The Epiphany of Jazz Charts
Or: A Case for Doing Things the Easy Way
I confided in my roommate Paul my dream of one day fluently sight-reading treble and bass clef simultaneously for piano. He responded by altering my trajectory as a musician.
This conversation began partially because of a tiny game controller Paul showed me. It looked sort of like a console controller, but it was about a fourth of the size. He’d bought it to scroll through Anki decks during his commute to his new job (congrats Paul!). While his Anki decks were mostly about javascript and effective database design, mine were all the notes on the treble and bass clef.
Which brought us to the second reason this conversation began; in the apartment we’re subletting for another month and a half, we miraculously share a grand piano.
I’ve been enchanted by pianos of all kinds ever since the fifth grade, when my parents briefly and mysteriously got a standup piano in my childhood home, only for it to disappear a couple years later. It’s been nothing short of magical to get a chance to sublet this Ridgewood apartment for that reason alone.
I have joked that after having seen the grand piano during the apartment tour, I was ready to pay rent, having suspended any other requirements I might have for a living space. And in fact, the shower does randomly switch from reasonable temperatures to ice cold or boiling hot, and Ridgewood is pretty far away from everywhere I need to go, but the grand makes up for it all and then some.
I digress. Paul is a wunderkind of a musician. He is a jazz pianist, guitarist, and a former startup for a musical startup. HIs very existence showed me that programmer musicians can exist with the full inventiveness of traditional ones.
Paul listened patiently to my dream of sight reading fluency, and when I was done, he asked me a question.
“What is your goal with sight reading? Why do you want to learn it?”
It’s a rare moment to be asked about a dream, so rare in fact that it took me by surprise.
I hadn’t really consulted myself past this point, but went into a description of unlocking the tools to collaborate with musicians across musical traditions, to jam with them spontaneously, and to write songs with them as artists. I imagined an electric type of collaboration I’ve witnessed between musicians more skilled than I, where they have patchy conversations that go something like:
Musician A: “oh and then we can do…”
plays chord
Musician B: “exactly! But we want a suspended 4th there, for mystery”
plays something else.
— you know what I ’m talking about, right? This famous clip of Jon Batiste transporting Beethoven across centuries and continents might get it across better than anything.
The magic in this clip is in— beyond Batiste’s technical wizardry — the act of conveying human stories and emotions beyond what words are capable of conveying. I don’t know why that’s what music is, but that’s what I think it is, at it’s best. A language for telling stories of the human spirit that words alone struggle to capture, and fail completely at doing so with comparable simplicity.
I also shared with Paul a dream simply to be able to record my own adventures in music. When I stumble upon a chord on the piano or guitar, or even a melodic riff with my voice, I struggle to note it down. I am forced to compulsively record voice memos, and have little language to communicate or navigate the musical structures that sometimes come to me in torrents.
I didn’t tell Paul my dreams for the camper van I’d spent the spring converting in the hopes that I could stow my keyboard in the fold-down table and a guitar on the while, an amp under a seat, and travel around the country trading song with old friends and new.
It isn’t often that someone has responded to me with such authority about my own ambitions. There is advice that is only best for the giver, who has not taken the requisite time to confirm their words have any bearing on the reality of the recipient.
That was not the case. Paul was spot on. He saw where I wanted to go, andd that there was a much more efficient path there.
What was this more efficient path?
Jazz charts.
The Jazz tradition in general, in fact.
This surprised me, mostly because I didn’t really have a desire to learn Jazz, necessarily, more than any other musical tradition.
But what I learned that night was that there is a language that can briefly notate and communicate complex musical concepts with just a few slashes of a pen. That musical experiences can be described with just a a few symbols, and although they often require a music staff to accompany them, entire chords, notes, melodies and rhythms could simply be implied rather than written down directly. And the exciting part was that the language of Jazz charts was already pieced together from the scraps of lessons I’d been learning through my life — bits of the musical staff I’d learned on clarinet in middle school, names of chords I’d learned from Guitar tabs, and some of the anatomy of a chord I’d learned this past summer.
I didn’t believe him at first. It’s been such a paradigm shift for me, I have to resort to metaphor. I’m a runner, so I will use that experience. It was kind of like this;
Imagine you are dreaming of running a marathon one day. You’ve just gotten to the point where you can run three miles and not feel like you are dying. You’ve made progress, but have a long way to go. The journey is often overwhelming and demoralizing. And yet, the loftiness of your goal is such that you dare not speak it out loud. There is an inner power you carry from aiming so high so that, on good days, your world has been transformed into one where truly anything is possible. The cost being that, on bad days, you feel like a complete fool.
Yet you persist. You follow a training plan. You sign up for a 5K. You buy running shoes. You ask your running friends for advice. You miss training days, but you try to make up for it. Missed days become weeks, become months. But you always get back to it, eventually. You run your 5K, and you are so proud of yourself for runnin ghte entire thing, but it stops there, for a long time. The dream of a marathon looms, impossibly high above you.
