Critical Incident- Jazz/Blues

Jazz and blues night

I just went to a jazz and blues society performance.
For the first time I felt the emotion of Jealousy. This was not nice and not justified either.
This emotion is not something which I want to be associated with me and it is not okay that I have felt this. This isn't part of my identity but maybe to some degree it is and I don't like that.

I feel that it is really important for me to dwell on this because it has weirded me out. I want to analyse this so that I can process this and make sense of it so that it never happens again.
Jazz/blues is my go-to when it comes to music. Its not that I listen to lots of it but it is how I write music and sing when I have the free reign almost like it is my natural genre and my comfort zone, what I feel. I also played the clarinet for years and only could really engage with the jazz and blues side of the exam board.

I was just enjoying listening to some beautiful heartfelt improv and tunes. Normally when a singer comes on stage I can be like WOW they are incredible, I totally respect them, they are amazing at what they do and how they do it. Inside I know that they sing in a different way to me and so I cant compare myself to them. For the first time tonight there was a female singer who hit a nerve. She sang to similarly to me and she was incredible, literally like she was recorded in the 1940s and was being played off a record. To make things worse my go to song to sing is Summertime (Gerschwin) and she sang it and it was too much! Furthermore she does art history at Leeds Uni so this isn't even her profession, a hobby. Perhaps this has freaked me out that because I come from a tiny village not and wasn't part of a large city in any respect that I didn't really appreciate how much talent there is in the world? It is weird that at home I was known as Alex, the singer or Maraca girl but coming to university nobody knows that part of me and until I found my 2 bands it really wasn't part of my identity even though it is so thoroughly who I am. That I can have been seeing someone for months and they had never heard me sing. Its not that I want praise because I am too much of a perfectionist to ever revel in it but just because singing and music is a large part of who I am.

At current I am not in a good place because I am recording for one band tomorrow but my voice is a total mess. I have a hacking cough and have realised that I don't have control over my voice which is something that is one of my attributes maybe (I am not very good at talking about my singing confidently as people have said in my mind-map impressions research) and singing has been one of my main identities forever and the only rock that I have had even through when I had ME, I could always sing. It is scaring me that it is not itself at the moment and this must be to do with smoking and my awful health. I need to quit. My bluegrass band is getting some paid Gigs and I need to be confident enough that I am worthy to be paid and that I am good enough to perform. I guess that sitting there not in a position where I can sing to what I can be didn't help the situation...

So I am having a battle with myself.
I am extremely inspired by watching this evening realising that I need to join the jazz/blues society (probably next year though as I need to have my voice back and I have enough on my plate at the moment and they year is drawing to a close).
It is making my analyse what music is to me. I have never been someone to go to many Gigs, I used to go and watch West End musicals and dance shows when everyone else began going to Gigs. This is possibly because I never really listened to music from bands that are up and coming and popular so presumed that they would never perform. I have been performing through out secondary and 6th form and my 6th form band performed multiple times before I had even watched a Gig and what a band performance should be like. Even through this I was watching how they held the stage and captured the audience so that I could use my reflections.
I also tend to listen to bands that have male vocalists, so that I can enjoy them as I can't identify with them. This is a horrible realisation to have but it seems I compare and my brain tries to draw advice from every piece of music and I have to be able to distance myself to enjoy it. The female vocalists that I do listen to have a very different voice to me and aren't things that I can sing well.

I am really not a competitive person and everything is about self improvement I guess to reach that one day where I am confident in my practice, to ful-fill capability.