SIA ZEIGT: JOJO MAYER LIVE IM SAM - 3/5 Ein Architekturvortrag der anderen Art!

AN ARCHITECTURE LECTURE WITH A DIFFERENCE
I would like to explain this analogy briefly,
because it is also an architectural model which I use when giving lectures
to international audiences about music and playing the drums.
I believe that no matter what you do,
whether you are an athlete, artist,
architect, politician or philosopher,
when you learn something,
a certain dynamic of progress applies,
which I envisage as a flight of steps.
When you begin, these steps are very small.
The longer you do something, the higher and wider these steps become,
but they are still steps.
If I go to my first drumming lesson,
I learn how to hold the sticks.
I will demonstrate this briefly - it is a little boring.
In the second lesson, I learn to play a stroke.
In the third lesson, I learn to play a simple beat.
In the fourth lesson, I learn to vary this beat a little.
In the fifth or sixth lesson, I learn to play a variation.
And so it continues.
Very quick progress is made.
But the longer you do it, the longer you stay on each individual level.
And everyone who does anything will eventually reach a boundary
where they are faced with a wall,
where they cannot go any further
and this gives rise to crises.
I have been confronted with such crises.
I did not know how to get any further, or what was next.
I blamed my technique or my environment
and was totally frustrated because I perceived a wall in front of me.
Back then, I did not yet know
that this wall was simply the next step.
It was possible that my greatest heroes on the drums,
like Tony Williams for example, were just one step away from me,
but it was a giant step which I could not surmount
with the knowledge I had accumulated on the way to that platform.
Okay, Tony Williams was somehow in sight, but out of reach.
The first thing was to realize that that wall was not a wall,
but just a step.
a way to reach the next step, in my awareness and in my art.
Then a second analogy occurred to me, which is also architectural.
My influences, from whom I had learnt, whom I had copied, so to speak:
the great percussionists Max Roach, Buddy Rich, John Bonham,
Stewart Copeland, Billy Cobham and Tony Williams.
If you were to transfer them to the analogy of architecture,
they would be towers.
The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Sears Tower,
the Petronas Towers or the leaning tower of Pisa.
I wanted to build towers like these.
I began to build my first tower with the bottom steps.
That went quite quickly.
I made a 6m foundation and started building this tower,
working upward. When the tower was around 30m high,
it started wavering and I realized that I could build no further.
The first wall-like step had confronted me.
Then I realized that my only option was to climb back down,
demolish the tower and widen the foundation from 6m to 12m.
Once I had done that, I was able to build a tower that was 60m high.
But then that too began to waver and I had to come back down and expand to 90m.
And I did that several times,
it went on and on.
I knew that whenever I could go no further,
I had to come back down to my foundation.
But then came the really big crisis, where many people give up.
That was when I reached 120m,
which was already quite respectable,
and I knew that I would have to enlarge the next foundation.
But unfortunately neither stones, wood, nor any other construction materials
were at hand, because I had used up everything that was available.
That was until I realized that I had a 120m tower,
which gave me a view that I had not previously had with a 30m tower.
I could see everything going on around me
and I saw that in this valley out yonder, there were still plenty of stones
and in that valley out yonder there was still plenty of wood.
All I had to do was to gather these stones or this wood
from another place and I would then be able to build a tower
which was twice as high.
And so it goes on.
I believe this analogy explains
why it is important to think outside your own square
and why it is so important to shift paradigms and to change the perspective.
In life, in everything we do,
we meet our limits everywhere.
When people started noticing what I was doing,
I had traversed this step.
That is all I wanted to say.
I will now attempt to "build time" with my tools at hand again.
The first piece I have chosen is structurally very simple and transparent.
I have oriented myself toward a cybernetic beat,
a dance beat.
I will then make the next piece more complex.
(Translation: Simon Thomas)