Music

I’m a beginner. That’s the honest description — a beginner musician working his way into jazz and blues, one grade at a time, at bedroom volume, most evenings I can find one.

Guitar is where most of that happens at the moment. The tenor saxophone is in its case for now, a casualty of time rather than interest, and I’ll come back to it.

What draws me to this music is improvisation: the discipline of inventing something in real time inside a structure everyone has agreed to. You learn the changes so thoroughly that you can stop thinking about them, and then you find out what you actually have to say.

There’s an obvious parallel with leading a team and I’m trying not to draw it too neatly. But it’s there. Knowing when to lay out. Comping behind someone else’s solo. The difference between a band and four people playing at the same time.

The other thing: being a beginner again is good for you. It is very hard to stay precious about your own authority when you can’t reliably get from one chord to the next.