Quick and easy jazz improvisation?

A marketing email hit my inbox last Thursday. It was promising the benefits of their special way of  memorizing and practicing licks, that once cobbled together would make ‘improvising’ quick and easy. 

A whole system for playing instant jazz much like instant mashed potatoes. “Just add hot water. Your family will never taste the difference.”

It plays on our brain’s hardwiring to seek out efficiency in the things we do. Building and reinforcing neural connections in our brain is absolutely necessary for human life. If every time you wanted to walk, you had to purposefully position your feet one in front of another without losing your balance, you’d never get out of bed! The same goes for language, tying shoes, using a smart phone, and every other daily activity you do as almost a reflex.

I sense, however, that that impulse to create shortcuts is creeping into more advanced activities like jazz improvisation. In the process, the substance and depth of those activities is being drained from them. Does ‘quick and easy’ result in better education, art, political thought, writing, thinking, and other higher-level activities?

If you are a member of my free Pocket Jazz course, you may be asking why I’m condemning my own approach. After all, the entire course consists of three-minute jazz lessons. 

But don’t confuse the efficient delivery of information with the information itself. Dumbing down the content for the purpose of making improvisation appear easy is most certainly not what I’m doing, both in TikTok and Pocket Jazz. 

These three-minute lessons send you off with a lifetime of focused effort to accomplish what you were shown in that three minutes. The lessons give you quick insight that lays the groundwork for what I admit is hard work. The lesson is short. The fruit of that lesson comes in the long-run.

Consider the increasingly common practice of promising quick and easy results that everyone can achieve with minimal effort. Dare I say effortless mastery?

I am reminded of the dystopian world characterized by Ray Bradbury in his great novel, “Fahrenheit 451”. Because the title refers to the temperature at which paper begins to burn, readers might think that the point of the story is book burning. And while the burning of books is the activity that propels the plot, it’s more important to think about why they were burning books.

Early on, our hero Montag is having a crisis of confidence over his chosen profession as a book burning ‘fireman’. He is paid a surprise visit one night by his boss, the fire chief, who senses that Montag needs a refresher talk concerning the culture that has evolved requiring the burning of all books.