if it ain’t got that swing

Frenchmen Street, New Orleans

I’m a musician, but not a jazz musician. I barely listen to jazz, and I don’t really understand it. Like the emperor tells Mozart in Amadeus, too many notes. But Wynton Marsalis says something in Ken Burns’s jazz documentary that changed the way I think—about jazz, sure, but also about therapy.

“The real power of jazz and the innovation of jazz is that a group of people can come together and create art, improvised art, and can negotiate their agendas with each other, and that negotiation IS the art.”

So that’s what all those notes are. They’re a conversation about music that also turns out to BE the music. Huh.

In the music I’ve always made, the negotiation happens while you write the song, but ultimately the song is the song. The conversation was just to get you there. In jazz, the conversation is the there.

And I’d never noticed, but it turns out jazz is like therapy in that way. Here’s Irvin Yalom, in The Gift of Therapy.

“Therapists must convey to the patient that their paramount task is to build a relationship together that will itself become the agent of change.”

The relationship you’re building (therapists call it the therapeutic alliance) isn’t there to help with the therapy, it is the therapy. Yalom, again:

“Above all, the therapist must be prepared to go wherever the patient goes, do all that is necessary to continue building trust and safety in the relationship.”

That’s improvisation! “Yes and” is easy to understand, even if it’s challenging to do. My clients play me astonishing melodies every day. Complicated, difficult ones—because no one brings their simple problems to a therapist. And I try to go where they go, contributing what I can: backbeat, repetition, harmony, call and response, counter-melody.

If I’m really in the pocket, I’ll add silence. Miles Davis:

“It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”

Furthermore, the track you’re laying down won’t sound like anybody else’s. Therapy is bespoke, one-off, a deep cut, a Japanese import bootleg version on coloured vinyl that you’ll never find on eBay. Irvin Yalom concurs:

“I try to tailor the therapy for each patient, to find the best way to work, and I consider the process of shaping the therapy not the groundwork or prelude but the essence of the work.”

The process and the product? In jazz and in therapy, they’re the same damn thing.

To be clear, this isn’t a naïve art form. Not primitive or unschooled. I’m nuts about punk rock, but that’s not what therapy is.

The whole time, I’m using my training, my techniques, and my interventions: CBT, attachment theory, developmental work, positive psychology, self-regulation, trauma-informed ideas, narrative therapy.

Those things matter. In jazz, they’d be my scales and chord progressions and rhythms and song structures. But those chops are not the therapy. The therapy, like the music in jazz, is the unfolding, the shaping, the negotiation, the relationship building.

I could’ve skipped this whole essay and quoted my friend Dan instead. A hard-boiled journalist and a rock-solid guitar player, he might tell you he’s full of shit, but the man loves words too passionately to waste any.

“You just find a way to connect with people. Each one is their own song, right? You jam the now-familiar riffs and find their verse and chorus, together.”