When I recently gave a JazzCode in Berlin, I did not know any musicians
in Berlin, and the way I found the right players was different and very
successful. I went to the biggest jazz club, found the most busy bass
player who played with the most bands, checked out his website,
listened to a few recordings with him, and ended up hiring Marc
Muellbauer. Then I asked him to hire his favorite pianist in Berlin.
Every time I do the JazzCode in a new city, I have to put together a
new band for the event (I now have alumni bands in Berlin, Barcelona,
Boston, Bergen, London, Paris, New York, Miami, Stockholm, and Sydney).
But how do I find the best players? How do I locate guys who don´t
have an attitude problem or are unreliabale? I can´t really ask local
musicians who I should hire, because most likely, they will suggest
that you hire them.
I usually start with the bass player because. as a drummer, no other
factor can more effectively make me sound good (or really bad).
Furthermore, if the two of us can hit it off, then the job is much
easier for piano and sax which is usually the instrument combination I
work with.
Great players are always busy because they are in short supply.
In Berlin I hired Marc. I knew that if I asked him to contract for me,
then he would hire a great team. As one of the top calls in Berlin he
had played with all the best players. And, as a contractor he knew
that hiring the best guys would make him sound better too.
In that way he was very accountable, the way performing artists usually
are extremely accountable. In jazz we usually work in small
transparent teams. Every role is unique, every instrument different,
but every part is needed in order for the music to work. You can of
course reduce the size of a group if one of the players don´t perform.
But if a quartet must perform as a trio, then the reduction in
textural combinations is far greater than the 25% you might guess. In
fact, going from four to three players, you lose 50% of your possible
instrument combinations (A quartet has 14 combinations, a trio has
seven), but at the same time, each remaining player must do a bigger
part of the job with less available sound combinations.
We always try to get the best possible people in the team.
In Berlin, once I had found Marc, I knew that he would get me great
players because it would make him sound good, and it would
enhance the likelihood that I would use him on a later occasion.
The lessons for small professional teams who needs to improvise together to get the job done might be this:
Find out what the most scarce or in demand skill is given the context
Locate the best person with the required skill
Make sure your chosen person is also sensitive to the external context
Ask that person to suggest the best people given the task
In an improvised performance culture, you always look for people with
big ears. But in addition to big ears, you need a sense of "horizontal
perfection", someone willing to sacrifice the urge to make every moment
perfect in order to stay in sync with the rest of the team and not get mired in perfection of one thing while the others forge ahead.
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