How to Be Creative Part 1 - All That Jazz!

Show Notes

Summary

Alex kicks off a new series of a yet unknown number of episodes on creativity. He explores the nature of creativity using examples from the world of jazz, introducing the core concepts that will be covered in upcoming episodes.

Notes

• The Wikipedia entry of Kieth Jarrett’s legendary gig
• Tim Harford telling the story of that gig considerably better than I did. Includes some other bits broadly relevant to my points on creativity.
• Listen to the first hour or so of this episode of 500 Songs that has a detailed but accessible explanation of modal jazz
• A couple of dudes getting uncomfortably excited by John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
• Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Transcript

Once upon a time there was a young girl called Vera who lived in Cologne, Germany. Vera loved jazz, but Cologne wasn’t exactly a destination for jazz scenesters. Unperturbed, 18 year old Vera took a punt and invited American virtuoso improvisational jazz pianist Keith Jarrett to come and perform in her jazz-deprived city. To her surprise and joy he agreed. On 24 January 1975, after a long, gruelling drive, suffering from back pain, Jarrett arrived for his 11.30pm performance at the Cologne opera house. He took a look at the crappy, broken down, out of tune piano that the Opera House had provided, and walked out again, refusing to perform. Jarrett had asked for a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial Grand Piano. He was very particular about this. The Opera House staff had interpreted that as “some Bösendorfer piano or whatever” and rolled out a dusty old practise piano they found back stage. So basically, Jarrett, somewhat understandably, pulled the whole “how can I create under these conditions” routine. Vera was in a tight spot, and 1,400 German jazz fans waiting were expectantly in the Cologne Opera House. This was a disaster.

So Vera did what any self-respecting teenager would do in such conditions. She badgered him until she got what she wanted. Against all odds, Jarrett took pity on the rain soaked (I’m imagining it was raining, for dramatic effect) teenager, and agreed to play. He hadn’t even managed to eat much, after his long drive, and he was tired and in pain. By the time he re-entered to the auditorium, the piano had been tuned, but a bunch of the keys weren’t working and it wasn’t nearly big enough to to be heard across an auditorium of that size. Jarrett assumed he was about to give the worst performance of his career, but the German kid had seemed to miserable, and they’d already set up the recording equipment, so what the hell?

The thing is, Jarrett was a genuinely prodigious pianist, so he knew his way around a piano. The limitations of the offending piano forced him to be much more creative in his delivery, both in terms of his note choices, but he also had to hammer at the keys in a way that he wouldn’t usually, just so he could be heard. The resulting performance, which was recorded and can be tracked down easily at all the usual streaming platforms, is considered nothing short of legendary. One of the most revered, venerated, copied and best selling jazz recordings of all time. It propelled Jarrett from being a preternaturally talented upstart, to being a major force in modern jazz. In jazz terms, this most definitely counts as fairly tale.

What lessons are there to be learned from this story? I think there are a few. There’s probably quite a lot to be said about proper preparation if you want a quiet life, and completely conversely, that all’s well that ends well. But it’s what this story, and some others I will touch upon, tell us about creativity that I want to focus on.

I’m actually going to spend a couple of episodes talking about the nature of creativity. Maybe more. Because I think it’s essential to understand the role that creativity plays in the therapeutic power of art and the creative process. As I’ve said before, if you can’t loosen up a bit, making art isn’t going feel relaxing and fulfilling. It’s going to feel stressful. And relaxation, flow and creativity all come from the same source. The same spring of magical, mystical unicorn juice. But the experience and understanding of creativity depends heavily context and your place in the lifelong creative journey. Put simply, if you’re obsessed about doing things “right” then you’ll always be doing something wrong, and you’ll almost certainly end up doing the same thing over and over again.

Music, and particularly jazz music, is a good place to start here because, during improvisation, creativity happens in real time, and in full view. Now I should point out at this point, that I’m no expert on jazz, or even particularly a jazz fan. There just so happens to be a few characters and stories I’ve come across that help make the points that I need to make. And more generally, Jazz, as opposed to say, country music, puts quite a high premium on creativity.

Take Jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. He is considered one of the most important jazz musicians of all time largely, for his improvisational abilities. He reputedly practised for 16 hours a day. He was good at his instrument. But he was also renowned for his creative approach to the saxophone, and to jazz music and indeed music in general. He was your archetypal innovator. John Coltrane changed the jazz genre. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007 citing his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.” He was even made a saint by African Orthodox Church!

