aka Ken Smith: Riffing on and being riffed on

I've been trying to think more clearly about miscommunication, sparked by a recent experience of the same.#

I remember a jazz musician talking about giving workshops for promising high school groups, and finding that the individual soloists often couldn't talk about what the previous soloist had played. There was the appearance of building on what the previous musician had set up, but the young people were not actually listening closely enough to really carry it off. Instead, they'd play something of their own choosing that fit the broad patterns of the song at hand.#

The senior jazz musician said to the young people that doing this was to miss the entire heart of jazz.#

So the specificity of the first soloist's phrasing should in some specific way be acknowledged in the notes played by the second. Lots of ways to do that, I believe, but still, the link should be noticeable to a thoughtful listener.#

This implies a more or less tangible standard for communication that could apply to social media exchanges. The specificity of the seed message should be recognizable in some way in the reply. If it isn't, then the first writer is right to feel wronged in some way, such as being misunderstood, being misrepresented, etc. Possibly having been engaged only in a tangential way.#

Another way to put it might be to say that the first writer has a project that in some way should taken seriously by the second writer.#

Stock phrases and cliches are obvious failures, then. But even a reply that is fresh in some way might not really be a reply, might only look like a reply.#

I'm not sure if it's fruitful to keep writing about this right now, or ever, I suppose. But I suspect there's more to say about common general patterns of miscommunication.#