A Master Class in Jazz Performance and Creativity with Pianist Kenny Werner

A transcript from ArtistsHouseMusic

Opening: The Invitation to Dialogue

I’m going to throw it open if you have a question on anything involving anything in the world—I can answer it, you know. Nuclear Physics, transportation in the 19th century, trade with China… Do you know anything about the Yankees? Yeah, they won the war.

Anyway, so you can formulate something you want, or we can just begin.

On Inconsistency in Performance

Student: Inconsistency of performing—performing on a level of feeling like you’re just connected to your thoughts. What about when you’re in the zone, just being in control?

Well, there’s a couple of issues there. One is you have to learn to play what is within your control, because what happens is the mind sends messages—like, “you should be playing more burning,” or “it should be more modern,” or “it should be more authentic traditional.” The mind has always got possible criticisms, and when you try to respond to those criticisms, you actually move out of your comfort zone into a place that you’re not familiar with.

That’s sort of the ego. The ego wants you to go for things that you haven’t practiced and shouldn’t be there anyway. So what you have to learn to do is play within your comfort zone.

The Disease State of Mind in Education

It’s very hard when you’re in school, because you’re always learning new things. So you get into a sort of disease state of mind where anything you play easily can’t be worth much. People are so busy trying to learn new things that the stuff you already own—“oh, that’s nothing, it’s this stuff I got to learn.”

Yet performance is always about playing well within that comfort zone. You want what you play to resonate, and it won’t resonate if you’re not in control of the information.

The Zone and Self-Criticism

How do you resist the mind’s propensity for bringing up issues and messing up your groove? Basically, your groove is messed up by the mind or a lack of technique. It’s always two reasons why a performance doesn’t go well:

1. You’re not releasing yourself to the zone of just playing
2. Technical limitations

What Does “The Zone” Mean?

The zone is created by not criticizing yourself in performance. You cannot afford to criticize yourself in performance—that breaks the zone, that breaks the groove.

Of course, you may hear notes that you don’t like, but don’t key in on that. In my book, there’s an exercise in the second step where you practice a sort of brainwashing—you brainwash yourself to like every sound you make. Not to flinch from any sound you make.

That is the closest thing to Enlightenment in music—loving absolutely every sound you make, no matter where it is.

You’re already halfway there. People are intrigued with that because they don’t accept themselves on that level. So when they see a musician accepting everything they’re doing with love, that’s half of the attraction—the music being the other half.

The Practice of Non-Reaction

The first thing you need to do is learn how to touch your instrument without thought. That way, you stand a better chance of not thinking on the gig. That’s a long process.

The first thing that happens is you learn how to touch the instrument and not react. That may sound strange, but it’s your reaction that gets in the way of the groove.

[Demonstrates at piano]

Here’s the groove. There’s one note, there’s another—they all have equal value if you don’t judge them. Can you feel that? This is no plan, but whatever I play just feels perfect… unless I try to create it, plan it, or imitate—then you’ll hear it won’t groove. Notes will sound wrong when I try to place the notes too carefully.

Performance Is About Not Being Careful

Performance is about not being careful at all. But if you’re not careful, where’s your safety net?

Your safety net is in you. It’s not in the fact that the audience will understand because you read a book. The safety net is never in the world—the safety net resides in you.

For example, if you are always worried about having enough money, the safety net is not in having enough money. Because if you have enough money, the next thing you’ll be worried about is losing that money. That’s what the mind does.

If you are totally controlled by your mind, then you’re always in a firestorm of mental activity. Maybe 25 to 50 years of therapy would do something for that, but there’s another way: you just focus on something else other than your mind. When it happens, it happens immediately, all at once. Suddenly—wow, I’m just playing because my hands are playing. That’s always exactly the right stuff. That’s the right formula for living.

Practicing the Love of Every Sound

There is a place for thinking, but it’s not in performance. Just knowing that is not enough—you need to have a practice.

The Sequence

1. Learn how to touch your instrument without thinking—or for singers, making a sound without thinking. “Is this a jazz sound? Is this the right sound? Is it pretty enough?” The rough thing about school is you’re trying to educate yourself, and it’s awfully hard not to fall into the hole of always criticizing yourself. Education stimulates criticism.

