Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Bowie, Jazz and the Unplayable Piano

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

It was the biggest concert of Keith Jarrett's career - but the pianist was in for a shock when he entered Koln's opera house. The only piano at the venue was a broken-down wreck. Should he risk humiliation and play anyway or simply walk out? The collaboration between pop superstar David Bowie and arch disruptor Brian Eno offers a lesson that staying in your comfort zone isn't always the best option.Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin As the night draws in and the fire blazes on the hearth, we warn the children by telling them stories. The Juniper tree teaches them, oh I don't know what it's just horrendous, don't Google it. But my stories are for the education of the grownups. And my stories are all true. I'm Tim Halford, gather close and listen to my cautionary tales. Late in January 1975, a German teenager named Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty.

Litt only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit sign. This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. Vera loved jazz and was frustrated that there just wasn't enough good jazz in Cologne. So, at the age of 16, Shid started to arrange concerts herself. Tonight would be the fifth, and by far the biggest. Vera Branders had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late night concert of jazz from the American pianist Keith Jarrett, a remarkable venue for a remarkable 29-year-old musician. Jarrett had already played with greats such as Art

Blakey and Miles Davis, but now he was on his own. The vast auditorium was sold out, 1,400 people were coming, easily the largest audience for Jarrett's tour of improvised piano performances. In just a few hours, Keith Jarrett would walk out alone on that stage, hid sit down at the piano, and without rehearsal or sheet music, he'd begin to play. But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. Jarrett looked at the instruments a little wearily, played a few notes, walked around it, tried a few more, his producer Manfredaika joined in. Neither of them spoke to Vera,

instead they were huddled together. Then Manfredaika came over to Vera. If you don't give another piano, Keith can't play tonight. There had been a mistake. Jarrett was, and is, an exacting musician, he likes things to be perfect, absolutely the way he wants them. And he'd requested a specific piano, a Bursondorfer in Perial. The opera house had told Vera Brande's they had just the thing, but somehow the piano on stage was nothing like what had been promised. As Vera Brande's remembered, they found this tiny little Bursondorfer that was completely out of tune, the upper and the lower octave was wrecked, the black notes in the middle didn't work, the pedal stuck, it was...

unplayable. Absolutely unplayable. And quite understandably, Jarrett didn't want to play it. And when it became clear there was no way to get a replacement piano on stage when it became clear that it was the unplayable piano or nothing. Keith Jarrett opted for nothing. He walked out into the rain, leaving a bedraggled Vera Brander's trailing behind him, begging him not to cancel. When 1400 people showed up for their late-night concert, Vera Branders was going to find herself facing a riot.

You're listening to another cautionary tale. About the same time as Keith Jarrett's encounter with the unplayable piano, on the other side of Germany, a very different musician was scrambling over his own musical obstacle course. David Bowie, the unearthly, ambisexual rock icon, had moved to Berlin. Bowie had had a grim alienating period living in Los Angeles. He was beset by legal troubles, his marriage alternated between indifference and contempt, and he was taking far too many hard drugs. It was a dangerous period for me, Bowie reflected. But Bowie had a very different attitude to his music than Jarrett. While Jarrett was a

purist, Bowie actually enjoyed self-imposed obstacles. Bow we believed that accidents were to be treasured, even planned, rather than avoided. That's why he asked Brian Eno to join him and his producer Tony Visconti in Berlin. They'd meet regularly in Hunser Studio 2, the big hall by the wall, as Bowie called it. It was a beautiful park-a-floor concert hall, popular for recording chamber music, but a few hundred feet away from the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Eno took to showing up at the Hansa studio with a soft black box containing a selection of curious cards he called oblique strategies. They're quite simple these cards, small

black text on a white background, curved corners, they're about the size of playing cards, although there are more than a hundred of them, making a thick deck to be shuffled and consulted. Each card has a different instruction, and you never know which one you're going to get. Eno once told me you have to pick. If you don't like it, tough. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders. Be the first not to do what has never not been done before. Look at the order in which you do things.

Emphasize the flaws. Change instrument roles. Sure enough, during the recording of David Bowie's Lodge-A-Album, Carlos Alamo, one of the world's greatest guitarists was told to play the drums instead. Another guitarist, Adrian Beliu, was asked to improvise a solo in response to a recording that would eventually become the single, Boyz Keep Swinging.

Sorry, what key is that in? Don't worry about the key, just play. Bellew described the experience. It was like a freight train coming through my mind. It's an amazing solo though. And that astonishing, wailing guitar at the beginning of Heroes, that's Robert Fripp. Fripp was just playing around with guitar feedback, but when Visconti patched together the random noises, the effect was beautiful. The poet Simon Armitage describes the cards as if you're asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction.

