make your music dirty

i think i was in 11th grade or so when i started taking trombone lessons from this dumbass trombone player whom we'll call "burt." he was the bass trombone player for what we'll call "a symphony orchestra somewhere in colorado." he had facial hair in the style which we'll call a "goatee." he also had an approach to playing trombone and music which we'll call "fucked in the head."

at the very beginning of my first lesson, "burt" said something along these lines: "we want every sound that we make with our trombone to be beautiful, so when we play trombone, we should only play when we're ready to make beautiful music. even if we're just warming up, we should concentrate on making beautiful sounds." i didn't know any better so i was like, "oh yeah, totally. i totally agree. beautiful music. yeah, that's what i think, too."

i didn't realize until many years later how fucking stupid that is.

when i was in college, i saw a post on the online trombone forum in which someone had written how he wants to make "music so beautiful with my trombone that people will weep when they hear me play." i remember thinking at the time, "well that's retarded. who wants to make shit like that. i'd rather make music so awesome that it makes people puke their fucking guts out, followed by their heads exploding in a cumbath of awesome. fuck 'beautiful.' i want my music to sound like a pair of fat, sweaty ass-cheeks squishing around in shit-stained drawers."

as i started getting into free improvisation and found all sorts of weird, nasty, awesome sounds to make on trombone, i realized how stupid it is to talk about how music should always be beautiful. sometimes music should be dirty. even if you're playing a slow jazz ballad, you can just blow your fucking balls off like roswell rudd and slam the shit out of that ballad in the ass rather than take it out for a date to get ice cream with sprinkles like bill watrous would. when you have a long cadenza in jazz band where you're free to play whatever, you can take it to the park for a bike ride in matching blue helmets followed by over-the-shirt light boobie-fondling like tommy dorsey would or you can kick that cadenza in the tits and molest its asshole and play like paul rutherford. personally, i'd probably be a douchebag and play 2 short farting noises followed by a sustained out-of-tune multiphonic if i had a cadenza like that, but i'd rather do something like that and have big hairy balls than have a bunch of dumbasses who have no idea about anything go "oh, listen to that lovely trombone solo. mm... so beautiful. yes, what a talented performer he is. mm-hmm... just lovely."

you're welcome. the end.