Creative Cross Pollination

I’ve been listening to a BBC documentary about the life of Miles Davis. And there’s a great clip of Joni Mitchell saying Miles was the best singer she ever heard. Although - of course - he didn’t sing: it was the way he played trumpet that had a profound influence on her own vocal phrasing. And then today I was reading about how photographer Joel Meyerowitz sought fleeting moments of harmony within the chaos of street scenes, the same moments of unlikely clarity revealed in the music of his New York contemporaries Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and - there he is again - Miles Davis.

Image by Joel Meyerowitz

And it got me thinking about how genius in one medium can influence technique in another. How important it is to expose yourself to work in genres other than your own. To ask when something moves you, what’s really going on here? And how could I reinterpret that feeling, or intention, or approach in my own medium?