 Good evening and welcome. My name is Chris Washburn, and this is my band, Sayotos. We've come from New York City to share our world with you tonight in a very unusual event. We're not only going to be playing for you, playing jazz for you, but I'm also going to be talking to you about jazz. And then we're gonna have a dialogue and you'll be able to ask us questions and share your ideas with what we are sharing with you. But before we begin, I'd like to just take a moment to introduce the wonderful musicians that I have up on stage with me. These are some of the busiest and most sought-after musicians in New York City. Originally from Norway, Sandefjord, Norway, he came to the United States 25 years ago to go to school and he's become one of the most original voices on the tenor saxophone in New York, which is very difficult because there's about a hundred thousand tenor saxophone players living in New York City and over half of them sound like John Coltrane, but he sounds very unique. Please welcome Ulle Matisse. On guitar, we have a gentleman who has been very very busy, especially in the more avant-garde jazz realms, playing with the likes of Ornette Coleman and also Donald Fagan and many others, the fabulous Kenny Wessel. On bass, we have a gentleman who lives in Oslo, who is one of the top bass players on the Oslo, sent the Norwegian scene and plays all over Europe, the fabulous Pair Metisyn. And on drums, someone who I have been collaborating with for close to 30 years now, someone who plays with everybody in the world of jazz. He plays with D.D. Bridgewater, Paquito de Rivera, played with Ray Burrero for many years and also the Jazz at Lincoln Center program. He also plays many different styles and got his start playing with the mamas and the papas, the fabulous Vince Cherico. So before I begin our musical portion of the the program, we need to just talk to you a little bit about my idea of what jazz is. I know some of you are very familiar with it and some of you might not be as familiar with it. And there was a wonderful musician from New Orleans named Louis Armstrong. He was a gentleman who was responsible for really defining what jazz was, very famous in the 1920s throughout to the 1970s. And when people would ask him about what jazz is, one of the ways he would answer that question was, if you have to ask, you'll never know. And when I first heard that comment, I thought, boy, that's very unproductive. But then I thought about, well, wait a minute, maybe he's trying to give us a message. Maybe he's trying to give us a message about this music, that it's not something that we can actually tell you about. It's something that you have to experience and hear and listen deeply for yourself. So with that thought, I would like to play a composition for you. This is something that was written by Thelonious Monk. It's called Bimpsha Swing. And originally it was called Bimpsha Swing. It's dedicated to the island of Barbados. And it really shows you in the 1950s when Thelonious Monk was readiness that he was thinking globally. And jazz indeed is one of the first truly global music. And here's an early example of how that sounds. Hope you enjoy. Music There was another gentleman who came from New Orleans and is credited one of the originators of jazz. His name was Sidney Bache, wonderful clarinetist. When they asked him what jazz is, he said, it's the sound of freedom. It's the sounds that emulate from the emancipated slaves, the newfound freedom that they found in the south of the United States. And they had to make sense of that newfound freedom. They had to turn ugliness into beauty and to rebuild their lives. In other words, they had to use the materials at hand, whatever that might be, and create something new and beautiful. One of the things that's at the center of jazz, and the most essential part, is improvisation. It's spontaneous creativity which we have inherited from the African American culture. And to turn that spontaneous creativity into an art form which eventually became known as jazz. So what does that mean when we say that improvisation is at the center of what we do? Well, in this last composition, I told you we were going to play a Thelonious Monk Tune. We did. We used it as a blueprint. It was the first 30 seconds of what we played. And then what came after, we had no idea what was going to happen. We had a musical conversation on the stage with you and created a piece of work of art. And so the demands of jazz musicians, if you were to think about what that really is, it's kind of bizarre. Think about it in film. What if you were to hand Frederick Fellini a video camera and say, you've got five minutes. Shoot a movie. No crew. No script. Or maybe let's think about Matisse the artist. In other words, make a masterpiece. Here's a canvas. You have three minutes and we're going to watch you paint. No doubt he could do it. But that's not how those arts emerged. But jazz is unique in that, in the sense that the demand is to create spontaneously. But then there's another problem. That the spontaneous creativity has to be new every time. We've played that song, Bembs of Swing. We've been playing together for 25 years. We've played it 2,153 times. It never sounded like that. Because if it did sound like we had done it before, we would no longer be playing