A fellow member of my online jazz guitar community posted a link to a neuroimaging study on jazz improvisation this week. He introduced it with admirable economy: you may or may not be interested, but to summarise — just let go, but practice a lot first.
He wasn’t wrong. But the summary, for all its wit, compresses out the most interesting territory.
The study centres on work by Limb and Braun, who put professional jazz pianists into an fMRI scanner and compared what happened in the brain during memorised performance versus free improvisation. The finding wasn’t that the brain worked harder during improvisation. What they found was a dissociation: the region governing monitoring, planning and cognitive control went quiet, while the area associated with self-expression and internally generated thought lit up. The editor left the room. Something else took the chair.
The article makes a point that caught my eye. It states that flow states are not available to beginners. A pianist six months into their studies who stops monitoring their left hand doesn’t enter a creative state — they hit wrong notes. The release of monitoring that produces flow is only possible when what was being monitored has become automatic. The freedom comes after the constraint, not instead of it.
I sat with that for a while. And I’m not sure it’s entirely right.
I don’t think the threshold is binary. I don’t think there’s a day when you can’t do it and then suddenly you can. I think the state is available earlier than the study implies — but only if the demands on the substrate are reduced enough to make room for it. Which is, I’d argue, exactly what good teaching does.
My tutor Matt Warnock uses a device that illustrates this perfectly. He’ll give a student just three notes to solo with. Not three chords, not a scale. Three notes. The monitoring burden drops to almost nothing. The decision anxiety evaporates. And in that protected space, even a relative beginner can briefly touch what flow actually feels like. Not a simulation of it. The real thing, in a reduced form — a flame in a sheltered corner.
The constraint produces the freedom.
I’ve found versions of this myself. Solo on one string and a particular vibe arrives, partly because it has to. Play in octaves and every note becomes declarative — you can’t throw anything away. Never land on the one and the groove has to be implied rather than stated, which changes your relationship to time entirely. The restriction in one place doesn’t block creativity. It might not even be creativity. It might be something closer to necessity. I’m not tall enough to reach the shelf without thinking, so I stand on my toes.
This morning I was out on the bike, and the whole question followed me up the road.
In cycling, a flow state isn’t optional. Things come at you too fast for micro-management. You have to draw back, look at the bigger picture, look further ahead to where you want to go — and hand off the braking, the balance, the trajectory, to somewhere below conscious thought. Surrender to the flow. Trust the instinct.
There’s a term for it: reading the road. You’re not reacting to what’s under your wheel. You’re reading twenty metres ahead and letting the body handle what’s underneath. The hands and the balance go downstairs so that the eyes and the mind can operate at a higher altitude.
Jazz does exactly the same thing. When the changes are coming thick and fast, the player watching their fingers is already behind. The player who has handed the mechanics downstairs and is looking ahead — to the phrase, to the landing point, to where the line wants to resolve — that player is riding the music rather than being chased by it. Reading the changes the way you read the trail.
I used to choose a melody before the start of a race. Deliberately, in the same way you might check your tyre pressure or pin your number. I’d found empirically that it worked — that having something playing internally kept the conscious mind lightly occupied and stopped it interfering with everything that needed to run below it. I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who did this.
One of my favourites was Kylie Minogue. Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Specifically the la la section — not the verse, not the full chorus, just that pure repeating melodic fragment, stripped of words. Nothing to process, nothing to decode. Just the shape of the rhythm and the lift of the melody.
And at 120bpm it maps perfectly to 90rpm pedalling cadence.
So there I was. National Veteran MTB Champion. Three World Championship appearances. La la la la la la, going round and round in my head at the start line.
That’s not superstition. That’s applied neuroscience, arrived at through experience, long before the fMRI studies caught up. The melody was doing real work — setting tempo, setting mood, vamping the conscious mind while the body got on with racing. A holding pattern. A groove.
There was a saxophone player in our online community for a while. Accomplished, serious, genuinely musical. He decided to try guitar. It didn’t work, and eventually he disappeared from the group. I’d expected the transfer to be smoother. He had the vocabulary, the ear, the jazz language already internalised at a high level. What he didn’t have was the physical map of the instrument in his hands. And those turned out to be separate substrates that don’t automatically translate.
His ear knew exactly how far short his hands were falling. The beginner’s mercy — of not yet knowing what you don’t know — was completely unavailable to him. That gap is a particularly difficult place to live.
“Just let go, but practice a lot first” is a fine bumper sticker.
But some mornings the fuller version arrives on the bike, uninvited, at 90rpm, with a Kylie Minogue melody running underneath it.
The real conversation starts where the bumper sticker ends.