Resolving a musical tug of war

Along with the question, he sent me a long complicated online lesson on jazz theory he found and was trying to work through. The following is some of my response:Hey,

Thank you for reaching out to me.

Those two sides of the tug don’t have to be at war. The sides can compliment each other. My recommendation is for you to find the right balance between the two. Stop thinking of it as one side OR the other.

However, there are plenty of great jazz musicians who knew very little if any music theory like Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Wes Montgomery, Erroll Garner, Django Reinhart, Roland Kirk, George Benson, and many others. So you can become a great jazz player while having no theoretical knowledge. But the reverse is not true. All theory and memorization and running of scales and arpeggios (thinking, thinking, thinking) with no hearing the music from within, is a machine. 

I think one reason there are so many more jazz materials out there focused on notes, scales, patterns, chord changes, etc. is because so many musicians just want to know what notes to play. They want to sound like someone else. They want to calculate their way through their improvisation. They want to paint by number. And while that’s fine when you are learning, there should be a point fairly early on when you throw away the map and calculator, and just jump…

Here are some questions to ask yourself: