Where True Musical Creativity Comes From (with David Reed, Improvise For Real)

Christopher: Did you know you already have 90% of what it takes to become a creative, confident improviser? That might sound unlikely, especially if improvisation feels way out of reach to you right now. But you might be surprised.

What if there was just one missing piece which stood between you and free, creative, instinctive music making? And what if that missing piece was already inside you, just waiting to be brought out?

Today I’m sharing part three of a conversation I had with David Reed from Improvise For Real, where we unpack two more of the quotes from their book and discuss creativity, improvisation, musical understanding and more.

Before we get to that, just to let you know, we’re switching up the schedule for the show. We were doing six daily livestreams each week for the past ten weeks, and it’s been a blast! I have had so much fun and I so appreciate all of our live crew who’ve been tuning in day after day with me.

Based on feedback and based on some other exciting projects we have coming up in the next couple of months, we are shifting up that schedule for now at least, to be three episodes a week rather than six.

I was hearing from a lot of you who are super keen and love the show, but found that just it was too much to keep up with and you are frustrated that you couldn’t hear every episode or watch every episode.

So for now, anyway, we’re going to be paring back a little bit to three times a week, but sticking with the same format, same time, same live broadcasting. So please do keep coming along if you’re part of our live crew. And again, a big thanks to everyone who’s tuned in for this reboot of Musicality Now.

I absolutely love doing it and love being here with you.

So, on to today’s episode, then, part three of that conversation with David Reed.

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Christopher: let’s talk about the next one, which I think is, again a little bit bold in the way it’s phrased, but I’m certainly on board!

What’s the next one?

David: Okay, so the next one is, “Even before knowing the name of the note, the true improviser hears the note in his mind”.

Now, this is another example of fighting words, but we’re only fighting with ourselves. And so this is just, it’s not even, you know, it’s not intended as dogma. It doesn’t you have to even accept that.

It’s just, I’m just inviting you to think about it and to decide if that’s true for you. What does that mean to you? Is it relevant to the way you wanna make music? But what I was trying to express is that, and I think I used the example in the book, when you see a, chord symbol on a page and it says like an F minor 7 chord.

A very natural kind of paradigm for a lot of beginning music students is to ask the question, what note or notes would sound good over this F minor 7 chord? What am I allowed to play? What can I play?

And I’m saying that we can replace that with a better question. And the better question is, what is that sound that I hear in my mind, and how can I play it?

Where will I find that sound on my instrument. That’s why we study harmony. That’s why we study harmony so deeply. It’s not to know what are the acceptable notes over the F minor 7 chord. It’s because it takes a lot of experience and exploration and personal relationship with harmony in order to be able to answer that question of, “what is that sound I hear in my mind, and where will I find it on my instrument?”.

And so that’s what that was about.

Christopher: Yeah. And I applaud your boldness. I think the bit that stuck out to me was the word “true”, where I can imagine the, you know, wizened jazz expert reading that quote and being like, “well, I don’t hear it in my mind and I can play the Phrygian over a dominant 7th chord all day long in every key on three different instruments.

And I am, you know, I impress the audience when I improvise.

David: Yeah, you impress the audience, but what you should do is you should write a book about how to destroy a popular music culture, because I got news for you. The jazz audience was about a thousand times stronger and healthier 50 years ago before we had all this academic nonsense.

And so it turns out the audience doesn’t care. It turns out nobody really cares about your Phrygian and scale, and how clever all your theories are and how fast you can move your way through the scale. The audience wants to feel something, they wanna feel something of you. They want to connect with you. And that’s why, I mean this contrarian attitude, it starts with the title of the book, right?

I mean, how many people do we alienate just by calling it “Improvise For Real”? But that’s the point. Instead of spending 10 years learning all these tricks and techniques to make the audience think you’re improvising. Why not actually improvise? Why not actually create the music spontaneously from our imagination and pair that with a deep and loving and respectful music practice in which we do study harmony and we do come to understand all these things?

Why not improvise for real?

Christopher: Absolutely. And I was speaking earlier this week with Jason Tonioli on the “Successful Musicians” podcast, and we were talking about the classical tradition and how so many of the great classical composers would roll over in their graves if they knew how strictly we were performing and interpreting their music, given that they were born and bred improvisers, dyed-in-the-wool improvisers themselves.

