Improvisation: Redefining the process.

When you take the word Improvisation and split it down the middle, you get the word Improve minus the letter E. And what’s in need of improving is the melody, as it’s always played before you’re free to “improve” upon it. Now logic says that if you want to learn to do something, simply find a good model to emulate. However, it should also go without saying that your comprehension of what you hear is of greater importance than simply the sound itself. Therefore, what you listen for matters more than what you listen to. So before getting to the crux of this post, I want to point out that the best improvisers always embody the three elements, which as you’ll see, will play an important role in how this post concludes.

a) They have a myopic concern for self-expression.

b) They have a concern for their fellow musicians’ ability to adequately support them within the functional areas of time, intonation, and harmony.

c) They have a concern for their band’s collective effort in servicing the emotional integrity of the music they’re playing.

As mentioned, what we listen for is more important than what we listen to. And when I listen to many of the ideas that people reference, it sounds like they simply focused on the sound of those ideas at the expense of questioning why those ideas were ever played in the first place. And because texture and function are the only two reasons why we play anything, the unfortunate trend these days (especially within the education system) has been that people have become more bullish in their investment towards self-serving ideas (i.e. texture) as opposed to unifying ones (i.e. function). And just to be clear, this has less to do with character defects as it has to do with flaws in how they were taught to think about improvisation. But here’s the irony. When we listen to the agreed upon masters, especially in their later years, they all tend to express themselves in a way where they can satisfy both the issue of texture and function at the same time. Therefore, this leads me to believe that if you can focus on being functional in a way that also allows you to express yourself with the textures you like, you’ll finally become free to shrink your circle of concern down to just one thread of thought. Which, when accomplished, can greatly decrease the amount of incessant mind chatter that keeps many musicians confused about what to play, and how to play it. So here’s my remedy for this.

If practicing is a form of situational preparedness, and the ideas you hear on a record are simply tactics for negotiating those particular situations, then the goal is to simply decide if you want to adopt those same tactics for similar situations. And once you’ve listened to, and have learned to emulate a number of these tactics, it’ll reduce the chances that you’ll be caught off guard as to what to play in any given situation. Therefore, once a melody has been played and the real improvisation starts, it’ll increase the chances that your ideas will be framed through the lens of wanting to help everyone else’s performance, despite you being the soloist (think Miles Davis)! So once you can develop the faith that a focus on others can still yield extreme satisfaction for yourself, it’ll not only revolutionize your growth potential as a musician, but as a citizen of society as well.

Suggested Takeaway’s…

a) While the quality of what we listen to matters, what we focus on when we’re listening matters more.

b) There are two types of ideas: self-serving and functional. Self-serving are textures that satisfy only the soloist, while more functional ideas are specifically meant to help others. Therefore, to satisfy yourself through the aid of others means you “win.”

c) Oftentimes we listen to the improvisations of our heroes as if their ideas sprang up from out of nowhere. But we always forget to ask the critical question of how this concept of improvising even started in the first place. And the answer is that in the beginning, success meant being able to play a well worked-out arrangement, which had much less to do with how we think about soloing today. Therefore, through the knowledge of the many tactical ways in which the masters thought to negotiate an arrangement, is where you’ll find the raw materials needed for you to play through all other arrangements, as well as when it’s time for you to improvise.  

The Jazz Dilemma: What is it, and why might it be worth talking about?

Back when MySpace was at the forefront of the social media race, an old college friend used to have a profile tagline that read “I’d rather be relevant than famous.” However, it could be argued that those who are famous are indeed relevant, as the energy behind and frequency within our conversations about them make them so. When we talk about them, I believe what we’re really engaged in is the exercise of either reinforcing or questioning the framework of our own values, but at a safe one-arm emotional distance. And more importantly, who our values seem to align with, and how we ultimately feel about that. Therefore, it can be argued that the sliding scale of a person’s relevance is tied to the amount in which we think we might benefit from having a conversation about them. So if you believe that relevance can be equated to usefulness, then this begs the question of “what is Jazz and why might it worth talking about?”

As we’ve already seen, and continue to see within the styles of Hip-Hop, Rock, R&B, Pop, etc., they provide the public with more obvious ways of incorporating their perceived value (for better or worse) towards their everyday lives, as it gives people content to converse with, sell stuff with, and share within the realms of fashion and speech patterns—all of which are just cultural symbols that people deploy to make it easier for other members of their “tribe” to identify them within crowds. That said, let’s take a quick look at one of the most pervasive forms of music to come about in roughly the last 40 years: Hip-Hop.

