Jazz and Zen: Silence

The overlapping concepts and practices of jazz and Zen have a common starting point. To put it simply, or reduce it to an initiating idea: All action springs from inaction and all sound springs from silence.

The idea that music is not in the notes but in the silence between notes is not a new idea. The idea has been attributed to everyone from Mozart to John Cage. Perhaps because it is a paradoxical, ironic idea, it may appear glib and shallow. However, the idea of silence deserves consideration.

The silence of sitting meditation is one of the most essential parts of Zen practice. The ability to bring the mind into silent stillness is hard, but essential. To “hear” the silence becomes a way to attend to and focus on everything else that is not silent. Silence is one way to set the listening dial back to zero, so the other noise of life can be heard, felt and experienced more fully.

Jazz, too, incorporates silence as an essential part of its practice. Jazz musicians learn how to listen to the others in a group. They are cued to interact by what the other musicians are playing but also by what they are not playing. Accomplished jazz musicians use silence to create tension and energy. A developing pianist will comp too much or put in too many fills instead of letting silence build tension.

An experienced jazz musician rides silence like a surfer rides a wave. The complex rhythms of jazz are created through the interplay of sound and silence. A jazz drummer keeps time, as the phrase has it, but also lets time go, to break up the silence with drumbeats, and to break up the drumbeats with silence.

Zen, too, teaches one to accept and appreciate silence, and to use the power of silence to break up the constant noise of life. Silence is always the backdrop to life, though in daily life we usually ignore it or cover it up. Zen meditation helps one to hear the silence behind existence. The famous koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” raises the question of silence, along with many other questions, and asks us to ponder, metaphorically, sound and non-sound, silence and non-silence.

Another way to think of silence is as a blank canvas on which music, or life, is painted. A visual artist must know the qualities of the paint they are using, but also how the paint soaks into the canvas, how it brushes across the fibers of the canvas, how it dries, drips or moves.

Musicians must have this same knowledge about the silent canvas on which they create music. Knowing how a note, chord, or melody line covers over and interacts with silence is essential to creating jazz. This knowledge does not need to be conscious or articulated. It is perhaps better as a felt, practiced, interior knowledge that is never, or rarely, spoken about.

To start a song, there is always a leap over the void into the song. In jazz, the count “a one, two, a one, two, three, four,” always has a moment of silence after the “four” and before the first beat. Musicians and listeners both need a passing moment of quiet before the music flows.

Zen meditation reveals there is never really any complete silence. There is always some noise, the call of birds, the creaking of wooden pillars, the shuffling of clothing, to expose silence as more of an idea than an actuality. Awareness of the idea of silence, or what is close to silence, though, is essential for both jazz and Zen.

Jazz music is a complex interaction between sound and silence. The skill of any musician is finding the right silent spaces to fill and being able to work with silence to create the right effects and the right feel. “Right” is of course the wrong word, since there can be no right or wrong in jazz, only sound or silence, and the back and forth between the two could always be different.

In both jazz and Zen, silence accompanies and precedes action, and the awareness of the silence is what produces the quality and sensitivity of the action, that is, of the quality and sensitivity of music, and of life.