Later today, the band gets to record in a basement studio in an old historic building, grand staircases and marble floors leading to a retrofitted basement space. We did a mic check—literally to check on which microphones work best—where I figured out where I’ll sit, where the hands will lay upon keys, how the headphones fit. It was exhilarating in a different way than playing live gigs. Not better by any stretch, but of importance in a different dimension. The headsets immerse you while the computer opposite my piano stool parades waveforms that sample and display every nuance, every note, every key hammering.
And, every mistake. Just to remind me of this, there’s a framed poster on the wall, centered on my line of sight. “Don’t Fuck It Up,” it commands in bold white print on black canvas. As if I hadn’t already thought of this. The voices in my head are yelling this most of the time.
When we’re playing a gig or now as we anticipate making a recording, I immediately worry about the mistakes that I could add to the production. The 88-notes of possibility laid out before me doesn’t just invite expression, but disaster. I respond with the natural tendency to be careful, calculating, tentative, to avoid the errors that could be thrown in, to steer clear of any maneuver that could increase the likelihood of wrong. The feature of having it all recorded, rather than lost forever to the concert space, makes the stakes that much more elevated.
But this isn’t when I’m playing best. How could I? The best playing is when there’s rehearsal and attentiveness and concentration, but also immersion and bravery and gut. The best playing will have mistakes poised at the edge, as if I’m running along the intersect of cliff and sky, watching stray pebbles crumble off the sides and bouncing their way down to the river below. But these don’t matter because you’re paying such close attention to the feel of feet landing on solid ground that the error isn’t even in the periphery. It’s just a glorious view.
The mistakes are the thing you don’t want to be part of the calculus of it all. As soon as you concentrate on the don’t-fuck-it-up sign, you’re thinking about the mistakes instead of the creation, the path and the beauty. Thinking about my fingers, rather than letting them lead, is a paralyzing disaster, that poster on the wall a witness, looking down at me in judgement. So the trick is to find comfort upon and play on that cliff’s edge. We’ll see how that goes later today—after this internal pep-talk.
I bring this up here not only because it’s my own psychological evaluation, but because this is a lot like my teaching. When it’s going well, I’m not thinking about what I might get wrong, but on piecing all the right together and finding new possibilities, not just for the sake of correctness but something much better. My students who are themselves learning to be teachers are usually afraid of getting something wrong or simply not knowing something. This can be paralyzing, especially when they consider an audience of super-critical 14-year-olds.
What my students and I all have to embrace is that it’s more than even what the teacher is doing with chalk and props and notes and poetry. I’m working within the bounds and with the creative possibility of what and who is there: the physical space, the concepts at hand, and especially those who are learning alongside. This is a collaborative endeavor, and it’s not only better this way, but essential. Neither teaching or learning are solitary.
The band is the same. When I’m worrying about mistakes or even my own precision then I’m not listening to the rest of the ensemble. At our best, I’m there responding to them, and them to me. That’s when it works and when it’s especially fun, and mostly you’d never even notice the occasional mistake. Better yet, there are possibilities that come out of the risk, things we hear in each other that we hadn’t heard before. Even that stray note* becomes something else that’s not worse, but improved, closer to that potential for perfection that only error can provide.
* This reminds me of an interview I did years ago in which we talked about “Straight, No Chaser,” by Thelonius Monk. When the audio was transcribed, presumably by someone without prior knowledge about Monk, the phrase turned into “Stray Note Chaser.” We corrected it, but to this day I still embrace this as an apt description of how Monk seemed to play and how I aspire to play.