2. Learn to aggressively love every sound—not just accepting it, but actively loving it. In the beginning, you have to fake it. Before you have a chance to think, go: “Ah! That’s the most beautiful sound I ever heard!” You convince yourself. You don’t want to wait and evaluate.

You’re aiming for something that happens after you affirm it. If you’re waiting for proof that you sound good, it’s like a dog chasing its tail—you never quite get there. You affirm that what you’re playing is beautiful, and it becomes beautiful, because as you accept it, it starts to glow with your own acceptance.

From Practice Room to the Gig

Then you go to gigs, and it’s uneven—because you can’t ignore your attachments to that gig:

• You want to sound good
• You want the rest of the band to like you
• You want the club owner to give you the gig again
• You hope a record producer likes you
• You hope there’s a critic there writing good things (which he never is—he occasionally writes good things, but he’s never actually there)

These attachments make it difficult to let go like you were letting go in the practices. But as you keep practicing, letting go of your thoughts becomes less difficult and more natural.

Programming Your Mind

Eventually, you set up a program in your mind where to touch your instrument is to let go. When you touch your instrument, you go into a mental balance that you don’t even own the rest of the day.

The good news is that this can be programmed. As you program that, the inconsistencies in your performance will disappear. You’re looking for something to happen on the gig, but the mental preparation for that has to happen way off the gig.

Getting Better While Loving Everything

Student: How do you get better if you’re going to love everything you play? Don’t you need to be unsatisfied?

You don’t need to be unsatisfied in order to be motivated to go beyond. There are two functions in the brain—the left brain and the right brain.

Left Brain: The Business of Practice

The left brain is more intellectual—the side that takes care of business. Practicing is taking care of business. Practicing should not be sitting there for an hour just playing and enjoying yourself. That’s playing.

Practicing is the study of that which you do not know, or that which you haven’t gotten control of yet. That’s it.

The Problem with Diluted Practice

Efficient practicing means only dealing with things you’re not comfortable with yet—not sitting there and playing for an hour. Sometimes a practice session starts as practice but devolves into just playing. You start with a specific idea, but in a minute you’re just playing. That specific thing gets diluted; you start to cover more stuff as you’re practicing, and eventually you just start playing tunes over and over again.

The problem is: in real time, you can never get to any new stuff. You will not upgrade your language in real time.

Targeted Practice: The 20 Variations Method

You’ve got to take spots and upgrade through variation. If there’s two or three chords in a chord progression you don’t play well, go right to those chords. Don’t play the tune over and over again.

On those chords, don’t find one way of playing through them—find perhaps 20 ways, 20 good ways. Get them under your fingers enough so that key, that scale, or those changes start to feel more natural.

When are you done practicing those changes? The next time you play the tune and there was no more thought in your mind at that point than at any other point—then you’re done. You practice things until they bear fruit.

The Ego’s Sabotage of Practice

Learning to play on changes is very tricky, especially for adults. Adults don’t have the proper patience that it takes to become natural with something. An adult is always questioning themselves: “How am I doing today? How am I doing tomorrow? I should have learned this by now.”

The Grandiose Statements That Don’t Help

Let’s say you’ve been studying how to play on changes, you go to do a gig, and you can’t play on the changes. The adult ego says: “Oh man, I suck. I’ll never get this.” You make a bunch of grandiose statements that don’t help—and they’re not true.

The truth is that you’ve been practicing playing on changes for, say, three months, and it wasn’t ready to happen yet. They have a saying in various programs—AA and all that—they say:

Don’t quit a day before the miracle happens.

That could very well apply to your practicing.

Two Different Flows, Two Different Grooves

Your mind messes up more than one flow. It messes up the flow of playing, but it also messes up the flow of practicing. These are two different grooves.

The Flow of Playing

The flow of playing is the carte blanche acceptance of everything that’s coming through you. No time to judge—no centurions at the gate, so to speak. There’s no time for them to gate-check everything that’s coming through. You just got to let it come through.

The thing that makes it sound good is your love and acceptance of it. This sounds like Harold Hill from The Music Man, but I swear it’s true.

The Example of Monk

How do you think Monk played these notes? Every time—“Wait, what was that? That’s impossible! That’s all wrong! Or it’s corny!"—and it was the most wonderful thing I ever heard in my life.

The personal power of the musician makes those notes right. Monk simply didn’t have any discretionary powers when he played. He didn’t block anything. If he went [plays unusual note], it was okay.