That doesn't sound fun, yet the strange chaotic working process produced some of the decades most critically acclaimed albums, low, heroes, and lodger, you can't argue with the results. I sought out Brian Eno to discuss this strange approach of deliberately adding obstacles. Eno is, to me, one of the most interesting musicians alive. He began his musical career in the 1970s with Roxy Music, where he'd create strange sound effects and play synthesizer with a giant plastic knife and fork.

He created music for airports, a simple, beautiful landmark in ambient music. My life in the bush of ghosts, an influential, sample rich collaboration with David Byrne. And another Green World, the record that Prince once named as his biggest inspiration. Eno has collaborated with Talking Heads, U2, Twiler Tharp, Coldplay, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Breyer's, Paul Simon and the cult director David Lynch. When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s,

Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them. And of course, there's his remarkable collaboration with David Bowie. But I wanted to talk to Brian not just because he's produced beautiful music with remarkable people using very strange methods, but also because Brian Eno is, like me, a nerd. He thinks hard about why obstacles are so often helpful. Listen on, and I'll tell you what I learned. You know that feeling of being a tourist in a totally foreign land? How rich all the tiny details are, how densely layered the memories. You can look back on a day and marvel at just how much you manage to pack in, whereas a day of your normal routines can be hard

to remember at all. One of the things that Brian Eno is trying to achieve with his strange cards is that same sense of attention of being alert. The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually, and the friend is alertness. Now, I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control, so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting. There's nothing like an unfamiliar problem to make you start focusing. If things feel out of your control, maybe even a little dangerous, that gets the adrenaline flowing and in the right circumstances, the creative juices too.

This attention-grabbing effect applies whether we're talking about trying to play a strange instrument, navigate a strange place, or work together with a strange person. And while it sounds dramatic, it can work its magic at a subliminal level. It can be something as subtle as whether the words we're reading on a page look familiar or odd. Consider a study by the psychologists Conor Diamond-Yamon, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erika Vaughn. They teamed up with high school teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials in

standard fonts such as Times New Roman. The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts. The dense text of Attenschweiler, the cursive flourishes of monotype corsever, or the zesty bounce of comic sands italicised. These fonts are, let's be honest, distracting and hard to read, but the ugly fonts didn't hamper the students at all. Students who had been taught using them ended up scoring higher on their exams. We don't know exactly why, but it seems that the strange fonts prompted them to pay attention, to slow down, and to think about what they were reading. If such obstacles make us focus and think harder, they may end up not being obstacles at all,

but secret weapons. There's a second reason that the oblique strategies may have helped David Bowie. They pushed him to try something fresh. Brianino described to me the tendency of highly skilled musicians to end up exploring a narrow territory because it's the only place they feel completely comfortable. You get more and more competent at dealing with that place and your clichés become increasingly cliché. But when you're forced to start from somewhere new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic. This effect is well understood far outside the realm of music.

Computer scientists use algorithms to look for solutions to complex problems. And those algorithms often use the tactic of stepping back and adding some randomness partway through their search. What sort of complex problems do I have in mind? Are there plenty? Planning efficient routes for a fleet to have parceled delivery trucks, figuring out the best layout for a silicon chip.

Such problems have so many possible solutions that it's impossible, even for a computer, to check them all. So, computer scientists have developed algorithms that try to find a solution that may not be perfect, but is good enough. You'd be surprised at how many of these algorithms add random shocks and remixes, those shocks are there to prevent the algorithm getting stuck on a bad solution. In the jargon, that's called a local optimum. But you or I would simply call it a dead end. The random shocks offer a way of backing out of the dead end and trying something else.

This might seem a long way from our everyday concerns. We're not musical geniuses, we're not computer algorithms. But the same logic is at play in the most humdrum circumstances, such as our daily commute. For example, in my own long standing commute across the London Underground, I know exactly where on the platform I should stand when I get on the first tube train, to ensure that after riding nine stops, including a change of lines, I'm in the perfect position to be first on the escalator out of London Bridge Station and thus the front of the line for coffee, the Monmouth Coffee House, near the Tube Exit. Find differences in where I stand on a train platform on one side of the city, determine

how quickly I get my coffee half an hour later on the other side. Yes, I promised myself I'd never become that person, but it happened anyway. And however you commute, you likely have your own little shortcuts and time-saving habits. Assuming that is, those habits really do save you time, because according to the logic I've been outlining, if you commute, being forced to change your plans may actually help you in the long run. It's the obstacle in your path that forces you to find a better path. But in what circumstances might the London Underground possibly be disrupted I hear you