Does this suggest that you need to be a virtuoso to be able to improvise or innovate? If we think of innovators in other fields, they also seem to be crazy talented prodigies and/or big brains. Think Einstein, Da Vinci, Bach, Bowie, Bill Gates, probably some sports people. I don’t pay any attention to sports. Ronnie O’Sullivan fits the bill I guess.

But there are plenty of virtuosos out there that neither improvise or innovate. Top tier convert violinists, for example, may bring innovative flourishes to their renditions of others’ works, but little in the way of raw creativity, much of which will have come from the composer. Walk into your local art gallery, and you might find some supremely able painters, but how many of them are using that ability to pump out fairly pedestrian landscapes. Every field is jammed to the gills with also-rans that pump out solid work, but did little to really move the dial in their respective fields.

No, Coltrane didn’t change jazz because he was a boss saxofonist, he had some other secret sauce. So what did Coltrane do that was so disruptive to the jazz genre? Well, strictly speaking, nothing, at least not alone. He was part of a movement that included another pioneering jazz legend, Miles Davis, which innovated the form of jazz known as modal jazz. The musical theory of what modal jazz actually is is somewhat brain-bending, so I’ll not attempt to characterise it here other than via a rudimentary description. I’ll put some links in the show notes for anyone masochistic enough to want to know more.

Put simply speaking, most music uses chord changes to to drive the melody and movements within the piece. Modal jazz instead uses modes, which are basically scales of the sort you were forced to learn during those piano lessons you did when you were a kid, that petered out because they were so dull. Often, modal jazz is performed as lengthy jams over a single chord, with melody and structure defined by changes in the modes used. I think anyway. It’s all very confusing. Just go listen to it. Listen to Coltrane’s magnum opus, 1965’s A Love Supreme, and you’ll get a sense of it. It’s easier to just listen to it than to try and describe what’s actually going on. It represents the musical intersection of hyper-minimalism and hyper-complexity. It is the music of dichotomies and extremes. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve no interest in the conversation about whether this is style over substance. Whether enjoyability or even listenability has been sacrificed in the name of technical prowess or the pursuit of pure, cold artistic abstraction. Many people love this music. I’ve included a link in the shownotes of a podcast where a couple of guys get something akin to sexually aroused listening to the aforementioned A Love Supreme. That whole episode’s worth a listen, as they state various views on the nature of art that are very much congruent of my own therefore is a good corollary to this and future episodes. And as an aficionado of most wonderful music form known as death metal, I have little time for views that, for example, assert that melody is an essential component for something wishing to be classified as music. That said, this particular debate is one that I’m going to come back to at some point, maybe as part of this series. I guess we’ll find out!

Back to Coltrane. Far from being cold or aloofly technical, A Love Supreme is, specifically and intentionally, an act of worship. An act of love. It is a document of Coltrane’s reverence for both the transcendent powers of jazz music, but also of God him/herself. And this is where we start to glimpse Coltrane’s secret sauce. For he was both obsessive and eclectic. He was a scholar and a spiritualist. Coltrane was a man of extremes, of contradictions.

Raised a Christian, he largely considered himself a Christian and was by all accounts a true believer, a profoundly spiritual person. Yet he frequently integrated beliefs, doctrines and practices from other, diverse world religions into his own spiritual world view. Including from Kabbalah, Hinduism, Islam, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. This inevitably found its way into his music. This compulsive cultural and spiritual kleptomania was part of his core approach to music. Coltrane interwove techniques, approaches, themes and motifs from all over the world, including from African music and particularly India, collaborating with legendary, Beatles approved, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, who by some accounts, thought that Coltrane was nuts.

And all this might seem to imply that he did this alone. But Coltrane worked with some world-class musicians. Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington are among the names that you’ve likely heard of. Each no doubt a melting pot of creative collaboration. But it’s with his longtime bandmates that complete the John Coltrane Quartet where the magic really happened. When Coltrane, double bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner got in a room together, something special occurred. Coltrane’s compositions were sparse at best and offered little in the way of direction to fellow band mates, instead relying on a shared understanding of the each other’s style, audible and visual cues and a deep understanding of the jazz artform. What emerges is a semi-improvised melange of diverse music styles that lead to innovation in real time - he and his band were making creative leaps unconsciously in as they recorded.

For Coltrane this was like prayer, or perhaps more accurately meditation. He and his bandmates would achieve trance like states of pure mindfullness. This is common among musicians, particularly while improvising. But these guys weren’t just in a world of their own (although sometimes it might sound like it), but they were in constant telepathy-like, communication, reacting to each other’s playing in realtime in ways that are seamless to the rest of us.

