Lately I’ve been working on playing jazz on guitar. This means learning a lot of jazz tunes and really getting comfortable improvising over the classic jazz changes.

I’m starting to understand a key difference between jazz and pop. Pop music is, I believe, really focused on crafting the best, most immersive song experience. A chord progression will be tweaked to perfection, engineers will spend hours hunting for the right organ sound, and a solo will be played over and over until perfect. The idea is to create 3 minutes of bliss. A jazz song takes a more different approach. Jazz is dedicated to the concept of improvisation and is willing to let things suffer a bit to take risks. If you record a tune and the sax solo isn’t all that great, nobody will demand redoing it. (Often jazz is recorded live with various instruments bleeding into each other’s mics so redoing it isn’t even possible.) A certain amount of Imperfection is the price of doing business in jazz.

To put it another way, I think if you are listening to a pop song and your mind is wandering, in some sense the song has failed. It hasn’t totally captured you. With a jazz tune, particularly a long one, it’s ok for the mind to wander. Not every moment has to be great.