A Lesson Learned at SJW From Clark Terry by Rob Kohler,
SJW Jazz Camp Faculty Director
A Montana native, Rob Kohler is a bassist who has performed jazz, classical, and pop music all over the world. His playing, composing, and producing skills have appeared on recordings by groups such as the Jared Burrows Trio, the Olem Alves Band, Three Form, This World, and the Platt/Kohler Trio. He has also toured and performed with such artists as Stefan Karlsson, Alice DiMicele, Madeline Eastman, John Stowell, Danny Gottlieb, Nancy King, Brian Bromberg, and Art Lande. Kohler has also been long active as a private tutor and school music teacher.

The young kid walked up to the front of the room full of anxious musicians and stood in front of the old man sitting in a chair.  “Come on, play me something,” Clark Terry said with a twinkle in his eye. 
       “What should I play?” 
       “I don’t care—whatever you want to play.” The kid put the horn to his lips and began to fluff around on a few memorized licks, his nervousness apparent.  After he started to get his confidence back a little and the tension in the room mellowed out, Mr. Terry demanded abruptly, “Wait a minute. Now play me all the wrong notes you can.”  With a little good-humored nudging and some nervous laughter from the audience, Terry was able to get the eager but confused student to start making some god-awful noises out of tune and out of time.  “Now stop.”  Clark Terry looked around the hushed room.  After an exaggerated pause, he said, “See, the world didn’t come to an end, and you played all those bad notes.”  The room erupted with laughter.  After it subsided, Terry turned to the kid and said, “Now you’re ready to play me something!”  And you know what?  He did.

I don’t know who that brave student was, but I hope the lesson he learned that afternoon continues to inspire him today.  I know that the lesson Clark Terry gave to the rest of us who were present observing made a lasting impression.  But what was the lesson?  Was it about being humble enough to make mistakes in front of a room full of musicians? Or was it about clearing the air so you could play something for real without pretense?  Was it about having the courage to try something new, something out of your comfort zone?  Was it about being in the moment so completely that music could start to happen?  Was it about just having fun and not being so serious?  For me, the lesson included all of the above.  These seem to be the kinds of lessons we have to be taught over and over again.  You can make mistakes and the world doesn’t come to an end, so lighten up and have some fun.  When you reach for something and don’t quite get it, it’s exciting and sometimes beautiful.  One of my favorite musical examples is Miles Davis’s playing on “It Never Entered My Mind.”  He hits a couple of pitches on this famous recording that are, in their own way, perfect, emotional, and beautiful, but not in the chord (nor are they even notes that can be played on a trumpet as the rest of us know it).

Branford Marsalis said during a Master class given at SJW that if he didn’t fall on his face at least three times per concert, then he wasn’t playing jazz.  The very act of being humiliated by the music is what lets him know that he is really playing, not just reciting riffs that he knows will work.  Some players call this “reaching for it.”  Audiences will say that a musician “phoned it in” if the performance doesn’t move them.  As performers, we have to remember that this sense of fun and adventure is what communicates feelings and emotions to a listener.  I have found that I get the most positive comments about my playing when I’ve had to work really hard to make the music come out.  My perception is that I am struggling and not sounding very good, but the audience is hearing that struggle and effort and ultimately just hearing the music in that moment.  So perfection might be our ideal as performers, but the audience often has a different perception altogether.  Gary Peacock once told me that he wanted to play every note like it was the first time he had ever heard music.  If it didn’t sound right, he would notice it and make it beautiful.  In other words, he wants to bring a kind of wide-eyed innocence and sense of wonder to the music.  Because his perception is that he is hearing it for the first time, it can’t be wrong.  The thought process or sense of panic that happens when you think you have landed on a wrong note and ruined your solo can play havoc with your concentration for the rest of the set.  But Clark Terry, Miles Davis, and Branford Marsalis teach us that to keep the music flowing, the right response to a note that doesn’t sound quite the way you had planned is to recognize that the world has not ended and then to slide up to a different pitch or change the color of your tone. In the example of Miles, he made that “out-of-tune” note sound like heartbreaking melancholy.

It seems to me that Clark Terry’s lesson in that Master Class was that he didn’t want to hear what the student had practiced to fearful perfection, but rather he wanted to hear what the student was able to communicate through music with qualities of innocence and beauty that came from an effort and conviction to play something for real.