It has been said that never in a time throughout the documented history of music have large contingencies of people (especially the youth) ever chosen to identify themselves as being specific products of a musical movement like they do with Hip Hop (i.e. “I am Hip Hop,” “I live Hip Hop,” “I eat, breath, and sleep Hip Hop”). Now granted, during the formative years of Rock & Roll, and even Jazz for that matter, we find that it was also the youth who rallied behind these two movements as well, as they found that they could use certain aspects of the music as a means of validating, to varying degrees, the energy behind the types of opinions they held. However, the power of Hip Hop—which really has to do with America’s long-standing fascination with anything associated with black male youth—is that its aesthetic is now just as interwoven into the everyday fabric of our society as is Starbucks and Nike. So how does this relate to Jazz you might ask? With the way that Jazz is generally marketed and presented these days, coupled with an ever increasing audience that has no significant history of having tried their hand at playing music of any kind at a high level (unlike with sports), the public’s relationship to Jazz is generally one of indifference. However, when people do think about some Jazz that they may have liked, it may have been related to a vocalist, as this is one “instrument” that we’ve all tried practicing behind closed doors. And to further prove my point about the public’s general feeling of indifference towards Jazz, is that their point of consumption is usually within public spaces where the volume is low enough to talk over, thus further conditioning them to regard it as a piece of interior decoration that doesn’t require much of their attention. A perfect example of this would be when the Grammies had Esperanza Spaulding, of all people, performing as background music immediately following her upset over Justin Bieber for “Best New Artist” in 2011 while they made their announcements about the next artist to receive their awards. Could you imagine them having asked Jay-Z to perform while they announced the next award recipient? Clearly, the answer would be no. So as you can see, what Jazz needs is a total branding overhaul, where the public is taught how to interface with it like what has been done with the more popular genres. But in order to do so, it would need to be done in a way that still reflects the hidden values that have helped to sustain Jazz up until this point. So the first step in re-branding this music appropriately lies within an understanding of what it even is in the first place.  

            The word Jazz, like any other style of music, is merely a marketing term. No more, no less. After all, real musicians put their energy into trying to play what they hear, not what to call what they’re playing. It’s also important to remember that the word Jazz had already been in circulation before it was ever attached to a sound. So a fair etymological definition for Jazz would be that it’s a term that was used to describe popular American music at the turn of the 20th century, whose roots can be found in both the Blues and Ragtime music. And whereas the Blues is more akin to an African-American sensibility towards early “American” folk music, Ragtime is more reflective of Western European Classical music and its residual effects upon the types of early Marches that were composed by people such as John Philip Sousa. However, the important piece of connective tissue between the Blues and Ragtime is the application of the black aesthetic on both. Hence, when you combine these two styles, and run them through an early black filter, what you get is a distilled version of the type of Jazz that people such as Louis Armstrong helped champion. So while this information is all well and good, the question still remains as to what, if any, might be the usefulness of Jazz on our society and the world at large?

            The answer to the above question is that Jazz, like sports and politics, is just another structural model that can be used to evaluate the democratic nature of relationships. So when you learn how the instruments function independently and collectively, a mirror suddenly appears that allows you to gain some insight into how either you or someone else is being. This is no different than how we can use fashion, food and drink choices, speech patterns, and choice of vocabulary as a litmus for how either we or others may be thinking and feeling at any point in time. In fact, I tell people all the time that even when we talk, we’re engaged in Jazz improvisation, as the words we use have to be relevant to the conversation, because if the goal is to build upon a set of ideas, then what would be the point of using words that few people can comprehend? That’s like talking to a baby about the stock market. What’s the point? So when I’m performing, I’m just using ideas that I already have a handle on. But it’s how I string those ideas together that will either attract or repel you from the “conversation.” In short, since listening comes before comprehension, and comprehension comes before action, then just like martial arts, Jazz is the human practice of creating a continuous sequence of appropriate moment-to-moment decisions, so that when it’s all said and done, you can look back with pride for the choices you’ve made.  

Entrepreneurial Tendencies

One of the things I always say about us musicians is that we’re thrust into the world of entrepreneurship, yet no one tells us this. And as such, the frustration that many experience is due to having embraced the wrong mental strategy for this journey. More specifically, it’s the application of an employee mentality to an entrepreneurial landscape that creates such friction. Now I’m not trying to make a judgmental comparison between employees and business owners, but what I am calling into focus is that they are in fact two different paradigms, as the circle of concern for each isn’t the same. One obvious symbol of this is reflected in the tendency for employees to associate with other employees, and business owners with one another, due to the empathy factor. Hence the phrase “birds of a feather flock together”.

