David Epstein on the Genius of the Self-Taught Musician

Jack Cecchini can thank two stumbles, one metaphorical and one literal, for making him one of the rare musicians who is world class in both jazz and classical.

The first was in 1950 in Chicago, when he was 13 and stumbled across a guitar resting on his landlord’s couch. He ran his fingers over the strings as he walked by. The landlord picked it up, demonstrated two chords, and immediately asked Cecchini to play accompaniment with them. Of course, he couldn’t. “He’d shake his head when it was time for me to change the chord, and if I didn’t he’d start swearing,” Cecchini recalled with a chuckle. Cecchini’s interest was ignited, and he started trying to imitate songs he heard on the radio. By 16, he was playing jazz in the background of Chicago clubs he was too young to patronize. “It was like a factory,” he told me. “If you had to go to the bathroom, you had to get one of the other guys to pick it up. But you’re experimenting every night.” He took the only free music lessons he could find, in clarinet, and tried to transfer what he learned to the guitar. “There are eight million places on the guitar to play the same notes,” he said. “I was just trying to find solutions to problems, and you start to learn the fingerboard.” Pretty soon he was performing with Frank Sinatra at the Villa Venice, Miriam Makeba at the Apollo, and touring with Harry Belafonte from Carnegie Hall to packed baseball stadiums. That’s where the second stumble came in.

During a show when Cecchini was 23, one of Belafonte’s stage dancers stepped on the cable that connected his guitar to an amplifier. His instrument was reduced to a whisper. “Harry freaked out,” Cecchini recalled. “He said, ‘Get rid of that thing and get yourself a classical guitar!’” Getting one was easy, but he had been using a pick, and for acoustic he had to learn fingering, so the trouble was learning to play it on tour.

He fell in love with the instrument, and by 31 was so adept that he was chosen as the soloist to play a concerto by none other than Vivaldi accompanied by an orchestra for a crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park. The next day, the Chicago Tribune’s music critic began his review: “Despite the ever‑increasing number of enthusiasts who untiringly promote the resurrection of the guitar as a classical instrument, there are but few men who possess the talent and patience to master what remains one of the most beautiful but obstinately difficult of all instruments.” Cecchini, he continued, “proved to be one of those few.”

Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self‑taught,” he told me. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error. It might sound unusual, but when Cecchini reeled off legends he played with or admired, there was not a Tiger among them.

Duke Ellington was one of the few who ever actually took formal lessons, when he was seven, from the exuberantly named teacher Marietta Clinkscales. He lost interest immediately, before he learned to read notes, and quit music entirely to focus on baseball. In school, his interests were drawing and painting. (He later turned down a college art scholarship.) When he was 14, Ellington heard ragtime, and for the first time in seven years sat down at a piano and tried to copy what he had heard. “There was no connection between me and music, until I started fiddling with it myself,” he remembered. “As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations. As long as I could sit down and
figure it out for myself, then that was all right.” Even once he became arguably America’s preeminent composer, he relied on copyists to decode his personal musical shorthand into traditional musical notation.

Johnny Smith was Cecchini’s absolute favorite. Smith grew up in a shotgun house in Alabama. Neighbors gathered to play music, and young Johnny goofed around with whatever they left in a corner overnight. “John played anything,” his brother Ben recalled. It allowed him to enter local competitions for any instrument, and the prizes were groceries. He once fiddled his way to a five‑pound bag of sugar. He didn’t particularly like violin, though. Smith said he would have walked 50 miles for a guitar lesson, but there were no teachers around, so he just had to experiment.

When the United States entered World War II, Smith enlisted in the Army hoping to be a pilot, but a left‑eye problem disqualified him. He was sent to the marching band, which had absolutely no use for a guitar player. He could not yet read music, but was assigned to teach himself a variety of instruments so he could play at recruiting events. Wide‑ranging experience set him up for his postwar work as NBC’s musical arranger. He had learned to learn, and his multi‑instrument and poly-genre skill became so renowned that it got him into a tricky spot.

He was leaving NBC one Friday evening when he was stopped at the elevator and asked to learn a new guitar part. The classical player hired for the job couldn’t hack it. It was for a live celebration of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s 75th birthday, and would feature one of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions, which had not been performed in 25 years. Smith had four days. He continued with his Friday night, got home at 5 a.m., and then joined an emergency rehearsal at 7 a.m. On Wednesday, he performed so beautifully that the audience demanded an encore of all seven movements. In 1998, alongside Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Tenzing Norgay was the first to summit Mount Everest, Smith was awarded Smithsonian’s Bicentennial Medal for outstanding cultural contributions.

