Bill Bruford - UNT (Kazumi Watanabe, The Spice Of Life, 1987)

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I think titles are important when it comes to instrumental music, so I’m surprised and sorry I didn’t ask this track’s composer, Japanese guitarist Kazumi Watanabe, what UNT meant, or stood for. I haven’t a clue what was running through his mind when he wrote it or named it, and that’s often helpful in deciding how to play it. I’ve written a little about my time with Kazumi in other video descriptions on this channel (see ‘Lim-Poo’, or a ‘drum solo’ from the Spice of Life tour), so I have little to add on this song from the same tour, other than how young and healthy everyone looks. Spare a thought for those musicians who are not so lucky, the men and women who are not on stage, silenced, invisible, and who would so like to be there.

The hazards surrounding musical instrument practice are many and varied. Painful musculo-skeletal issues include overuse injuries and hand and finger problems. Many drummers are particularly concerned with hearing loss and carpal tunnel syndrome, the drummer’s version of writer’s cramp. Musicians’ careers are threatened when they can no longer play their instrument because of pain and dysfunction. The difference between 95% recovery of an injured finger and 100% recovery may mean the difference between a world-class career and obscurity.

Musicians’ lifestyles can have significant impact on well-being and mental health. Financial security and sporadic work patterns are surely significant sources of stress, but the greatest pressure comes from maintaining standards of playing to a level that meets the musician’s own ideals. General well-being comes from a sense of direct control over right work, with observable (or audible) outcomes. The psychology of performance ‘wellness’ suggests that greatest performer happiness lies in those areas that welcome personal expressive input and which give the performer a sense of control over their own performance.

One music performance counsellor I know says that the least frequent visitor to his consulting rooms is the jazz performer, which he surmises is because the jazz performer typically exercises the greatest control over the performance, and is thus able to inject something of him- or herself in to it. His most frequent visitor, by genre, is the classical musician. We might generalize that the more choice and control individuals are able to exercise within their practice, the less likely it is to make them ill. Happily, I don’t think I ever missed a gig in my life.

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