Pat,

Hey,where you bin bud? If you've been hanging out at the Off Topic forum, I thought I might see something from you regarding my two posts involving you, Mac and RHarv.

Is it possible that silence = circumspection?

Hey, pal, let me tell you something about imitation, something I found out the hard way. When I first heard Wes Montgomery, I was completely blown away. It was as though Wes had part of my brain and I had part of Wes's brain. I was already playing with my thumb (learned from Gene Autry and Roy Rogers) and said to myself, "Now, I wanna sound like THAT!"

So I did what all aspiring jazz musicians have done through the ages. I sat with the vinyl records (on the Riverside label) and laboriously copied every one of Wes's licks and wore the vinyl through to the other side.

A few years later, after I could really move that thumb and play octaves and chord solos, I was at Manny's Music on 47th street in New York, where I grew up. I was looking to buy a guitar and was comping the blues, when I heard this wicked alto sax soloing on my chords. I recognized who it was by the sound, so I thought I'd really impress with some machine-gun octaves and chords.

So, out walks Cannonball Adderley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Adderley - the guy who launched Wes's career - offering me a cigarette. He says, "You can play kid, but you'll go nowhere as a Wes Montgomery sound-alike. If people want to hear Wes, why settle for you?" Then, Cannonball Adderley says something I've heard a million times: "You have to find your own voice."

Yeah, so what if you spend 20 years practicing and you do find your own voice and discover that you don't like it, and would much prefer a different voice? That happened to me.

In going back to the drawing board, I found that the goal for me was "lick-less" improvising, or nearly so. I would form a mental map of the guitar fingerboard so that a melodic idea in my head would be instantly "visible" on the fretboard. I've partially succeeded at this and it is a never ending process.

I'll finish by thanking you for the extravagant praise and, for what it's worth, repeating this hackneyed phrase: "You have your own voice to find, pal. Imitation has no payoff."

Dean