“… Play like you don’t know how to play guitar.”
That’s the instruction that John McLaughlin recalls Miles Davis giving him. It was on the occasion of his being pressed precipitately into service to collaborate in Davis’s milestone album “Bitches Brew” recorded in August 1969.
“I just closed the score and started playing: no rhythm, no harmony, just playing the melody and casting my fate to the wind. He loved it… He would hit a couple of chords on the piano and say: ‘What do you hear? Do you hear a riff? A bass line?’
(Jim Farber, “‘It sounded like the future’: behind Miles Davis’s greatest album,” theguardian.com, 2-24-20)
Jim Farber’s article gives a taste of the bracing environment surrounding Davis’s project and of his interactions with fellow musicians. (I can say, ruefully, that I would be able to comply quite well with Mr. Davis’s instruction, but not as happily as John McLaughlin.)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
When Less Is More
I’m glad to know about tengujo, the thinnest paper in the world, and to learn a bit about how it’s made. One of its numerous uses is in repairing and preserving old documents in places such as the Library of Congress, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Yale Center for British Art.
Paper deteriorates for many reasons: fungi, moisture, heat, light, atmospheric pollutants… With many Western writings before the 20th century, the ink itself was eating through the paper, in a process called iron gall ink corrosion.
Soyeon Choi is head paper conservator at the Yale Center for British Art, and has worked in the field for morel than 20 years.
Trying to aggressively mend a document is risky because long-term chemical and physical effects are highly variable and relatively unknown. “The more and more I am in this field, I feel that I should do less and less,” Ms. Choi said.
(Oliver Whang, “The Thinnest Paper in the World,” NYTimes, 5-5-20)
Ms. Choi’s comment evokes for me a kind of Hippocratic oath of conservatorship: First do no harm.
(c) 2020 JMN