What Jazz Can Teach Us About Working with AI

The magic of improvisation, the importance of the fundamentals, and the value of infusing our humanity

Music has been a big part of my life ever since I was little. After a short stint playing piano as a kid, I picked up the trumpet sometime near the end of elementary school. I took private lessons and played throughout my middle school years and high school, mostly as a part of the concert band at school but also in my local youth orchestra and in regional and all-state concert bands. Then, after not playing almost at all during undergrad, I picked my horn up again when I started my Ph.D. at Caltech and played throughout my five years there. Some of my favorite musical memories were playing with this group and the smaller brass ensembles connected with it, like those for Caltech’s commencements.

Me with the trumpet section from commencement in 2019. You may not recognize some of the players, but you’ve certainly heard them on movies you’ve watched. The folks on either side of me (David Washburn on my right and Marissa Benedict on my left) have played on Star Wars, The Incredibles, Indiana Jones, etc.

Music is powerful for a number of reasons, but I’ve been thinking about it this last week in connection to what it can teach us about communication and collaboration. These lessons are particularly important as we think about how and where to consider incorporating AI into our work. This week I’ll unpack a few that I learned after a recent jazz show I attended and explore how they might guide us.

1. Improvisation is anything but random and relies on mastery of the fundamentals

2. Teaching, like jazz, is a conversation.

3. You’re not just producing an artifact, you’re creating an experience

The beauty of jazz

Jazz is a musical style that I’ve always really enjoyed but only dabbled in as a player. I played in jazz band for a few years in high school, but other than that, most of my interaction with the genre has been as an admiring observer rather than a participant.

This last weekend the Mrs. and I had the chance to get away for a night to celebrate our anniversary. As I was looking around for something for us to do on Friday night, I stumbled upon a jazz club in Old Lyme, CT where the Cyrus Chestnut Trio was performing. After doing a little bit of research on Cyrus Chestnut (an accomplished jazz pianist) and the venue in Old Lyme (The Side Door Jazz Club which was recently voted one of 106 of the top jazz clubs in the world), I was in. I booked the tickets.

It was a great experience. First of all, the venue was wonderful. The room might have fit 50 people. Not a bad seat in the place. I could have reached out to give the drummer a high-five without hardly getting up from my seat.

Then there was the music. There is something about the experience of live music that is special, but live jazz has an even more distinct quality with its focus on building new and interesting musical thoughts in real time. Just take a minute or two to take a listen to the first bit of Cyrus and his trio playing his composition Nippon Soul Connection.

Improvisation depends on mastery

While Cyrus let the keyboard do the talking for most of the evening, he did share a few thoughts throughout the evening. One of the thoughts he shared that really resonated with me was about improvisation.

Improvisation is spontaneous conversation. It’s not noise. What we’re doing when we improvise is composing a musical thought in real time. Just like you would build a sentence with nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. we are building musical thoughts with the way that we arrange and connect the notes that we play into longer musical sentences and paragraphs.

While most of us aren’t jazz musicians, there is something powerful about improvisation in any of our areas of expertise. Many of the best teachers I’ve had are excellent communicators who can improvise, modulating the course material and its delivery in response to the needs of the students, whether that is answering a question, redirecting a lecture, or modifying a course syllabus.

But to be an excellent improviser, you need to have a strong grasp on the fundamentals. If you are a jazz musician, you need to understand rhythm, key signatures, chords, etc. If you are an engineer, you need to have mastery over the fundamental mathematics, physics, and the domain specific knowledge that allows you to see the whole picture and rearrange the pieces in order to convey new thoughts.

I think this is where a greater dependence on AI has the potential to have some serious negative consequences. Just like the search engine before it which convinced us that we don’t need to memorize anything because we can just look it up, I worry that under a similar logic we might decide to outsource some of our capabilities for thinking and communicating to a large language model. We’ll rationalize it as an excuse to use the time to specialize even more, but it’s a trap. We’ll end up building iron castles on a foundation of sand.

Jane Rosenzweig

said it well in her LA Times column this week:

While AI assistants might be able to help us with our own thinking, it’s likely that in many cases they’ll end up replacing that thinking.

I’m pretty solidly on team technology over here. I fundamentally believe that technology can help us to expand our capabilities to have a positive influence in our work and careers. But we need to be careful to make sure that we don’t outsource the elements of our work where the human element really matters.

