Reconnecting with Artistry

Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you threw everything else aside to achieve a goal? That has been me with academia. Indeed, the past few months have been very scholarly. Anyone who has followed my recent work will probably have noticed how academically intensive the past few months have been. I have been publishing, travelling for conferences, presented at others, attended many more online, and somehow found myself speaking across music, education, pedagogy, practice-led research, assessment, and, yes, AI too. I have also been very busy teaching and examining across multiple institutions, which is not stopping anytime soon.

These are all good, useful, and necessary things. I am not complaining, truly. This is the work I have been trying to build toward for years, and it is gratifying to see some of it finally cohere into something visible. BUT. Such behaviour may also be a tad dangerous if the artist gets buried under the academic persona. It is not that I stopped being an artist. It is more that I stopped having enough time to mull over my artistry, to ruminate on it, to be annoyed by it, excited by it, embarrassed by it, challenged by it, and to keep evolving it without everything needing to become a paper, a conference abstract, a teaching framework, or a carefully positioned professional update. In other words, the CV may look impressive, but jazz does not care.

I should clarify that I did not stop playing completely. I have been playing, A LOT actually. Gone are the days of my nine-gigs-a-week, seven-nights-a-week life, often ending at 4 or 5 am (and frankly I do not miss that version of myself very much), but I have still been keeping a healthy dose of two to three commercial gig engagements or so per week. That has helped me in two important ways: first, it keeps me sane; second, it keeps me in touch with the music industry, which is precisely what higher education is supposed to prepare students for. (Oh yeah, three: the money certainly is a nice bonus) I am proud to remain an active participant in the music industry, because practice can become strangely abstract when it is theorised from too great a distance. That is not a dig at theory; I enjoy theory: I live in theory half the time now! But music education becomes very strange when it forgets the actual musical worlds students are trying to enter.

However, there is a huge difference between playing for work, playing for content, and playing for ART. Recently, through a number of projects, conversations, affiliations, and renewed artistic relationships, I have found myself increasingly playing for art again. I have received artist endorsements and/or ambassadorships, including with Rohema for implements, and I have been renewing my Pantheon Percussion artist activity lately. There are also a couple of other entities I'm in discussion with, but that is for a future update! The point, however, is not the branding. The actual reconnection is not the logo, the bio line, the affiliation, or the nice-looking post. It is sound. As I always say: sound above all.

These are not always the glamorous parts of musicianship. This is the long sit with the music. The replaying of clips that really hit you in the heart and the head. The slow metronomic practice. The aligning of limbs. The stupidly specific obsession with the exact angle at which one activates the instrument. The difference between a stroke that speaks and one that merely happens; the way a drum opens, chokes, blooms, or dies depending on touch. The way a cajón suddenly stops sounding like a box when the hands remember they are supposed to produce a thump or a cut, not just slap wood à la piak piak. These are the actual stuff of musicianship!!

I touched on this briefly elsewhere, but I often tell myself: if I am a principal study tutor, if I am teaching music, if I am teaching musical judgement, I have to keep making good musical judgements. A lot of this can sound abstract, but it does not need to be. In fact, that is probably one of my larger missions: to demystify things like practice-led research, ensemble pedagogy, aural fluency, musical judgement, and structural listening without killing the artistry inside them. Because at the end of the day, these things are not only concepts. They happen when a musician makes sound, listens, adjusts, fails, tries again, chooses density or restraint, changes touch, hears the bass differently, supports the singer, leaves space for the phrase, or decides that the music needs less rather than more.

That is also why I keep returning to rhythm-section musicianship as a wider frame. Drums and percussion remain the centre of gravity for me, obviously, but bass, keys, and other related practices have become increasingly important in how I hear and think. Not because I want to collect instruments like Pokémon, but because each instrument reveals a different part of ensemble judgement. Bass makes me think differently about weight and placement; keys make me think differently about register, texture, and sound choice. Together, these remind me that musicianship is not only about one instrument. It is about how sound (and makers of sound) behave in relation to other sounds.

Social media complicates this, of course. I use it, clearly. It has helped me make my work visible, connect with people, document projects, and build a profile that reflects both artistry and academia. But social media also has a way of bending the mind if one is not careful. A gig becomes proof. A practice session becomes content. A musical moment becomes something to package. A brand relationship becomes optics. Then one day, you realise you are asking not “does this sound good?” but “will this perform well?” Very dangerous. Useful, indeed. Necessary, maybe. But dangerous if left unchecked.

So perhaps this is the small reminder I needed before the next academic year gets noisy again. Write, teach, supervise, publish, present, build the career, yes. I am not pretending that any of these don't matter. They matter a lot. But the artist-scholar still has to play. Not only to remain employable, visible, or “industry-relevant,” but because the work is only honest if the practice remains alive. No sound, no scholar-practitioner. Just theory.

Sound above all.