It's Never Too Late...

I was thinking, earlier on today, of trying to expand on last evening's meditations; but to be frank, I've left it too late: my capacity for cogent thought now diminished by food, and inevitably, alcohol. Whilst pondering my lack of immediate inspiration - common enough on most days - I was listening to a couple of interviews with Joe Bonamassa. To the uninitiated, Bonamassa is a [relatively: I can only frame it from the perspective of a seventy-year-old] young blues/rock guitarist from upstate New York, who has a great affiliation with the UK, and in particular, the music of the British Invasion of the US of the sixties, where the blues was weirdly exported back to its original home by a bunch of largely middle-class enthusiast musicians from Blighty.

What struck me from a personal point of view was the fact that - and this refers back to last night's scribble - all of this musical traffic was a continuous, two-way, learning process: discovery followed by innovation and progression: a circular reinforcement. As a teenager, I utterly misconstrued the process; believing in physical facility on my instrument of choice - the guitar - as somehow over and above actually learning the contextual stuff that is so necessary to true understanding of the music and the instrument itself. As in all things, I'm still learning on so many levels, well into what I will euphemistically term late-middle-age. Maybe I'll try as hard on my music too, who knows? Keep you posted, whatever I do...