TITLE: THE 4 A.M. TRICK: Why Quincy Jones Forced Michael Jackson to Record While ‘Brain Dead’ (music magic)
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOgucLME4AM

This is part two of music, magic, and science. >> Science. >> You have to start off as magic, but your goal should only be to become science. >> That sounds reasonable. It sounds professional. It sounds modern, but it's backwards. The closer it gets to science, the further it gets from the reason it mattered in the first place. >> The great things that you do are really happenings. For example, no great genius can explain how he does it. Yes. He says, I have learned a technique to express myself because I had something in me that had to come out. I had to know how to give it out. So if I were a musician, I had to learn how music is produced. That means learning to use an instrument or learning a technique of musical notation or whatever it may be. But then beyond that, I'm afraid I can't tell you how it was that I used that technique to express this mysterious thing I wanted to show you. If we could tell people that, we would have schools where we would infallibly train musical geniuses and there would be so many of them who we wouldn't know what to do with them. Geniuses would be a dime a dozen and then we would say, well, these people are after all not very ingenious. Music doesn't start as math. It starts as contact. Every artist describes the same thing. God, flow, the unconscious. Be up over here trying to be cute. You know, we don't care about all that. We just want to feel what you, you know, and what what the spirit is moving through you. And it's the best place to learn that, you know. So you you shut yourself down and um and you let whatever's coming come, you know, come through you. >> Carl Young said, "The creation of something new is not accomplished by intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity, not just fluff. That's psychology." The intellect explains patterns, but the unconscious recognizes patterns. putting a new band together and I'd like you to be a part of it. So I said, "Okay." I went down to rehearsal and Frank I thought we were going to be playing this kind of advanced music, you know, this kind of advanced orchestral music. And the first thing we did and he we were doing and I said, "Uh, Frank, I can't I" He says, "What's wrong?" I said, "I can't do this." And he says, "Why? Is something wrong with your hand? I said, "No, no. I I uh I just can't play that." And he says, "All you got to do is I said, 'But I can't do that, Frank." And he said, "Oh, you mean it's beneath you?" I said, "Well, uh, I didn't study all these years at the conservatory to to start playing, you know." So, anyway, the greatest thing that happened in my life was that Frank broke down these ridiculous barriers that I had about music. And that's why artists will say things like, "It just came to me. I don't know how I came up with that. It just came to me. Science can't explain that. It's just how creation actually works." Listen how Leonard Bernstein describes Beethoven. >> And as for harmonies, how many times do you have to listen pages of one chord over it? That's not very interesting harmonically, right? >> Well, what makes it interesting? >> Well, it's the form. Well, form is pl that can be made to be very uninteresting factor. But in Beethoven's case, the form is all because it is uh a case of what note succeeds every other note. And in Beethoven's case, it is always the right next note as though he had some private telephone wire to heaven which told him what the next note had to be. He didn't talk about any mathematics, any equations, nothing like that. Bernstein said he touched the piano. >> I touched the piano and I knew I had touched God >> in my way. >> It's a spiritual component and that's about alignment. It's not about math. >> Oh man, I went to this bar in Nashville. This band was playing Kelly's Heroes, a great guitarist, the best guitarist I've ever seen. and they were playing old country music with a heavy blues rock uh twist. So they do this great version of uh Ghost Riders in the Skyless 15 minutes long and this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on a limb and everybody in the crowd it's so was so fun to be there. They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do. He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner and everyone is so taken by that that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence. You know they see this joy just transfuse them and that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning and it's and it's it's it's not amenable to rational criticism which is the thing that I thought that struck me as so miraculous about music and why it has this element of salvation. It's like it puts you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains you in life. >> You have different errors in different cultures, but the same experience. >> You ever look at music that you've written and look back at it and say, "Whoa, that surprised me." >> I used to uh I I I don't do that anymore. Uh I don't know how I got to write those songs. >> What do you mean you don't know how? Well, those early songs were like almost magically written. Um, uh, Darkness at the break of noon, Shadows Even the Silver Spoon, Handmade Blade, A Child's Balloon. Try to sit down and write something like that. >> When you're soloing, are you thinking or are you just tapped in? >> Yeah, I'm trying to be tapped. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'm trying to tell a story. I finally I finally feel like I'm playing to a place where I don't have to like think about techniques or >> Yeah. You know, I'm trying to use like a language, >> you know, I'm trying to play to people, not over people's head. >> Yeah. >> You know, but I'm really trying to be as tapped in and trying to play in the spirit >> as much as possibly as as I possibly can. