One of my favourite albums to put on while writing is The Köln Concert album by Keith Jarrett. Despite listening to it for years, and my previous life as an arts journalist, I never knew the crazed mayhem it came from.
Among other elements that came together to mess with the performance – Jarrett was sleep deprived on that tour, a mix up at the restaurant meant he hadn’t eaten, and he had to wear a back brace. The concert hall had hosted an opera performance earlier that evening so Jarrett had to take the stage at 11.30pm. The staff at the opera house had misunderstood which piano he’d requested and given him a broken one that was out of tune. By the time the mistake was discovered it was too late to bring another one over in the rain. The piano tuner did his best for a few hours before the performance but he wasn’t able to fix the broken pedals.
The concert was almost called off except for, first, that it was sold out and, secondly, the recording engineers had already set things up.
So sleep deprived, in pain, and on a broken piano, Keith Jarrett took the stage and delivered a completely improvised performance that became the highest selling solo piano record in history.
The creative act is a moment in time. In this case, on that rainy night in 1975, Keith sat down and found the limitations in the piano with the broken pedals and made what he could with it. If everything was perfect and set up, then a different performance would have happened. It might have been just as captivating but in a different way. There would be no point in delaying the performance for those conditions.
There are always things that will go wrong. There are things that will make that particular creative moment – the draft, the acted scene, the musical take – unique.
The chaos in seeing how an artist reacts is what makes a performance interesting. This is why we’re fascinated by knowing that a scene or line in a film was improvised. Robin Williams improvised many of the therapy scenes, and the last line, in Good Will Hunting. Jack Nicholson brought the gun into the scene of The Departed without Leo DiCaprio knowing. Francis Ford Coppola had the door lock to fluster the actor when he was coming to apologise to Don Corleone. In La La Land, Emma Stone performed her audition with different improvised moments on each take.
Those moments threw something else into the mix that created the magic that engages us in a work of art.
There are some strategies you can use to bring this welcome chaos into your own creative process.
There’s an approach to the creative process that Brian Eno uses sometimes that – I believe – he adapted from a Japanese approach. He describes it as “long preparation, short execution.” Take a long time to prepare your space, your ideas, your craft… and then create the work in a short amount of time. For a book this might be difficult but I’ve used this approach to create drafts in a short amount of time, then spend longer polishing and editing them. The key here is to embrace the uncertainty, and make quick creative decisions in the moment instead of deliberating for days or weeks. Trust yourself in the moment to make the decision, and see where it goes.
There’s time for preparation. And there’s time to sit down and do the work. Not everything has to be ready to write or perform. It’s the bit of discomfort that will make the work even more interesting.