Range - David Epstein Page 0,29

did it with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

Even though he never learned to read music (or words—a fellow musician had to teach him to sign his autograph for fans), Django composed a symphony, playing on his guitar what he wanted each instrument in the ensemble to do while another musician struggled to transcribe it.

He died of a brain hemorrhage at forty-three, but music he made nearly a century ago continues to show up in pop culture, including Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and The Aviator, and in the hit BioShock video games. The author of The Making of Jazz anointed the man who could neither read music nor study it with the traditional fingerings “without question, the single most important guitarist in the history of jazz.”

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Cecchini has bushy eyebrows and a beard that parts and closes quickly like ruffled shrubbery when he talks excitedly. Like now: he’s talking Django, and he’s a huge fan. He used to have a black poodle named Django. He opens a sepia-toned YouTube clip and whispers conspiratorially, “Watch this.”

There is Django, bow tie, pencil mustache, and slicked-back hair. The two useless fingers on his left hand are tucked into a claw. Suddenly, the hand shoots all the way up the guitar neck, and then all the way back down, firing a rapid succession of notes. “That’s amazing!” Cecchini says. “The synchronization between the left and right hand is phenomenal.”

The strict deliberate practice school describes useful training as focused consciously on error correction. But the most comprehensive examination of development in improvisational forms, by Duke University professor Paul Berliner, described the childhoods of professionals as “one of osmosis,” not formal instruction. “Most explored the band room’s diverse options as a prelude to selecting an instrument of specialization,” he wrote. “It was not uncommon for youngsters to develop skills on a variety of instruments.” Berliner added that aspiring improvisational musicians “whose educational background has fostered a fundamental dependence on [formal] teachers must adopt new approaches to learning.” A number of musicians recounted Brubeck-like scenarios to Berliner, the time a teacher found out that they could not read music but had become adept enough at imitation and improvisation that “they had simply pretended to follow the notation.” Berliner relayed the advice of professional musicians to a young improvisational learner as “not to think about playing—just play.”

While I was sitting with Cecchini, he reeled off an impressive improvisation. I asked him to repeat it so I could record it. “I couldn’t play that again if you put a gun to my head,” he said. Charles Limb, a musician, hearing specialist, and auditory surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron-free keyboard so that jazz musicians could improvise while inside an MRI scanner. Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.

Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”

Django Reinhardt was once in a taxi with Les Paul, inventor of the solid-body electric guitar. Paul was a self-taught musician, and the only person in both the Rock and Roll and National Inventors halls of fame. Reinhardt tapped Paul on the shoulder and asked if he could read music. “I said no, I didn’t,” Paul recounted, “and he laughed till he was crying and said, ‘Well, I can’t read either. I don’t even know what a C is; I just play them.’”

Cecchini told me that he was regularly stunned when he would ask an exceptional jazz performer onstage to play a certain note, and find the musician could not understand him. “It’s an old joke among jazz musicians,” Cecchini said. “You ask, ‘Can you read music?’ And the guy says, ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’” There is truth in the joke. Cecchini has taught musicians who played professionally for the Chicago Symphony, which in 2015 was rated as the top orchestra in the country and fifth in the world by a panel of critics. “It’s easier for a