Stanley Jordan – HuffPost 12.3.11

Mike Ragogna: …what advice do you have for new artists?

Stanley Jordan: For me, my motto has always been the music comes first, that’s the most important thing. I know it sounds so obvious, but it’s so easy to forget that. In today’s world, everything is so complex; even just making the time to practice is difficult. There are so many distractions and there’s so much filling our time, so when I do my seminars, that’s the main topic I talk about. Practicing is universal, regardless of your level of skill or your instrument or the style of music that you play. We all need to make the best of our practicing. The other thing is that when you need to make a decision about what to do, try to ask the music. What does the music want to do? Sometimes, it doesn’t always make the most sense from an economic point of view or from a political point of view, but in the long run, if you go with the best music, then you will have the best opportunity for it to work out the most.

We have a history in the music industry to try and reduce music down to its most basic form. I think that’s been an efficient short term strategy–having expendable artists who are willing to do what they’re told, and get a product out so quickly that people don’t have to think about it to appreciate it. In the long run, I think it’s really hurt music because the musical experience is diminished. I think people don’t really care about music so much. At one point, music became the soundtrack to the video, and now they don’t even show you the video anymore. Music is so much less important, I feel, in people’s lives. You can have 50,000 songs, but how much do you really care about one individual song.

So, what I feel is that, if you make your best possible music, that’s the music that’s going to grab people. When I do a good show, then people will come up and say you’re great and you’re a good musician and all that, and I will say thank you. If I do a great show, then people aren’t talking about me, they’re talking about themselves. They’re saying what they felt, how the music changed them. They say things like, “Man, I’ve never heard anything like that, I can’t wait to tell my friends at work tomorrow,” or something like that. That’s what I’m talking about–the best possible music, changes people on the inside.