Jazz Is the Perfect Metaphor for Life: Freedom, Listening, and the Art of Improvisation
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking like a jazz musician, even when I wasn’t standing on a bandstand.
I’m not sure I realized that when I was younger. I just knew I loved jazz.
I loved playing it.
I loved the freedom of it.
And somewhere along the way, without ever sitting down and making some grand philosophical decision about it, I started living my life pretty much the same way.
Jazz, to me, may be the perfect metaphor for life.
Jazz Is Freedom
One of the things I’ve always loved most about jazz is the freedom.
There are no rules.
Okay, there are some rules.
You probably want to know what key the tune is in, blah, blah, blah…
And if the rest of the band is playing All the Things You Are and you’ve decided you’re playing Scrapple, there could be some tension.
But you know what I mean.
In the right musical situation, jazz gives you an incredible amount of freedom.
You’re not standing there waiting for somebody to tell you exactly what to play.
You’re there because of what you bring to the music.
Your sound.
Your ideas.
Your experience.
Your taste.
Your weird little musical personality that makes you sound like you instead of everybody else.
That’s the whole point.
If a bandleader wanted somebody who played exactly like somebody else, he could have hired somebody else.
You’re on that stage because of what you bring to it.
I love that.
And I’ve always wanted life to work that way too.
But Freedom Comes With Responsibility
Here’s the catch.
If you want that kind of freedom, you have to be good.
Really good.
Freedom doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibilities.
It means the responsibility has shifted to you.
Nobody has to tell you what note to play because you’re expected to know what to do.
You have to know your instrument.
You have to know the music.
You have to listen.
You have to make intelligent decisions, sometimes incredibly fast.
And you have to do something else that I think separates great musicians from merely impressive ones:
You have to make the people around you sound good.
That’s a big one.
Jazz isn’t four or five people standing onstage independently demonstrating how talented they are.
At least good jazz isn’t.
You’re having a conversation.
Someone plays something.
You hear it.
You respond.
Maybe the drummer changes the feel slightly.
Maybe the piano player throws something at you harmonically.
Maybe the soloist starts moving in a direction nobody expected.
Suddenly everybody hears it.
And the music goes there.
Nobody calls a meeting.
There’s no memo.
No PowerPoint presentation.
You just go.
That ability to listen and respond is one of the most beautiful things about jazz.
It’s also one of the most beautiful ways I know to live.
Life Doesn’t Always Follow the Chart
We like to imagine that life is going to follow the arrangement.
Intro.
Verse.
Chorus.
Solo.
Big ending.
Applause.
Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, life has apparently never seen the chart.
Things happen.
Plans change.
People surprise us.
Opportunities appear that we never expected.
Things we thought would last forever disappear.
We make decisions without knowing exactly where they’re going to lead.
That can be terrifying if your goal is to control everything.
But a jazz musician already knows something about this.
You listen to what’s happening now.
Then you respond.
You don’t spend the next sixteen bars complaining that the drummer played something different than you expected.
You incorporate it.
Maybe you even build on it.
And sometimes what you thought was a mistake turns into the best moment of the night.
There Really Aren’t Any Wrong Notes
There’s an old idea in jazz that there are no wrong notes.
I’m not completely sure I’d go that far.
I’ve heard a few.
And probably played a few.
But there is something true underneath the idea.
A note becomes right or wrong partly because of what you do with it next.
You play something unexpected.
Okay.
Now what?
Do you freeze?
Do you apologize?
Do you stop the tune and ask everybody if you can start again?
Not generally recommended.
You make something out of it.
You turn it into a phrase.
You repeat it.
You resolve it somewhere unexpected.
You keep moving.
Life gives us plenty of those notes.
Decisions we wish we’d made differently.
Plans that didn’t work.
Jobs that disappeared.
Relationships that changed.
Doors that closed.
Things we absolutely would not have written into the arrangement ourselves.
But the music isn’t necessarily ruined.
The question is:
What are you going to play next?
You Practice So You Can Stop Thinking About Practicing
Another thing I love about jazz is the strange relationship between discipline and freedom.
Great improvisation sounds effortless.
But it isn’t.
There are years behind it.
Scales.
Chords.
Tunes.
Listening.
Practice rooms.
Bad gigs.
Good gigs.
Really bad solos.
The occasional solo you hope nobody recorded.
You do all of that work so that eventually, when you’re actually making music, you don’t have to think about all of it.
You can just play.
Your preparation becomes part of you.
I think life works that way too.
We learn.
We screw things up.
We get better.
We develop judgment.
We develop instincts.
And hopefully, somewhere along the way, we begin trusting ourselves a little more.
We stop needing somebody else to hand us the instructions.
I’ve Tried to Live That Way
When I look back over my life, most of the ways I’ve made money started because I was interested in something.
Usually really interested.
I didn’t spend much time asking, “What career should I choose because it will make me the most money?”
Now, let’s be clear.
I like money.
Money is terrific.
I’m a fan.
And fortunately, I’ve been paid to do a lot of things I genuinely enjoyed doing.
But the money usually wasn’t the original reason I did them.
I played music because I loved music.
I got into photography because I loved photography.
I got into creative work because I loved making things.
One thing led to another.
I followed interests.
I learned.
I got good at things.
Then somehow those things became ways of making a living.
Looking back, it feels a lot like improvisation.
You don’t always know what the next eight bars are going to be.
But you know how to listen.
You know how to respond.
You trust your ears.
And you keep playing.
Jazz Forces You Into the Present
Maybe this is the deepest thing jazz has taught me.
You have to be here.
Right now.
You can’t play the solo you played last night.
That solo is gone.
You can’t play the great phrase you’re planning to play thirty-two bars from now because you have absolutely no idea what the music will be doing when you get there.
All you have is this moment.
This chord.
This beat.
This breath.
You listen.
You play something.
Then it’s gone too.
And another moment arrives.
There’s something wonderfully honest about that.
Life is exactly the same way, whether we like it or not.
We spend an awful lot of time replaying choruses that are already over or worrying about tunes that haven’t even been called yet.
Meanwhile, the band is playing.
Maybe That’s the Whole Thing
If I had to reduce my philosophy of jazz — and maybe my philosophy of life — to a handful of ideas, it would probably be something like this:
Be prepared.
Listen.
Bring what only you can bring.
Don’t be afraid of freedom.
Don’t waste that freedom.
Make the people around you better.
When something unexpected happens, use it.
When you hit a questionable note, make the next note count.
Don’t cling too tightly to what just happened.
Don’t worry too much about the next chorus.
And for God’s sake, listen to the drummer.
Maybe a good life isn’t one in which everything goes according to plan.
Maybe it’s one where you’ve developed enough awareness, skill, curiosity, and trust that you don’t need everything to go according to plan.
You can meet the moment as it arrives.
You can add something of yourself to it.
You can leave room for everybody else.
And somehow, together, you make music.
That sounds like a pretty good life to me.
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