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Ben Smith (far right) and friends amidst a 'good groove.'  See video below.

No Ego Can Withstand a Good Groove

Editor's Note: Peter Pula, founder of Axiom News, has been engaged in a series of conversations with community-builders from around the world with the intention of fostering Generative Communities. Ben Smith has been a regular participant in those calls. Here we share Ben's reflections after one of their most recent dialogues.

It only occurred to me recently that making music with others is a form of convening; the groove is a field of generativity. I play a lot of old-time music with fiddles, guitars, banjos. String band stuff. There's no band, just a small community of folks who all like the music and show up to our various gigs and jam sessions around Berlin. There are some usual characters, but every time we get together is unique: different musicians, different acoustics, different people listening, different tunes. And every time it's an open question — are we going to find the groove?

When it's there, it's clearly palpable. The timing locks and stays put. The sound of all the individual instruments dissolves into the unity of the tune. There are smiles on people's faces.

  Often the best thing we can do to foster a field of generativity is simply attend to what is before us.

What's most striking is the experience as a performer. When the groove settles in, I disappear. No ego can withstand a good groove. Instead of Ben-playing-music I simply exist as music for a time. "I" only really notice what happened after the fact, because for that time I'm not really there. Time's linearity weakens, while its cyclical and eternal-now aspects come to the fore. It's what makes years of practice all worthwhile. I just call it transcendence.

But how do we get there? How can we create a groove?

It can't be forced. It cannot be imposed by will from without. Yes, we need certain foundations. The groove cannot arise if the musicians do not have some basic faculty on their instrument. They must be able to tune to one another. They usually need to have some common pool of tunes. They must be able to listen to each other.

This is the foundation. But even with the foundation in place, we still have no assurance of a groove. The groove, it seems to me, arises only when we let go of outcomes, when we let go of making mistakes or making a good impression, when we let go of the ego as separate from the rest of the world. And this we do with our attention.

Like a row of seedlings sown into spring soil, sometimes the groove happens, sometimes it doesn't. The only thing we can add to improve our chances is attention, which for me is just another word for love. By attending to others, we simultaneously weaken the ego's sense of isolation and give room for the shared field to emerge. It might not look like much, it might seem like we're "doing nothing at all," but I think often the best thing we can do to foster a field of generativity is simply attend to what is before us.

The Bear City Ramblers play Booth Shot Lincoln:

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