jazz. We'd be playing something else. And you know what? We couldn't repeat that. We don't even have the tools to do that. And so the idea behind jazz is to tell a story with your improvisation. You'll see up here that we each take turns and we tell a story through our instruments. And it's like a journey that we take. I think that there was one particular writer that captured what the journey is like when playing jazz. Now I think I hope everybody in this room will recognize this passage. It's short. His legs powdered with snow, he pulled his way along, heading for some pale elevation rising higher and higher in a series of broad-sheeted terraces, leading he knew not where, perhaps nowhere. At some point he could no longer make out their upper regions blended with the sky, which was the same foggy white, no peak, no ridge was visible. It was a misty nothing toward which Hans Kastorp pushed his way. And since the real world, the valley populated by human beings, very quickly closed behind him again and was lost from sight, and since no sound could reach him from down there now, he was soon deep in his solitude before he even knew it, more deeply lost than he could ever have wished, so deep that the feeling verged on fear, which is the prerequisite of courage. That lostness that Thomas Mann captured in this valley and on these peaks is exactly what we do on stage in front of you, get lost together and try to find our way back. In order to do that, we have to rework as a team and rely and trust one another that we will help see through the foggy white and tell a story. And this story is told by each of us together, but also that represent individual voices. And this is where we get the legacy of slavery in the United States coming forth and speaking out here in 2013 in Davos. Because in jazz, it was created by a people who had been silenced for hundreds of years. And one of the reasons why we need to tell our own unique individual stories through our instruments is because when jazz emerged, it was very important that everybody be listened to and given a voice in that population. And so we pay tribute to that legacy, that ugly legacy, and turn that ugly legacy into beauty by telling our stories. I would like to tell you another story now through our music. I would like to play a song that was written by Duke Ellington in the 1930s, shortly after he had his first tour to the French Riviera. And he saw Côte d'Azur, the beautiful blue water, and he wrote this piece, a mood piece, which is called Azure, which is the color of blue that the sea and the sky blend together. We hope you enjoy. Music Thank you very much. So let's think about what improvisation is. In a jazz context, we're creating music in front of you. We're speaking the language of jazz. It has a grammar, it has notes. We're deeply listening to one another, and we're conversing back and forth. But it's something that's so fundamental to human existence. Everybody improvises all the time. As a matter of fact, if you didn't improvise, you'd be dead right now. I bet you improvised today. I bet you walked down the street and you saw someone that you knew. And whatever language that you spoke to each other, you said, hi. And then you asked the most dangerous question in the entire universe. How you doing? Because at that moment, you have no idea what's going to come next. It could be the best day of their lives, and the conversation goes one way. It could be the worst day of their life, and it goes another. Indeed, those people that you see and you say, hi, how are you doing every day? And they always say, terrible. And they say that same answer all the time. You tend to see them on the street, and you tend to walk the other way. Because you know that the improvisation isn't going to happen. It's only going to go one way, and that's no fun to deeply engage with one another. So it's something that we are adaptive creatures, and we have adapted to survive in this world through improvisation. As a matter of fact, the best improvisers in the entire world, do you know who they are? Two-year-olds. They're profound. They're virtuosic jazz musicians. Because they'll take anything and turn it into something. A toy, a plaything. And we were all two at one point. In some ways, I'm an educator. I teach in the jazz program. Most of us do that are on stage here. People say, how do you teach improvisation? And they say, you can't. Everybody already knows how to do it. You just facilitate them getting back in touch with their two-year-old self. There was a study recently by some neuroscientists that did these real-time MRI scans on human brains. And one of the first demographics they started to work with were jazz musicians. They were trying to figure out what we do. So what they did is they had the jazz musicians sit in the MRIs, get their brain scans, give them a piece of music and play and see what happens. So as you could imagine, like when we all read, the analytical side was firing all over the place. And it was nice. And there was the creative side and the motion side was firing, too. But then they said, okay, make it up now. Improvise. And then they showed us the pictures of what those scans looked like. And what happened was all of the analytical side of the brain was completely dark. It wasn't firing. The emotions were