I’ve been reviewing French for the past few weeks, in preparation for a trip later this year. I’m following this course, French in Action, which offers a few tips in learning a foreign language that I think are 100% applicable to becoming a jazz musician. One in particular:

Give priority to what you hear

The author, Pierre Capretz, argues that the writing systems of French AND English are merely attempts at capturing the actual sound of a language. As an example of the limitations of written language, he cites George Bernard Shaw’s jest that “fish” should instead be written “ghoti” – the “gh” as in “enough”, the “o” as in “women”, and “ti” as in “nation”.

Part of the point, here, is that inflection, accent, and a hundred other dimensions are simply squeezed out when we reduce living language to the printed word. In reading a novel, or even a newspaper story, we have to “rehydrate” the original intent in some fashion, lest the dry letters and typeset sentences betray the best intentions of the author as surely as a computer-generated voice would in reading Shakespeare aloud.

When you first play the melody, or “head”, to a jazz standard, such as “Stella By Starlight”, it’s tempting to think that your first reading of the music is definitive – that every subsequent performance of the melody, either in private or in public, must necessarily closely match your first rendering of the tune. It’s only as (much) time has passed that I’ve really begun to internalize the notion that the notes on the page capture at best 0.01% of the true meaning of the actual music. Just as you can stretch out words, or hurry through them; drawl or speak with a Yankee-ish accent; raise your voice, or drop your inflection, and so on, the true meaning of notes on the page seems ever more elusive.

Viewed from this perspective, it doesn’t seem interesting at all that in jazz you rarely play a melody the same way twice. It would seem amazing, given the almost infinite variations embedded in the almost-too-sparse language of musical notation, if you ever managed to truly duplicate a single rendition.