The Laziness Fallacy

The irony of the word lazy is that it’s a lazy form of analysis for inaction. In other words, it’s an expedient means of sidestepping the effort needed to ascertain why someone isn’t applying themselves as much as we’d prefer to see. However, if you’re a “leader,” this goes against the very nature of your position. After all, if everyone always knew what to do, there’d be no need for your position. So know that when you don’t center the conversation around how to clarify what the actual mechanisms-of-action need to be to generate results, then the conversation ceases to be a mechanical issue and instead becomes rooted in that of morality--which frankly only steals time and attention away from surgically identifying both the problem and solution.

That said, I believe that the root of inaction is simply clarity (or rather a lack thereof). And clarity around what, you might ask? Clarity around what the steps are supposed to look like, and what it might mean for the status of one’s position if they were to admit when they don’t understand something (especially when everyone around them seems to know what’s going on). So in these kinds of situations, it tells me a couple of things:

1) They’re not convinced that the work (or home) culture is as supportive as it might espouse itself to be when it comes to training. An easy example of this is the parent or boss whose open-door policy you doubt is all that “open.” #hiding 

2) There may be a real cultural disconnect between leadership and those within their charge that’s causing messages to be filtered through the communicative trough of skepticism, as neither side of the aisle is convinced that enough knowledge and respect exists for the pressures that either side has to contend with on a regular basis (thus causing workflows to move slow, which in turn could be construed as laziness). #powerdynamics

3) There may be a disconnect between what a candidate initially assumed the scope of their duties to be, and what actually lies in store for them. And as such, this will create a series of Wild West-esque standoff’s until either a renegotiation is met or they part ways. Either way, the narrative in the middle is likely to read by the establishment (at first) as if the new person is lazy and lacks the requisite work ethic for the job. #clarity

As you can see, all of these points center around the art of communication. Which, just like Jazz, means that it’ll be incumbent upon each of us to be as familiar as possible with all the different styles of communication there is if we’re to seamlessly flow in and out of any working environment we want.

In conclusion, I’d encourage you to see curiosity as being the antidote to “laziness.” And if the thought of taking the time to pump your breaks in this way feels like nails on a chalk board because you’re a hard charging go-getter, then it tells me that you have very little headroom for flexibility (which is liable to make you a liability sooner or later). After all, to want to go fast without the capacity to stop or change directions on a dime only makes the constant revving of your engine (i.e. the beating of your chest) a form of peacocking. That said, if you’re in a situation where you have to have immediate results because the stakes are that high, then by all means, put the pedal to the metal if you must and hope that you can contend with the consequences later. But if not, consider taking the time needed to build the kinds of systems and cultural conditions that can promote more clarity, transparency, and compassion within your home and work spaces.

Rehearsal Efficiencies (Part 1)

I had a conversation recently with a friend about music education in schools, where she made a really simple (yet profound) remark that equated to the idea that if you're having to spend too much time on correcting individual measures, then you're not really teaching "music" as much as you're creating a compliant workforce. In other words, what's good for one measure should translate to the rest of them (unless there's a good reason for it not to). Therefore, if you want more efficient rehearsals, teach the kinds of concepts that enable students to substantially scale their growth in your absence (making you virtually irrelevant).

Here are just a few benefits of doing so...

a) Fewer un-needed rehearsals.

b) Shorter rehearsals.

c) More productive rehearsals (i.e. the ability to focus on shaping the x-factor qualities of a performance vs the legalistic aspect of just playing all the right notes at the right time).

d) The re-allocation of time for the director to:

-Improve at their own instrument.

-Source more challenging music for their students.

-Stay on top of administrative matters and paperwork.

-Prioritize their health (i.e. more sleep, exercise, better nutrition).

e) Better cost-benefit for the director's time to earned income ratio.

f) A better self-perpetuating culture where the director won't be the only one responsible for everyone's growth; where the upper classmen also feel compelled to train the lower classmen to ensure that the flow of excellence within a program doesn't die on the vine after they graduate.

g) A developed reputation for developing students who are consistently awarded scholarships to help offset the rising cost of higher education.