And I think the same is true of jazz, right? Where of course, there is this incredible theoretical body of knowledge around the harmony of jazz and the traditions of what sounds good or correct, but the reality is the people who defined those traditions in the first place, they were hearing it in their mind before they played it.

And they were doing that a lot more than they were thinking through the rules and regulations of what would sound good together.

David: Yeah. And you know, when you think about how lively and free and politically grounded that whole movement was, and the constant innovation and how it was tied to the kind of psychosocial reality of those people at that time.

Especially when you think about just the pace of change and evolution in their music. I think they would all be quite surprised and horrified to find out that we took a snapshot of their music in 1965 and then spent the next 75 years teaching people how to do that. I don’t think it’s the same activity, and I don’t even think it’s the same kind of people really.

Christopher: Agreed. Well, I was expecting to take this one in quite a different direction and dive into the meat of audiation and its role in musicality, but we can certainly cover that with several of these other quotes we have lined up. So let’s move on to the next…

David: Absolutely. That’s a perfect segue. The very next one is “Understanding music begins with listening”. And this is much less controversial, and I’ll make a short comment about it, and then I would really love to hear your take on it because this is really in your wheel house.

But what I was trying to say is that, you know, when I was a kid, I was mystified by people who could recognize melody notes and chords by ear. I didn’t know how they did that. I didn’t even know it was possible. Now, part of that is because I didn’t have a language for talking about the way music actually affects us, which is thinking relative to the key of the music.

So when I saw people transcribing chords by ear, it just looked like magic to me. And that leads you down a path of asking, well, how is that possible? And so I, that led me to a number of sort of strange ways of trying to attack that problem, you know, largely rooted in this belief that there’s some sort of theory or intellectual knowledge that would unlock that for me.

And so what none of that takes into account or what I was missing, is the fact that everybody in the audience is already recognizing all of the notes and all of the chords by ear. If I were to sing a familiar or play a familiar melody to you like “Happy Birthday”, in any key, and if I intentionally played one of the notes wrong, you would recognize it instantly.

And so what that means is, you already, it means a couple things. You already knew exactly which sound you were expecting, but because I’m playing this song in a key that you maybe have never even heard the song played in this key before, that means that you have the ability to distinguish between the seven notes of the major scale, and you hear them as different.

Each one affects you differently. And you can even do those calculations. So I could play a song in an unfamiliar key, and you would even be able to intuitively imagine exactly what each note should sound like. And the same is true of chords.

And so the point I was making in that chapter, is that this is the entry point. This is the doorway. That we musicians don’t have to go off and join some strange cult in order to understand the secrets of music. If we wanna understand music more deeply than the person sitting next to us in the audience, all we have to do is listen more closely. But that understanding of music, the best role model for us is actually the audience, because they’re already hearing all the notes in the chords.

If you think about it, it couldn’t be any other way. Why would a composer choose one chord over another if the audience can’t even hear it? And so what that allows you to envision is a way of studying music that starts with the experience of the audience, but then organises that journey so that we can also become aware and we can name these different things that we’re hearing and feeling.

That beautiful sound that appears in almost every song, it has a name, right? And it’s this particular note, it’s note three, and I can show you that note three in a thousand melodies. I can also show you note two in a thousand melodies and so on.

And that I think is a, kind of, a really interesting way of telling sort of the origin story of why something like Musical U is possible and why you put so much, importance on audiation and on really hearing and feeling the sounds as, as not only an important part of your musical learning, but as like the very definition of musical learning.

Christopher: For sure, yeah.

And so for us, in the Autumn Season of our Living Music program, it, it’s really focused on playing by ear. And we have a tutorial about this relative pitch mindset and the need to shift what, for most musicians, is an absolute pitch mindset thinking in terms of notation and what key are we in and is an F sharp or is it a G sharp to that relative pitch way of interpreting the world or a way of thinking about what a note pitch is.

And we talk about exactly that, that if you didn’t already have an incredible sense of relative pitch, music would be a nonsense jumble to you.

And so the good news is actually you don’t need to do all that much ear training as such. All we’re trying to do is put some reliable labels on the thing that your ear is already naturally recognising and interpreting.