It’s possible that these AI tools can help us to create art. Maybe Midjourney can help us to conceptualize a scene that we never could have imaged being able to draw or illustrate. Maybe ChatGPT can help us to brainstorm or draft a new idea for our poem, short story, novel, or scientific research proposal. But we better not lose our hold on the fundamental concepts that allow us to think. Like I’ve been saying for a long time now: Ladder, not crutch.

Teaching, like jazz, is a conversation

Another element of jazz that I think translates to the classroom is its inherently collaborative nature. There is a beauty that evolves from music that is performed in a group. When musicians are synced up and listening to each other there is a conversation happening not just between the musicians and the audience, but between the musicians themselves.

This was another element that I became intimately aware of when listening to Cyrus and his trio last Friday. There were moments of more clear and explicit communication between Cyrus and the drummer and bassist playing along with him, but at a deeper level, you could sense a constant stream of communication going on beneath the surface throughout the entire evening.

At the surface there is a shared sense of the shape of the music: the rhythm, style, and contours of the piece. But here again the magic of improvisation strikes. Each performance that Cyrus and his trio is unique, like a snowflake. Sure, the set list might be identical, but they are always looking for a new musical thought to assemble on the fly as they are performing.

I think this too has elements which are a part of excellent teaching. Excellent teachers see teaching and learning as a conversation: between themselves, the students, and the course material. It is inherently collaborative. And just like performing jazz, each lecture or repetition of the course has its own flavor and new experiments. The variation is a feature, not a bug.

Music generally, but jazz in particular, highlights the importance of listening and collaboration. Not only will it help your work to be of higher quality, but you’ll also have more fun doing it.

Don’t forget about the experience

The content that we produce, be it an essay, photo, lecture, or assignment creates an experience. The experience is a fundamental part of what it means to communicate. We can’t lose track of that. Especially as technology continues to become a bigger and bigger part of how we communicate. Whether it is artificial reality goggles like Apple’s Vision Pro headset or Large Language Models generating templated emails masquerading as human-written messages, we need to be aware of what these tools give, but also what they take.

I’m not saying that AI can’t be used to create meaningful art and experiences. But right now we’re at a place where AI-generated content is still relatively novel and, on the whole, not so prevalent. But, it won’t stay that way. As AI-generated text and images begin to proliferate, hearing directly from humans will become increasingly desirable.

Embrace your own spontaneous composition

We were made to create. It’s in our DNA and deep in our souls too. As you think about your own work this week, consider the areas where you can improvise. What are your own skills and areas of expertise where you have achieved mastery? How can you remix those skills in order to do something new and explore your creativity? And how does your humanity infuse your work?

And if you’re looking for some inspiration, spend a few moments drinking in the goodness of the Nutman himself.

Some of the Best I’ve Read This Week

Here are a few reading recommendations to share from this past week.

• Jane Rosenzweig
  writes in the LA Times that AI-assisted writing becoming as common as spell checking might be a problem.

• John Warner
  reflects on two of the biggest stories in the world of books this week and shares some insightful reflections on Cormac McCarthy and Elizabeth Gilbert. One quote that’s sticking with me:

  We don’t ask of art whether or not it is appropriate to moral formation or presents a positive view of the world or is comprehensive of all experiences. We ask if what it has to say is, at some level, ‘true.’”

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The Book Nook

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is the current book for our murder mystery book club. I finished it up yesterday ahead of our upcoming meeting to discuss it.

I can’t say too much without giving the plot away, but the whole book is organized around a series of murders that are foreshadowed by a poem. Looking forward to the discussion about this one. It’s a fun and quick read that you might enjoy on a sunny beach somewhere this summer!

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The Professor Is In

This summer I’m trying a few things to level up my student mentoring practices. One prototype is having my students create an Individual Development Plan. I made a template based on a version I found for Postdocs at Stanford with three sections for discussion:

1. Self-assessment:

2. Career Goals

3. Action Plan

If you’re interested, feel free to check out and download a copy of the form (PDF, DOCX) to modify and use with your students.

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Leisure Line

I’ve been exploring Substack Notes as a way to share smaller snippets of what I’m thinking during the week. You can check them out and comment here if you’re interested.

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Still Life

I try never to leave Connecticut without two culinary experiences: Pizza from Pepe’s and Rich Farm Ice Cream. Mission accomplished.