Says Harris, "A mistake, from the perspective of a jazz musician...we don't really see it as a mistake. The only mistake is that I'm not able to perceive what someone else did. Every mistake is an opportunity in jazz." He demonstrates by playing in a certain key and asking the keyboardist to play a note not in that key.
After the wrong note, the band keeps at the same theme, and the note stands out like an unanswered call. "Hello, I'm here, please acknowledge." Nothing. Harris says the mistake was not the note, but that "we didn't react to it. It was an opportunity that was missed."
Then they play again, and the band shifts after the gnarly note comes in. Harris moves the key of the song, the drummer changes tempo. That wrong note sounds right all of a sudden. It sounds like, well, jazz.
A related riff appeared in the Times, which profiled Mr. Boyd E. Dunlop an 85-year-old jazz pianist from Buffalo who was rediscovered in the nursing home he lived in ("An Aging Pianist Finds A New Audience"). Mr. Dunlop's opportunity was to coax some music out of a broken-down old piano:
For years, the donated piano sat upright and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafeteria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys, but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day after surrendering day, the flawed piano remained mercifully silent.
Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop, and he could play a little. Actually, he could play a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance of improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life’s all....
Mr. Dunlop arrived at the brown-brick nursing home nearly four years ago, a strong-willed but slightly bent half-note. He had 50 cents in his pocket, too much sugar in his blood, and a need to be around others. He liked to sit in the lobby and greet people, especially the women.
After a while, Mr. Dunlop let it be known that he was a musician. This did not distinguish him in a place where someone might claim to be a retired concert violinist or President Obama’s mother, and, in the first case at least, be telling the truth. Also, music here usually meant something to be endured — the weekly sing-along, say, with a resident armed with his own electric keyboard.
The broken cafeteria piano was a tease that Mr. Dunlop could not resist. He played when no one else was around, between meals, early and late. He learned how to dodge the piano’s flaws, how to elongate the good notes and suffocate the bad....
In the spring of 2010, a freelance photographer named Brendan Bannon arrived to discuss an art project with nursing home administrators — and Mr. Dunlop greeted him at the door. Mr. Bannon is balding, so Mr. Dunlop assumed for some reason that he was a doctor. “Hey doc!” he shouted. “Take my temperature.”
A bond quickly developed, and before long Mr. Dunlop invited his new friend to hear him play what he referred to as “that thing they call a piano.” Mr. Bannon, who knows his Mingus from his Monk, could not believe the distinctive, vital music emanating from a tapped-out piano missing a few keys.
“He was a beautiful player,” Mr. Bannon says. “He was making it work even though it was out of tune.”
When all you have is a broken piano, if you want to play, you make it work. We can create mistakes by kicking something off and then not paying attention to how the world reacts around the idea - customers, co-workers, etc. Or, like Harris, and Mr. Dunlop, we can sense and respond - put something out there, then listen, then adjust.
Remember, there are no wrong notes in jazz. So how do we react when life throws things at us that upend our best-laid plans?
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