Last night I listened to the great Ella Fitzgerald singing George Gershwin's classic ' Summertime'.I caught her on you tube.Her delivery is perfect with a capital'P', and I asked myself how she managed to be so brilliant.
I concentrated on her vocal expertise, and after a while, it began to dawn on me, that every single syllable she sings, she sings with her everything.Every nuance she can extract, and then deliver from a single word is sung with real conviction and pure naked passion.Even words like 'and' and 'the' become charged with meaning when she sings them.
She has lost herself totally in the song. The song and her are one.It is the same as a zen master in his meditations.
She has no ego; there is only the song and nothing else.It is pure awareness that is singing, not the ego. And that is why it is so beautiful.
Was she born this way? I don't know, but I doubt it. I am sure that she spent hours, weeks, months and years learning her craft, before the miracle took place.She might have had a previous life that was preparing her for this also.
If you observe any great work, whether it is a song, a painting, an opera, a poem or a sportsman excelling in his sport, you will find that they all have one thing in common, and that is that the artist has immersed him or herself completely in the work.
They have lost themselves in the act of creation., so what we are given is the essential raw spirit of the message.
That is why great works of art are timeless and are loved by all generations.
People tend to think such great creators are very gifted and different to the rest of humanity.It's like in every 10,000 people a genius might emerge.But I don't believe that this is so. You see, all these people had one thing in common.Whilst they were writing the poem, painting the painting, or singing the song, their own identity was of no importance.
The art itself was what mattered.They had somehow opened a space in consciousness to let pure awareness take over and kick the ego out.
Bob Dylan claimed that he wrote most of his classics in the sixties in about ten minutes. How did he do this?
Well, he didn't.Pure awareness did, but he had created an environment that enabled pure awareness to enter. That is what all good creators do.
The amazing truth of this is that , surprising as it sounds, anyone can be a great artist, if they let awareness create the art.
It also seems to be that, say you have a passion for painting, when you start trying to paint, your results are not very good, but as you persist, you slowly get better and better.It is then, when you have mastered, to some degree the mechanics of the execution of your art, that suddenly, something from beyond you enters.
So you have to prepare the groundwork before it makes its presence felt.
Unforunately, not many pop singers today have this.I mean, who today can really compare to Ella Fitzgerald?
A few have it though, and they always leave the others standing still.They have it because they have surrended their ego and let another higher vibration take over.
If you want to master any subject, immerse yourself in it and then surrender to the fountain of creativity that will shower over you- from your true ground of being.
Maybe you'll become anothe Ella Fitzgerald!.
No comments:
Post a Comment