Playing Music

The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear the saxophone as though it was inside my head.... All the notes came easing out of my horn, like they's already been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of effort.

—Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues [5]

    Jazz musicians have long known that marijuana leads to a greater enjoyment of the music. Some, like the venerable Mezzrow, have claimed it makes them play better as well. Others disagree. A jazz pianist who has observed marijuana use over several decades says:

Our experience in the band is that very often we thought we were terrific, ingenious, clever and swinging, and then we would discover that we had been playing the same thing over twenty-five times. When we heard a recording of what we had played, we knew it was ridiculous, changing keys all over the place where we weren't supposed to.
    The folk-belief among musicians is that marijuana made you think you played better, but that you actually played worse. And I think that's how it was. The confusion is due to a second folk-belief among the listeners: they thought that we thought that marijuana made us play better, but they were wrong. It did help us enjoy what we were doing, but we didn't think it improved our music at all.

    Still, some musicians do find marijuana useful, if not for performing, at least for practice sessions. "It takes away my inhibitions," says a guitarist, "and lets me learn from my mistakes, which is normally not so easy." A mandolin player in a bluegrass group reports:

I might smoke before practicing. I play in a group, and I'll sit down and do a couple of hits to put a little edge on while I'm playing. When I'm stoned, I can visualize musical relationships more easily. The other day, I was practicing scales on the mandolin, double lines of scales in intervals. Playing them high, I made more sense out of them, and finally understood when and how they might be useful in my playing.

    A flute and saxophone player finds that marijuana is detrimental when he practices, causing him to forget what key he is in, for example, or presenting difficulties in reading music. But when he plays something familiar, marijuana can sometimes help:

If I'm confident of what I'm playing, pot can magnify the experience: the feel of the horn, the breath, the subtle intonation changes, the vibrations from the lips. The notes slide out like aromatic coffee beans from a sack, until the whole experience is so sharply sensed it's almost unbearable.
    This can lead to trouble, too, because if you're not careful, you can get carried so far away by the sound of your own instrument that you stop hearing the others. Or, similarly, you can get so delighted with the patterns your fingers are making that you start watching yourself play instead of actually playing.

    Another musician says that he doesn't play when he's high because he loses control of his instrument, even though he finds that smoking can be helpful in encouraging the spontaneity that jazz requires: "The notes go straight from the head to the fingers with no rationalization in between." But a pianist in the same group has a different experience:

When I play stoned, I really think I play better. This is partly because I relax more (that good old tension-relieving aspect of the weed), and partly because I seem to be more aware of the flow of the whole thing. I don't just play chords and lines; I seem to feel the whole continuum of whatever it is I'm doing. I know where the music is going, and I'm conscious of the process of getting there.
    I also become more aware of muscular movements. It's good to do technical practice while you're stoned, because it really feels like exercise—like calisthenics for the hands. I had my most recent technical breakthrough when I was high. I finally got that little wrist movement that lets the really good keyboard players play so smoothly that you can't even tell when they change hand positions. I haven't gotten it yet with my left hand, though; I ran out of weed!