The musicologist in the audience that day might have gone: “Wait a minute, I just told my class today that you can’t do this… and what he just played changed my life. I have to reconsider this.”

New theory is made by free souls who play the music by not having too much respect for the present theory. New stuff is created by people who are genuinely bored with what’s happening now and are not afraid to go into those other areas. What they have—that they never talk about—is a blanket acceptance of everything they do. That’s how they have the audacity to venture into these other areas.

The Flow of Practicing

What breaks the flow of practicing is also questioning yourself—but they’re different questions:

• “How am I doing?”
• “Why haven’t I learned to do this yet?”
• Questions that tend to break you down
• Injecting impatience into the process

The Toothbrush Analogy

If you could practice with the detachment and consistency that you brush your teeth… Think about that. You brush your teeth every day, once or twice a day.

You don’t brush your teeth and say: “Wow, we’re really getting somewhere here! I really feel like I’m getting to a new level of white teeth!” You don’t think of it progressively. You just do it, and you know you’re going to have to do it again. Doesn’t matter how it goes.

“Boy, that was an outstanding toothbrushing session!"—but that’s not going to change anything. You still got to brush them tonight or the next day.

If you thought of your practicing like that, you could attain anything you want. It doesn’t take talent to upgrade your playing—it takes patience. We don’t give ourselves the generosity. If we don’t get it in the time we think we should get it, we think we’re not going to get it.

That is the genesis of the negative attitude. All that’s happened is you haven’t gotten it yet. But the ego takes that and runs with it: “Oh, I can’t do this.” In fact, every limitation in our life is from these presumptions that aren’t true.

False Limiting Beliefs

“I can’t swing—I’m Danish.”

“I’m a woman; I can’t really… this is a man’s world, this jazz thing.”

You may never have said it out loud, but you may have thought it and then passed on that thought. These thoughts are limiting, and more importantly, they’re totally false. The person that doesn’t listen to those thoughts—they go very far.

Honest Self-Assessment Without Emotional Pain

If it hurts you to admit something you can’t do—rather than seeing it as an inventory which will help you figure out what to practice—you look at it as a weakness, or proof that you’re not really talented.

Rating Yourself Honestly

Whatever my worst gig is—that’s how I play. Whatever my worst gig, with things I did… “Oh man, I lost the time!” But it was, you know, could never happen again. It happened because I had a cold. It happened because I didn’t get enough sleep last night. It happened because I had a headache…

No. It happened because you haven’t mastered the form. If you mess up the form, it’s because you haven’t mastered form. If you lose time, it’s because you haven’t mastered meter. If you can only be rhythmic occasionally, then it’s better to say: “I’m not rhythmic yet”—as long as you don’t go into depression over it.

The Consequence of Dishonesty

If it hurts whenever you realize you can’t do something, then you’re going to rationalize. You’re going to gloss over subjects because you remember hearing yourself play it well once or twice.

Those parts of your game that have not been adequately worked—they will plague you for the rest of your life. They never get better just because you get older. If you have bad time, it’s not going to get better unless you admit it and do certain exercises. If you’re not good with changes, then every tune is going to be like an adventure—and not the adventure you were looking for.

Foundational Elements for Improvisers

There are foundational things that have to be learned for improvisers. Improvisers have to have an easy, if not effortless, relationship with:

• Rhythm
• Time
• Linear manifestations of chord changes

If that all comes easy, then just throw the music in front of the person and they’re just going to play it. As soon as they see it—because the elements have been learned.

Separating Self-Worth from Playing

The reason this gets to be an emotional thing is because we don’t just evaluate our playing—we evaluate ourselves. On a day that you play very badly, maybe in front of people where it was important, you don’t feel as worthy that day as you do the day that you really played great and a few people complimented you.

Does your self-esteem go up and down with your playing? Does that happen to everybody here?

That’s an unhealthy linkage. Your value as a human being is not to be tied into how good you play—for two reasons:

One, spiritually it’s not true. If you take the broader implication of what a life is, then it’s so much more than a solo or how you play an instrument. That’s taking this broad thing and subjecting it to the shallowest of definitions: “I’m a good player, therefore I am a valuable person.” Spiritually, that’s wrong. To devalue yourself that much is very ungodly.

