First of all, please forgive me if you feel like I am painting this picture with too broad of a brush. I am the first to admit it, and writing this to demonstrate some points.
Right now, I am back home in Japan for a week while I am also studying Jazz improvisation and a lot of this in my thoughts at this moment, and came to a bit of enlightenment why "Defining My Own Style" is so important. So I decided to jot down some of the thoughts that came to me just now.
Quite often we get all excited while I am back in the Bay Area when some "name" Japanese gig show up in the area's Jazz venues. We get all excited but then in the end we left the concerts thinking, "We are not stopping by to buy the CD."
It so happened this week, I had to attend to a lot of ceremonial aspects surrounding a recent loss of both my parents, and thinking about growing up, we have been and still are a product of a lot of cultural pressure that shape how we are today.
From the early on we really all have been taught to be good service to the community and also the stress of living and working harmoniously have been put into our head. This does not mean we as individuals have harmonious life inside of ourselves, actually quite an opposite, but that's a whole different story.
The foremost importance of though is to getting taught good skills to service the society.
All these manifiest in high quality cooking, products, and even execution of services.
In looking at many American musicians life, they are taught and encouraged to be more competitive by providing more individually unique style from very early on in their life. Actually in many situations, they are not taught so but that's the only one choice to survive; lots of the life decisions are left to their own.
Back to Japanese musicians, when we go listen to them, they can make them sounds really like big name musicians. They have all the licks, inflections and fast fingers. Very high quality playing, but lack the uniqueness that make them "them."
The difficulty to them is that is very very difficult to undo and get out.
Suppose that if you pick up a semi-acoustic Jazz guitar and if do not sound like "Wes" then you'd be ridiculed by your Japanese Jazz teacher, colleagues and so forth. There is a proposition of huge risk not doing so, and you'd be even taught, if you do not attain that level, you are not even permitted to do your own. You may also not even get a gig unless the bill says to the effect of "you sounds like Wes." Everyone expect you to be one unique way as they expect you to be.
This kind of style permiates from going after the mastery in Buddhism or Judo or even cooking too. They encourage you to have years and years of training to get the enlightenment. It's very heavily built into our culture.
It is certainly necessary to the training, but I think that these kinds of cultural pressure seem to distract us from getting free, take some risks, and be unique, not "just as good as" someone else.
We got to be noticeably better and different than the competition through enlightenment and also through what uniquely define your style as yours. One positive aspect of this is that you can use both, the first will come natural to us.
If you are starting out in music, please give this bit of thought. Style does matter.
