The Importance of Collaboration

While music is where I live and breathe, I am also a student of literature, photography, film, and visual arts. Spending some concentration on appreciating other art forms makes you a better creator, and I think just makes life much more interesting. Otherwise, what’s the point?

A couple of weeks ago, I collaborated (a “collab” as the young kids say nowadays) with an artist from Philadelphia, Diane Roka, who creates some terrific minimalist line drawings of musicians in action, and specifically of drummers. You can check her work out here.

One of the sketches that came out of that session I really liked in particular, because it just captured the essence of a “big ending” so well. When you have a band as big as The Complex is (13 musicians with 9 horns), the ending of a chart tend to be big as a house, because it needs to be to punctuate all the wall of sound that preceded it.

Diane nailed it.