I understand why a 'cinephile' might love the film, because it is well made. I understand why someone like yourself might like it because it speaks directly to something you might have the ears to understand as you have studied music yourself. What I find surprising about the film is the average Joe that aligns with it. Those who are only vaguely interested in the artistry of a film, and those who (while possibly being a fan of music) don't have any 'in' into entirely being able to understand exactly when Teller's character gets 'great'. The average person obviously does not have the ears of Simmons' character, and so who are we to trust when he finally breaks through. We aren't in a position to trust any feedback we get from this teacher. And so where does Joe Q Public's allegiance lie in such a film. I feel there is almost a championing of this kind of abusive teaching that is going on, and that is what I don't quite grasp. And maybe don't even want to understand.
As for the importance of time, trust me, I get the value. I've no doubt you probably have better ears for perfect time than I do, but drums and those that keep the rhythm have been my gateway into being able to understand most great music that is considered complicated as well as rudimentary. I would not have grasped Coltrane's "Ascension" without Elvin Jones. I don't think the thick funky syrupy squall the Stooges made would come together and swing without Scott Asheton. And I wouldn't love the Stones nearly as much without the perfection of Charlie Watts behind the kit.
But...at a certain point, you are chasing perfection for an audience of no one. I believe you can get so good at something, there is no longer anyone left to truly understand how good you've become. That if you were a fragment less good, it wouldn't make any true tangible difference to how a piece of art resonates with anyone else. Or at least very very few people.
And...this also isn't me saying I don't think we should chase that level of perfection. I'm not a musician but writing has been the pursuit I've dedicated myself to and I've got the blisters on my typewriter fingers and even on my brain to prove it. In my teens and early twenties, I would devote eleven to twelve hours a day just sitting in my room alone. Experimenting. Perfecting. Rewriting from a different perspective. Rewriting from a different tense. Playing with passive ways of writing to see if what they offered was more interesting than asserted approaches generally more approved of. I would walk out into rain storms for hours at a time with a note pad, scrawling down observations of what being caught in the rain felt like, then go home and write pages and pages and pages of that one experience trying to wring every sensation I just experience down on a piece of paper. And the end result was that, yes, I got better and better, but I also developed massive problems with anxiety (because the more you learn about something, the more you clearly come to understand how far you still have to go to get truly good) as well as having everyone in my family, and everyone in the neighbourhood who saw me walking around in the rain with a pen and paper think I was a total looney (and, undoubtedly, I was....but I didn't have to make it so obvious). And at no point have I regretted this kind of dedication. It's almost a monks like life where you devote your entire existence to one thing. There is a simple beauty in that.
Still though, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this with your pursuit of music, I got to a point where I realized 'who on earth is going to realize for even a second that I spent the last two months debating with myself if I should use a contraction or not in one particular sentence'. These were the kind of things I would tear my hair out over, and sometimes cry, and sometimes go to be for weeks at a time when I couldn't figure it out. And maybe all that strain led to me making the right decision in using 'do not' instead of 'don't', but...does it actually matter. If art is communication with others, did I need to take the minutia this obsessively to the point of actual self harm? At what point is it needlessly destructive.
Hence, that is how I got to wondering what fractions of fractions of a second really matter in the big scheme of things. Like...how much do they actually matter if almost no one else is truly going to ever hear this tiny difference. Have we just been chasing our creative tails all this time thinking that perfection (which is of course always a malleable term to some degree) was what we should even be persuing (as I'm sure we both know, after all, there are also a lot of great drummers who have made great careers out of not being perfect time keepers, Keith Moon for example). So, how important is perfection...really?
Basically, it's more of a philosophical inquiry that I found the movie tapped into and that, I don't believe, it actually answers. Which I actually find compelling about the film but....I doubt many other bigger fans of the film care much about all the critical minutia I just spilled out here.
Wow, man, that is really f*ckin' cool. I used to enjoy creative writing but it never occurred to me to do all those things you talk about to actually
practice that craft. Frankly, I wish more writers did that.
One subtle difference though between what you do and what I do is that Writing is a pretty solitary art form (outside of an editor) whereas Music is very collaborative. What's going on
within the band is frequently as important or more important, especially for Jazz musicians, as the audience's response. For example, in composed music, whether that's Classical or Rock or what have you, being able to play it exactly as the composer hears it in their head is essential, so if they tell you "I want this in 5/4 with accents on the 1s and 4s (instead of the 1s and 3s, say) and I want it swung, but not too loose"... well, that's already a lot and you have to be a pretty highly practiced musician to even pulled that off, but then you actually have to, ideally, play all that with a relaxed feel and be able to react to what the other musicians are doing, and possibly improvise and fill and even be playful with all of that. And, obviously, this is really true of Jazz where you have a room full of excellent players but "that guy's just a little too stiff" and "that guy's just a little too loose" and "that guy's always rushing" (a really common problem) and "that guy's playing it perfectly but he doesn't seem to have much to add" and so forth. You want to be able to talk to each other and you want to able to make a musical joke and have everyone in the band musically "laugh" along with the joke and maybe return one as well. I mean, you can be
sarcastic in music. It's
conversational. And to be conversational you need to be
fluent. Because
the other people in the band are listening. When you play Jazz, you are playing to experts. The other players.
That's your audience and that's the standard you're trying to live up to. The "audience", the people in the seats, may not have any idea that you just "whispered" something (musically) to the bassist that made him "chuckle" (musically) but that's what Jazz musicians and I think great improvisational musicians in general are really on that stage for and they are just inviting an audience to watch them have their conversation. I mean, that's really what Jazz is, I think. And that takes an incredible, Herculean amount of practice. Like what you were talking about with your writing but never stopping.
To bring it fully to your point, the bassist in the band I'm in is very much the opposite of me and will never be a Jazz musician because he wants to know what he's playing and play it and feel satisfied that he did his job, he does not like to take risks in front of people, and he plays
for the audience. He's always on about how we need to keep the tempo up for the audience, that people want to dance, and all this other stuff about the audience, that's probably true of some audiences, but obviously not all. So it's hard to get him to take any risks or play musician games. He does not need to practice like the musicians in
Whiplash because his audience is a pretty average audience.
I, on the other, hand, am playing for the drummer, the "lead-guitarist"/songwriter, to some degree the bassist if he's actually listening and not just making sure he's playing his part well and checking out the "audience", and for myself. And I assume that if I'm good enough to play for that audience, then the audience on the floor will hear good music whether they realize
why or not.
And, to your first paragraph, definitely good for the "cinephile" in me, but it's also the
feel. I think that movie has a feel, like any good movie with a feel, and that could be
Messiah Of Evil, for example. I'm not talking about a
style, and obviously those two movies have very different feels, but it has a feel and I think you know what I mean from past conversations we've had about movies; and it also makes me feel like I am living in the space with the characters and I don't quite know what witchcraft that is but Chazelle is a filmmaker (among others) who can do it.