Myths & Philosophies: The Birthing of a Constitution

When people say that they’re not rule followers, that’s not to be taken literally. What they’re really saying is that the only rules they see fit to adhere to are their own, as we’re all following a framework of some kind. That said, when two or more musical frameworks/philosophies are at odds with each other, friction on the bandstand becomes the most visible. Therefore, the only way to reach a sense of equilibrium is to balance enough perspectives against as many objective truths as possible.

Like the framing of our constitution, our sense of reality is representative of philosophies that were once distilled from a set of “tribal myths.” So until I can fully explore the myths and subsequent philosophies of another musician, I’m compelled to suspend my judgement of their capacity until I have this important information. In fact, a perfect illustration of this idea gone awry can be summed up by the 1984 decision by the Portland Trailblazers to draft Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan. The philosophy that all centers should be over a certain height was driven by the myth that if they are tall, it increases the chances that they’ll be able to make and block shots easier when closer to a basket, in addition to grabbing rebounds easier. In other words, the idea that the success of a team should hinge around the position of a center is the myth. But clearly this concept isn’t an exact science, as MJ would go on to dominate the sport from the position of a guard. So because their philosophical calculations didn’t allow them the flexibility to identify other useful key performance indicators (KPI) for MJ’s growth potential, the Trailblazers passed on one of the greatest basketball players ever in exchange for a guy who would be riddled with a number of injuries.

In bringing this back to music, my experiences over the years have taught me to be cautious of being overly certain about the growth potential of others, as there have been a few people that have really surprised me with what they’ve been able to bring to the table over time, which I could have never predicted if my philosophy on permanence was too ridged. And in each of those surprising instances, my decision to keep them close always came after I had gained more clarity behind the myths of their philosophies. Which in turn gave me an idea as to how open their mindset was to entertaining other philosophies. So to paraphrase a quote by the great saxophonist Kenny Garrett, “I don’t need someone who’s at my level. I just need someone who’s trying to go where I want to go. I can teach them the rest of what they need to know along the way.” And as we know, it’s not uncommon to hear of a student eventually surpassing the abilities of their teacher.

Suggested Takeaways…

a) Our sense of reality will always be representative of philosophies that have been distilled from a series of “tribal myths” from somewhere. So without the knowledge of the “myths” of another, our ability to comprehend and communicate effectively will always fall short to some degree.

b) Everyone is a rule follower, even if it is one’s own rules that are being followed. However, unlike our nation’s constitution, our internal constitutions haven’t exactly undergone the same level of scrutiny by the minds of as many critical thinkers. Not to mention, our personal constitutions aren’t accessibly on display for all the world to understand us better either. So if we can’t imagine there not being a well-defined constitution to help guide the culture of all organizations, why not apply this idea to our personal lives?

c) To have an expanded view of all key performance indicators helps to hedge against any bias we may hold towards one’s growth potential if at first they don’t appear to comfortably fit the framework of our wisdom (i.e. Michael Jordan).

Improvising and leadership: You Can't Have One Without the Other.

To paraphrase a funny quote by John C. Maxwell, “if you call yourself a leader, and no one is following, you’re not leading, you’re just taking a walk.” And I make mention of this because it’s important for musicians to see the correlation between soloing and leadership. Meaning that leaders have to be able to project clear visions in order to elicit buy-in from those in their charge. And the clearer the steps are for how to accomplish a mission, the easier it’ll also be for others to offer up relevant ideas that may be even better than what the leader has proposed.