Two, you won’t play as well. If you are going to go up and down with how good you play, then it’s going to become very important that you never go down. There’s pressure on you to play good—and it’s just being put on by you. Because if you don’t play good, you’re going to feel bad.

The Paradox of Caring

Think about a time that you really needed to sound good—because of who was there, what you wanted to show them, or a jury. How did you play? Was that your best performance, or was it your worst?

Did you not play better when you were just fooling around in the practice room the previous Tuesday? Then you get on this gig and everything feels like you’re fighting through a paper bag.

When you so wanted to play well, you didn’t. When you don’t care so much, it all flows.

The Philosophy of Not Caring

I adopted a philosophy about 30 years ago of not caring. And it’s going well. It’s going really well.

If I’m going to play in Carnegie Hall tonight, it doesn’t really do me any good to sit there going: “Wow, I’m playing in Carnegie Hall.” That does not help my performance. Therefore: Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Deli—doesn’t matter.

You have to have that sort of attitude in order to be consistent wherever you play. To get to you, you have to not be impressed by the externals. It’s a healthy way of not caring when you play.

Of course you care—you wouldn’t be in this school spending so much of somebody’s money trying to learn to play if you didn’t care. But it doesn’t help you to be aware of your caring when you play. It helps to not care when you play. That gets it flowing.

Why the Magic Doesn’t Last

I get a lot of calls from people that say: “I read your book, and for three months I had a great recording session.”

I say: “Well, you have to be concerned whether it lasts.” The reason it won’t last is because when you start to play well, that becomes your new attachment.

“Wow, I tried this approach of detaching myself, and I played great!” You keep thinking about that gig where you played so great. Next thing you know, it sets up an attachment for the next gig—and the next gig goes very poorly because you have an expectation that you didn’t have on the first gig.

The 30-Hour Train Ride Phenomenon

I can’t tell you how many gigs—you travel with people on a very long journey, 30 hours on a train. One guy’s got the runs, another guy’s got pneumonia. They’re pissed off that they had to travel all that way just to play this one damn concert.

“I don’t care about this gig. This promoter can’t treat us this way. We’ll show him.”

And you know what happens? Unfortunately, they play their asses off. Because they go in there like: “I don’t care about this promoter, I don’t care about this audience, I’m so pissed off at being on the train for 30 hours…” And all that sets up such freedom. That’s the best gig.

Then you play there the second night. Now you’re well rested, you took a shower, you’ve been in a nice hotel, you’ve meditated, you’ve had a good meal—and that gig doesn’t go as well.

It’s a funny paradox that pretty much is endemic to all humans.

Developing Consistent Detachment

Developing detachment creates a consistency in your performance. Developing detachment to your practice creates a consistency in your practicing.

Don’t say things to yourself like: “Wow, I’ve really got to get better by tomorrow,” or “ain’t getting any younger.” These thoughts just put pressure on the practicing. What does that pressure do? It causes you to practice more things because you want to get better faster.

But your concentration should be the thing that decides how much you can practice. You should practice as much as your concentration will allow.

If it’s one thing that you can examine—but you can examine it so well that you can begin to own it—that will have a better effect on your playing than if you practice 10 things and run through them because that’s your program, but you never notice anything change.

My playing changes all the time. I only practice one thing at a time. I may have three or four things, but in my mind, it’s one thing until I’m done with that, then there’s the next thing.

Playing vs. Practicing: Finding Balance

Student: How much should you balance practicing specific things and practicing performing?

To me, I don’t find it good to practice performing, because sometimes all my best stuff comes out in the practicing of performing. I have so many stories where we were rehearsing the day of and it was going so well—and we should have stopped, because that night it wasn’t as easy.

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

Playing is completely right brain. Now, you’re not going to run your life with your right brain, because you need to get paid, get places on time, catch subways. That’s left brain. With your right brain, you’re going to be late for everywhere and not going anywhere.

But when I get on stage, it’s all right brain: Yes, yes, yes, yes! Oh, I love that! Yes, yes, yes! More! Do it to me! That’s the only message I want in my brain until the light goes off. Then I walk off the stage as if it never happened—because I don’t want to be attached to that performance so that the next one could be good too.

No Formula for Balance

I don’t think it’s a question of balance, because one should never not play when one feels like playing. That goes against one’s own nature.

But a lot of times, people who play a lot don’t have the patience to practice. They also don’t have the method to practice—they don’t know what to practice. That is the biggest thing I find with people trying to get better.