And so that’s really mind-blowing for a lot of our students. It’s quite exciting to think that actually, you know, they’ve got 90% of the skill, it’s there. It’s just latent, it’s happening subconsciously, and if we can make it conscious and we can put some structure and some labels on it, suddenly it becomes this really powerful thing that they can.

David: Yeah, and that’s true of the notes of the major scale and the notes outside the major scale. And it’s true of all of the chords as well. So like, just, just to put an example to what you just said, the seven chords of the major scale make up 95% of what we hear in popular music. Most people have no idea how to recognize those things by ear, but, but what the way you describe it is perfect.

And it makes me think of as a metaphor that these seven chords are like seven housemates that you’ve been living with all your life, and you absolutely recognise each one of them when he or she walks in the door. You know Maria, and you know John, you know all these people and you’ve been interacting with them all your life in the same way.

Your mind recognises them perfectly, the sensation of the one chord and the sensation of the two chord and so on, but you never knew their names. Imagine that you’ve been living with these seven housemates all your life and you know a million things about them and you know their personalities very, very well, but you just don’t know their names and you have no way of talking about about them.

And what that does is later when you’re out of the house and you want to call one of them, you want to call up one of those beautiful people that you know, like you wanna call up one of those sensations in your music. You don’t know how to do it because you don’t know what that thing is called.

So that’s really a big part of our project in learning music. It’s not to learn how one could create, or what to do in music, it’s to just to learn how to name and express on our instruments these things that we are intimately familiar with, that we’ve been hearing all our lives.

And what surprises everybody is how simple our musical system is. All day long on the radio, you’re hearing seven notes and seven chords and it’s so easy to recognise all that stuff by ear, but people don’t develop that ability, mostly because we got everything a little backwards and it’s all quite jumbled up.

And, and we’re throwing people into, like you said earlier in a different conversation, the Phrygian scale, and very complex stuff.

And if you just kind of organise this journey a little better, you can build it up in a way that is completely integrated with your ear and we can actually know what we’re talking about.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, this quote, “understanding music starts with listening”. We’ve talked about it kind of from a methodology point of view, like do the listening so that you have the understanding.

But I think when I first read it, it was actually a slightly different perspective on the same thing, which was: the really deeply reassuring good news that the thing that’s been puzzling you all your life has an answer. Because so many people, they slave away on their instrument. They never really feel like they understand music. They maybe do a bit of theory and they get some intellectual understanding, but they don’t have that instinct, they don’t have that inner understanding of what are they playing and why are they playing it and what would it mean to pick the notes themselves.

And I love this quote for just summing up, you know, the bit that’s been missing for you has been the listening.

And this comes up in a couple of your other great quotes, David, so we’ll talk more about it I’m sure. But that idea that maybe there’s just been a lot too much output and not enough input in the process of learning music for you. And if we could put that listening piece back in place, actually a lot of those things you’ve been wondering about will start to fall into place naturally.

David: Yeah. Yeah. And it, and even connects to some of our conversations about musicality and the importance of simplicity and how fragile that connection is between a beginning music student and the sounds and the sensations. And we have to respect that. We have to create a safe space where you can get to know just one or two of these, you know, sensations at a time so that you can learn to really clarify for yourself, which is which.

And that’s how you tap into that enormous wealth of experience and knowledge that you already have about music.

But it’s a delicate process. And somebody has to respect that and give you the time and the activities that allow you to have that calm and sincere kind of recognition of “oh, that thing that I’m studying now, I’ve actually been hearing this all my life. That’s what that thing is called. That’s where I can find that thing in any key on my instrument. Now, I get it.”

Christopher: Perfect.

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Christopher: I wonder, did that resonate with you? We had some great chat over on Instagram that it definitely was hitting home with some people. Let me know in the comments or email [email protected] and let me know how that bit of our conversation landed with you. Some of these ideas around instinct and hearing and understanding and, you know, the notes and the chords might just be familiar members of a family that you just don’t know how to name out in the wild just yet.

So that was part three of four. We actually only covered half the quotes in the conversation, in the whole conversation. So if you’ve been enjoying these episodes, please do let us know, and I might have to nab David for another session sometime soon and take a look at the other quotes as well!

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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