Now I bring this up because if you want to accomplish anything big, you’ll need the help of a team. And a good example of this would be the difference between a great solo that’s performed to a metronome click as opposed to the same solo being performed with a world-class band behind them. You’ll only get so far on your own. And to quote Maxwell once again, “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group.” So in the case of music, the downside of not moving in lockstep with your band is that if when you’re soloing you don’t know how to communicate the direction you’re trying to go, the other musicians might either dig in their heels by offering minimal amounts of support, or worse, attempt to sabotage you by temporarily refusing to play behind you, or by playing tricky ideas to disorient you as a way to express their frustration. So now let’s look at the hidden mechanisms behind what actually makes a quality solo.   

When we talk about quality within any area of music, the yard stick is always clarity. As in clarity of intent, both rhythmically and harmonically. So just because a soloist thinks to play an idea, it doesn’t mean that its execution will always translate as clear to the listener as it was perceived in the mind of the performer. A clear example of this is the way your voice occurs to you when you hear it on a recording. For many people, the rhythm and tone of their voice tends to not match the memory they have of themselves speaking into the recorded device. That said, while clarity of rhythm is merely an issue of sound-separation, harmonic clarity involves a few more layers of insight.

Over the years I’ve concluded that there are three harmonic levels to soloing. And to be aware of these levels allows you to use them like manual gears on a bike or in a vehicle, so that you can shift to the gear you need when the terrain dictates it.

Gear #1 (diatonic/horizontal playing): This means that the notes you use will either be scales that belong to the chord you’re addressing (i.e. diatonic = belonging to), or you’re going to assemble the chord tones of each chord in such a way that it creates the illusion of a domino effect where each one sounds like they’re falling into the next, much like reading words horizontally in a book from left to right.

Gear #2 (diatonic/vertical playing): This combines diatonic playing with chord stacking. Therefore, you can either arpeggiate the notes of only one chord or superimpose another chord on top of the chord you’re supposed to be playing to make another chord. And this works best when chords ring out long enough for the listener to figure out that you want them to focus on how well you can go up and down harmonically as opposed to going across horizontally. This would be analogous to a gymnast who wants you to marvel at how well they can do a series of back handsprings in one spot (vertical), as opposed to across a floor (horizontal) where your hands and feet have to be positioned in such a way to propel yourself.

Gear #3: This is just like gear #1. However, you get to superimpose the outlining of whatever chord progression you want, so long as it resolves back into the fray of the song’s original chord progression. This would be analogous to a 007 scene where Bond is chasing a bad guy across the top of a train but is too far away to easily catch him. So instead, he gets the good fortune of being picked up by a helicopter and then sat back down on the train just a little closer to the person he’s chasing. So again, it matters less about where you start your chord substitutions, and more about how you resolve them back into the original harmonic structure of a song.

What’s great about this idea is that it gives your solo structure. Too many times I’ve either heard people solo where it sounded like their solo ended too early or too late. And since these three gears follow an order of least to most tension, it makes sense to know where you want to start so that you know what direction to go in.

Suggested Takeaways…  

a) The difference between horizontal and vertical playing is the difference between a series of back handsprings across a floor as opposed to in one spot.

b) The utilitarian goal of soloing is to guide the listener along a logical sounding harmonic path, with the aid of clearly articulated rhythms and harmony.

c) To understand the three harmonic gears allows a soloist to not only take more ownership over when they choose to shift gears, but also allows them to know which appropriate gear to shift to when they need to. So the longer the solo, the more gears it helps to have. The shorter, you’re better off choosing a gear and making the most of it.

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.  

What is Style, and how important is it?

One of the biggest challenges we face as musicians is how to make sense of the duality between music as a team sport and our desire to stand out as an individual. So allow me to quickly explain the cause of this tension and how to reconcile it.

