Teaching with Miles Davis
Chaz Pugliese, France and UK
Chaz Pugliese is a trainer, presenter and author working out of Paris. Previously Academic Director for Teacher Training at Pilgrims, he’s now self-employed while he continues to be associated with Pilgrims. He is a regular presenter at all major ELT events and has published several book chapters as well as numerous articles for several ELT journals. He has two books out, Being Creative (Delta, 2010) and Principled Communicative Approach (with Z.Dörnyei and Jane Arnold, Helbling, 2015). His interests are: creativity and motivation, group processes, and corpus linguistics. He’s a keen guitarist and likes any music that’s raw, honest and real. E-mail: chazpugliese@gmail.com
Menu
Background
Rules are there to be broken
Radical simplicity
Creative leadership
Don’t fear mistakes: there are none
Conclusions
I’ve been teaching and training for over twenty years, I have a wall of qualifications, but whatever I know about teaching I didn’t learn from the books I’ve read, or from the conferences I’ve attended, or even from rubbing elbows with several fabulous teachers and among the world’s finest trainers. None of that. What I know about teaching I‘ve learned from Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpeter and bandleader. Miles was a real innovator, a man who earned his sobriquet as ‘the Picasso of jazz’ (though the story goes that one day he snapped ‘My name’s Miles, and if anything, Picasso is ‘the Miles Davis’ of painting’), because just as Picasso innovated in the arts, Miles changed the course of jazz several times throughout his lifetime.
I’ll play it first and then I’ll tell you what it is, or the art of improvisation.
Miles influenced my teaching in many ways: he taught me about improvisation, first of all. Like all jazz musicians, Miles’ art revolved around the skill to improvise meaningful melodies. Improvising is about composing and performing music at the same time. But improvisation is not chaos, it’s about the interaction that takes place between the players. Musicians have an agenda, but what they do is keep it loose, and let the band dictate the agenda. Working without a script or with a very loose script forces you to listen intensely to ensure that your own contribution is contextually relevant to what everybody else is doing in the moment. I find this concept fascinating. It took me a while to realize that just like a jazz musician wants to feel free to improvise and do so within the boundaries of the song, as a teacher you need to have some sort of structure too, pay attention to what goes on in the here and now and be reactive, ready to abandon chartered routes (i.e. lesson plans) and be ready to explore some other path, more promising perhaps, certainly more risky, but infinitely more exciting. In other words, it’s the lesson, and the people you’re with, that dictate the agenda.
I find improvising is also a great way to stay fresh and so stave off routine, and eventually, burn out, which is always lurking around the corner in a people’s profession such as ours. It just occurs to me as I’m writing this, that you will disagree with me if you look at teaching as science, but I think it isn’t. Teaching is, for me, about facilitating the person’s encounter with the subject matter. In so doing, it is certainly closer to art and craft. To paraphrase Miles, ever thought about teaching that doesn’t look and sound like teaching?
Miles taught me to break rules, and John Fanselow reinforced this concept and helped me take it home: I came to realize how important this is when I got familiar with the making of Miles’ masterpiece, ‘Kind of Blue’, (1956) the most best-selling album in the history of jazz. At the age of 32, Davis managed to coax innovative ideas out of his players that took everyone by surprise. He also remade the industry, introducing longer, more contemplative songs like the now classic "So What." When Miles contacted his musicians to tell the about the recording, he didn’t send them the music scores, as one would expect a bandleader would, didn’t talk about the music he’d written and wanted to record, intentionally leaving everybody in the dark. What he wanted to do is preserve the music. The musicians found out about the project when they met at the studio. The result was stunning, the music was so fresh and the tunes are all, with the exception of one, first takes. Yes, breaking rules is high-risk affair: in education, I feel this is necessary so to keep our students on their toes. What I’m talking about here is the necessity to provide the students with effective pedagogic surprises as advocated by Bruner.