The starting over breaks from running is the most painful part, physically and emotionally. The pain becomes a familiar memory, and it stops you from lacing up. A part of you hates yourself for leaving the world where anything felt possible. That’s painful too. Painful enough that you try to forget about it, how you didn’t seem to be enough.
This experience is distilled in running, but it has existed in me within the process of many leaps into something new. If that experience was an analogy for the audacity of trying to teach myself two-clef, classical sight-reading, then here is analogy for learning to read jazz charts:
You go on a walk. You feel the urge to move. You sprint down the block, or something like sprinting! It leaves you out of breath, slightly dizzy, yet exhilarated. You didn’t even run far enough for it to be difficult. Happy, feeling a bit silly, you finish your walk at a normal pace.
You sign up for a 5K. You walk a lot of it. You sign up for a running group. You meet everyone and get tips, but aren’t able to keep up. It’s okay. At least you’re there — one person tells you about a podcast that got them up to the 6 mile mark. Another tells you of a really fun race you should sign up for. A third one observes that you might need more stable shoes. Another one tells you, well, if you want to improve your running fitness, just running a mile five days a week would probably be twice as effective as running five a week.
In this second experience, you get to your resolve. You use the tools at hand. And you don’t hold yourself hostage with dreams. You fail, yet do not judge yourself for it somehow, maybe because you have found a way to celebrate the trying over the completing. Over time, little by little, you become stronger.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, but that’s what it feels like. I was trying to do something bold, and the expectation that it would difficult is actually what prevented me realizing it. Had I imagined something easier, it would have gotten me closer to what I wanted, wouldn’t have made my path so difficult.
What does this look like in music?
For classical piano, if you want to understand what a C major chord looks like, you would need to know where to place your C, E and F chords on both the treble and bass clef. That’s 6 symbols.
In jazz notation, you would just write “C”. And then maybe a single C note in just the treble Clef. You could deduce the E and F just as much from the shape of a triad on the keys of the piano — if you saw them on the musical staff it would make sense, but their presence isn’t necessary in notation — it’s implied by omission of any other information because it’s the most intuitive step. This strategic omission of unnecessary information is just how Jazz notation is. It’s fiercely lazy, allowing the intuition of music fill in the blanks. I can simply say Csus4, or C7, or even just C∆ as a shorthand because, as I said, Jazz is lazy.
The musician reading a jazz chart is allowed creative latitude, and therefore the person writing the chart doesn’t need to have all the answers. All they have to do is write down the gist.
The result?
Well earlier this year I pored over Anki decks about all the notes on the scale. I struggled. I looked at them every day for three weeks and still didn’t quite get it — at some point I gave up, like the runner did in the metaphor. It was way too hard. And you know what? I wasn’t surprised at my failure. I knew it was going to be hard, and so I sort of expected to fail. There were many other things happening in my life competing for my attention, so I was all too ready to give myself a pass.
But Paul told me about Jazz Notation, and the whole trajectory changed.
That same night, I salvaged the bit I remembered about the treble clef and I used it to play the first six measures of Black Orpheus. The next day I played the whole song, key changes and all. I could sight read after all!
For all the years of imagining the crushing weight of becoming a “real musician”, I was transported back to a wonderful night in high school, when my parents bought me a Yamaha keyboard with weighted keys I learned “Mad World” by Gary Jules (as featured in Donny Darko) in a night based off of a youtube video. I woke up the next morning able to play a new song.
I had learned to think of the inventiveness required to sound something out by ear and observe the fingers of another pianist in a video to be shortcuts, a crutch, which I wouldn’t need once I became a “real musician”. My intuition that there were other tools at my disposal was correct. But my rejection of the methods I already employed was a huge mistake.
Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
And that’s why Jazz notation is such an epiphany to me. It’s so easy. It makes so much sense. It sounds intimidating, so intimidating I never ventured to open the door without a helping hand. The other reason was simply that I was looking for a way into furthering my musical apprehension that was exceedingly difficult, so I didn’t see this path.
Anyways. I am having so much fun playing songs out of The Real Book. Shoutout to my brother for loaning it to me — I remember him handing me this hefty chunk of a book and thinking, well here’s a another book I’m going to lug around for years and never find a use for. He knew I would somehow.
It feels impossible, like having woken up speaking a new language, a bit like Grace Winter’s experience in The Life Impossible by Matt Haig. At the same time, I am kicking myself for not finding my way down this path earlier. I am grateful to Paul for the nudge in the right direction.
Maybe this is why children are able to be so creative — they haven’t yet learned that anything in life should be difficult. Therefore, it isn’t, so they go on following their dreams, it never occurring to them that they may stumble.
Epilogue
A few more things I’ve been noticing and enjoying I don’t want to forget.
There’s a lot of joy in the doubt of playing a particularly discordant chord, especially a sprawling 7th or 9th, only for it to be resolved by the next chord.
There’s also a wonderful game in getting things wrong the first time (or first twenty times) around, and knowing it might not be quite right, but it sounds good enough. Then later on, the musician’s true intensions for the piece come progressively into focus.
I’ve noticed in drawing and music - their very source is the mistakes I make trying to make something perfect.