88 Muses

Jazz Pianists, Harry Likas

Most jazz players don’t stall because they “think too much”—they stall because their thinking isn’t yet fast enough to keep pace with the harmony. When the chords start moving, the brain has to instantly recognize shapes, tendencies, and voice‑leading pathways, and if that recognition isn’t automatic, the player is forced into slow, conscious calculation. The result isn’t overthinking; it’s latency—a delay between hearing the change and knowing what it means under the fingers. Jazz is a real‑time motor skill, and like any motor skill, fluency comes from reducing that delay until the harmony feels as immediate and effortless as spoken language. Players don’t need less thinking; they need thinking that’s so quick and embodied it no longer interrupts the line.

Love it!

John Coltrane learned that the hard way that Miles didn’t hand out compliments easily...

If you played in his band, you learned through pressure, silence, and the occasional brutal one-liner.

By 1960, Coltrane’s solos had become legendary — long, searching, unstoppable streams of sound. He could stretch a single tune for 20 minutes without repeating himself. For some listeners it was hypnotic; for others, exhausting.

One night after a show, Coltrane admitted to Miles that he didn’t know how to stop.

“I start playing,” he said, “and I just can’t figure out where to end.”

Miles, deadpan as ever, replied: “Take the horn out of your mouth"

That was it. Lesson over.

Behind the humour was something deeper — two completely different approaches to creativity. Miles believed in space, in the power of silence between notes. Coltrane was obsessed with searching, following each phrase until it reached its spiritual limit.

The tension between those ideas made their music together so explosive. You can hear it on Kind of Blue: Miles playing short, perfectly placed phrases; Coltrane spiralling outward in search of something infinite.

By the time Coltrane left Miles’s group later that year, he’d already begun to map out a new sound. He formed his own quartet, recorded My Favorite Things, and by 1965 released A Love Supreme — a record that turned jazz into prayer.

That one exchange — half joke, half philosophy — summed up their difference. Miles wanted each note to mean more. Coltrane wanted to find all the notes that could exist.

And somehow, both were right.

The story has survived because it captures a universal truth about art: the balance between saying too little and saying too much.

Miles’ timing and restraint shaped modern jazz. Coltrane’s intensity and devotion expanded it into something spiritual.

Two artists, one simple piece of advice — and two completely different roads that changed music forever.

[📸 Miles Davis: William Gottlieb, public domain // John Coltrane: Distributed by Impulse! Records, Public domain, both via Wikimedia Commons]

“We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution — real girls’ talk.”

Nina Simone died on this day in 2003. A celebrated musician, prominent civil rights activist, and radical, Simone brought revolutionary praxis to her music.

📰 Read "Nina Simone Was a Radical": https://jacobin.com/2021/04/nina-simone-radical-music-lorraine-hansberry

Wes Montgomery never used a pick, only the fleshy part of his right thumb. He never stood up but sat back, holding his guitar at a semi-horizontal angle, 45 degrees from his lap. His solos would swell into octaves and block chords, driven more swiftly and cleanly than most players can articulate single-string notes.In later life one of Wes’ most intriguing quotes was: “You shoulda heard me 20 years ago, when I could really play.” Fans took this with a pinch of salt, yet his remarkable self-deprecation was probably genuine and rooted in the fact that he was an ear player, entirely self-taught and unable to sight-read music. Many great musicians have found it necessary to conceal this fact, because learning by ear instead of learning by eye remains the last taboo.
When asked if he could read, the great pianist Erroll Garner once replied: “Not enough to hurt my playing.” Art Tatum, Monty Alexander and Django Reinhardt (in his way every bit as distinctive a guitarist as Wes) did not read music either. All are or were not only wonderful ear players but also magnificent individualists whose recorded work, unlike that of so many conservatory graduates, can be recognised instantly. Guitarist Martin Taylor, who learned to read only after learning to play, once defined jazz as a process of elimination, involving the acceptance of attractive ideas and the rejection of unattractive ones. “In that sense all jazz musicians are self-taught,” he concluded. “Particularly the best ones.”
-jazzwise

Photo: Jean-Pierre Leloir.

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Joni Mitchell

Wonderful history here...