firing a little bit. But it was the prefrontal lobe that was really bright and intensely on fire. It's the same place in the brain that two-year-olds use when they walk into a room of foreign objects. And it made me wonder, wow, maybe that solved the mystery why when we go to work, we say we're going to go play a gig. We don't say we're going to work a concert. We're going to play a concert because there is something about getting in touch with that playful side, being able to refine those skills that we learn as soon as we are born that we have and that are coping mechanisms. Indeed, when we get to college and the students come to college and we start teaching them how to improvise, you know what we're doing? We're trying to have them unlearn everything that they learned through grade school and high school that taught them not to improvise, not to be spontaneous and creative. Our educational system is in dire need of improvisation 101 in kindergarten and it stays all the way through to college. Everybody should major in improvisation. I guarantee you that would be the key to world peace. So what we try to do is if you think about what the lessons of a jazz musician are in other realms, in our everyday lives, it's something to think about. A short example of what I do in my class, my jazz history class, it's about as many students as there are people in this room right now. None of them are jazz musicians. They're all coming and they want to learn about jazz. They're in college. And so the first day I have an assignment that I give them. And the assignment is this. Walk home a different way from class that you've never walked home before. See what you find. Now college students, they think this is cool. They don't got to read. They don't got to write. You just got to walk. So they come back the next day in class and they say, wow, that was a great assignment. I walked a different way and I found that there was a wonderful restaurant right around the corner from my apartment. It's my new favorite place to eat. I said, that's lovely. Second class, next same assignment. Walk home a different way. They come back in, say, wow, that was amazing. I ran into an old friend that I hadn't seen for years. It turns out we live right around the corner from each other and we never knew. I was saying marvelous. Third class, same assignment. Now, how many people here have been, I teach in Manhattan. How many people have been to Manhattan? Okay, quite a few of you. You realize that it's built on a grid. By the 27th class, they've got a real problem. They're like walking to New Jersey before they can come back. It's taking hours and hours. By the 29th class, I say now you know what it's like to be a jazz musician and take a solo on a tune that you've already played 28 times. And then I got an email, professor. That was the best assignment I ever had in my entire career at Columbia University because on the 16th day, I met my current wife. Now that's a lesson in jazz. Would like to play one more number for you, do a little more talking, and then I'm going to start asking you some questions for us about what we do. So one of the themes that I've been thinking about lately is the idea that this is risky business. It's risky when you ask someone how they're doing. It's risky when you're walking home a different way because you never know what you're going to find. It's the unknown, it's those unknown variables that can create angst and anxiety in everyone. Jazz musicians have to do it up on stage in front of a bunch of people. We have one of the riskiest jobs in the world because failure is just around the corner at every single turn. As a matter of fact, in some ways, you can think about jazz as just a series of failures. Sometimes it's overt, sometimes it's covert, and we can cover it up, but I'll let you know. I've just realized that there was one moment in my life that I failed miserably, and it was when we played this song. We've been playing this song for many, many years. It's a lovely song. It's called Softly as a Morning Sunrise. And one of my friends got married, and they hired us for their wedding, and they said, could you play for our wedding? We don't know a lot about music. Could you recommend a first dance? I said, oh, well, we play this lovely song. You should use that for your first dance. And they said, great, so we did. Well, a couple months ago, I went to a club, and one of my friends is a jazz singer, and I heard her sing. And I realized that I had never listened to the lyrics of that song very closely, because it's all about infidelity and adultery. I hope that marriage has not failed, but I'll take credit for it if it does. Hope you enjoy. My question is, what does making improvisation a good or considered as a good improvisation? And what is the limit between improvisation and chaos? Because sometimes it might sound like there is no rules in improvisation, but I'm sure there is rules that we still have to follow. So this is my question, actually. What's the limit between chaos and improvisation? I've never heard chaos in my band. No, that is a fabulous question. And indeed, it's why I chose that Thomas Mann quote from The Magic Mountain. That's the point of, what jazz musicians are really improvising, we are pushing the limits almost over the precipice into chaos. Sometimes