Jazz and mindfulness

Mindfulness has in many ways always been at the core of jazz. It is possible to listen to jazz as background music or as accompaniment to the activities of life, but jazz, when listened to with even a smidgen of care, creates the conditions for a higher mental state of awareness, in what many researchers and theorists are calling “mindfulness.”

Mindfulness is a hard term to define exactly, but in simple form it is a full awareness of the present moment through direct experience, without interference from judgmental evaluation or preconceived ideas. Mindfulness has become increasingly popular in America as a way of making meditative practice and Buddhist concepts realizable and applicable to everyday life.

Ellen J. Langer, who has developed the contemporary approach to mindfulness and published several excellent books on the subject, ran a study of classical musicians and mindfulness. The idea was simple: ask classical musicians to find something new in the pieces they played to see if that attention helped them play better.

It did. What Langer found was increased attention on a single passage or other “small” details of performance infused their playing with new energy. By paying attention to peripheral points, they became more aware overall, played better overall, and reported experiencing their performance more fully.

Langer should have studied jazz musicians. Such mindfulness is a basic part of jazz practice. A musician who improvises is doing exactly what the classical musicians were asked to do—pay attention in a new way. Jazz musicians are forced to pay attention and keep their awareness at a high level by listening to how the other musicians handle a passage and by constantly creating new melodies and harmonies as they improvise. That mindfulness comes from improvisation, but also contributes to it.

Langer quotes Charlie Parker about there being no boundaries in art. But Parker also meant there are no boundaries inside art, nor inside a single piece of music nor even inside a single melody line or chord pattern. Boundaries, in that sense, are a form of mindlessness, if adhered to too strictly.

Setting aside boundaries and creating without them, or around them, is a fully mindful process. The way of finding new aspects of a song, the way of finding new places to pause, play stronger, lay out, bring other patterns or feelings inside, or deepen what is there, in short, all improvised activity requires a high level of mindfulness.

While improvising, jazz musicians must be mindful of each other, too. They must listen closely—mindfully–to be able to offer the interactive support that makes a group hold together as a group. It is that mutual support that provides the freedom for the improviser to focus attention on making a new melodic line, trying a new technique or shifting attention away from technique to focus on feelings or telling a story.

In that sense, jazz improvisation is a double awareness. First, there is awareness of what “should” be the melody line, chords, and rhythm. And second, there is awareness of what is actually being played in the improvised section. Really great jazz improvisers are aware of what could be played, but at the same time they are also aware of what actually is being played.

Somewhat confusingly, though, only when that doubling is merged into a single moment of creativity does the best improvisation emerge. The doubled awareness must merge into a more encompassing mindful state for the improvisation to work well. That is often why a jazz solo is better on the third or fourth round than the first or second, because the improviser becomes increasingly more mindful.

To hold in mind simultaneously the possible and the actual is what makes jazz soloing such a special pleasure. For the listener, to be swept away into a long solo is to be aware of the present moment with increased intensity, even when the tempo may not be that quick. The listener’s consciousness merges into the flow of the music with heightened awareness, and the mind becomes flooded with musical mindfulness.

That happens with all great music, of course, but with jazz, and especially during improvisation, the process is laid bare for both performer and listener to follow in their own ways until, at the moments of peak intensity, mindfulness takes over for everyone in the room. Mindfulness, there just wouldn’t be jazz without it.

Michael Pronko
May 3, 2015