against Oprah as a person. I have plenty against Jerry Springer as a person and, aside from the annoyingly mathematical miseries he caused for me in my younger days, I have no opinion whatever about Descartes as a dude.  But here’s my problem: If I watch TV, I want either brilliance or absolute melt-into-the-couch drivel — Cops, or World’s Dumbest, for instance. I can’t be bothered with middle-of-the-road quality in a TV show. Oprah is arguably a genius, in a lot of ways, but her show is pretty run-of-the-mill, on the intellectual scale. Not delightfully bad, not intellectually stimulating . . . just . . . there. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, television by Chris Matarazzo
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I have known some stinky, sweaty, rude, intolerable, brutish, self-absorbed, pimple-faced, neurosis-addled musicians in my time and out of all of those cats, not one of them ever had a problem getting a date. Why? Because they are musicians. Because they close their eyes and soar over a fretboard and pour their souls into microphones. Because they do what everyone else in the room wishes they could do. (It works for girls, too, but my gentlemanly mien prohibits such arguably critical assessments, lest my readers begin suspect me of being both judgmental and rude.) [Read more →]

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In discussions about art, we babble constantly about “quality” as if it is the determining factor in terms of what is “good” or “bad”. Some say that, for instance, Mozart was a better composer than John Williams could ever be. Or, we might dismiss Norman Rockwell (a mere illustrator) in comparison to, say, a VanGogh. We read a novel, and we nit-pick, saying: Steinbeck is sentimental; Dickens’s plots are too neat. A ballet choreographer might look at kids dancing for change on the street and he might say, “Unsophisticated. That’s not art. It’s ‘pop’ dancing.” But, in the end, what does all of this mean? As I have suggested lots of times, isn’t the measure of art in the way it directly affects us? How important is the “quality” of the work? One can (and I certainly do sometimes) marvel at an artist’s craft, but is great skill necessary for great art? Is skill necessary at all? [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, getting older by Chris Matarazzo
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I don’t know why I get so annoyed by clichés. Maybe it is my fiction-writing background. Maybe I’m just an early-onset curmudgeon. But one time, at a party, someone referenced the idea that you can’t play the blues well unless you lived the blues — whatever the hell that means.  Does he mean you need to be short of cash for the rent? A heavy drinker? Does he mean you have to be from a certain town? Do you have to be African-American? If that is what he means, I think he is simply buying-in to a tired cliché. Worse, he may be treading on prejudiced racial ground, just when he thinks he is being complimentary. [Read more →]

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