My All-Time Favorite Quote About Music (and Life)
One bit of advice from Charlie Parker (sort-of) that I can never get out of my head
Starting this week, I will be moving from two essays per week to just one. With my teaching schedule, research, other projects, and family life, I want to make sure I embrace a writing cadence I can stick to consistently without any drop-off in quality.
Essays will be posted Mondays, and weekly recommendation posts will move to Friday. Thank you for reading!
Quotes are funny things.
We hear them or read them, maybe from a friend or maybe in a book, or maybe we see one on an arty Instagram post.
Often, we forget them as soon as something else catches our attention.
But sometimes a quote meets the right person at the right time, and it just sticks in our heads. Even if it’s simple, even if it represents meaning that we know already.
Then we dig around, and to our disappointment discover that that person didn’t really say that, or maybe no one said that, at least not anyone important. Or maybe they said it, but not quite as succinctly or memorably as the quote you saw. Maybe they said something like it, and later someone polished it up and straightened it out and made it snappier.
This is one of those instances.
My favorite quote, it turns out, is actually a paraphrasing of a much longer, much less punchy quote.
The original comes from the jazz great Charlie Parker, a midcentury saxophonist, bandleader and composer. Parker lived only 34 years — just three more than I’ve logged so far — but in that time he managed to revolutionize jazz music with the free-flowing, virtuosic style known as bebop.
It should be noted that the average person hates bebop. It’s usually a nightmare to listen to, and if you’re someone who dislikes jazz music, bebop is probably the kind of music you think of when you think of jazz.
That said, Parker was an artistic revolutionary. He broke jazz out of its traditional, by-the-numbers approach of his time and turned it into an art form whose avant-garde foundation allowed later geniuses like John Coltrane to create otherworldly masterpieces.
But none of that matters to us here today.
What matters is this quote which I once read as an impressionable teenager who loved music:
“Learn the changes, then forget them.”
In jazz music, the “changes” refer to the underlying harmony of a song or composition. In pop music we call them the chords. If you’ve ever taken piano lessons, the “changes” are probably what you played on your left hand. They’re what the bass player in a band plays (usually).
In traditional jazz music, as in most music of all genres, the chords or changes determine which notes you can play in your melody and be “in key.”
So to give a basic example, let’s say you sit at a piano and play the following chords:
C Major — F Major — A Minor — G Major.
That’s a very basic chord progression, in the key of C.
There are 12 notes in a Western musical scale, but only some of those are “in key” when playing the above chords. On a piano, they’re the white keys. If you play any of the white keys in any sequence over those four chords up there, they’ll all sound like they belong. Play any of the black keys, and you’ll instantly feel that something feels off.
But Charlie Parker looked at those black keys and thought: How can I make these fit? How can I play a solo where there is no “in” or “out” of key?
The way Charlie Parker played and composed meant that he could play any of the 12 notes in the scale, arranging them in such a way relative to the underlying changes that they could all “work.”
This is a dramatic oversimplification, but it gets the general point across.
Now if you’re someone who hates bebop-style jazz, or free jazz, you probably hear it and think, “Well yeah, anyone can just play a bunch of wrong notes over a bunch of chords and say ‘I’m a genius.’”
But what made the greats like Parker and Coltrane truly great was that they knew when and where and how and why to play which wrong notes relative to the underlying changes. They knew that to play out of the key, you first had to totally master what it meant to be in key.
Hence: Learn the changes, then forget them.
All my life, I’ve benefitted from the simple wisdom of those six words.
Again and again, I’ve found that mastery (or at least a passable impression of mastery) comes from investing the time to understand the way things are done so that you can then strategically ignore those conventions whenever they don’t serve you.
In my early years, I often tried to do the latter before I did the former. I instinctively wanted to rebel, to do things “differently” — but the result was that I often ran face-first into the concrete wall of a question: “differently” compared to what?
And, even more important: Why?
It turns out you can’t effectively rebel against conventions you don’t understand. Before the rulebook can be thrown out and rewritten, it helps to maybe read it first.
They say that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. But equally dangerous is the fact that those who learn history incompletely are doomed to learn the wrong lessons from it. We need to know what went wrong so we can surgically extricate the right. We can’t just go in with a chainsaw and start cutting.
They’re both equally essential, the learning and the forgetting.
That’s what mastery is, and that’s what Charlie Parker was talking about. And while the real quote — the one he actually said — isn’t quite as catchy, it does a better job of explaining why you should learn all the rules of your chosen craft just so you can skillfully ignore them.
You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
Think of a house. You start with the foundation, an absolutely essential part of the structure.
But if you get impatient with pouring concrete and start throwing up walls and terraces and staircases, your house won’t stand.
Meanwhile, if you get so attached to the comforting solidity of the foundation, you’ll never stop pouring concrete.
Arts, professions, relationships, they need that foundational building time. That’s why so many people who we think are “overnight” successes actually toiled in obscurity for years before their break.
Getting up in front of the world and ignoring all the rules? That’s a privilege earned by those who have built the right foundation.
Once you’ve got it?
Forget all that and just wail.
I'm an old musician now. So, forgetting the changes comes so much easier.
If you google Kerouac and Charlie Parker you'll get a writer's take on this great artist.