How Jazz Improvisers Solve Problems Differently
Be more creative, confident, and composed in any situation
Life is a lot like jazz. It’s best when you improvise.
— George Gershwin
Jazz has been a huge part of my life ever since I picked up the saxophone in school, and it continues to shape how I see the world. A fundamental part of jazz is improvisation, where a soloist creates new musical ideas in real-time with the band. There are few examples that boil down human creativity and brilliance better than improvisation, and I desperately wanted to find out what made the best improvisers so special.
At first, it might be explained away with chord theory, scales, and patterns, but there are underlying techniques that explain how creative thinkers think and how successful people succeed.
These universal principles explain not just how jazz musicians improvise, but also how creative entrepreneurs, confident CEOs, and composed world leaders succeed.
Creativity
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun. — Mary Lou Cook
The best problem-solvers and innovators are creative in their approach. Visionaries like Elon Musk are doing what we thought was impossible and are revolutionizing methods of how to solve existing problems. Creative people produce refreshing, original ideas almost effortlessly — a skill that artists and entrepreneurs alike mastered.
Before I started music, I had no artistic interests, and I hardly considered myself to be creative. As I progressed in jazz and improvising, however, I realized that creativity is less of a skill and more of an exercise in stretching your imagination. By consistently challenging your beliefs and taking chances, you create an identity of a creative thinker. No one is born a creative genius, but there is no reason why you can’t become one.
Limit the Scope
A simple way to practice creativity is to set constraints. Counterintuitively, constraints are the foundation for more original ideas. Google accomplishes this by setting strict deadlines and ambitious requirements for their engineers. Bebop jazz musicians limited themselves by improving over music with complex harmony, which ended up redefining the entire music genre. In fact, nearly every creative idea starts with a unique set of circumstances and challenges.
Whenever I improvise, I limit myself to a few techniques— sometimes I will only use certain notes, play a certain rhythm, or try to include a reference to another melody. These small constraints have led to my most creative improvisations because it forced me to play in new ways. When you face hard problems consistently, your brain suddenly starts experimenting and trying new things, methods that you couldn’t have imagined without the challenge.
Creative thinking is problem-solving, and you can’t solve problems if there aren’t any.
Whenever you get stuck in a rut and find yourself doing the same things, try to limit the scope:
- Finish the task in a small amount of time
- Do it without one crucial tool or element
- Make it into a game and don’t avoid failure
Confidence
One of the easiest ways to separate good solos from the bad is to see how well the musician sells the notes he plays. While every other note of a novice improviser will be shaky and unsure, a great soloist will always be in control of what he plays. How do they do it?
Name some of the traits you want from someone you look up to. There is no doubt that strong values or integrity is one of those traits you listed. The reason why salespeople are successful because they believe in the product, and they believe in their own skills to sell it. Sometimes they might get the sale, other times they won’t, but salespeople always know that they are capable. To be confident, you have to create a strong belief in your abilities.
Practice & Prepare
Do the homework beforehand and be prepared. The best interviewers spend weeks or even months in advance researching before their interview. Chefs know nearly every recipe in their cookbooks and how to prepare it in multiple ways. Jazz musicians know the chord changes to every standard and have mastered their instruments. When you have put in the work, confidence won’t be an issue.
When starting out in jazz, I used to prepare entire solos in advance, and practice them until I had every note the way I wanted. Although this defeated the purpose of improvising the solo, it taught me the importance of being prepared. My worst solos were the ones where I didn’t practice over the changes until I was satisfied with every single note.
You can’t be unsure of yourself if you’ve done it hundreds of times.
If you want to be more confident in any situation, be prepared:
- Attend practices, dry runs, and dress rehearsals
- Mentally prime yourself for how you think a situation will turn out
- Focus on one thing at a time, and do it well
Composure
Right before I take a solo in a song, my palms sweat, butterflies dance in my stomach, and my breathing becomes shallow (which isn’t too helpful for a wind player). The last thing you would think to call me is composed. But the moment I stand up and my fingers start moving, all of that goes away. Because if it doesn’t, it will all be for nothing.
No matter how creative and capable you are, if you don’t stay calm under pressure, you won’t be able to do your best.
In his book titled The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande explores how surgeons, who are some of the most composed professionals under pressure, can make mistakes. He found that by making a checklist system, surgeons were calmer under pressure, and complications after surgery drastically decreased. Although making a checklist may not be the perfect solution for every problem, there is a common theme behind it that can help you stay calm even under high pressure.
Forget the Crowd
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people but care more about their opinion than our own. — Marcus Aurelius
In sports, it’s called getting your head in the game. In meditation, it’s called the present moment. In music, it’s called forgetting the crowd. The fight or flight response we naturally turn to in stressful situations wasn’t designed to help you do your best — it was designed to help you get out of the situation alive. If you want to leave the room knowing you did your best, your full attention has to be on yourself and no one else.
Getting into selective music groups means giving an audition — a classic example of where composure gets tested. My greatest struggle has always been sight-reading — where you are allotted 30 seconds to scan a new piece of music and then perform it in front of judges. When I asked for advice from the top performers in the groups, they all told me the same thing: play it like you mean it and don’t worry about the judges. Everyone struggles with hard sight-reading, but what separates who makes the band and who doesn’t is how you handle the pressure.
To stay composed when the pressure is high, just forget about everyone else:
- Commit to it fully — play it like you mean it
- Don’t overthink, or you will never do anything
- Whatever you do, do it for yourself and not the approval of others
Putting It Together
Just before winter break in my first year in jazz band, my school held an event where all music groups would come together to play holiday music. In preparation for this event, I practiced a solo that I wanted to play note-for-note — I couldn’t afford to mess up in from of the whole school.
My band director started conducting, and within a few dozen measures I felt myself standing up. The crowd of over a thousand students roared — they weren’t expecting a solo. And I definitely wasn’t expecting that response.
At that moment, I forgot about the crowd, about my sweaty palms, and even the solo I had spent hours perfecting. It was the first time I stopped caring about the crowd in a long time. It was the first time I actually improvised. And yes, it was a great solo.
I think jazz legend Charlie Parker summarized it best when he said:
You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
