Becoming the Instrument: Lessons on Self-Mastery from Music to Life by Kenny Werner
When Herb Alpert was trapped by a creative block, he turned to Kenny Werner who had just published his landmark book, Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Musician Within. Alpert was floored by it. Now Werner has released the much-anticipated follow-up, Becoming the Instrument: Lessons on Self-Mastery from Music to Life (Sweet Lo Press).
“I wanted to find my own personal voice as a jazz artist,” said Alpert. “Kenny and Effortless Mastery were the keys for me. His book is tremendous.” Alpert was in good company. The New York Times has called him “a pianist who tempers fearsome technique with a questing spiritualism” and “a clear virtuoso.” Quincy Jones said Werner is “my kind of musician.” Effortless Mastery revolutionized how musicians approach their craft.
Packed with profound insights and uplifting anecdotes from his 40 years of studying, performing and teaching music, Werner’s follow up, Becoming the Instrument, is a guide for accessing the spiritual in our everyday existence and applying it to the pursuits we love. Werner shows us how musicians, artists or even business people can allow their “master creator” within to lift their performance to its highest level, showing us how to be spontaneous, fearless, joyful and disciplined in our work and in our life.
Werner, who was awarded the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his seminal work, “No Beginning No End,” has performed with such legendary musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Betty Buckley, Toots Thielemans, Charles Mingus, Marian McPartland, Bobby McFerrin, Lou Rawls, Michel Legrand, Gunther Schuller, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, Elvin Jones and many more. Werner has composed for international orchestras, received numerous NEA grants and been nominated for an Emmy Award, and became the artistic director of the Effortless Mastery Institute at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Werner’s message is clear: whatever your passion, mastery is possible. “Mastery is not perfection or even virtuosity. It is giving oneself love, forgiving one’s mistakes, and not allowing earthly evidence to diminish one’s view of one’s self as a drop in the ocean of perfection,” he says. “And here is the good news: You don’t have to be a musician to have the experience!”
