I am not a musician

I’m not a musician. But I come from a long line of musicians so maybe I have that gene. My dad founded the band that gave Quincy Jones his start, The Charlie Taylor Band (which later became the Bumps Blackwell Band), in the 40s. His parents were musicians too. My grandparents’ basement served as a bar and was the place to hang out for black musicians traveling through Seattle after their gigs: Lionel Hampton, Erskine Hopkins, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford and more.

My dad said in an interview once: “All the black kids I knew had a favorite instrument that they liked to listen to and could ‘pose’ to. I liked to pose to a tenor saxophone. So, when I got my instrument that’s what I got. I liked Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. So the first thing I did was pose…. I went from posing to playing, because we didn’t really know how to play. But we just kept on doing it.”

Bob Lefsetz has talked a lot lately about the 10,000 hours, Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of how people achieve great things. It’s not about being born with talent, it is about doing something so much that you become great. My dad had that kind of obsession. First as a musician. Then as a cultural anthropologist. Then as an explorer of inner domains, meditation and other other-worldly stuff.

My great grandmother on my mother’s side was a Madam. Not just a prostitute mind you, but an entrepreneur, a very successful business woman in the 1890s and 1900s. We don’t need to guess what she did in her 10,000 hours. She would turn up at my grandmother’s convent every week in a limousine, each time with a new guy in tow. My grandmother didn’t know who her father was but it was family myth that he was Spanish (more likely Mexican) and was a piano player in a silent movie theatre. But the Madam was no doubt Irish Catholic (or mostly so) because my grandmother had about 5 middle names.

There are members on both sides of my family who were obsessive about their thing. Business is a form of creativity; that is my thing. I certainly have done my 10,000 hours, but I am not sure that I will ever be truly great or supremely successful (in my own metrics). My son was a great actor, then a great chef and oddly an incredibly charismatic evangelist at my company, our company, all dig down. He started ballet at 4 and dance and acted all the way through university; that is all he wanted to do. But he, my only child, died a few months ago at 32 years old.  We will not see any more of his greatness… just the ripples he caused in the lives of those who knew him. He left a trace. And you can get a hint of his greatness by seeing the video of his one-man show (Pimp Dreams), written and directed by him and performed 10 years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a coming of age story. His journey was not easy.

I have not missed even an hour of work since he died. Maybe I will one day. But I am a workaholic and I do love what I do… plus he would have wanted this business to succeed. I picked up a book written in the 1960s about the settlers to the Northwest (in the US) and some of my ex-slave family in the 1880s. In it was an old folded article about a mine explosion in the 1940s where some of my family, Taylors, died.

I’ve been writing a book about the importance of failure in success, “Cultivating Failure.” It happens to all entrepreneurs many times in their lives, sometimes in big flaming crashes and sometimes in smaller less noticeable ways (to the outsider). Life also happens; things we could never have imagined, events so devastating that it doesn’t seem possible to survive. I am surviving. But life is hard. And I wonder why some of us survive what seems un-survivable. Is it the same as the 10,000 hour theory, but maybe includes our ancestors? Am I surviving because of my own 10,000 hours, my own cultivated creativity? Is that my success? Or am I successful, which includes surviving what is almost impossible, because of the generations of those before me who put in their 10,000 hours or practice at living and creating? Am I just posing now, like wannabe musicians, while I wait for the real thing to take over? No. While I am not a musician, I’ve gone from posing to playing. I guess that is the musician in each of us.

Posted at 07:38AM Jun 05, 2009 by shelley in Music  |  Comments[0]