we fall over, but then bring it back and try to create unique ways of coming back home in a different way. What makes a good improvisation versus a not successful improvisation is about listening. And I heard earlier today, they said it was a Native American proverb. I've never heard it before, but I love it, that we are given two ears and only one mouth. Which means that we need to listen twice as hard as opposed to when we speak. And indeed, that's what it is in a jazz setting. In the sense that we're up here and we need to deeply listen to one another and hear each other's stories and we're going and work with that and work together as a team. And if we don't listen, that's when chaos kicks in and that's when bad jazz happens. Because then we're not working together. I mean, I could be up here playing my trombone alone for you and I can play jazz by myself. But you know, as soon as I bring another musician in and we start collaborating, the music becomes twice as good. You bring another member in and it's exponential. So the possibility of the music being at a high level of conversation and intensity by listening deeply to one another and feeling each other and in some ways being empathetic. One of the greatest qualities of a jazz musician is being generous, emotionally generous and also being open to possibilities that you haven't thought about before that happened spontaneously. And so that's the divide between listening breaks down, that's chaos, and that's not good improvisation in my mind. Good evening. My name is Tim Lehmann. I'm orchestrating here with my colleague together, a team of six student journalists. I was wondering what we or let's say leaders of political organizations, private business organizations or non-governmental organizations can learn from jazz and improvisation. That's also, thank you for that question. And I've met with several of your student reporters and they're fabulous, by the way. Great questions. The two things have happened in the past with jazz. The first came in the 1950s with a program called the Jazz Ambassadors. And basically it was the U.S. government creating cultural tours of U.S. artists to go to, especially during the Cold War, to places that were politically maybe turning in a way that the U.S. government thought they shouldn't turn to. And the reason that they sent jazz musicians and Louis Armstrong was one of the first to take those jazz ambassadors tours was because they said that a jazz band sounds democracy. It's democratic. Why? Because everybody's given an equal voice. And that the way that our organization is structured is, yes, I'm the leader, but you can see that many times when I'm standing off to the side, I'm not participating in any direct way. Maybe I'm facilitating a space for creativity, but the idea is to sound that out and to spread that beauty around the world. That was the idea. About 20 years ago, academics started paying a little closer attention to what happens on the jazz stage and how that might be transferred into a boardroom or a way of creating leadership and teamwork within large corporations and organizations. And one of the programs that I participate is at the Columbia Business School where we actually do very similar types of dialogues playing with groups of executives from different segments from around the world to show the intricacies of what happens here and say, okay, in your world, can this translate in some ways? And I think that one of the most useful concepts, especially for team members, comes from the idea of a fluid leadership, a fluidity in leadership in the sense, this is my band. I'm here standing in front. I say we're going to play this song and I say one, two, one, two, three, four. And after that happens, then leadership is up for grabs. At any moment, typically whoever's taking the solo is taking the lead and dictating where the music goes. But at any time, someone else can change that direction and can change it drastically. Or I step back, I don't say who's going to take over the next solo next. And so what has been really interesting is how that translates into organizations, businesses, different kind of political structures. Because think of a boardroom where you're sitting around a round table as opposed to a rectangular table. That there is an agenda, which is the blueprint, the composition that we were playing. But then anybody can change that agenda at any time. And that as a leader, that your job is not to dictate what happens, but your job is to facilitate everybody feeling comfortable to take risks and to contribute and to be given equal voice and equal time. And it's amazing that there are so many different types of businesses that say, they think about it, you can see the CEOs get kind of uncomfortable when you start talking this way and all the middle management people get really happy when you talk this way. But I remember that I had a really profound interaction with one of the admirals from the Navy SEALs, US Navy SEALs. We were giving this workshop to him. He pulled me aside and he said, you know what? What you guys do are exactly what our SEAL Team 6 teams do and that's how they're organized. And you actually even talk about it the same way. And I never thought, I always felt jazz was a peaceful art form and had nothing to do with warfare, but