So that starts with getting a good diagnosis of how you’re playing. Not just criticism, but a real diagnosis: “Your rhythm could be this… your lines are very limited to that…” And then be given exercises to correct them.

A lot of times you do a clinic and there’s a great player there—not necessarily a great teacher, but a great player—and he goes: “Oh man, you’re not swinging.” Next week: “Still not swinging, man.” Don’t just criticize—give somebody an idea what to do about it.

Songs and Deep Familiarity

Student: What’s a song? Does a song access you, or do you access a song?

You access a song first, and then as you familiarize yourself with it, you and the song become one. The most natural thing you could do is play that song.

For me, I probably have that relationship with Stella by Starlight. I could be on my deathbed… The reason I play that so well is because that key is comfortable, most of those chords are comfortable, and I don’t have to be too interesting in my lines because the chord progression is so interesting.

It’s like being home, playing Stella by Starlight.

Recording What You Know, Not What You’re Working On

When I start with a new tune, I will work on that tune until it starts to feel like home—because that’s when my voice starts to come out on the song. Your voice won’t come out on material you’re not familiar with.

Here’s a very good strategy: if you’re going to do your recording, your CD—and everybody will, not that the world needs it, but you will anyway—it would be a mistake to record the things you’re working on. Record the things you know.

We don’t want to know what you’re working on. We want to be enlightened, enlivened, charmed, lifted up. Once you get out of school, that’s it for projects. You better go out there and have total control.

The Presence of Carmen McRae

When I think of one of the most compelling, amazing performances I ever witnessed—I only saw Carmen McRae one time, but it must have been like what it was like to see John Coltrane.

There was such presence. As soon as she got up on stage, you were already… This woman was so in her body, so in the moment, and in such control of the material she was about to do, that her presence was a concert. These are the higher goals of concerts—not to show people what you can do or what you’re working on.

Connecting Deeply: A Strategy for Success

Student: Do you feel like people’s phrasings are different because they’re different individuals?

Yes. For example, it is clear that Chick Corea played Latin music. It’s not so clear that Keith Jarrett played Latin music. I can hear that—that’s one of the reasons his phrasing is different. Influences affect your phrasing.

If you grew up listening to pop music and started playing jazz at 19, if you ignored the pop music, you would be not playing to your strength. You’d be trying to be somebody else, and you would be weaker for it.

Be Who You Are

If somebody is angry, then they should play angry—because otherwise they’re avoiding their own strength. Your strength is in what’s really happening with you, not who you’d like to be.

Basically, if you ignore the things that you are presently about, your playing lacks strength and attraction. We’re attracted to people who are not afraid to be who they are.

My Strategy: Going Deeper

I always noticed that Brazilian percussionists were thought of as such high, free spirits. People from different ethnicities… and that a guy from Brooklyn or Long Island shouldn’t expect of himself the poetry of life that, say, someone from the rainforest might have.

Then I realized: everybody’s got everything inside them. You just have to develop it. I became special in my own way for being from Long Island. What I had to do is continually go deeper and deeper into what that is—go so deep that as soon as I start to play, I start to go into a trance from what I’m playing.

By learning to do that, I have joined the other spirits who I normally wouldn’t have thought I felt part of. The secret of these spirits is how deeply they love what they’re doing. That’s a strategy.

Process and Instantaneous Transformation

Student: Do you think this transformation of consciousness can happen instantaneously, or is it a process?

That’s a great question—a very important question. The answer is both. It is a process, and yes, it can happen instantaneously.

How Is That Possible?

It does happen instantaneously when you change consciousness. It’s like—whoa. But it doesn’t stay. You can’t hold it. Let’s say you experience complete freedom in your playing—but for how long, before you start getting bound up again?

We all have an epiphany or a peak experience. I bet everybody here has had an experience where, for whatever reason, they broke through—it was the best playing they ever did, the best singing. And they felt like they weren’t even doing it. That’s what that experience feels like—you feel like someone’s doing it for you.

But it hasn’t happened again, or it hasn’t happened often. And it can happen when you choose to make it happen.

The Process

Breaking into that consciousness can be instantaneous. Learning to hold it—to be able to choose to go into it, like when the performance is important, and say: “I’m going to go into that space, I’m going to let myself be a vehicle for this sound, and it’s going to pour through me”—to be able to say with certainty “I can do this whenever I want to”—that is the process.

