December 20, 2019 • 30 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
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
(00:40):
for the education of the grown ups, and my stories
are all true. I'm Tim Harford. Gather close and listen
to my cautionary tales. Late in January nineteen seventy five,
(01:09):
a German teenager named Vera Brandes walked out onto the
stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty,
lit 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
(01:32):
enough good jazz in Cologne, so, at the age of sixteen,
she had started to arrange concerts herself. Tonight would be
the fifth and by far the biggest. Vera Brandes had
persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late night
concert of jazz from the American pianist Keith Jarrett, a
(01:55):
remarkable venue for a remarkable twenty nine 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 auditor was sold out. Fourteen hundred people were coming,
easily the largest audience for Jarrett's tour of improvised piano performances.
(02:18):
In just a few hours, Keith Jarrett would walk out
alone on that stage. He'd 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
(02:38):
the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked
around it, tried a few more. His producer, Manfred Eicher,
joined in. Neither of them spoke to Vera. Instead, they
were huddled together. Then Manfred Eicher came over to Vera,
if you don't give another piano, Keith can't play tonight.
(03:01):
There'd 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 Bursendorfer Imperial.
The opera house had told Vera brands they had just
the thing, but somehow the piano on stage was nothing
(03:24):
like what had been promised. As Vera Brands remembered, they
found this tiny little Burstendorfer 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
(03:48):
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 Brands trailing behind him, begging him
not to cancel. When fourteen hundred people showed up for
(04:13):
their late night concert, Vera Brandas was going to find
herself facing a riot. You're listening to another cautionary tale
(04:46):
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.
(05:08):
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
(05:28):
self imposed obstacles. Bowie 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 Hansa Studio too, the Big Hall
by the Wall, as Bowie called it. It was a beautiful,
(05:51):
parquet flawed concert hall, popular for recording chamber music, and
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 strategy is. They're quite simple,
these cards, small black text on a white background, curved corners.
(06:16):
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 one if
you don't like it. Tough. Whenever the studio sessions were
(06:38):
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 floors, change
instrument roles. Sure enough, during the recording of David Bowie's
(07:00):
Lodger album, Carlos Alamar, one of the world's greatest guitarists,
was told to play the drums instead another guitarist, and
Balu was asked to improvise a solo in response to
a recording that would eventually become the single boys Keep Swinging,
So don't worry about the key, just play. Bellu described
(07:23):
the experience. It was like a 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,
(07:49):
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,
chaos working process produced some of the decade's most critically
(08:12):
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 nineteen seventies with Roxy Music, where
(08:35):
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
(08:56):
once named as his biggest inspiration. Eno has collaborated with
Talking Heads, You Two, Twilight, Tharpe, Cold Play, Laurie Anderson,
Gavin Bryars, Paul Simon and the Cult direct to David Lynch.
When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top hundred albums
of the nineteen seventies, Brian Eno had a hand in
(09:17):
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
(09:38):
about why obstacles are so often helpful. Listen on and
I'll tell you what I learned. You know, that feeling
(10:04):
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
(10:26):
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.
(10:48):
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 at applies whether we're
(11:10):
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 Connor Diamond Yeoman,
(11:34):
Daniel Oppenheimer, and Erica Vaughan. 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
(11:55):
challenging fonts, the dense text of Haddensfeiler, the cursive flourishes
of Monotype Corceiver, or the zesty bounce of comic sans
It talicized. These fonts are, let's be honest, distres acting
and hard to read. But the ugly fonts didn't hamper
the students at all. Students who had been taught using
(12:16):
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
(12:46):
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 cliches become increasingly clichde.
(13:12):
But when you're forced to start from somewhere new the
cliches 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
(13:33):
and adding some randomness part way through their search. What
sort of complex problems do I have in mind? Are
there are plenty? Planning efficient roots for a fleet of
parcel 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.
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
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 and we're not
computer algorithms, but the same logic is at play in
the most humdrum circumstances, such as our daily commute. For example,
(14:41):
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 at the
front of the line for coffee the Monmouth Coffeehouse near
(15:02):
the tube exit. Fine 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 promise myself I'd never
become that person. Happened anyway, And however you commute, you
likely have your own little shortcuts and time saving habits.