apparently not. But there was so much that we had to talk to a very productive conversation and sharing these ideas about improvisation in the field, about dealing with unknowns, being extremely prepared, but allowing each member to take initiative when they need to. The other person that I also really connected with was a coach of a professional basketball team. And saying that it's exactly the same type of teamwork that happens in order for a team to win. They all have to have their roles and their jobs, but the idea is this fluidity and improvisation. So I think these are some of the themes that really resonate with some business leaders and that they've been able to incorporate in a variety of ways in a very productive way. There was a question over here. Do you still have a question? There's a microphone on our way. Sorry, we're giving you lots of exercise tonight. Thank you. Is it not on? No, it's on. I have two short questions. One, why don't you have a singer with you? I think there would have a thousand people come with a singer, a name we know, you know, like from Montreux Jazz Festival. And who of you performed at Montreux, maybe some bit, I hope so. So, I have nothing against vocalists. I've played with many. I actually toured with Celia Cruz for many years and we performed with Tito Puente at the Montreux Jazz Festival many years ago and that was wonderful. I find that a vocalist in this setting brings a different message. Not a bad message, but a different message. It's a different dynamic. And typically, when ends up happening, when there are words, then your attention goes to those words and that the singer becomes the focal point and the band becomes the support staff. Typically, now there are some singers that don't operate that way, but most do. So, I find that without working with a singer, I'm able to best translate some of the ideas that I'm sharing with you now. However, there are many great vocalists and that we do work with a vocalist often. A wonderful vocalist in New York named Claudette Sierra. And so, it would be lovely to bring her along one of these times as well. But we're open and if you know a great singer and you want to send her away, please, I'm open. Question there. Does it work? Yeah. First of all, I wanted to thank you because what you just did was amazing. So, thank you very much for coming here from New York. I wanted to bring the discussion a little bit more about the making of the improvisation that you just did and you do every time on stage. You mentioned that there is an active listening part between you and the band and each other. What happened with the audience? Also, you mentioned that you are getting back to your two-year-old life. I have an nephew of two-year-old and I love seeing him like playing with leaves, playing with everything that he has. But sometimes I see that he's in his own world and I'm wondering if you feel something different with different audience and how the audience can participate to that apart from just enjoying the show. Thanks. Oh, thank you for that question. It's a very important one. Indeed, as I said, when jazz musicians create, it's almost like an art form of bricolage. In other words, using everything that's at hand. A good example of that was I used this, a very sophisticated musical instrument. If you ever have any plumbing problems, just call a trombone player. But we've inherited this from the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the reason why they started using this was it's a way to turn brass instruments into human voices and more closer to the human expression. And so this is a great example of using things at hand. But it's also using the context at hand, which means that there's no way that we could play the way we play now if we were not in this room, in Davos, with you all. In the sense that we're up on stage here but we actually have a better view of you than you have of us. Even with our eyes closed, we can feel the vibe. You can feel the warmth in the room when you're playing. You can tell those people that are text messaging and on Facebook and not writing about us. You can also tell the people that are really engaged and listening and wanting us to play better and we're feeding off that energy. So just by being deeply engaged, that is something that you are giving and we're making us play better. Just try it. Totally ignore us on the next one and we're going to be terrible. So that is one way. The other thing that I found about listening, one of my first jazz professors, my first assignment wasn't to walk home a different way, it was to go to a concert and listen to it. And I was like, okay, fine. He goes, no, really listen. I want you to listen so hard that you sweat. And the concept of listening that deeply and intensely of capturing everything that you possibly can, so it's an active engagement, is something that what we practice when we improvise, deep concentration and listening, not letting our thoughts drift away. When you have audiences doing the same thing, it has an amazing effect on the musicians because we can feel that. Sure, music can also be a time that you can veg out and escape and that's a great use of it. But if you have a really intense, active audience, it enhances the music. So you play a huge role in how we sound. We'll take one