The Epiphany of Jazz Charts
Or: A Case for Doing Things the Easy Way
I confided in my roommate Paul my dream of learning how to fluently sightread treble and bass clef simultaneously on piano. He responded by altering my trajectory as a musician.
This conversation partially came about because Paul was showing me a mini game-controller he bought specifically so that he could efficiently scroll through his Anki decks about programming during his commute to his new job (congrats Paul!) and partially because, in the apartment we’re subletting, we have this big honking communal grand piano miraculously sitting two feet behind the desk I work at every day.
We have the place for another month and a half. As someone who has been enchanted by pianos ever since the fifth grade when my parents briefly and mysteriously got a standup in our living room only to disappear it for equally unknown reason, it has been nothing short of magical to get a chance to sublet this Ridgewood apartment for that reason alone.
I have joked that there were literally no other requirements I had for this apartment after seeing that the piano existed during a brief tour. And in fact, the shower has tried to kill me once already by switching from normal to ice-cold to boiling-hot water, without any shower-knob intervention on my part. The piano more than makes up for it.
I digress. Paul is a wunderkind musician. He is a jazz pianist, guitarist, and his existence showed me that programmer musicians certainly 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 wonderful feeling when someone asks you a questions like this about a dream, a question nobody had ever asked before.
So, not totally prepared because I hadn’t really consulted myself past this point, I went into a description of how I wanted to communicate and collaborate with musicians across musical traditions, to jam with them spontaneously and also to write songs with them in some way or another. I think what I had in my head, and still do, is that magical thing musicians do when they speak with music, they say “oh and then we can…” and play a chord, and the other musician says “exactly! But we want a suspended 4th there, for mystery” — you know what I’m talking about, right? That kind of magic. Actually, this famous clip of Jon Batiste playing Beethoven never gets old, and gets this across perfectly.
The magic in this clip is, beyond Batiste’s technical wizardry, the act of communicating beyond words, communicating 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 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.
It isn’t often that someone has responded to me with such authority about my own ambitions. There is advice, right, where someone thinks they know what’s best for you, yet really your lives are different and they only know what’s best for them.
That always may be the case. But in the case of Paul’s response, I don’t think it was. I think that he saw what I wanted, and could also clearly see the distance between that and the misguided efforts I was making to get there, and that there was a more efficient path.
This was the 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.
It was hard to believe 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 have only just gotten to the point where you can run three miles and not feel like death though. So you know you have a long way to go. And it’s overwhelming, and demoralizing at times. Yet although the loftiness of your goal is such that you dare not speak it out loud, there is also a rush, a strength, in aiming so high. On good days, it is exhilarating, as if you can do anything simply by believing it is possible. On bad days, you feel like an utter fool.
And yet, you persist. You follow your training plan. You sign up for a 5K. You buy running shoes. You ask your running friends for advice. You miss training days here and there, and you get back on the wagon anyways. Sometimes you fall of the wagon for entire months at a time.
What’s even harder than all this — losing fitness when you start over again. In fact, it’s so hard, you may fail. It may be too much. You remember all of the pain of the long runs, and you have trouble motivating yourself to get out of the door. A part of you even hates yourself for this, and you try to forget it, so that you can forget that part of yourself — the part that didn’t seem to be enough. But that would be misguided, I think.
If this is learning two-clef, classical sight-reading, then here is the same experience as a Jazz chart:
You go on a walk, and, feeling the urge to move, sprint down the block. It leaves you out of breath, yet exhilarated. 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.
The experiences are similar, full of similar events, but with a different attitude as a backdrop.
In this second experience, you get to save your resolve. You use the tools at hand. You fail, and you do not judge yourself. Although your imagination is capable of it, you do not have to imagine a world in which you are doing far beyond what you feel you are able. You listen to what you think you can do, and you do only that. And you say, this is enough. And that little bit teaches you things, and trains you, so that every time, you can do a little more.
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.
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 too hard. And you know what? I wasn’t that surprised. 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 had a pass ready to give myself.
But Paul told me about Jazz Notation, and the whole trajectory was different.
The 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. 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, invalid cheats, which a “real musician” wouldn’t need. And yes, my intuition that there were other tools at my disposal was correct. But my belief that the methods I was already employing to learn music were invalid was entirely unhelpful, and untrue.
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, even more intimidating than sight-reading, which is one reason why I never found the door to it. And 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 (thanks for letting me borrow it Noah!). I am wholly surprised that I can. It feels impossible, like having woken up speaking a new language. And 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. And therefore, it isn’t, so they go on following their dreams, it never occuring to them they could stumble.