Learning to stay there for longer periods of time. The process is basically anything that brings you into that space.

Why We Can’t Hold It

The reason we can’t hold it is because we get excited about it. As soon as you get excited about it, it’s gone.

“Wow, I’m really swinging!"—uh oh, where’d it go?

Almost as soon as you acknowledge how good you’re playing, you notice it starts to tank on you. So the practice is in not really noticing. I don’t really notice how I sound. I notice how it feels.

From Thinking to Feeling to Sensuality

From not judging myself emotionally, I have connected with the world of sensuality—what it feels like to play the instrument.

The greatest singers are reveling in the sensuality of how their throat makes sound. They’re actually enjoying the feeling of the notes coming out.

When you get past the world of thinking, you fall into the world of feeling. And then you jump right back into the world of thinking because you say: “This is not me, I’m not comfortable.”

If you’re a person that thinks too much, if you have a moment where you’re not thinking, you’re going to get so excited that you’re going to start thinking again.

The practice is in learning to stay there longer and longer until this is who you are. To make that who you are is a process. To experience it is instantaneous.

Teaching Young Students

Student: Do these concepts apply to teaching younger students, particularly high school students?

The first thing a person learns when they play an instrument is a drag—trying to learn to read, you know. They may never have made that sensual connection with the instrument.

Who here had a teacher that said: “Oh, just fool around—how’s that feel? What’s it feel like?” Immediately they were into it. Instead: “Now you have to do this, put it there…” Meanwhile, your parents are giving this really inspiring message: “Well, you got to practice.”

For a kid, playing music feels like homework that they don’t get graded on. What do they need with this? That’s why as soon as they can, they stop. But then they are always sorry they stopped, because they see the gift of music—in other people.

Some people had such a karmic destiny to play music that even the educational system couldn’t ruin them. As a result, they became musicians.

A High School Experience

I did a high school group one day—a hybrid high school and junior high. I was trying to illustrate how to play on changes. We took one chord and said what the scale is. I said to this trombone player: “Now just play any notes from that scale.”

He was so timid. If you know that scale and you’re not going to change the chord, then the excuse is not “I don’t know what to play”—you’re just afraid to play it.

I said: “Close your eyes.” The kid said he had never closed his eyes and played before—because obviously he’s been in band, concert orchestra, reading music since day one.

“Close your eyes and pick any note from that scale. The only thing I want—play it for sure, play it definitely.”

In the beginning, as a trombone player, he was down in the middle register where you don’t have to commit. After he got this, it was like a sail with the wind—he started playing the upper register, all this stuff on that scale.

Then I told the other people to support him with certain licks. They naturally took a dynamic underneath what he was doing, and he felt them supporting him.

When he opened his eyes, he said: “It was the greatest experience I had in his life.”

Here are kids in high school already, and he never really had the real experience of music.

The Teacher’s Role: Embodying Liberation

I think it’s important to establish the joy of playing first, even if you get them in high school. They’ve already been ruined several times over, but they’re not irretrievable in every way. Show them the joy of being able to do this.

I had a teacher—I never liked opera, but in junior high school, I had a teacher who loved opera. He put this one opera on—I can still remember all the arias. Il Trovatore—in fact, the only opera I can remember the name of—because this guy put the record on and he acted all the parts. He was so into it that we were enthralled.

Then we went to see Il Trovatore, and for one opera, for one year in my life, I loved opera. Seeing it through the eyes of someone who loved opera.

Let your love of the music shine through. That may be the most important thing.

Freedom To, Not Freedom From

I once heard a Hasidic rabbi say:

The problem with the 60s was everybody wanted freedom from, not freedom to.

That’s beautiful. That says it all. People dropped out to be free: “I don’t have to do that—my parents did that, but that’s square.” What they did was drop out from everything, and what they found there was decadence and boredom.

You want to be free by mastering the form and learning that on that level, you can do no wrong. Every instinct you have is right, there in that form. That kind of freedom is important.

It’s a game. Human beings are here, we’ve got to do something. We have this ability to master ideas and forms and then transcend them. It’s a great way to spend a life. It’s a lot better than just flipping through TV Guide.

Somehow you communicate that—but that’s what you embody. I could teach any class and within a short time they would share my excitement for the subject. I think it’s important to get them on board that way—more important than teaching them anything.