Common sense dictates that the “goal should always be greater than the role.” However, when solitary achievement is continuously exalted over collective efforts, it’s hard to not get seduced by the allure of feeling special when you stand out. Not to mention, if you largely see success in your field as being a zero-sum game, then of course you’re going to favor self-serving tactics. But to be honest with you, I think the subtext behind this type of mentality falls under the misguided lens of “job security.” After all, if your value makes you irreplaceable in the eyes of others, then you’ll always have employment. That said, however, if you have enough cash-flow producing assets that you own, then you won’t have to entertain the idea of “job security,” as your survival wouldn’t be contingent upon someone else’s valuation of you. And in such situations, any pressure you might feel to overcompensate for attention would lose its allure.

I often say that music is 98% preconceived and 2% inspiration. So like a conversation, where all the words we use are known to us before we use them, the order in which they come out is where this 2% comes into focus. And it’s that 2% (style) that makes us memorable enough to stand out. Therefore, the impact of your style in music, fashion, speaking, etc., is really predicated upon the strength of your fundamentals, as your style is simply your point of view about those fundamentals. Therefore, if your style is simply a natural byproduct of your interpretation of your fundamentals, then by simply focusing on those basic principles, it allows you to let your stylistic chips fall where they may, without the fear that they’ll fall in an unflattering way. 

Suggested Takeaways…

a) An incessant interest in maintaining “your style” at all times forces you to turn your focus inward as opposed to the outward concern for the good of the band.

b) Actively seek out as many examples of team-oriented successes as possible to believe that that can be an attractive option to pursue.

c) If real success is “significance,” and significance is measured by the effect you have on others, then this is how your name will truly outlive you.

The Rhythm of Life: Rhythmic sensitivity in music, life, and business.

When I was a student at Rutgers University in the early 2000’s, my drum instructor was the great Ralph Peterson Jr. And in one of our lessons he said to me that the art of playing perfectly in time had less to do with playing perfect quantized time, and more to do with being sensitive enough to catch when the tempo starts to slip and adjusting accordingly. And from that one simple statement, I was liberated from years of having felt handcuffed by the thought of what I’d have to do if and when I ever find myself in a situation where I suddenly couldn’t trust my internal alert system to keep me on the straight and narrow. So allow me to explain how I not only solved this problem for myself, but what the larger implications can be when we extrapolate this idea into the realm of life and leadership.

The act of being sensitive enough to catch shifts in anything has to do with our familiarity of the thing we’re observing. So when I started observing how my body and mind felt about the steadiness of my ideas when practicing them in two bpm increments, I learned to identify the subtle differentiating signs of what it feels like to play tempos that are really close together. So when I take the metronome away, all I’m doing is approximating my memory of what it feels like to play ideas at a given tempo. Therefore, like any relationship, there will always be an uneasy period of having to reestablish rapport with your internal alert system (for tempo stability) when your relationship to a metronome has become estranged.

Now the life lesson here has to do with the value of consistency and measurement of progress. As they say, “winners are trackers.” For example, a friend of mine told me that his dad circumvented a major heart attack not too long ago when he admitted himself into the hospital after noticing that his body felt different on a run that he normally does. And because his routines in life were pretty consistent, he deduced that what he felt was worth investigating. And to his surprise it certainly was! For had he not done so, my buddy might be without a father today. And as for a leadership perspective, the question becomes “how familiar are you with the routines of your organization?” Are their tasks all over the place, or are they pretty streamlined to where everyone is basically handling tasks that are in line with their job/task description and strength zone? After all, the hallmark of any good leader is one where they’re able to feel the micro shifts in efficiency and morale before the people in their charge, so as to adjust accordingly.  

Suggested Takeaways…

a) When practicing with a metronome, focus on assessing your ability to detect micro shifts in your rhythmic timing as opposed to proving that you can play an idea in time. Now granted, this might sound like double talk, but the benefits of shifting your focus like this is WAY more useful.

b) The value of being sensitive to anything is that it allows you to predict how a butterfly effect might play out before anyone else.

c) Everything we do communicates something about us. And the majority of what we use to filter the messages that come our way are related to rhythmic timing (i.e. investing, cooking/baking, sex, speech patterns, crawling/walking/running, submission of deadlines, etc.)