Nobody is perfect. Even if you’re a great musician and have been playing in front of people for years, you will eventually mess up onstage. Whether your mistake is subtle enough to be hidden with a straight face or painfully obvious, the best part of messing up is you can learn from your experiences and do better next time.
Throughout my musical career I’ve endured many such experiences. Below is an example of one such error that happened in college and what I learned.
Any Genre Can Be Jazz?
When I was in college, I took a jazz improvisation class which proved to be one of the most fun courses during my college career. I had the opportunity to play with many musicians who were performing at the professional or semi-professional level.
During this time, I learned so much about my place as a bassist in the band, as well as how to communicate with an audience through the band’s dynamics. Students learned various jazz tunes throughout the term and formed groups with classmates to perform twice in a live, gig-like setting. Our gigs consisted of a dress rehearsal at a coffee shop, and a main event in a theater.
One of the musical philosophies that stuck out to me was that “any genre can be jazz” if performed correctly. The idea was that instead of playing a bossa, swing, or funk tune, you could also steal your favorite country or metal track and structure the song using a jazz-like paradigm. This could mean passing a solo to different members of the band for a set number of bars or just vamping on a riff for a while, reading the audience and playing what they want to hear next.
Unfortunately that last part was lost on me… as great as it may sound in theory, reading the audience can be tricky to get right in practice. In any case, I was ambitious to get started and volunteered to co-lead a band with a very talented girl who was a saxophonist and a singer. We started brainstorming which of our favorite songs we would cover and came up with a list that looked like this:
- Can’t Stop by Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Diary of Jane by Breaking Benjamin
- Knights of Cydonia by Muse
- Orion by Metallica
None of these are what you would consider to be jazz.
Dress Rehearsal
There were a few problems with our selection. Our audience was expecting traditional jazz tunes from artists like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. This set us up for failure right away. We also didn’t have enough time to practice the songs as a team due to scheduling conflicts, so we had some pretty rough patches in the harder sections.
The only thing worse than playing the wrong music is playing the wrong music poorly. Not only did we fail to play as a cohesive group, we suffered from all the usual sound level issues that often come with playing with a large group in a small room; we played too loud, but also couldn’t hear each other.
As far as the actual performance, it’s hard to know where to even begin because just about everything that could’ve gone wrong did. Knights of Cydonia in particular was so bad we probably should have stopped playing and moved on.
Main Event
After the dress rehearsal, we worked with the instructor to refactor our setlist. We threw in a rendition of Take Five with a twist: the last measure of every phrase had six beats instead of five. We also worked in a transition from Take Five to Can’t Stop. We ditched Knights of Cydonia, our most disastrous tune, so we could be as polished as possible. In the end, everything went smoothly if not perfectly, and we had a blast.
Lessons Learned
Though this experience happened over a decade ago, it stuck with me; I don’t think I’ve been part of such a spectacular trainwreck since. It’s something we all laugh about now, although I still cringe a bit when I hear Knights of Cydonia.
I want to end on an encouraging note. Chances are you’ve never messed up this bad in front of an audience. Perhaps you have and are afraid to try again. Although you may feel embarrassed in the moment, the best thing to do is shake it off and keep going. Try not to let fear stop you from doing the things you love. Take what you can from the experience and don’t dwell on the negative.
It’s not like this incident was the end of my musical career, either. I still keep in touch with my instructor, and he has since recommended me for several groups who needed a bass player (I even subbed for a house band at a jazz jam).
Whatever you do, be it music or something else, don’t give up without a fight! Keep working with perseverance until you achieve your goals. When things go sideways, dust yourself off and use the experience to your advantage; now you know what not to do and won’t make the same mistake twice.