ask? Well, in February 2014, two trade unions representing workers on the subway launched a 48-hour strike, which closed well over half the stations on the system. The first day of the strike was wet, as well as being cold and dark, which would have discouraged people from simply walking or getting on a bike. The trains and buses that day were rammed full

of grumpy commuters trying to figure out how to get around the disruption. After the strike, the economists, Ferdinand Rausch, Sean Larkham and Tim Williams, looked at data from London's electronic fare card system. Those fare cards work on the subway, the buses and the overground trains too. Raochen and his colleagues identified people who had to change from their regular route during the strike. Most changed back again when the strike was over, of course, but many did not. They realised that they had been getting their own commute wrong all their lives, and all it took to prod them into finding a better way was two days of disruption.

So, there were two reasons why an obstacle might actually help us solve a problem. First, the ugly font effect, the strange, unfamiliar, or even threatening situation grabs your attention and holds it. You're not checking your phone, you're not daydreaming, you can't afford to miss a second. And then there's the tube strike effect. The way a random disruption forces you to try something totally new, whether by forcing us to pay attention or by prodding us to try something different, these obstacles can actually help us find better solutions to the problems we face. But this is still a cautionary tale, because it's a story of danger.

The danger is that we shun these obstacles, avoid difficulties flee from problems, and in fact, we might flourish from facing them head on. Keith Jarrett, after all, didn't celebrate the appearance of a bad piano on stage at his largest ever concert, rubbing his hands in glee at the opportunity to have his creativity supercharged by the challenge? Of course he didn't. He walked away. Who wouldn't? When faced with the unplayable piano, we resist. We resist all sorts of obstacles, but the most obvious example of this resistance comes when the obstacle is a strange or unfamiliar person. There's a large body of research that suggests a diverse group of people,

I mean, people of different ages, genders, nationalities, professions and political views. That diverse group of people is more likely to find solutions or make better judgments than a group full of look-alikes, everyone echoing everyone else. When pulling together a team are instinctive to go for quality, the best people we can find, but perhaps instead we should be going for variety. One analogy is that different perspectives, skills and experiences are like different tools in the toolbox. A well-stocked toolbox is more useful than a case full of hammers, even if they're really good hammers. But while we should be looking for a diverse group, we tend to gravitate to the familiar, friends rather

than strangers, people who look and sound like us, who reflect our own views and make us feel comfortable. We're hammers looking to get cozy with other hammers and we view wrenches and screwdrivers and sores as awkward misfits. There's an elegant experiment that underlines this point conducted by the psychologist's Catherine Phillips, Katie Lillianquist and Margaret Neal. They gave murder mystery problems to students. These problems consisted of dossiers of information, with alibis and evidence, witness statements, and a choice of three possible suspects. So, who committed the crime?

The researchers divided the groups into two sets at random. In one set, the murder mysteries would be solved by four people who knew each other, four friends. In the other set, the murder mysteries would be solved by four people who knew each other, four friends. In the other set, the dossiers would be given to three friends, and one stranger, for maximum awkwardness. You can see where I'm going with this. Obviously, I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which they did. But the scale of the improvement may surprise you. The groups of friends did better than a random guess between the three options, but the groups with a stranger did much better yet,

with a success rate of 75%. In fact, the groups with a stranger were as far ahead of the groups of friends, as the groups of friends were ahead of pure random guesswork. But what's really interesting is not just that the groups with the stranger made smarter decisions, but how they felt about it. When the scientists interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time and they also thought they had done a good job, they were complacent. When they spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they hadn't enjoyed themselves, and they were full of doubts about whether they'd chosen the guilty man. I think that really exemplifies the challenge. Here's what seems like an obstacle, this awkward stranger sitting in the group

and spoiling everyone's fun, but the obstacle is actually a secret weapon, the stranger dramatically improves the performance of the group. Yet the people in the group don't realize it. The same thing happened with Brian Eno and his curious cards. The musicians hated them. That can't have been a surprise to Eno. On that earlier Eno album that Prince loved so much, another green world, Eno asked Phil Collins the superstar drummer from Genesis to play. The instructions from the cards so infuriated Collins he was reduced to hurling beer cans across the studio in frustration. Faced with one piece of card-inspired foolishness, the guitarist Carlos Alamo are told he know, this experiment is stupid.

The violinist Simon House commented, the sessions often sounded terrible. Carlos did have a problem simply because he's very gifted and professional. He can't bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap. How do we persuade ourselves to engage with broken tools in possible deadlines or awkward people when really all we want to do is help beer cameras.

