Winners Don’t Win, pt. 5
Improvisation, Trust Is
Episodes:
Part 1: Time, Space, and Tennis
Part 2: Winston
Part 3: The Dharma Racquets
Part 4: Error As Hidden Intention
Part 5: Improvisation, Trust Is ← You Are Here
Between and above the lines in a tennis match, nothing is linear. A round ball spins, flies in arcs, and never travels 100% straight back the path it flew. Upon landing, balls can bounce in any direction, sometimes even reversing course.
Shots are aimed at empty spaces around you. You attempt, then, to fill in the distance with speed and quickness, conjuring responses to push your opponent to their limits, in ways their movement (and thus, the ball’s) may become more predictable.
No ending to any tennis point is predetermined. Improvisation, all the way to the outside edge of the lines, from any possible position on the court, is your best friend in the heat of a match. You 100% have to make it up as you go along.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a musician, trust me, if you’ve ever played tennis, you’ve turned yourself into a jazz instrument. If you can’t dig that, this game is not for you.
Back in 2021, from my temporary home in a converted 19th century sarsaparilla soda factory in Lowell, MA, I watched the Lowell Regional Transit Authority (LRTA) volunteer snow removal force battle a relentless winter storm right out of The Crucible. For over 12 hours, they shoveled, blew, and salted to keep the buses and trains moving through central Massachusetts.
As the action unfolded five floors below through the day into night, I began to film the snow force, and their movements inspired me also to record a bunch of live takes of improvised acoustic atmosphere. Later on, I layered a few of the videos on top of each other, and created a tiny tribute to all the LRTA’s epic work.
I take great joy in responding to (and celebrating) chaos and randomness with music. I’ve gotten better in the last decade or so in quelling my perfectionist impulses in favor of letting things slide, and I’ve made sure to make room for a few tracks like this on all my catalog’s latter releases. My most popular ambient track is a sprawling 12+ minute layer cake of improvisation called The Shimmer of Stars in Green Water, inspired by the author Antoine de Saint Exupery, released on my 2014 record Particle Theory.
Sometimes not knowing what’s coming next heightens your awareness to a point of clarity you would not find if you had more time to think.
Moments of improvisation, creative or otherwise, are windows into how you live in the now. In many ways, I’ve learned more about myself as a musician through my flights into ambient “unstructure” than in most of the more “conventional” songs that comprise the heft of my songwriting success.
Solo tennis matches are unstructured in a parallel way. You never know the ending when you start. Everything is only obvious once the final point is played. Once over, there’s no other way things could have gone. The outcome is accepted, processed, and if you’re lucky, you come out the other side as a better player, having learned a bit more about yourself.
Beyond improvisational challenges and rewards, great confluence exists between playing tennis and music. Strings, sounds, rhythm, flow. You need to read shots coming at you like notes in a music score.
Like, there are only 8 whole steps in any octave of a musical key, and only 8 basic shots in tennis: serve, return, forehand, backhand, slice, forehand volley, backhand volley, and overhead.
The action, however — the drama, that is — comes between those steps and shots. Transitions from note-to-note and shot-to-shot are the “how” in “how you play.” Your movement through a musical piece or a sequence of tennis shots in either context defines your style. In either case, nuance and texture are the means to expression.
There may only be 8 notes in a scale, but there are exponential ways to move through them and create melodies. Same with those 8 tennis shots.
In the film King Richard (which I always took somewhat as documentary), legendary coach Paul Cohen tells a child Venus Williams, “Tennis is a chess match of 228 shots, which you will perfect.” At any given moment, there is perhaps the “most correct” of those 228 shots to attempt, but by no means is there ever only one option open to you as a point unfolds. You always have choices, from anywhere on the court.
How many choices you have at any given moment, though, is a function of your skills. Like, you can’t attempt a drop shot from the baseline if you don’t know how, but once you learn, it’s another weapon in the arsenal. It’s in the same zone as learning how to bend notes and tap arpeggios on a guitar fretboard. Once you know, you learn to deploy.
Moving from note-to-note, shot-to-shot, chord-to-chord, or phrase-to-phrase offers up as many possible pathways and techniques as you are capable. To play to the edge of your limits is the ultimate challenge of any creative pursuit. Arguably, if you’re not always attempting to exceed your limitations, you will never improve.
Such is tennis. Such is music. Such is life.
As on a tennis court and through a guitar, technique is an expression of style. The master player will own a technique, and become synonymous with a style. No one mistakes Jerry Garcia for Eddie Van Halen, or Serena Williams for Monica Seles. They’re all genius, however, and identifiable from the first notes and shots they play.
There seems to be very little recognition of the fact that if someone plays the guitar in a certain way, it’s probably in order to play a certain kind of music. If you wanted to play flamenco guitar it wouldn’t be much use studying with a 1950s-style jazz guitarist. So techniques are connected with the music, with style.
Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice (rev. 1992)
Musical improv can fly off the rails the same as an approach shot can go long. And, as on a tennis court, if your stage performance goes awry you can lose your looseness, and ultimately risk losing an audience.
At the same time, you need to look and sound original and inventive. No athlete or musician want to be called “robotic.” As you uncoil your imagination into the unfamiliar, you have to balance desires for taking risks with recognizing the opportunities in which those risks will work.
Improvisation, athletic or otherwise, is a tightrope walk with no net. There’s only atomic time for deliberation between decisions. A couple seconds, at most. Time mediates the ultimate tension between focus and freewheeling.
In a tennis point, awareness narrows to the next shot. You work out how to end a point as it progresses, feeling out your opponent while attempting to swing momentum and physics in your favor.
Sometimes you have to let go of your two-handed backhand to hit a one-hander.
In musical improvisation, your focus narrows also to the next — in this case, the next note. Often your decisions are made in split-seconds. You backwards induce your tonal choices from an ending that, in the end, you also discover along the way.
Ultimately, one key skill in tennis and music, then, is to stretch time.
Stretching time breeds silence. Silence creates stillness. Stillness makes space. Space brings peace. Peace is a timeless sound. Winning is a timeless feeling.
Unconscious competence is a concept from 60s psychology that never got old. It’s the fourth stage of learning when you learn how to improvise. The goal is to get so good at something you can do it while thinking about what you need to do next. That’s where pros play.
The goal in learning to master musical crafts is to arrive at a place where the playing is second nature, where you just exist as an instrument; a channel. In losing (i.e., loosing) your consciousness to pure instinct, you will find your style. As in music and athletics, the critical skill that determines success isn’t a technique or a particular approach to a situation, but rather, the ability to trust yourself.
Where you just know. You just are.
Improvisation, trust is.