How to View Mistakes as Opportunities:
An Example from Jazz Juggling
“I think a wrong note is when you give up on that note. When you give up on it then it’s wrong . . . [if you] play something that doesn’t sound good . . . then play your way out of it.” – Joe Magnarelli
By Wayne Taylor
Sunny Day Counseling Guest Blogger
A few weeks ago, I took my wife Miriam to see a performance of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. It was one of those live vaudeville shows that I like, and it was an interesting combination of juggling, clown pantomime, percussion performance, and pun-based jokes: “music comes from the Latin word moo-sikwhich means ‘the cow is sick.’” Overall, it was enjoyable, but uneven. In their first juggling routine, there were a couple of places where two of the jugglers dropped their clubs, but I figured that at our local Cultural Center you get what you pay for.
The best bit in the show was a piece they called “Jazz Juggling.” They started it by attributing the following quote to the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie: “In jazz there is no such thing as a wrong note; it’s the note you play afterwards that determines whether it is wrong.” The Karamazov Brothers’ application of this idea was that a wrong note in juggling is dropping a club. But the premise of jazz juggling is that when a club is dropped, it’s what the jugglers do to get the club back into the routine that makes it interesting. They began the performance by passing clubs back and forth between the four of them, and then they began dropping clubs and finding clever ways to get the clubs back into motion. Then they started dropping clubs at a faster pace and at inconvenient times and in awkward places until it reached a point where the clubs were flying off the stage. Throughout the routine they kept most of the clubs in the air, and the entertainment came from watching the clever and sometimes amazing things they did to keep the routine going. Conceptually, I thought it was brilliant.
In the context of classical music, wrong notes can ruin a performance. But in the context of jazz music the success of a performance is determined by all the notes—even the accidental or unexpected ones. In a juggling routine, dropping a club can ruin a performance. But for the Karamazov Brothers, a dropped club presented the opportunity to do new and interesting things in the performance. It was in a way a visual and kinetic example of Jazz historian Rowe Monk’s observation “I think that all the musicians who addressed this question would say that if you play something by accident, take responsibility for it, account for it, and try to make it work.”
The interesting question, then, is can this idea be applied to life? What if this idea can be applied to the unexpected, accidental or even intentionally bad things that happen in life? Do serious mistakes ruin our lives? The consequences of a wrong note in life, of course, can be catastrophic and long lasting, but perhaps only if things stop on that note.
When the stakes are high there is a natural tendency to lay blame outside ourselves, to cover up the mistake, perhaps even lie about what happened. But this isn’t taking responsibility for the bad note; rather, it’s a strategy that results in emotional and spiritual dissonance that ultimately makes things worse. It can be difficult to take responsibility for something that is embarrassing or humiliating or something that destroys the image we had of ourselves. For those who lack courage, everything stops with the mistake. The dropped club stops the performance. The wrong note is either the last sound heard or the start of a discordant cacophony of hiding from it. But for those who take the steps to fully own the wrong note, and the consequences that attend it, can find they are at the starting point of one of the most interesting and rewarding passages of their lives.
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Rowe, Monk. “A Wrong Note?” Jazz Backstory, Adventures in the Jazz Archive. 3 October 2010. http://jazzbackstory.blogspot.com/2010/10/wrong-note.html