Back in dark rainy cologne in 1975, young Vera Branders was in big trouble. An opera house full of paying customers, an unplayable piano, and an understandably reluctant Keith Jarrett. So she did the only thing she could. She ran after Jarrett, found him waiting in his car, flung open the door, and begged him not to cancel. And Keith Jarrett, looking out at this rain drenched teenage girl. Took pity on her. Never forget.

Just for you. Keith Jarrett would play after all. While a tuner worked to straighten out some of the kinks in the unplayable piano, Vera Branders took Jarrett and Manfred Eichert to an Italian restaurant to get some food before the show. Jarrett barely had time to bolt down a few mouthfuls of pasta before rushing back to the opera house to face the piano. The instrument was now in tune,

but still had some silent keys, a malfunctioning sustain pedal, and was harsh and tinny in the opera register. But of course, not being a full-sized concert grand, it was simply too quiet. If played in the conventional style, it would never fill the vast auditorium with music. But it was too late to back out now, utterly alone, in front of 1400 people. Jarrett walked back out onto the stage of the opera house.

He sat down at the unplayable piano and began. The minute he played the first note, everybody knew this was magic. That's something I will never forget. The first tone and everybody was totally mesmerised. Jarrett was avoiding those tinny upper registers. He was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing ambient quality. His left hand produced rumbling repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano's lack of resonance. The music had a trance-like quality as a result. But Jarrett couldn't simply relax into that easy listening zone because the tiny piano

simply wasn't loud enough. He stood up, twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. Jarrett really had to play that piano very hard to get enough volume to get to the balconies. He was really... Pachau pushing the notes down. Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Jarrett didn't hold back in any way as he pummeled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. That night became legendary, the performance that made Keith Jarrett's reputation. It wasn't the music that he ever imagined playing, but handed an impossible mess.

Jarrett sawed. I never before or after saw anybody so immersed in his music. You could see it. He was absolutely there. That was how one member of the audience remembers it. It's just as Brian Eno said, what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control. Jarrett was having to play the piano in a different style from a different stance, remembering to avoid certain faulty keys and all in front of the largest audience

he'd ever faced. You can bet that he was alert. And you can bet, also, that he was trying something new, like a commuter dealing with a transports strike who suddenly discovers a fresh way to the office. Keith Jarrett could have played the music he played at Cologne on any piano, but it was only when he was forced to deal with the limitations of a bad piano that had occurred to him to try. Usually we don't try, unless something forces us to. Maybe it's a subway strike. Maybe it's the turn of an oblique strategy's card. Or maybe it's a guilt trip from a German teenager. You might wonder why Keith Jarrett and Manfred Eichert even bothered to record the concert when they expected it to be an embarrassment.

It's a fair question. Jarrett had told Eichert to send the recording engineers home what was the point. But Eichert argued that since they were there they might as well press record on the tape machine. Jarrett later admitted the logic. We know what we went through. We've paid for the sound guys to come here, so why don't we just let him record it and we'll have a tape of it? That way, at least Ica would have documentary evidence of what a musical catastrophe sounds like. But he didn't get a catastrophe. He got a masterpiece.

The recording was released as the Coln concert. It's the best-selling piano album in history, and the best-selling solo jazz album too. There's something very special about it. My wife asked me to put the music on while she was in labor. Not once, but twice. And it's so good that even after that rather painful association, we both still love listening. Yet, it so nearly never happened. If Vera Branders hadn't begged, if Keith Jarrett hadn't felt pity for that bedraggled

teenage girl, he certainly would never have chosen to play on a piano like that. Faire Brande's wasn't credited on that blockbuster album. She never got a penny of royalties, and in a way that's fair enough, concert promoters aren't artists. And yet, I have no doubt that the colon concert would never have been such a special piece of music without Vera Branders and her unplayable piano. All of us, from time to time, have to deal with our own unplayable pianos. When that happens, we need to sit down and try to play. You've been listening to Corsionary Tales, and if you liked this particular episode, I wrote a book about these ideas, it's called Messy, you might like it. Corsionary Tales is written and presented by me, Tim Hafen. Our producers are Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer and mixer was Pascal Wise, who also composed the amazing music.

This season's stars Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stevens and Russell Tovey. With Enso Chalente, Ed Gochen, Melanie Guthridge, Maseyem and Ro, Rufus Wright, and introducing Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Fame, Mia LeBelle, Carly Miliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course the mighty Malcolm Gladwell. And thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times. you