According to USA today, the average length of an attention span of a man in America is 23 minutes.
And if you are playing in several meters at once, there has to be a - not a rigid - but there definitely has to be a reference to a common pulse in the band.
Even within the band, if I cannot manage to persuade the members of what I see to be the next course of action, how do you expect the group to deal with the expectations of thousands of people. It is not possible.
However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.
If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.
Music can be transformative, utterly transformative. The act of music is utterly transformative.
So, you can set up an orchestra down this end of the railway station playing one particular area, and simultaneously at the other end something completely different going on. And in the middle they meet, or not, depending.
The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.
To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.
