“Ready or not.” That easily summarizes my first experience with improvisation. Jazz was a foreign concept to me and I found myself enrolled in the “Beginning Jazz” class at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. The instructor spent an hour discussing what appeared to be rocket science. (Later, I realized it was simply beginner’s jazz theory, and that often chords by the name of “dominant” were used. Who knew?) After this crash course in Confusing Symbols 101, a rhythm section started to play and the teacher started pointing at each student to take a solo. Upon my turn, I simply stared back at him wide-eyed, frightened, and embarrassed. I maybe played two notes. By the end of the week I had progressed to about seven. Ready or not – there’s much to be said for that. Often the best way to learn is to be thrown in head first.

However, readiness rarely gets its due. As a result of the above experience, I completely avoided jazz for another ten months before attempting to tackle it with my private teacher. I had wanted to ever since my failure of a debut at camp but was too embarrassed (even though no one I knew saw me crash and burn). I was interested but far from ready.

Conversely, last week I practiced some flute etudes (on saxophone) by Benoit Berbiguer. I had gone through them in graduate school at my professor’s request, but I was far from interested at the time. I begrudgingly got through them, often wishing to practice other material. However, last week’s work on the etudes was far more productive because I was interested and ready. Instead of going through the motions I had a vested interest, and my practicing reflected that.

The moral of course is not to never leave your comfort zone but to become aware of your boundaries, interests, and readiness. Such awareness can be a wonderful, intuitive guide to improvement.

Over the last few months, I’ve participated in a number of rehearsals and/or projects that have been stifled because of too much talking. Now, I’m not mentioning discussion of unrelated issues, such as personal conversations, etc. Instead I’m referring to discussion of the music itself.

I can’t even count the number of rehearsals that have included as much time spent discussing the arrangement of a tune (all in “non-classical” genres) as spent actually playing. I admit that some discussion is relevant, but too much talk or over-analysis can both make the performers second-guess themselves and also further cloud the issue (as opposed to provide clarity). As opposed to simply playing together and letting the music guide everyone, the players instead focus too much on technical issues and not on the actual music.

The most rewarding musical situations I’ve been involved with have been with groups that let the music guide the players. Two of my longest and closest musical collaborators, Pat Harris and Nate Powell, are such joys to play with in part because we spend almost no time actually talking about the music. With The French Henchmen, the only discussion we ever had was really about tempo – should we play it up or again as a ballad? Beyond that, we would just play, and if we started to take the piece in a direction that none of us had anticipated, we simply went with it and made the best of it, and 99% of the time were met with success.

Collaborations that involve a little less talking and a lot more listening, feeling, and playing, will find the greatest musical return.