(15:25):
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, they actually help you
in the long run. It's the obstacle in your path
that forces you to find a better path. But in
(15:46):
what circumstances might the London underground possibly be disrupted? I
hear you ask well. In February twenty fourteen, two trade
unions representing workers on the subway launched a forty eight
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 will have
(16:08):
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 roush Seawan
Larcom and Tim Williams looked at data from London's electronic
farecard system. Those fair cards work on the subway, the buses,
(16:31):
and the overground trains too. Rausch 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 realized that they'd
been getting their own commute wrong all their lives, and
all it took to prod them into finding a better
(16:52):
way was two days of disruption. So there are two
reasons why an obstacle might actually help us solve a problem. First,
the ugly font effect, the strange and familiar or even threatening,
grabs your attention and holds it. You're not checking your phone,
(17:13):
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
(17:35):
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, when 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
(17:55):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:51):
group full of lookalikes, everyone echoing everyone else. When pulling
together a team, our instinct is 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 different tools and the toolbox. A well
(19:12):
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 are hammers looking to get
(19:33):
cozy with other hammers, and we view wrenches and screwdrivers
and saws as awkward misfits. There's an elegant experiment that
underlines this point, conducted by the psychologists Katherine Phillips, Katie Lillianquist,
and Margaret Neil. They gave murder mystery problems to students.
These problems consisted of dossiers of information with alibis and evidence,
(19:57):
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 dossiers would be
given to three friends and one stranger for maximum awkwardness.
(20:22):
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 seventy five percent. In fact,
(20:44):
the groups with the 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 than how they felt about it. When the scientists
interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time,
and they also thought they'd done a good job. They
(21:06):
were complaisant when they spoke to thee 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
(21:29):
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,
(21:50):
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 foolish. The guitarist
Carlos Alomar told, you know this experiment is stool did
(22:14):
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, to impossible deadlines or awkward people, when
really all we want to do is her beer? Carris
(22:41):
back in dark, rainy Cologne in nineteen seventy five, young
Vera Brands 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,
(23:04):
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.
(23:26):
Vera Brands took Jarrett and Manfred Ikea to an Italian
restaurant to get some food before the show. Jarrett barely
had time to bolt down a few mouthfuls of pastor
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
(23:47):
tinny in the upper 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 fourteen
hundred people, Jarrett walked back out onto the stage of
(24:08):
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.
A first tone, and everybody was totally mesmerized. Jarrett was
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:23):
very hard to get enough volume to get to the balconies.
He was really pachoo pushing the hoods 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.
(25:43):
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 soared, I never before or
after saw anybody so immersed in his music. You could
see it. He was absolutely there. That was how one
(26:06):
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.
(26:29):
You can bet that he was alert, and you can
bet also that he was trying something new, like a
commuter dealing with a transport 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
(26:51):
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 strategist card, or maybe it's a
guilt trip from a German teenager. You might wonder why
(27:18):
Keith Jarrett and Manfred Iker even bothered to record the
concert when they expected it to be an embarrassment. It's
a fair question. Jarrett had told Ika to send the
recording engineers home, what was the point, but Ika 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
(27:41):
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 Iker 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
(28:03):
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's so nearly never happened. If Vera Branders hadn't begged,
(28:27):
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. Vera Branders 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
(28:48):
I have no doubt that the Colman 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
(29:08):
to play. You've been listening to Cautionary Tales, and if
you liked this particular episode, I wrote a book about
these ideas. It's called MESSI you might like it. Cautionary
(29:28):
Tales is written and presented by me Tim Harford. Our
producers are Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer
and mixer was Pascal Wise, who also composed the amazing music.