Another aspect of Miles’ art that has been a constant inspiration is his mastery at playing just a few notes and yet develop highly sophisticated, meaningful solos. This is the mark of any great musician, and it’s where real, raw, honest music is. Miles’ approach made me understand that I can do and (hopefully) achieve more with less in my classes too. Mind you: there’s nothing wrong in wanting to use resources, books, pictures, or technology, just like in jazz lots of people play more notes, faster, and nowadays with the advent of technology, some use loops, too! I think though, that just like jazz, a session with my students is a conversation that is mediated by the sound of the human voice. I find that materials often get in the way things are done in the classroom, so I learned from Miles to declutter my teaching, and just like he used to do, leave center stage for a while. This frugal approach has served me well over the years. Miles used to say that ‘music is the silence between the notes’.
‘Don’t play the ‘butter’ notes’ or: the art of keeping it fresh.
Ever the innovator, Miles always looked ahead and never looked back. In the 70s Miles broke away from the jazz tradition, and was the first to introduce electronic keyboards and combine the rhythms of rock with jazz music, giving birth to what was called fusion or jazz-rock. When an interviewer asked him why he’d quit playing ballads, he famously quipped: ‘because I love them too much’. In the 80s, after a long hiatus due to poor health, Miles returned with a new band and a new repertoire which included M. Jackson and Cindy Lauper’s covers. The effort was typical Miles: unafraid to risk reputation in pursuit of new trends. Needless to say, in either case, he inflamed the critics (and a great deal of his aficionados, as well). But he wanted new challenges, and he persevered. Why? Because he knew he had something to say. And ultimately, because that’s what creative leaders do. They believe in what they do, and they do not hesitate to defy the crowd no matter what, remaining indifferent to criticism. Leaders like Miles are thick-skinned, they wear an indestructible armor, nothing and nobody can make them doubt their beliefs. They know better. He certainly did. And that’s another lesson I learned from him.
When I meet a class for the first time, I write them a letter and I encourage them, urge them, even, to please make as many mistakes as they can.
I live in France, a country where mistakes are scorned at, are stigmatized and severely punished in school. As a result, rather unsurprisingly, this is a society with very high-risk aversion, and this has a big impact on the economy of the country. For example, banks in this country are traditionally reluctant to loan money, and as a consequence France has a much smaller number of middle-sized, family run businesses than the US, or China, for example. When my students read my note, they’re totally bewildered and they think it’s some sort of bad taste joke.
Mistakes are only important if we develop an unhealthy attitude to them. If we accept them (not just tolerate them), we’re much better off.
The jazz pianist Herbie Hancock tells a lovely anecdote which illustrates how Miles viewed mistakes. One night, Hancock was playing with Miles, and he happened to play the wrong chord in the middle of Miles’ improvisation. He cursed himself, but he then realized that Miles went off his original solo and played a few notes to make that chord sound ‘right’. Another example: on the song "Freddie Freeloader" (from Kind of blue) Davis comes in one bar early at one point. The band adjusts to this unexpected entry by the leader in such a seamless way that very few people notice the subtle glitch. This is the power of collective improvisation: Everybody listens to everybody else and adjusts to what they are doing. Isn’t that what we do in conversation? And isn’t this what Mc Carthy says when he refers to fluency as confluence and a dialogic effort in the sense that speakers fine-tune their respective output?
Miles changed music several times throughout his life. Creativity was his middle name and his very raison d’être. This is a man who constantly pushed boundaries, never played the same thing twice, he was never happy about his past successes, and very much like Picasso, always looked forward, always in pursuit of something more exciting, more adventurous. When he recorded Kind of Blue, he surprised the critics who thought he had peaked with Milestones. With Kind of Blue he put aside his past success and strove for even greater heights. What he achieved is extraordinary: not only was the album the most commercially successful jazz album ever, but with it, Miles redefined the industry, and showed what a great manager of talents he was, by pushing his musicians to the edge and taking experimentation right up to the edge of failure on a quest for something new. Davis did push his musicians "to the edge," but he did it in a way that effectively managed the risks. What he was interested in was blaze new trails and create new territory. Think how interesting it would be if we had that in education as well, if we learned to teach not what’s there but what’s NOT there, to paraphrase Miles…
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
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