Mistake

Playing by ear

⩩ 7

These seven year-olds! Look how they write! Especially when running with an idea, not looking back or down but up. When you start reading, you quickly find yourself caught, at a standstill by a word that is strange, unrecognizable, illegible, a word that is not a word; you mark time there until you break it down, pronouncing the letters they have written in the order they have written them in, — you sound it out and… poof! the word is there, materialized out of thin air, and you stream onwards. They write phonetically, not by convention and memory but by ear, a new ear each time: often one word written in two ways on the same page. When you zoom out, you see that their text is studded with them, snags, illegibilities, originalities, riddles. And how unapologetic they are! They march up to you holding their work out with both hands, beaming! A sprawling labyrinth, a hieroglyph, a snowflake in language. They write without fear.

It is not always so, not in spelling. Every time I walk into the classroom with a new list of words we do the same thing. We go through the words twice, in two columns: the first time they write by ear, sounding them out, on their own; the second time, when I put them up on the board, they compare and copy down the new spelling, if need be, in the next column. The first round is a first pass, an impression. There is no wrong and right. Before you have taken the words home, before you have practiced them in class, before you have even found out what they are, you write them out, a first take, willy-nilly. Spell them however you please, in your own language if you want, or draw a picture. It is a variety round, bursting with diversity, — or that’s what I envision. How they cower, how they freeze! How they correct themselves, these seven and eight year-olds! They hide their pages, leaning over their desks. Instead of making a second column, they erase what they had written and write overtop it, or they don’t write at all: they abstain, writing nothing until we go through with the answers. The “answers”! These accidents, themselves the results of mistake, chance and time.

Miles Davis encountered this problem again and again in making music, in his attempt to make great music, to get his bandmates to open up, to stretch out, especially when using written music and trained musicians. He found that trained musicians play what is on the page: no more, no less. But great music is made when players are open, ready, listening, reacting to what’s new, what’s there, what’s happening. A trained musician has good technique and good memory, — and the mind of a robot. No give, no feeling, no imagination. Worse, if someone is different, if she is out of key, or late, or plays an unscripted note, if she ever strays from the path or follows her whim, if she isn’t all the way a robot, then the other robots point at her and laugh: one plays what’s written. And if someone told them he wanted something else, told them not to play exactly like it was written, told them to play what isn’t there, they would look at him like he was mad. “It was hard to get the musicians to realize,” Miles said, “that they didn’t have to play perfect. It was the feeling that counted.” He eventually learned it was best not to bring in written music at all: just a sketch, an idea.

Herbie Hancock tells a story on this point, a lesson from his days with Miles. One night when they were performing, when the group and music were on, right in the middle of a song, in the middle of Miles’ solo, Herbie slipped. He played a wrong chord, and not just a wrong chord: he says, “it sounded completely wrong. It sounded like a big mistake.” Herbie cringed, scared and embarrassed, and brought his cowering hands up to his ears and head, as if to hide, as if to die, — and then it happened. Miles paused, and then played notes that made it right. Miles’ notes made Herbie’s mistake — correct. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Herbie at the time. Later, he understood more: Miles didn’t correct anything, because he didn’t hear it as wrong, as a mistake, but just as something that was, something that happened, an event.

And really how fixated we are on what’s on the page, the script. Like pupils, how patiently we wait for the answer to be put on the board. How good, how astonishingly good we are at calling “correct” and “mistake” by its measure. When we stray from it, how good we are even at scolding ourselves for it, regretting, admonishing. When we ask why we are so good at it, the answer offers itself: we are trained to do it. We are educated right out of the ability to spell, to write, to act by ear, — the most educated most of all. The result is that when something unexpected happens, when we do or would do something unexpected, we cross it out, we erase it; we think we have to go back, to start over. We see it as a dead end, a mistake. We are rarely so disarmed, so generous and largeminded, so free that we call a mistake what it really is: a crown, a door, the start of something new, a beginning.

We might still learn to see things in this way; we might learn to invite mistakes, to receive them, to be thankful for them, as Miles Davis and Tony Williams were; we might still learn to say and feel with them: “Perfection for foofoos. For me those who make mistakes. I honor them, I choose them, I build my band with them.” But careful: to learn to see things this way is not really learning a lesson at all but unlearning a lesson you know very well. There is nothing beyond you that you are trying to reach, rather something within you that you are trying to let go of.

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Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Did it make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Do you have another angle on the topic?

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There is an overall narrative in this running series of a newsletter, the first chapter of which describes our encounter with the strange, new and unknown and our reaction to it. Catch up on the first six installments:

⩩ 1 Headsup

⩩ 2 Out of Place

⩩ 3 Speechless

⩩ 4 Sideeffect

⩩ 5 Audience

⩩ 6 Whim

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Josh DeFrieze is a poet, story-teller, essayist, and a good friend. He and I have been sharing writing for years. Last week he opened Against Time and I am so excited to see what comes out through it.

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I learned of Herbie Hancock’s story about Miles in this interview (also linked in the essay). You have to watch it. I love not only the story Herbie tells but the way he tells it.

The Miles Davis quotation comes from the liner notes for his album Sketches of Spain, which I first read about in Aaron Gilbreath’s book, This Is: Essays on Jazz. If you’re interested, the best places to get to know Miles’ personality are his music and the autobiography with Quincy Troupe.