I’m at my happiest behind a drum kit, playing jazz with a big band. The chart that sits on the music stand is the guide, but 90% of the playing is improvisation.
Making stuff up on the spot.
Put like that, it sounds like a) I am a terribly prepared musician and b) the band’s sound must be complete chaos.
But it’s far from it. Because as much as we all use the notes on the chart in front of us, we all improvise, nearly all of the time.
We’re constantly listening to everyone else, adjusting volume, providing nudges, adding flourishes, taking up the tune, or backing off.
Improvisation is hard work. It takes hours - years - of invisible-to-the-crowd practice, and sometimes it doesn’t quite work out as planned.
At that point of potential disaster you have two options.
Last week in our team, a beautiful piece of work didn’t quite land. The client who had to work with what we’d provided had the same two options as a jazz musician:
Complain that the piece of work that was beautiful wasn’t entirely what they were expecting to work with; or
Take the beautiful piece of work and make it into something even more beautiful, transcendent, innovative, remarkable.
They took option one, meaning there’s a redo in order. That’s alright, but they’re missing out on something better.
They want the notes we agreed on years ago played precisely, even though we reckon the notes that looked right a year ago might be the wrong notes to play today.
Option 2 takes improvisation skill. But even more importantly: it takes an improviser’s attitude.
Miles Davis is a name that most readers will know of, even if they’re not a fan. Miles Davis had the improviser’s attitude, as well as the skill. He helped define it. Herbie Hancock recalls a moment where taking Option 2 made the night instead of killing it:
I’m onstage at a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden, in the mid-1960s playing piano with the Miles Davis Quintet. We’re on tour, and this show is really heating up. The band is tight—we’re all in sync, all on the same wavelength. The music is flowing, we’re connecting with the audience, and everything feels magical, like we’re weaving a spell…
We’re playing one of Miles’s classics, “So What,” and as we hurtle toward Miles’s solo, it’s the peak of the evening; the whole audience is on the edge of their seats.
Miles starts playing, building up to his solo, and just as he’s about to really let loose, he takes a breath…
And right then I play a chord that is just so wrong. I don’t even know where it came from—it’s the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now it’s hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit. …It’s as if we’ve all been building this gorgeous house of sound, and I just accidentally put a match to it.
Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that moment I believe my mouth actually fell open. What kind of alchemy was this? And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo that took the song in a new direction. The crowd went absolutely crazy.
…
It took me years to fully understand what happened in that moment onstage.
As soon as I played that chord I judged it. In my mind it was the “wrong” chord. But Miles never judged it*—he just heard it as a sound that had happened, and he instantly took it on as a challenge, a question of “How can I integrate that chord into everything else we’re dong?” And because he didn’t judge it, he was able to run with it, to turn it into something amazing.*
Don’t take Option 1. Option 2 unleashes possibilities you hadn’t even thought of.
Be more Miles.
Be more Herbie.
Be more jazz.
Improvise.
Links: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/randy-fertel-improv-everywhere/id1400082430?i=1000668976430