It came up again during a Jazz piano lesson the other day. My young student said, “I’m trying as much as possible to only play what I hear.” This undergrad music major was reiterating Jazz orthodoxy: Improvisation, creating new melodies (or harmonies), should be the result of pre-existing, internalized motives, phrases and harmonies. I’ve heard this same mandate from touring musicians at my University: You wait for the internal prompt, then you improvise.

But I don’t agree, at least not completely. Jazz improvisation is much more nuanced and neurologically complex than that. Although I try to avoid just playing a string of “correct” notes when I improvise, I cannot always tell if I’m making up stuff from what’s already in my head, or if I’m hearing what my hands are telling my head to play. In other words, sometimes you play what you hear, and sometimes you hear what you play.

And for beginning improvisers, the freedom to just try out new ideas, phrases or short motives is imperative. New improvisers haven’t acquired the large, mental library of ideas that more experienced players have acquired over the decades. And what’s wonderful about this freedom to explore without knowing how things will sound ahead of time is this: you start to put those files away in your “synaptic hard drive” for later use. The great Jazz composer/saxophonist Wayne Shorter encouragingly said (paraphrase): all practice is good, because you store these deposits into your improv library for later use. And the more ideas that go into that repository, the richer your improv will be. We’re all making new deposits by melodic exploring, and this reconfigures and deepens our improv knowledge. If we’re pianists, or guitarists or brass or wind players, or percussionists, our hands develop their own “intelligence”, and they tell us what they “hear.”

And this goes for life: For the past several years especially, I’ve looked for and read authors that I have never read: Mikhail Bulgakov; Franz Kafka; Leo Tolstoy’s novels and short fiction; Anton Chekhov; Vladimir Nabakov; Dostoevsky’s short fiction; Americans Carson McCullers, Lorrie Moore, James Baldwin and William Faulkner, and most recently the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart,” to name just a handful. Talk about enriching, deepening, humbling, course correcting stuff! These men and women pack our idea vaults with an incredible range of human realities! And one result is; anything that we then create is much better, much more authentic, much more compelling.

So don’t just play what you hear: hear what you play so that later on, you can play it anew in a truly original way.