On Influence

The subject of influence has been a big one for me lately. There are a number of questions that I have been asking myself that I would like to throw open to all of my fellow musicians/artists/thinking individuals.

It seems that we spend our early, formative years as artists assimilating information from many different sources. For jazz musicians, such as myself, this tends to consist of listening to records by the greats, figuring out whose sound you like, and learning how to imitate those sounds. There have been countless musicians who have made great impressions on me, and whose work has affected the way I approach music. To become an artist, one must be able to synthesize all these sources and put them to use in creating original art.

An anecdote: In my first week here at Oberlin, I attended a jam session with some of the other jazz students here. While I was waiting for things to get started, I sat down at the piano to play a little bit. Without thinking much, I dove into a modal improvisation, using typical McCoy Tyner-style stacked fourth chords. Another musician heard me and said something to the effect of "It's good to have a McCoy Tyner guy hear, everyone else is into Bill Evans." I know he meant it as a compliment, but it raised a lot of problems for me. Certainly we don't train ourselves as musicians (or in any other discipline) merely to fit into one established school of playing. I don't want to be identified as a Bill Evans follower or a McCoy Tyner follower or any such bullshit. I must admit though, that a lot of this was on me. I had essentially sat down to the piano on that particular occasion and intentionally decided to imitate McCoy Tyner. I could not deny the influence that he has had on my playing, but I don't want to let myself fall into something like "Okay, now I'm doing my McCoy thing, now I'm doing my Herbie thing, now I'm doing my Cecil thing. "

The problem that I now confront is how to synthesize these influences into one cohesive approach to making music. How do I use the things I learned from Mccoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor and everyone else all at once, without sounding like any of those people?

This gets even more problematic if you view influence in broader wider terms. There are a lot of figures outside of jazz who are equally important to my music. Composers such as John Adams and Morton Feldman, for example have had a huge impact on me. How can I reflect this in my approach to playing jazz?

I know that I am not the first person to raise these questions. Nor are they questions that necessarily have answers. Perhaps this synthesis of styles and influences is a process that one undergoes innately as one continues to study. In any case, recently it has felt necessary for me to put more deliberate and conscious thought into the matter. So anyway, I'd love to here all of your feedback, anecdotes, asides or completely unrelated comments.