Dave Liebman and Michael Kaplan: How Does the Brain Make All that Jazz?

AAJ: Dave, I know that Lydia is a very gifted singer. [At twenty-five, she has released her first jazz album with Dave's group, Familia, CD Baby, 2016-Eds.] But does she like to listen to "Crescent" today?

DL: I don't know, but she likes Coltrane. Here's a cute story: at one point in her early teen years, Lydia was listening to rap a lot, and I was very worried, I almost flipped out! Then one day, she's sixteen, and her inner alarm clock goes off with new music, and she's listening to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme"! So I asked her what's going on. She said, "I found it in your collection, and I kind of like it." And she hasn't gone back after that, thank God!

MK: My advice for parents was going to be the same as yours. All you can or should do is expose a little kid to a lot of music, and see what sticks. As far as actual musical instruction, some of the research I mentioned about functional connectivity found that improvising as part of practicing may be very important, at least as far as the apparent brain activity. People who had grown up improvising had different patterns of brain activity, with more connectivity between premotor and motor cortex, than those who also became good musicians but hadn't practiced improvising. They also found that most of the proficient improvisers in their sample did report improvisation as part of their practice routine from a very young age.

DL: I'm not an expert on teaching young kids, but I think the first thing you teach them should be improvising: here are two notes, do what you want to do with them? Let them play with the notes. Then jump ahead a couple of years, and give them the blues scale and let them play with it.

AAJ: I see that we're running out of time. This has been a fascinating discussion, and I'd like to thank you both for participating. Mike, could you please sum up our excursion into jazz and neuroscience for us?

MK: As a student of both music and the brain, I've enjoyed hearing the perspective of such an accomplished improviser (thanks, Dave!), and I hope these kinds of experiments are interesting to the readers of All About Jazz. And I also hope it's clear that musicians, fans and critics have nothing to fear from the neuroscience of music. Explaining something in neuroscientific terms isn't "explaining away" anything about the experience, which "is what it is." There is no conceivable finding from neuroscience that can diminish the greatness and the excitement of a great solo, or compel a listener to like (or stop liking) their favorite music.

Scientists study music because we love music. Trying to think about just how the brain pulls off this most amazing feat of jazz improvisation can only enhance our appreciation, not diminish it.

Reference: Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: an FMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS One, 3(2), e1679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

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