more question and then we'll play another number. There's one in the back. I would like to know what's the limit of the size for a group to improvise? A big corporation, has a big corporation the same possibility to improvise as a small group of people? Yes, thank you for that. I remember one of the first times we did a workshop with corporations. I was sitting next to a gentleman and I said, where do you work? And he goes, I work for the Hong Kong police. I said, what do you do for the Hong Kong police? He goes, I'm the chief. I said, how many people are you in charge of? He said 250,000. And I thought to myself, hmm, I'm telling him about my team of five. And of course, some of these ideas, they can't necessarily directly translate. But by the end of the evening he talked about his managers and how he could interact with the managerial team and how they then in turn could work with the people right below them. So it was kind of more of a microcosm within a larger corporation to get better feedback from all of the people that were working on that. So this was one productive way that people were using some of these ideas. I'd like to take a pause now from the talk and let's get back and play another number for you. This is a song that is one of the favorite of mine. It was made famous by Frank Sinatra in the 1940s with the Tommy Dorsey band. And it's called Pokedots and Moonbeams. It's a lovely love song. I know the lyrics of this one. And although they're very odd, I don't know how the translators are going to translate this into German, but there's this whoever is the object of love is referred to as a pugged nose dream. You know, that's kind of like a strange looking nose dream. And it happens three times in the song and this was written by Jimmy Van Huisen. So it's a very odd, but the melody is lovely and we hope you enjoy our version of it. Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music What a baptism. Kenny Wessel, yeah. Another thing that occurred to me in that particular number that can happen within teams in terms of business and a variety of different things is competition but friendly competition. I was thinking to myself I was so happy that I soloed before Ole on that last song. Because if I had to follow him I have to figure out something to do that's going to be more exciting and surpass him. And I was thinking to myself, you know, you know, in a business setting you know, and even in interpersonal relationships you have to make it as a leader. You have to make the stakes high but a space for creativity you know, you know, but a space for creativity and an openness for failure. You need to allow the people you work with to fail because failure is a prerequisite for success. It's just like fear is a prerequisite for courage. We need to learn from our failures so that we can next time improve upon what we did. Indeed, I think Samuel Beckett said it the best. He said he thinks failure is just part of an existential condition. It's what life is. It's a series of failures and then we all fail really big time in the end, right? But as we go along he said every time we fail our only hope is that we fail better each time and we grow and we learn from that experience. And indeed, that is what is happening in a jazz stage within a jazz group. Questions? Question right here. Thank you very much. A two years old kid discovers the universe and he has no rules except his parents saying no, no all the time because he shouldn't burn himself and so on. Now referring to you when you improvise on stage to which extent can you let all your emotions go or to which extent do you have some boundaries and some rules? Like you played your trombone a few minutes ago or you may have played much louder or you may have wanted to have a whole room, you know, to just explode and where are your boundaries referring to yourself and also referring to the other members of the group? When do you explode and when you do not explode? Thank you. I've never been asked that question before. Those are my favorite questions. It's interesting that you're making me think about things in a little different way and I thank you for that. When you're improvising you actually don't have time to think. One of the things about training as a jazz musician is we work on scales and chords and harmony and melody and rhythm and as soon as you get on stage it's vitally important to forget all of that. We oftentimes hear musicians talk about flow about creative flow also you'll see psychologists talk about this as well as neuroscientists that there's a moment where we transcend our existence in some ways and we're almost outside of our bodies or we're playing and it's almost like the music is coming from someplace else and we're just a vessel and it goes through us and so in some ways what determines whether I explode or not is that it's the band and the context and the flow and if they push me and I go there yes but I don't have time to think I'm angry right now like a two year old and I want to stamp my foot and explode and play so loud it hurts all of your ears. First of all that's not good business for a musician to hurt the audience's ears but the idea is that it has to organically come from the music in a jazz setting and if I'm going to imitate explosion and play as loud as I possibly can I will