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Gregg Belisle-Chi: When I first moved to New York, I wasn't a very good band leader because I didn't have a strong sense of vision and I didn't feel like I had a strong identity. I thought that the way to make musicians happy was just to let them do whatever they wanted, and that wasn't necessarily the case.
Host (Wesley Slover): This is the Collab Collection, where we collect stories and useful insights about creative collaboration. I'm Wesley Slover. I really enjoy live jazz in large part because it involves a lot of improvisation. Aspects of the music are being made up on the spot, which means that no two performances are the same. I find that to be a really refreshing experience in a world of recorded media where art is so often optimized then frozen in time.
I wanted to understand how an ensemble works together like this to make music in the moment, so I reached out to an old friend. Gregg Belisle-Chi is a jazz guitarist based in New York. To start, I explained to Gregg what it is that I love about live jazz, and that made sense to him.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: It's funny. When I started playing more improvised music, out of the woodwork came all of these like Grateful Dead fans and like jam band fans. That's not music that I necessarily have any kind of relationship to, but there is a huge group of people who love kind of unpredictability and newness and the journey that the musicians are taking you on. It's not good all of the time, but it's the moments where it really hits that are kind of worth waiting for.
Host (Wesley Slover): I personally wouldn't tell a Phish fan that it's not good all the time, but I think that the aspect of unpredictability is something that's really appealing to me. But what if, like Gregg, you're one of the musicians playing that unpredictable music? It's one thing as an audience member to sign up for a performance that's kind of unpredictable, but what if you're the performer who's responsible for it? It can be perplexing because it's amazing when it feels authentic and alive, but other times it can feel like, "Where are we going? What am I doing?". There can be a lot of anxiety about not trusting the process.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: The matter starts in your mind: self-doubt, self-criticism, anxieties, and insecurities. And Gregg says that impedes on one of the most important aspects of performance, which is listening to the rest of the band. When I'm interpreting the music going badly, I go inward. That's not a very good place to be when you're trying to collaborate with other musicians, where your listening should be expanded and you should be feeding off of what other people are doing.
Host (Wesley Slover): I certainly feel that negative self-talk. But often our perception of ourselves is kind of warped. Good collaborators can be really helpful in getting outside of our own heads.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: I remember one set that we played maybe a couple years ago. I was really down on myself and I talked to the drummer, Tom Rainey. I was just kind of giving myself a little pity party, and Tom, he doesn't mince words. He said, "Well, if there was anything good that happened tonight, you were just as much a part of it as anybody else". Rarely is there a night where nothing goes well.
It's one of the best things about being in a band. When you're playing with the same people night after night, month after month, there's so much trust built in and there's so much camaraderie. You know that we're all after the same thing and you know that everybody's taking care of business.
Host (Wesley Slover): I had Gregg walk me through the process of preparing for and playing a gig. While the music is made in the moment, it's the result of preparation.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: I try to get the material as soon as I can. I want as much time as possible to get to know the music and get to know the parts so I don't have to look at any music, and my head can be looking at my bandmates. When you know the material that well, you can manipulate the material in different ways. You can inject it with your own creativity and make the music feel more alive rather than just reading instructions off of a page. Setting time aside to rehearse it with the band is really important.
Host (Wesley Slover): With jazz, there's also parts of the music that are scripted, but there are a lot of variables to be worked out during the performance. Gregg gave an example for how this looks when he's playing with Tim Berne, a well-known avant-garde saxophonist.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: With Tim Berne's music, I walk in knowing the material really, really well and then it's kind of anyone's guess how the music is going to go. There are a lot of variables and factors that are going to influence how that music is going to be performed, like a rowdy crowd or someone's mood. There are a lot of non-musical things that could happen that influence the music.
Responding to these variables involves a lot of listening. When you start playing with other people, you start to hear interaction—how two instruments play together. When you join an ensemble, you start listening to the whole orchestration. I have this conversation with musicians all the time: is it actually possible to hear the totality of everything that's happening? You can zoom in on something and then you can also zoom out and hear something much bigger, but I don't know if you can do both at the same time.
Host (Wesley Slover): I am constantly amazed at how our brains process auditory information. Your brain is doing almost all of the sorting of information; it is why you can be in a crowded room and still hear the person you're in conversation with. Listening requires a lot of brain power.
There's a lesson here about perception in general. Each person plays an active role in interpretation just based on where their attention is focused. Learning to zoom in to perceive the details, but also being able to zoom out and not miss the forest for the trees is really important in how we evaluate creative work. Another important aspect of playing this music is leadership. Groups only thrive under good leadership.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: I wondered what it is that attracts me to certain band leaders. Do we have like a shared sense of values? Does this person have a philosophy that they live by, an assuredness, a strength in the way that they're presenting their music and maybe presenting themselves?
I think it's easier to collaborate with someone who's not asking a lot of questions of you—they're not just like, "I don't know, what do you think?". When I first moved to New York, I wasn't a very good band leader because I didn't have a strong sense of vision. Parameters are good; they help set the stage for how far something can be pushed. If there's no boundary, then you don't really know where to start. A strong leader will communicate somehow what you're supposed to do.
Host (Wesley Slover): When all of this comes together—the preparation, good listening, good leadership—it creates a good experience. Gregg shared a quote from guitarist Wayne Krantz that really sums up the feeling about improvisational music and why it's so exciting.
Gregg Belisle-Chi: "Audiences don't come to watch you play some super technical music. They come to watch you explode". That idea of combustion and danger and spectacle has nothing to do with the intricacies of making music; it has everything to do with the totality of the expression of that music in that room, in that space.
I remember one gig that we did where we played something really epic and the energy in the room was really, really high—everything seemed to be buzzing and sparkling. Then the next song the band leader played, he just started by himself—this really slow, contemplative blues—and the whole room just went down with them. It was a magical moment in music, how everybody was in tune with one another. There's this kind of organic living feedback loop happening between everybody in that room.
Host (Wesley Slover): This episode was written and produced by me, Wesley Slover, with help from Jake Merritt. It was mixed by Trevor Richardson. Our artwork and branding was created by Audrey Havey. She's a phenomenal collaborator, and I cannot recommend her highly enough.
If you have any thoughts on collaboration, we would love to hear from you at the collab collections sanctus.audio. The Collab Collection is a project of Sanctus Audio, a sound and music design studio. Hear our work at sanctus.audio. And if you could use a sonic collaborator, hit us up.