I’m not trying to sell you on freeform, avant-garde jazz here. I’m very far from being sold on it myself. It’s the sort of music that I want to like, but it largely leaves me cold. But I can hear their passion and focus here. It’s hard to find another artform that makes the creative process this manifest. It’s hard to parse for us mere mortals, for sure, and the theory of it is largely beyond me to understand, let alone explain. But as I’ve suggested, there’s something to be learned here about the process of creativity.

So let me summarise some of the things that are going on here that seem to be driving creativity:

1. Ability or mastery within the medium. We’ll come back to this one a fair bit. I think this requirement is overstated, but a good understanding of the medium is essential. As Coltrane himself stated “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.”

2. Conviction. Or passion or maybe authenticity. Although the latter is, as I’ve stated before, to my mind, overused and nebulous as a concept. What we really mean here is that sense that the artist really believes in what they’re doing. That they care deeply and approach it with zeal and enthusiasm regardless of what it is. I’d rather spend time with a passionate train spotter than a cynical or ingenuine classical composer.

3. Eclecticism aka curiosity. An open mind. From my perspective, this is as important as conviction. Coltrane didn’t innovate by doing the same thing over and over. He brought in influences in from wherever he found it, and he searched far and wide. Part of the reason that some of his stylistic flourishes feel familiar now, is because he seamlessly integrated them into his own style, then everyone copied him.

4. Input from, and collaboration with, others - Coltrane collaborated far and wide, as well as with his hard-core of regular bandmates. You can’t help but, if only by osmosis, absorb approaches and ideas from people who you work with. And they in turn absorb from you. They take your ideas and expand on them based on their experiences and interactions, and when you work with them again you absorb your own ideas back again, but now expanded, mutated, maybe even improved. Even if you collaborate with someone who you end up feeling is a complete waste of space, you still take away some knowledge of how not to do things!

5. The zone - that mystical state of hyperfocus, more formally known as flow states, is where the magic of creativity really comes spilling out. That’s not to say you can’t be creative or innovate at any point. I’ve come up with new approaches before while doing mundane tasks like stretching canvases and cocking it up. But as I said earlier, this is where jazz shines as you can see innovations as it happens.

With those five elements, we can go a very long way to where creativity comes from. These are the attributes or perhaps conditions that need to be in place for creativity to happen. Not all of them need to be there for innovations to occur. For example it’s perfectly possible for someone who never leaves the house or sees anyone else, to be creative or innovative. But it’s a lot less likely. Conversely, putting all these things in place, does not guarantee creativity.

But there’s something missing here, and it goes back to the story I started off with. It’s at work with Coltrane and his compatriots, just in a more subtle, routine way. And that is randomness. Chaos. Unpredictability. Luck. In the case of Jarrett, the “luck” was, on the surface at least, bad. An apparent setback. Really it was just an unexpected constraint which forced the pianist to think differently. In the case of Coltrane and friends, chaos was their whole approach. Outside of some basic melodic and structural guidelines, each band member did not know what they were going to play, let alone what everyone else was going to. By going in somewhat blind, they were deliberately imposing constraints, the influence of which they were unable to predict, then trusting in their own instincts and ability to not only account for these, but to capitalise on them.

So with my original list - mastery, conviction, an open mind, collaboration and focus - you have a set of ingredients, that can be put together in varying measures, to cook up something different. But to really mix things up, you need a sprinkling of chaos. It’s like making your omelette with all the usual stuff, then picking something random from your fridge or pantry to add in every time you make it, to see what works. Sure, some omelettes will be choked down or just thrown in the bin, but once in a while you’ll create something magical.

So the chaos isn’t one of the core ingredients, it’s a more like a method or seasoning. It can be applied to any or all of the ingredients, at any point of the process, in any amount. It could be argued that, as far as creativity is concerned, it is the magic unicorn juice.

I’ve got a lot more to say about this particular subject. But I’ve piled a lot on here. Much of which borders on philosophy, or at least isn’t very practical. I also worry that this is probably a bit daunting to those just starting their creative journey. So I’m going to shut up for today. In the next episode I will be making the case for how this works at any point in a creative’s maturity. At least I think that’s what I’m going to do. For better or for worse, my pathological propensity to create chaos means that unpredictability plays a large role in my work. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about that too. Maybe not!

In the meantime, if you don’t feel like taking my word on all of this, or you just want to get ahead with some reading, many of the ideas from this and future episodes are crystallised and expanded upon via various real-world scientific studies by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi gave us the concept of flow states, and in his book Creativity: The psychology of discovery and innovation, elaborates on my of the subjects discussed here using interviews with and anecdotes from real-world innovators. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

In the meantime, go create.