Pianist Dave Brubeck earned the medal as well. His song “Take Five” was chosen by NPR listeners as the quintessential jazz tune of all time. Brubeck’s mother tried to teach him piano, but he refused to follow instructions. He was born cross‑eyed, and his childhood reluctance was related to his inability to see the musical notation. His mother gave up, but he listened when she taught others and tried to imitate. Brubeck still could not read music when he dropped out of veterinary premed at the College of the Pacific and walked across the lawn to the music department, but he was a masterful faker. He put off studying piano for instruments that would more easily allow him to improvise his way through exercises.

Senior year, he could hide no longer. “I got a wonderful piano teacher,” he recalled, “who figured out I couldn’t read in about five minutes.” The dean informed Brubeck that he could not graduate and furthermore was a disgrace to the conservatory. Another teacher who had noticed his creativity stuck up for him, and the dean cut a deal. Brubeck was allowed to graduate on the condition that he promise never to embarrass the institution by teaching. Twenty-five years later, the college apparently felt it had sufficiently escaped embarrassment, and awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Perhaps the greatest improv master of all could not read, period—words or music. Django Reinhardt was born in Belgium in 1910, in a Romani caravan. His early childhood talents were chicken stealing and trout tickling—feeling along a riverbank for fish and rubbing their bellies until they relaxed and could be tossed ashore. Django grew up outside Paris in an area called la Zone, where the city’s cesspool cleaners unloaded waste each night. His mother, Négros, was too busy supporting the family making bracelets out of spent artillery shell casings she gathered from a World War I battlefield to lord over anyone’s music practice. Django went to school if he felt like it, but he mostly didn’t. He crashed movie theaters and shot billiards, and was surrounded by music. Wherever Romani gathered, there were banjos, harps, pianos, and especially violins.

The violin’s portability made it the classic Romani instrument, and Django started there, but he didn’t love it. He learned in the call‑and‑response style. An adult would play a section of music and he would try to copy it. When he was 12, an acquaintance gave him a hybrid banjo‑guitar. He had found his thing, and became obsessed. He experimented with different objects as picks when his fingers needed a break: spoons, sewing thimbles, coins, a piece of whalebone. He teamed up with a banjo‑playing hunchback named Lagardère, and they wandered the Paris streets, busking and improvising duets.

In his mid teens, Django was at a restaurant in Paris where the city’s accordionists had gathered. He and his banjo‑guitar were asked to the stage to play for the other musicians. Django launched into a polka that was known as a skill‑proving piece for accordionists because it was so hard to play. When he finished the traditional form, rather than stopping he careened into a series of lightning improvisations, bending and twisting the song into creations none of the veteran musicians had ever heard. Django was playing “with a drawn knife,” as the lingo went. He was looking for a fight by warping a sacred dancehall tune, but he was so original that he got away with it. His creativity was unbound. “I wonder if, in his younger days,” one of his music partners said, “he even knew that printed music existed.” Django would soon need all the versatility he had learned.

He was 18 when a candle in his wagon ignited a batch of celluloid flowers that his wife, Bella, had fashioned for a funeral. The wagon exploded into an inferno. Django was burned over half his body and ended up bedridden for a year and a half. For the rest of his life the pinkie and ring finger of his left hand, his fret hand, were dangling flesh, useless on the strings. Django was used to improvising. Like Pelegrina of the figlie del coro when she lost her teeth, he pivoted. He taught himself how to play chords with a thumb and two fingers. His left hand had to sprint up and down the neck of his guitar, the index and middle finger flitting waterbug‑like over the strings. He reemerged with a new way of handling the instrument, and his creativity erupted.

With a French violinist, Django fused dancehall musette with jazz and invented a new form of improvisational music that defied easy characterization, so it was just called “Gypsy jazz.” Some of his spontaneous compositions became “standards,” pieces that enter the canon from which other musicians improvise. He revolutionized the now‑familiar virtuosic guitar solo that pervaded the next generation’s music, from Jimi Hendrix, who kept an album of Django’s recordings and named one of his groups Band of Gypsys, to Prince (self‑taught, played more than a half‑dozen different genres of instruments on his debut album). Long before Hendrix melted “The Star‑Spangled Banner” into his own wondrous creation, Django did it with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

Even though he never learned to read music (or words—a fellow musician had to teach him to sign his autograph for fans), Django composed a symphony, playing on his guitar what he wanted each instrument in the ensemble to do while another musician struggled to transcribe it. He died of a brain hemorrhage at 43, but music he made nearly a century ago continues to show up in pop culture, including Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and The Aviator, and in the hit BioShock video games. The author of The Making of Jazz anointed the man who could neither read music nor study it with the traditional fingerings “without question, the single most important guitarist in the history of jazz.”

