Last night, I sat in with a great jazz combo playing at Ye Olde Tripple Inn, a bar a few blocks from where I live. The gig went well, and most of the group was exceedingly complementary – to their ears, I was told, I sounded like the re-embodied ghost of Woody Shaw. The bass player, however, knew otherwise – I could see it in his eyes. He was the only one who could tell I wasn’t playing complex harmonic ideas because I was intentionally sidestepping, substituting tritones, and building upper structure triads. I was playing complex harmonic ideas because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

For me, playing jazz is a bit like speaking French. Which is to say, I can’t actually speak any French at all. But I do have a remarkably good ear for accents*, and can pretend to speak French well enough to not only convince non-speakers I’m fluent, but even to convince those who’ve studied the language for a few years (apparently under the belief that I speak so fluently they just can’t keep up).

To be fair, the analogy between jazz and French isn’t precise; while both follow formal grammars, language conveys precise meaning in a way music is rarely meant to. So, at a certain level, sounding like you can play jazz and actually being able to play jazz are the very same thing. It is, after all, an aural tradition.

And, in fact, I do know the grammar of jazz. It’s just that I know it only academically, intellectually, rather than having the myriad chords and scales and all their variants seamlessly enough under my fingers to play them through without conscious thought. So, under the heat of the moment, as tunes fly by, I fall back on my ear, on simply playing what sounds right.

Hence my new resolution: going forward, I’ll be working hard to bring my academic jazz theory up to practical jazz theory. Running patterns again and again to ingrain the harmonies deep enough in my subconscious that, when, as I do now, I let whatever music is in my head push through the bell of my horn, it pushes through in a form that’s, jazz-wise, unimpeachably grammatically correct.

Until then, though, I’ll be faking it by ear and heart. Unless I’m looking to impress last night’s bass player (or any of the other small handful of extremely well trained listeners who can actually tell the difference), that seems to be good enough.

*side story: While underage, I drank for years on an Australian fake ID, managing a 100% success rate (even in front of Australian bartenders) in passing both my accent and the ID off as the genuine article.