I’ve heard it said that the difference between an employee and an owner is that of a child and an adult. Now the funny thing about this phrase is that I’ve run it by MANY employees and owners of businesses over the years, and what’s always consistent is the emphatic knee-jerked responses of agreeance from owners and push back from employees to hearing it. So allow me to elaborate for a moment.

As a parent, you’re held accountable for EVERYTHING that happens on your watch. If your kid breaks a neighbor’s window, you must resolve the issue. However, you do something bad, your kid won’t be held responsible. But depending on the severity of the situation, your kid’s security could be impacted, as they’d be under the legal authority of your leadership. So like a company, it should be no wonder as to why more potential benefits are accorded to a parent/guardian to help offset the weight of responsibility that they’re forced to shoulder. So while I don’t think everyone needs to become an entrepreneur, I do think that it’s highly beneficial to develop entrepreneurial/leadership tendencies, because as a leader of an organization (just like the conductor of an orchestra) you HAVE to maintain a topographical awareness at ALL TIMES for what’s happening within your organization so that you can best assess the shifts that need to be made to navigate the ever shifting sands of the marketplace (or a song if you’re a conductor). As an employee, however, your only concern is to consistently check the boxes for satisfactory completion of whatever your individual role is that you’re being paid to do (like a side-musician). And once you check out of work for the day, you have the luxury of turning your brain off from work because you’re not being paid to think about your job in the off hours. However, for an owner (just like a parent to their kids and household), it’s impossible to fully mute the noise you’ll hear, internally and externally, from the concerns you’ll likely have towards the health and well-being of your business.

Now just like in business, musical decisions become easier to make when you have a clear mission and vision statement by which to filter your decisions through. And for me, the beginnings of gaining this type of clarity came after I asked myself this very important question, which was “is it more important to make 100% of my income from music, or is it more important to live a phenomenal life with music anchored in the middle of it?” You see, what I had forgotten over the years was that the second question was where I started! It was never the profit potential from music that drew me towards it. It was a combination of the relationships I had developed, and the fact that I was already experiencing a great life because of what my mother had provided for me, which gave me the latitude to just focus on growing as a musician without having to worry about any of the managerial issues that grown-ups have to think about every day. So when it became clear that number two was what I was really after, it forced me to begin thinking outside the box (like an entrepreneur) by searching for innovative ways of carving out a sustainable niche for myself that could hedge against competition/saturation, provide great upside for profit potential, flexibility to prioritize my most valued relationships at the drop of a hat, and a financial moat to help protect myself from the periodic downturns in the economy. And just like learning how to become a great musician requires being mentored by better musicians, I recognized that I would need to do the same thing within the arena of acquiring a more affluent lifestyle. And I think the reason why more people don’t put into practice such a simple concept as acquiring a mentor is for two reasons:

a) Fear from the guilt of potentially having to face a reality that might prove that the quality of the time you’ve invested thus far (especially if you’re past a certain age) might not have been as well invested as you initially thought, thus calling into question your assumption of your intelligence.

b) Fear from the abandonment-laden judgement of those that have gotten you to where you are if you prioritize a new relationship with those that can take you to the next level.

It’s important to remember that as you’re trying to make such a transition there will be a period of time between fully earning the trust and respect of the new relationship(s) and being possibly ostracized by the old relationship(s) for leaving them behind, that can leave you emotionally floating in no-man’s land until you’ve fully leveled-up or back down to what was once comfortable and familiar. And the reason for such potential push-back will be because you come from where your old association comes from, while they’re still stuck there. In short, your decision to potentially graduate onto a better situation would serve as an indictment for the quality of the decisions that they’ve made up to now. Therefore, they’ll either respond with lashing out to bring you back down, or they’ll slowly begin to disassociate with you first before you get the chance to “break up” with them first. Either way, expect for there to be resistance, as all success is gained up-hill.

So here are a few suggested takeaways…

a)  If you want to go up in life, you’ll need a tour-guide.

b)  If entrepreneurship is the street-facing vernacular in business for leadership, then the best environment to experiment with the development of your leadership acumen should be within the home.

c)  The relevancy of our personal and professional productivity can only be measured against the clarity of the mission and vision statements we set for ourselves.