I'm prepared for it so in some ways it's interesting it's like a fine balance between ego and serving the music as something greater than all of us and that has to be kept in mind the vision of the music because I could play extremely loud at the wrong time and ruin the whole vibe and ruin the music so it has to be attended to but if you push that way just shy of chaos and explosion and musical explosion explosions can be quite beautiful and fun and cathartic and transcendent I think I'm going to be working on that answer to that question for several months though that's my first try that was a failure but I'll fail better next time I would like to go back to improvisation and creativity I think that many people are looking for it and would like to train and exercise it what would you recommend someone who is not a musician that's another great question I often times work with non musicians in terms of trying to tap into creativity and I find that the easiest is with words and because we all use words and there's some very very simple kind of exercises and games that we can kind of engage with where which I do with my kids actually where you're allowed to say one word and then the person has to add a word that kind of makes sense and you create a story that way it's a way of kind of collaborative creativity and it's fun and easy it's these types of things also it doesn't, I mean everybody's creative inherently you have to be creative to survive the idea is that but it requires some time of conscious effort so another way of doing it is let's say that you have to write an email we all write email and text messages all the time try to write an email but don't use the letter E and send your message it's simple little tricks like this that challenge you and get you to start thinking in alternative ways that can really spark creativity you can't choose like the letter Z or W, it has to be a vowel we have time for one more question yes we spoke a lot about failure now as a musician you can fail all the time and just jump to the next song but in the business case failure can cost millions of dollars and affect a lot of people's lives they might lose job so where's the limit to that absolutely and in terms of failure especially if it's a type of failure that's going to hurt other people of course there's a limit there but in terms of innovation and thinking of new ways within business structures you as a leader you have to be open to ideas that might fail now a company failing that's a different issue or an investment that's failing that's going to lose millions of dollars you need to attend to what those costs are and have some risk management in place but at the same time in terms of determining what types of investments those will be or what time of those decisions will be as a leader you need to be open to all of the different possibilities and especially if you have a creative team and you're working on an idea and there's a risk involved often times pay attention to the worst idea that's set put out that table attend to it and see is there any value there but of course yes if it's depending on people's lives and livelihoods care must be taken indeed we can fail and move on to the next song but if we fail in the middle of a recording session or we fail in front of an audience that has a bunch of promoters and producers in it we lose the gig and we lose our livelihood so the stakes can be high in a variety of different ways and you have to attend to those stakes and determine where those risks are but without risk you're not going to be able to create and you're not going to be able to move forward so you have to attend to those parameters speaking of risks last night I was at a dinner and this woman came up to me and introduced to herself and I had heard about her because she's a very young, talented Venezuelan trumpet player we had a very nice conversation there's a tradition in jazz when a musician walks in with their horn in a room where you're playing you need to invite them up on stage to join you we've never ever played together she doesn't know what we're going to play so you need to wish her luck and a lot of goodwill and good vibes and you're going to see real improvisation right in front of your eyes right now please welcome Linda Breseno to the stage okay so considering that she's from Venezuela we've got Norwegians on the stage we've got New Yorkers we're going to have a variety of ethnicities and nationalities represented in this room we're going to play I think the best example of when music from very different places come together and instead and cultures come together and instead of creating some type of ugly situation that we have in the world today some beauty emerges and this was a song that was written by Juan Tizol he was the first Puerto Rican to be hired by Duke Ellington and this song was inspired by their travels in North Africa and the Middle East and all around the world and they call this caravan I hope you enjoy music music music music music music Vince Cherico on the drums Para Matisse on the bass Kenny Wessel on the guitar Ulla Matisse on the saxophone Linda Breseno on the trumpet and you should hear her sing my name is Chris Washburn this is the Sciotto's Band it's been a pleasure dialoging with you take a different way home tonight goodnight