“The ear level. Hearing. You can hear what’s happening around you. Now, in improvisation, especially in jazz, this is the level that everybody talks about the most. I performed for a few years with one of the great jazz icons, a pianist named Monty Alexander from Jamaica. And Monty does not read. I mean, he reads a little music, but he’s all ear. If you ask him what a scale is, I mean, he doesn’t know modes, he doesn’t know scales. He’s hearing everything. We were once traveling to a little group of islands called the Aeolian islands, these little islands off the coast of Sicily. Gorgeous. And I made a dumb, dumb music joke, a music “dad joke”, almost. Right as we were traveling over there, I said “Hey, Monty, I bet they love the Aeolian scale over here”. And he said “What’s that?” You know, he didn’t even know what it was. So in the history of jazz, there have always been musicians like that. Somebody like him, or Stan Getz famously was like that. They’re just hearing stuff. You know, they’re not necessarily operating at the head level. They have heard something, and they can just play it for you. And in jazz, this is the level that we usually talk about the most. It’s my view, however, that can make things a bit more difficult for some of us when we’re starting. Because we may not be hearing anything yet. So a lot of times, if we’re beginner improvisers, we may not hear stuff yet. We have to have a little bit of the head stuff. Unless you’re the Monty Alexander or the Stan Getz and you are just hearing it, I feel like it helps to bring our head into the picture a bit and have a sense of just some simple, very, very simple… I hate the word theory, so it’s “head” – the “head stuff.” — Lorin Cohen, Jazz Bassist and Educator → Watch the full episode: https://musicalitynow.com/283