All That Jazz
Writing and thinking with music
Many people like working with music playing in the background. I was never one of those people. In fact, I long thought I absolutely could not work with music in the background.¹ For whatever reason, my brain is wired in such a way that I’m not only better at doing one thing at a time, I seemingly can only work that way. Music was a distraction that sidetracked my attention.
Then I found jazz music.
Of course, I didn’t “find” it. But obviously, most young people don’t listen to jazz music. Because it’s not 1950. And I considered myself “young” until relatively recently. I don’t consider myself young anymore, and so a few years back I started getting into jazz music. And not only do I enjoy it, I absolutely love it when it comes to working.
The caveat here is that I mean jazz music without any vocal component. I actually realized some years back that it’s not music that distracts me from work, per se, but rather the singing and lyrics of a song. Because I’m an audible learner, and I’m always listening to words and thinking about them.
But non-vocal jazz is perfect. Electronic music would work for the same reason, and to fit the coder stereotype back in my web development days, I tried to get into this. But it didn’t stick. I think because I just didn’t like the music. For me, it’s jazz when I write at night and classical music when I read in the mornings — another tell-tale sign of growing old, no doubt.
I was thinking about this the other night at a jazz concert. It’s not just that I can work with jazz on in the background (which I’m doing right now!), it’s that it spurs activity in my brain that I seemingly don’t get in other ways. As such, I actually like to bring notebooks to jazz concerts. Because I have so many thoughts that reveal themselves at such times (and obviously don’t want to use my phone to jot them down during a show).
I’m sure a large part of this is simply having time to think. Again, I can listen to jazz and do something else at the same time: thinking falls into this bucket too. But I do think there’s something about the genre that spurs more activity in my brain than normal. I also like it while writing because it lends a unique cadence to my typing — as if my fingers were another instrument, riffing…
¹ Or really, any noise. Even more distracting than music is when a few people are having a conversation nearby. So I often need to find a balance of a cafe that’s either entirely empty or jam-packed — because crowd chatter, or any “white noise”, doesn’t bother me.