What’s the point of teaching somebody something about phrasing when basically they’ve never experienced why they’re even playing? That’s the biggest question: Why are you playing?

It starts with an attraction. You hit a note, you went: “Wow! That is amazing!” But after a while, it gets to be about lesser things: “I started, I can’t stop now. I got to be a success.”

Getting back to that wonder—like the first time, every time. I just get engrossed in something and I say it’s better than anything else I do.

Managing the Mind Amid Daily Life

Student: While you’re practicing, day-to-day things come up—you’re sitting there practicing your scales and you start thinking, “Oh, I got to do the dishes, I got to call the phone company.” How do you manage the day-to-day things during practice?

You have to learn to manage your mind.

We have all this technology now—it’s supposed to save us time. You could be on the plane with your whole office. There’s no time when you’re away from your business or office. What have humans done with that? Have they used this upgrading technology to create more space in their life? No. They used it to get busier. This is what human beings do—they clutter their life first with thoughts, then with what the thoughts are saying.

Those things you mentioned—“I got to pay the phone bill, I got to do this”—those were first and foremost thoughts. How does that mess you up? It’s true you have to pay the phone bill, but do you have to think about paying the phone bill if you’re about to practice? No.

That means subdividing what you’re doing at what moment. And that takes mental control.

Five Minutes Is Your Way In

When a person needs to get organized in their life, I always recommend they start by trying to learn how to organize their thinking.

You could practice while the coffee is perking. But if you have the thought: “Well, it doesn’t do any good unless I practice for at least an hour”—then you’re going to miss all these five and ten-minute opportunities. We waste more time—if we borrow 10 minutes from the time we waste, we’ll be practicing.

If you say “I’m going to practice for two hours,” you don’t practice at all—because you’re waiting for two hours to come up. If you say “I’m going to practice for five minutes,” you’ll practice a lot. And every time you start for five minutes, before you know it, it was 45 minutes.

“There are many five-minute opportunities in my life.” Let me focus what I’m going to practice so much that in five minutes I can go to something and start working on it.

It’ll feel good because you’ll finally start to feel that you’re not a hostage to the external events in your life.

Find Something to Master Your Mind

If I say “I’m too emotionally upset to practice these days”—instead of not practicing at all, practice five minutes. Five minutes is always your way in. You will be amazed and pleased with yourself that now these things that come up are not blocking something you got going, something you got started.

There are many modes of study for mind control: meditation, running, mountain climbing, Zen, EST, Scientology… All these things wouldn’t have any attraction if people weren’t personally conducting their lives with more power.

What a musician does too often is underestimate how their mind is screwing everything up. They say: “Well, if I just play good, it’ll all take care of itself.”

But if you realize how many ways you’re sabotaging yourself every day—all of us—then you realize you’re trying to walk uphill while pushing a boulder. That boulder is a bundle of thoughts.

How do you feel good right now, in this body, in this moment? It’s the absence of thoughts that instantly feels good. Find a mode of study that will help you have more and more times where you’re not thinking. It just adds so much power and organizational ability.

Don’t Ask Questions That Don’t Have Answers Today

I used to ruin much of my life worrying about things that actually never happened. I heard this once—someone said: “99% of things I worry about never happen, so I’m going to keep worrying.” As if the worrying was what was keeping them from happening.

You’re wasting your time worrying about things that aren’t happening today.

I started to adapt a phrase that was very helpful:

I’m not going to ask questions today that don’t have answers today.

If I ask “Should I stay in New York?"—I don’t know, there’s no data today. I’m not going to spend the rest of the day going back and forth. Have you ever done that with an important decision?

When the answer’s not there, stop asking the question—because you’re ruining time that could potentially be applied to the moment, to something that can be done.

Closing Thoughts

My mental processes never got any better until I actually took a course here or there. I actually had to do something. There is strength in numbers—there’s a power in a group.

If you put me in a group of people exercising every day, I will actually start exercising. I’m susceptible to the group I’m spending time with. So if everybody in the group is learning how to master their mind, I’m spending at least an hour a week on that study.

Musicians would do well to add that to their work, because it will maybe facilitate the rest of what you’re doing.

Transcribed from “A Master Class in Jazz Performance and Creativity with Pianist Kenny Werner” — ArtistsHouseMusic