This season stars Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stephens and
Russell Tovey, with enso Celenti, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, mass
(29:52):
Siam Unroe, Rufus Wright and introducing Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to
the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Mia LaBelle,
Carlie Milliori, Jacob Weisberg and of course the mighty Malcolm
gladwe And thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times
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
(00:40):
for the education of the grown ups, and my stories
are all true. I'm Tim Harford. Gather close and listen
to my cautionary tales. Late in January nineteen seventy five,
(01:09):
a German teenager named Vera Brandes walked out onto the
stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty,
lit 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
(01:32):
enough good jazz in Cologne, so, at the age of sixteen,
she had started to arrange concerts herself. Tonight would be
the fifth and by far the biggest. Vera Brandes had
persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late night
concert of jazz from the American pianist Keith Jarrett, a
(01:55):
remarkable venue for a remarkable twenty nine 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 auditor was sold out. Fourteen hundred people were coming,
easily the largest audience for Jarrett's tour of improvised piano performances.
(02:18):
In just a few hours, Keith Jarrett would walk out
alone on that stage. He'd 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
(02:38):
the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked
around it, tried a few more. His producer, Manfred Eicher,
joined in. Neither of them spoke to Vera. Instead, they
were huddled together. Then Manfred Eicher came over to Vera,
if you don't give another piano, Keith can't play tonight.
(03:01):
There'd 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 Bursendorfer Imperial.
The opera house had told Vera brands they had just
the thing, but somehow the piano on stage was nothing
(03:24):
like what had been promised. As Vera Brands remembered, they
found this tiny little Burstendorfer 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
(03:48):
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 Brands trailing behind him, begging him
not to cancel. When fourteen hundred people showed up for
(04:13):
their late night concert, Vera Brandas was going to find
herself facing a riot. You're listening to another cautionary tale
(04:46):
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.
(05:08):
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
(05:28):
self imposed obstacles. Bowie 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 Hansa Studio too, the Big Hall
by the Wall, as Bowie called it. It was a beautiful,
(05:51):
parquet flawed concert hall, popular for recording chamber music, and
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 strategy is. They're quite simple,
these cards, small black text on a white background, curved corners.
(06:16):
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 one if
you don't like it. Tough. Whenever the studio sessions were
(06:38):
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 floors, change
instrument roles. Sure enough, during the recording of David Bowie's
(07:00):
Lodger album, Carlos Alamar, one of the world's greatest guitarists,
was told to play the drums instead another guitarist, and
Balu was asked to improvise a solo in response to
a recording that would eventually become the single boys Keep Swinging,
So don't worry about the key, just play. Bellu described
(07:23):
the experience. It was like a 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,
(07:49):
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,
chaos working process produced some of the decade's most critically
(08:12):
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 nineteen seventies with Roxy Music, where
(08:35):
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
(08:56):
once named as his biggest inspiration. Eno has collaborated with
Talking Heads, You Two, Twilight, Tharpe, Cold Play, Laurie Anderson,
Gavin Bryars, Paul Simon and the Cult direct to David Lynch.
When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top hundred albums
of the nineteen seventies, Brian Eno had a hand in
(09:17):
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
(09:38):
about why obstacles are so often helpful. Listen on and
I'll tell you what I learned. You know, that feeling
(10:04):
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
(10:26):
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.
(10:48):
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 at applies whether we're
(11:10):
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 Connor Diamond Yeoman,
(11:34):
Daniel Oppenheimer, and Erica Vaughan. 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
(11:55):
challenging fonts, the dense text of Haddensfeiler, the cursive flourishes
of Monotype Corceiver, or the zesty bounce of comic sans
It talicized. These fonts are, let's be honest, distres acting
and hard to read. But the ugly fonts didn't hamper
the students at all. Students who had been taught using
(12:16):
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
(12:46):
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 cliches become increasingly clichde.
(13:12):
But when you're forced to start from somewhere new the
cliches 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
(13:33):
and adding some randomness part way through their search. What
sort of complex problems do I have in mind? Are
there are plenty? Planning efficient roots for a fleet of
parcel 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.
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
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 and we're not
computer algorithms, but the same logic is at play in
the most humdrum circumstances, such as our daily commute. For example,
(14:41):
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 at the
front of the line for coffee the Monmouth Coffeehouse near
(15:02):
the tube exit. Fine 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 promise myself I'd never
become that person. Happened anyway, And however you commute, you
likely have your own little shortcuts and time saving habits.
