What Music Means to Me
Music unifies people in essential ways by sharing emotional and aesthetic experiences. It influences how I express myself through the guitar to inspire trust between the music and listeners. Such powerful, shared experiences can serve our common good, especially in those times when divisiveness and mistrust are more the rule than not. Music can also be a powerful way to give a voice to the voiceless and challenge systematic paradigms such as social inequality.
Music has much to offer through expressing our oft-shared dreams, wishes, hopes—and yes, even nightmares. But for me, the healing powers of music offer people shared cultural experiences and unity.
Through jazz and blues music--performance, composing, producing or music publishing--there are stories that enable people to recall their own experiences, and to sound a common chord when they see others around them living them as well.
I do my best to play "stories-- finding and losing your truest love; of the joys and sorrows and the joys that arise from them; to speak truth to power; or simply enjoy a few moments of peace in a world gone mad.
That's my mission, my commitment to you. Through performance, composition, and producing I hope to enable very different people to feel a shared experience --and discover how very much alike we truly are.
Yours in Music,
JB Abbott