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not it's not much thought once at this particular point. Yeah. The last few years, it's not much thought at all. It's just it's all spirit. I think modern creators, they struggle with the concept of who's in the room matters. It's a vibe. The person in the room with you can change the feeling of the music and anybody in the room can bring the vibe down. There's no math to correct that. >> How much of just the vibe of a room, the spirit, like what you walk in, like how much of that plays into the music that you make? >> A lot. For me, I'm a I'm a vibe [ __ ] Uh, look, >> even at my shows, the vibe got to be right. People get mad sometime cuz I don't like lights. >> Robert won't even let you come on stage at 10:45. If it don't look right, going to 10:53. 10 for three. >> Everything's a vibe, man. I like people walking around, coming in, you know, like everybody there. I want to experience it. But in the studio, I'm all about vibe. I I love candles. Like T, you know, candles. The lights got to be right. If I'm about to play something on the piano, you know, I have I got to tell them dim the lights depending on the vibe what I'm trying to portray. You know what I'm saying? And you try to >> get as close to that actual thing as possible in the studio. >> Quincy had a sign up on on the wall. Leave your ego at the door. >> People get in a room with the intention to do one thing and something else emerges. Um, and even without just the the example of one form becoming another form, once people are in a room and they're performers, of course I can relate it to being an actor, something changes and I think it can be exciting to feel how you think you're doing this is the play and suddenly something shifts and the play becomes something else. >> Ernest Hemingway said, "The best writing is done when you're in a daydreaming state." I did a deep dive on Off the Wall and I'm listening to it and I'm like, "Bro." >> Yeah. >> And then I I saw a Quincy interview where it got me to the why because I always would ask, "Why does this sound this way?" So he said all the sessions he recorded for Offthe-wall Thriller. He usually did them super late at night, like at close to the end of the night, like at 4:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning when they were dumb tired because that's what So he would like sit there working all night and then he would get the take at the end of the night. Y >> and he said so his why was because their brain shut off >> and then they just be doing the most magical [ __ ] ever. >> I've also heard the statement that you create drunk and you edit sober. We have always told the musicians and I've felt that from the bottom of my soul that let's leave some space to let God walk through the room because that's when the real serious things happen. And it's the the divine intervention and it's uh the divinity is really what it's about. Cause and manifestation as cause is God's job. And so once you have the delineated the lines of responsibility some beautiful things can happen. And uh uh that that the footprints that God leaves in the studio is uh you can always hear it on the tape. >> Creation first, science second. >> What is it that makes it to you like the the hand of God? Like what is it about writing on paper? >> My little an analogy of it is you can't write poetry on a computer. >> Why not? >> Well, because we're it's we're I'm I'm going for a rhythm, >> right? >> I'm going for I'm I'm going for I'm I'm going for a rhythm. And then and and and there's a there's a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to >> this other thing. And and the more unintelligible and only I can read it, the more legit >> it kind of is. And the thing is and and it's it's vomit. >> It's absolutely vomit. Okay. You when you write by hand, you overwrite. You way way overwrite because you're just you're just getting it out there. you're getting it out there. Then after all the the vomit happens, then you sit down with a typewriter or then you sit down with a thing and now you take the vomit and you and you tame it. >> The contradiction is that the science doesn't cause the magic. The science explains. Science is a translation tool. >> There's five instruments in bluegrass music. The bass is in one octave. The guitar is in one octave. The banjo is in one octave. And the fiddle and the mandolin are in the high octave. Octave is a 10 notes. When you double a note, that's an octave higher. Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician, set that up. >> Now them talking about instruments. >> Yeah. >> Now me and Bill higher than the instruments are high on some sound. >> Let me tell you something. The bass is in the bottom octave. The guitar next, the banjo, then Monro's manlin and fiddle, chubby or whoever. Monroe never let two instruments play in the same octave. When the fiddle played, he didn't have nothing to do, so he started playing time. That's the secret of bluegrass. Keep every instrument in a separate octave. Because Pythagoras set it up and gave the A note 440 vibrations. If a octave is doubling, the A underneath that' be 220 vibrations. The next 110 and the next 55. The third string on a bass is a A string. It vibrates 55 times a second when you tune it. The fifth string on his guitar is a. It vibrates 110 times when you get in tune. The banjo A is 220 vibrations. The second string on Monro's mandolin and chubby wise fiddle is a 440 vibrations. And Monroe kept every instrument in a separate octave creating four separate octaves going up. And that's what bluegrass music is. And you got it for the first time. >> If there's no magic, there's no science. Magic is the source. When you reverse that, you don't get better art, you get empty art, soulless art. It'll be perfectly optimized, but it'll be easily forgettable. >> For me, like a song like a Big Brother, um, or even a song like A Village Ghetto Land. Um, I just feel like, you know, the melody of a song is what touches our heart. Uh, [Music] You know, um, it makes you feel something in here. I mean, I say your name is Big Brother. You say that you're watching me on the tell, seeing me go nowhere, you know, it's um it makes you feel, you know, feel sad. It makes you feel how I want for it to make you feel in thinking about what the words are being said. >> Art doesn't need more systems. Art needs more courage. This is Brian from The King's Hand. And like I say, I don't need to always be right. I just want the opportunity to be wrong. If you like this video, make sure you like and subscribe and hit the notification bell. Until we meet again. >> Be appointed hand of the king. [Music]