Cecchini has bushy eyebrows and a beard that parts and closes quickly like ruffled shrubbery when he talks excitedly. Like now: he’s talking Django, and he’s a huge fan. He used to have a black poodle named Django. He opens a sepia‑toned YouTube clip and whispers conspiratorially, “Watch this.”
There is Django, bow tie, pencil mustache, and slicked‑back hair. The two useless fingers on his left hand are tucked into a claw. Suddenly, the hand shoots all the way up the guitar neck, and then all the way back down, firing a rapid succession of notes. “That’s amazing!” Cecchini says. “The synchronization between the left and right hand is phenomenal.”

The strict deliberate practice school describes useful training as focused consciously on error correction. But the most comprehensive examination of development in improvisational forms, by Duke University professor Paul Berliner, described the childhoods of professionals as “one of osmosis,” not formal instruction. “Most explored the band room’s diverse options as a prelude to selecting an instrument of specialization,” he wrote. “It was not uncommon for youngsters to develop skills on a variety of instruments.” Berliner added that aspiring improvisational musicians “whose educational background has fostered a fundamental dependence on [formal] teachers must adopt new approaches to learning.” A number of musicians recounted Brubeck‑like scenarios to Berliner, the time a teacher found out that they could not read music but had become adept enough at imitation and improvisation that “they had simply pretended to follow the notation.” Berliner relayed the advice of professional musicians to a young improvisational learner as “not to think about playing—just play.”

While I was sitting with Cecchini, he reeled off an impressive improvisation. I asked him to repeat it so I could record it. “I couldn’t play that again if you put a gun to my head,” he said. Charles Limb, a musician, hearing specialist, and auditory surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron‑free keyboard so that jazz musicians could improvise while inside an MRI scanner. Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self‑censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them. Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”

Django Reinhardt was once in a taxi with Les Paul, inventor of the solid‑body electric guitar. Paul was a self‑taught musician, and the only person in both the Rock and Roll and National Inventors halls of fame. Reinhardt tapped Paul on the shoulder and asked if he could read music. “I said no, I didn’t,” Paul recounted, “and he laughed till he was crying and said, ‘Well, I can’t read either. I don’t even know what a C is; I just play them.’”

Cecchini told me that he was regularly stunned when he would ask an exceptional jazz performer onstage to play a certain note, and find the musician could not understand him. “It’s an old joke among jazz musicians,” Cecchini said. “You ask, ‘Can you read music?’ And the guy says, ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’” There is truth in the joke. Cecchini has taught musicians who played professionally for the Chicago Symphony, which in 2015 was rated as the top orchestra in the country and fifth in the world by a panel of critics. “It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re‑creative artist.”

After Django Reinhardt lit the nightclub music scene on fire, classically trained musicians began trying to transition to jazz. According to Michael Dregni, who wrote multiple books on that period, improvisation was “a concept that went against conservatory training. After years of rigorous conservatory training, it was an impossible transition for some.” Leon Fleisher, regarded as one of the great classical pianists of the 20th century, told the coauthor of his 2010 memoir that his “greatest wish” was to be able to improvise. But despite a lifetime of masterful interpretation of notes on the page, he said, “I can’t improvise at all.”

Cecchini’s analogy to language learning is hardly unique. Even the Suzuki Method of music instruction, synonymous in the public consciousness with early drilling, was designed by Shinichi Suzuki to mimic natural language acquisition. Suzuki grew up around his father’s violin factory, but considered the instrument nothing more than a toy. When he fought with his siblings, they beat one another with violins. He did not attempt to play the instrument until he was 17, moved by a recording of Ave Maria. He brought a violin home from the factory and tried to imitate a classical recording by ear. “My complete self‑taught technique was more a scraping than anything else,” he said of that initial foray, “but somehow I finally got so I could play the piece.” Only later did he seek out technical lessons and become a performer and then an educator. According to the Suzuki Association of the Americas, “Children do not practice exercises to learn to talk. Children learn to read after their ability to talk has been well established.”

In totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.

That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.

Compared to the Tiger Mother’s tome, a parenting manual oriented toward creative achievement would have to open with a much shorter list of rules. In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.

“It’s strange,” Cecchini told me at the end of one of our hours‑long discussions, “that some of the greatest musicians were self‑taught or never learned to read music. I’m not saying one way is the best, but now I get a lot of students from schools that are teaching jazz, and they all sound the same. They don’t seem to find their own voice. I think when you’re self‑taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems.”

Cecchini stopped speaking for a moment, reclined in his chair, and stared at the ceiling. A few moments passed. “I could show somebody in two minutes what would take them years of screwing around on the fingerboard like I did to find it. You don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. You don’t have that in your head. You’re just trying to find a solution to problems, and after 50 lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It’s slow,” he told me, “but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.”

__________________________________

Excerpted from Range. Used with permission of Riverhead Books. Copyright 2019 by David Epstein.