Show Up and Listen

One of the most valuable things you can do as a developing musician is also one of the simplest: go out and hear music in person.

Streaming is extraordinary. You can pull up a recording from 1957 on a bus in the middle of the afternoon and hear something that changes your understanding of what music can be. That access is genuinely remarkable and you should take full advantage of it.

But it does not replace being in the room.

When Chip McNeill talks about watching Elvin Jones play from just a few feet away, he is not being nostalgic. He is pointing at something real. There is information you receive from live music that recordings cannot transmit — the physical presence of a player fully committed to what they are doing, the way sound moves through a space, the split-second decisions being made in real time right in front of you. That experience drives inspiration in a way that a phone speaker simply cannot.

Go to sessions. Go to concerts. Go with friends and talk afterward about what you heard. Ask questions.

And this brings up the second part of showing up: asking questions of people who know more than you do.

The great players, McNeill says, are almost always willing to share what they know. "They've been right where you are when you're asking those questions. That's how we all get better. We learn from each other." Stan Getz said it plainly: there is no substitute for getting on the bandstand and playing with people who are better than you. It exposes your weaknesses. That is not a bad thing. That is the whole point.

John Coltrane spent his entire career attacking the things he could not do yet. Wayne Shorter used to say that if you walked within a block of Coltrane's apartment and could not hear him practicing, he was not home. And when you could hear him, it did not always sound polished — because he was deliberately working on the hard things, not the comfortable ones.

Attack your weaknesses. That is where the growth lives.

Show up to your lessons. Show up to your ensembles. Show up to sessions even when you do not know the tunes. Especially when you do not know the tunes.

"Nobody's stopping you but you."