Improvising Together: Why the Room Matters More Than the Résumé
6 minute read
The red recording light illuminates inside Columbia Records’ legendary 30th Street Studio in New York.
It is the spring of 1959.
Miles Davis says very little.
Miles has invited accomplished musicians to join him in New York City for two days. Each is a virtuosic musician and plays with a distinct sound: Bill Evans on piano, Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Wynton Kelly on piano. There is no rehearsal, no sheet music. Instead, Miles has brought sketches, scales, and a sense of direction for each piece. Miles understood each musician’s chemistry and had the foresight to know these chemistries would mix well.
What they recorded is Kind of Blue, an album whose sound still feels spacious, modern, and almost inevitable. Yet very little about its creation was inevitable. The music depended on combinations of preparation and openness, individuality and trust. But most importantly, it depended on one decision Miles made before anyone entered the studio: who belonged in the room.
Kind of Blue, Miles Davis, 1959
Organizations often confuse assembling great talent with building a great team. When hiring, it is natural to focus on the individual candidate: their accomplishments, experience, and ability to deliver results. But sometimes, organizations forget that every hire changes the conversation of the team. An important consideration, then, is to ask, “How will this person change the way this team thinks together?” Will the chemistries mix?
“Their differences were not obstacles to coherence. They were the raw material from which coherence could emerge.”
In recording Kind of Blue, Miles understood that the musicians he invited each brought distinct and sometimes sharply contrasting voices. He also knew these artists were able to listen to one another, leave space, respond, and alter their own contributions. Their differences were not obstacles to coherence. They were the raw material from which coherence could emerge.
To novice ears, jazz improvisation is often misunderstood as just a bunch of random notes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Jazz improvisation occurs within a framework, a structure, and only works when the structure is honored and the musicians listen to one another.
Similarly, successful organizations respect structure and framework. All leaders are on the same page, reducing the need to have a script for every response, and instead encouraging judgment to pivot and respond as markets shift.
Why Lydian Partners?
I came to this work as a trained classical musician, and I have spent nearly thirty years in executive search. Classical training teaches reverence for the score: you learn to reproduce a masterpiece faithfully, to carry emotions someone else set down centuries ago, and to render them as close to perfection as human hands allow. Jazz taught me something else: it taught me to explore while remaining connected to the other musicians.
I have taken a page from each discipline. I have come to believe that most executive search is still performed classically. It reproduces a score written for another company, in another market, at another moment. Read enough commentary on the modern CFO and the same story returns, as though the conditions that produced it have not moved. What is missing is not rigor; rather, it is a narrative that is in-the-moment and expressive, built for business and market variables we have genuinely not seen before. With Lydian Partners, I take from the jazz discipline the ability to be in-the-moment and to craft unique solutions. Lydian strives to offer more than a cookie-cutter solution.
This is increasingly important because no leadership team operates from a finished score. Markets move. Technologies change. Competitors behave unexpectedly. A strategy that appeared coherent six months ago may suddenly require reinterpretation. The advantage does not belong simply to the organization with the most detailed plan. It belongs to the leadership team capable of revising the plan without losing its center.
That capacity begins with listening. Listening is often treated as a matter of temperament or courtesy. In an executive team, it is a strategic capability. It determines whether weak signals are noticed, whether disagreement improves a decision or merely hardens positions, whether an unexpected idea is dismissed as a mistake or incorporated into something better.
“In an executive team, listening is a strategic capability.”
Boards confront this challenge whenever they add a leader to an established team. The goal is not to find someone who sounds exactly like everyone else. Uniformity may create comfort, but it rarely creates discovery. The goal is complementary excellence: a leader with an authentic voice who can contribute something distinct without losing the capacity to hear and be heard by others. The right executive may unsettle a team’s habits. The right executive may ask questions others have stopped asking. Productive tension can widen a leadership team’s thinking, but only when it is joined with judgment, humility, and the ability to build on the contributions of others.
Miles Davis understood that every person changed the dynamic, positively or negatively. He knew when chemistry was sparking innovation, achieving something new collectively.
Boards and CEOs cannot reproduce the conditions of a jazz studio. Nor should they romanticize the difficulty of leading successful organizations. But they can learn from the decision Miles Davis made before that red studio light came on. Kind of Blue remains revered by jazz musicians and fans and is the best-selling jazz album of all time. Herbie Hancock, an accomplished jazz musician himself, with an Academy Award and 14 Grammy Awards, said, “If you want to hear the spirit of jazz, listen to Kind of Blue.” The album still sounds modern and forward-thinking. It celebrates bringing musicians together who listened intently and improvised together.
Choosing talent is not enough. The deeper responsibility is choosing the right people for the room, for the moment, and for the ensemble.
Bryan Proctor
Managing Partner
Sources & Further Reading
- Miles Davis Official Site, “60 Years Ago: Miles Davis Completes Kind of Blue,” including Davis’s account that the sessions had no prior rehearsals and used sketches of melodic ideas.
- Bill Evans, “Improvisation in Jazz,” original liner notes to Kind of Blue, Columbia Records, 1959.
- Herbie Hancock, interview transcript published by HerbieHancock.com, August 4, 2016, recounting the ‘wrong chord’ performance with Miles Davis.
- George Russell, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
- Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece.
- Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography.
- The Making of Kind of Blue, 2004, Miles Davis, YouTube.com.
