Jazz, Startups, and Chaos
I grew up around jazz. My Grandfather owned a jazz club in Tokyo. I was a jazz piano major at a small arts school in Seattle, and though it ultimately wasn’t for me, my childhood was jazz. By the time I was 12, I playing with professional musicians at the Ballard Bait and Tackle live venue in Seattle. I sometimes ponder what would have happened had I not moved to Tokyo a year later that disrupted all of my lessons. That’s jazz is it not? By the age of 12-13, one might know the basic melody of life and my Tokyo years were playing off the melody. It wasn’t sheet music that was handed to everyone around me. It was a left hand built around scribbled chord progressions and the synergy from the room. Tokyo was “you learned enough about life, now go explore the world solo.” And speaking of solos, there were those too in jazz. Those were prompted by a simple look or nod. Jazz has a lot to do with risks and living in the moment. With music in general, so much is built around the room. If the audience is feeling it, you’re in for a wonderful night. If not, you very well may want to slink off stage to never appear again. There are plenty of articles on UX and startups, but many of them are like sheet music. I’m here to give another angle; that the successful startups are the ones who played off the melody, broke the rules, and were unafraid of experimentation.
The thing about jazz as well, is that a lot of people don’t get it. Maybe they equate a saxophone to elevator music and lump everything into that category just as they would think that any black liquid must be coffee. I’ve pitched to many accelerators, generators, and ‘expert’ panels who are so confident in their expertise but do not have the background of experimentation. They understand sheet music and that’s wonderful but they do not conceive the kind of risk it takes to be the one on stage. They are more comfortable in the dark corners of the room judging whether or not the band can make money. They are the record labels that have never picked up music themselves. They know the key demographics of the 12-14 audience and wonder if it would translate. Do kids like jazz? No, they label it too boring or perhaps too complex. Music that sells is sheet music, the kind they understand. Easy to read so they too can read along. Challenges are too risky. Experimentation is dangerous. They enjoy the pop bands playing the audio behind the act as they run around stage lip syncing to carefully crafted lyrics often written by middle aged grown ups. They prefer cover songs because they know it has worked before. Therefore, there’s a bit of a disconnect from what they say they want versus what they really want. They say they want innovation, but innovation is not safe. They want the formula. The thing is, a lot of jazz musicians can play the popular music of our day but it doesn’t work the other way around. If you want innovation, you’d have to trust the innovator and if you don’t have a taste for innovation, then you’ll enjoy the same thing that everyone in the crowd enjoys right now. Right now is not exactly innovation. Innovation is years from now and you’d have to be able to read between the lines if you’re going to see it.
I know it may be strange to say, but music used to not always be digital. We learned our instruments and played them in a room with one another well before an idea was documented easily on a computer. We’d then take that idea and play it in front of an audience. That’s risk. The practice of constantly “putting yourself out there” is something I respect from anyone in any industry- yet, it’s all a process. Good musicians can tell whether a song is great or not just by the idea. We can fill in the various parts just through a hum or a whistle. We can take an idea and create something beautiful with zero resources, but the hardest part is creating the resource because we live in a subjective marketplace where many who can provide those resources cannot create. They cannot hear the melody in a whistle. They cannot play off the melody. The cannot solo. They were hired by innovators who took the initial risk and translated it to safety. With that safety, they desire to create safety through dispersing resources to the things they can recognize- which is a song they’ve already heard before. Play a rough recording on your phone to one of these gatekeepers and they’ll be confused by the sound quality. They do not hear the song, they need the whole context.
I’ve written about this example before when Joshua Bell, a renowned and accomplished violinist experimented with whether people would recognize quality. He opened his case to his 3.5 million violin and began to play in a busy subway station. Would anyone stop? Would anyone recognize him or the quality of play? And you’d be right if you guessed that hardly anyone did. In the wrong setting, no one cared. Anyone can busk in a busy metro station. Unfortunately, because many start ups do not pitch to innovators, we are playing in the wrong setting. There must be a crowd already there for someone to recognize quality. They reason, “there’s a crowd so it must be good,” rather than knowing the craftsmanship of the thing they are judging. Innovators understand innovation just as musicians understand music. Building a start up FOR innovators? Well, that’s been a challenge to say the least and one I have yet to communicate effectively.
If you’re a startup founder, an artist, an innovator, or creative- take heart. Oscar Wilde once said, “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” If the judges and gatekeepers do not see, it’s because they judge by a separate metric. Keep going and eventually you will find someone who is the first person to stop. That person will be one who judges separate from the crowd; someone who understands the thing they stopped for in a world full of people who cling to order over chaos. If you want innovation, you might find it in jazz. Building on top of a melody, full of the risk of failure, but climaxing to something original and new.