(15:25):
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, they actually help you
in the long run. It's the obstacle in your path
that forces you to find a better path. But in
(15:46):
what circumstances might the London underground possibly be disrupted? I
hear you ask well. In February twenty fourteen, two trade
unions representing workers on the subway launched a forty eight
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 will have
(16:08):
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 roush Seawan
Larcom and Tim Williams looked at data from London's electronic
farecard system. Those fair cards work on the subway, the buses,
(16:31):
and the overground trains too. Rausch 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 realized that they'd
been getting their own commute wrong all their lives, and
all it took to prod them into finding a better
(16:52):
way was two days of disruption. So there are two
reasons why an obstacle might actually help us solve a problem. First,
the ugly font effect, the strange and familiar or even threatening,
grabs your attention and holds it. You're not checking your phone,
(17:13):
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
(17:35):
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, when 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
(17:55):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:51):
group full of lookalikes, everyone echoing everyone else. When pulling
together a team, our instinct is 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 different tools and the toolbox. A well
(19:12):
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 are hammers looking to get
(19:33):
cozy with other hammers, and we view wrenches and screwdrivers
and saws as awkward misfits. There's an elegant experiment that
underlines this point, conducted by the psychologists Katherine Phillips, Katie Lillianquist,
and Margaret Neil. They gave murder mystery problems to students.
These problems consisted of dossiers of information with alibis and evidence,
(19:57):
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 dossiers would be
given to three friends and one stranger for maximum awkwardness.
(20:22):
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 seventy five percent. In fact,
(20:44):
the groups with the 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 than how they felt about it. When the scientists
interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time,
and they also thought they'd done a good job. They
(21:06):
were complaisant when they spoke to thee 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
(21:29):
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,
(21:50):
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 foolish. The guitarist
Carlos Alomar told, you know this experiment is stool did
(22:14):
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, to impossible deadlines or awkward people, when
really all we want to do is her beer? Carris
(22:41):
back in dark, rainy Cologne in nineteen seventy five, young
Vera Brands 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,
(23:04):
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.
(23:26):
Vera Brands took Jarrett and Manfred Ikea to an Italian
restaurant to get some food before the show. Jarrett barely
had time to bolt down a few mouthfuls of pastor
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
(23:47):
tinny in the upper 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 fourteen
hundred people, Jarrett walked back out onto the stage of
(24:08):
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.
A first tone, and everybody was totally mesmerized. Jarrett was
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:23):
very hard to get enough volume to get to the balconies.
He was really pachoo pushing the hoods 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.
(25:43):
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 soared, I never before or
after saw anybody so immersed in his music. You could
see it. He was absolutely there. That was how one
(26:06):
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.
(26:29):
You can bet that he was alert, and you can
bet also that he was trying something new, like a
commuter dealing with a transport 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
(26:51):
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 strategist card, or maybe it's a
guilt trip from a German teenager. You might wonder why
(27:18):
Keith Jarrett and Manfred Iker even bothered to record the
concert when they expected it to be an embarrassment. It's
a fair question. Jarrett had told Ika to send the
recording engineers home, what was the point, but Ika 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
(27:41):
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 Iker 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
(28:03):
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's so nearly never happened. If Vera Branders hadn't begged,
(28:27):
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. Vera Branders 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
(28:48):
I have no doubt that the Colman 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
(29:08):
to play. You've been listening to Cautionary Tales, and if
you liked this particular episode, I wrote a book about
these ideas. It's called MESSI you might like it. Cautionary
(29:28):
Tales is written and presented by me Tim Harford. Our
producers are Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer
and mixer was Pascal Wise, who also composed the amazing music.
This season stars Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stephens and
Russell Tovey, with enso Celenti, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, mass
(29:52):
Siam Unroe, Rufus Wright and introducing Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to
the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Mia LaBelle,
Carlie Milliori, Jacob Weisberg and of course the mighty Malcolm
gladwe And thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times
Host
Tim Harford
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