Michael Brecker and Discovering ‘Big Ears’

The great tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker

Personal Backstory

Big Ears is one of six in the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP) ecology of practices. Such a practice extends skillful means of communication as an individual into collaborative relationship with others who share common purposes and goals. In basic terms, Big Ears, a vernacular phrase of appreciation among jazz musicians, means “deep listening.” Music is of course an aural art form; in jazz, deep listening is nurtured by “ear training.” When I studied Western music theory at Tottenville High School and Hamilton College, ear training was a special branch of jazz theory whereby you honed a capacity to recognize song forms and harmonic progressions and chord patterns by ear. 

An adjacent skill, back then, at seventeen, while immersing myself in the music day and night, tuning into bliss, incessantly, on the radio and on records, was a keen ability to recognize certain artists by their sound, by their musical phrases and inflections, by their association with certain styles and schools of playing. I’ll never forget the time I was listening to an album by the gospel singer and composer Andrae Crouch in the late 1970s, This Is Another Day. 

I noticed on a few songs a signature sound by a tenor saxophonist whose instrumental voice and style sounded familiar to me. Could it be . . .  no, I said to myself. This was a gospel album so my young, traditionalist mind didn’t expect to hear someone known for pop music, fusion, and jazz. (I was young and naïve; I came to realize that when you’re a studio musician, if they pay, you play.)

So even though I wasn’t expecting it, when I searched the credits on the back cover of the album, I had guessed correctly: Michael Brecker, whose post-Coltrane sound was all over the airwaves back then. I went on a Brecker kick, hunting down recordings, going to see him play at Seventh Avenue South, and being introduced to stunning displays of saxophonic pyrotechnics such as the duet rendition of “I’ll Never Stop Loving You” on Hal Galper’s 1977 Reach Out! album. His cadenza at the end was awe-inspiring for a beginner saxophonist such as myself. It remains so to this day—any saxophonist claiming lack of admiration for such virtuosity is likely lying or jealous.

Correctly identifying Brecker made me feel great; it confirmed that my baptism in bebop and beyond resulted in an ability to identify artists by ear. That discovery bolstered my confidence, and from that point I cultivated the practice of keen listening to recognize players I loved. 

Professional Background

As Jewel and I ventured deep in the shed of preparation and study to launch the Jazz Leadership Project, we knew that listening would be a key practice, a fulcrum around which other practices, for instance, developing your sound, improvisation, and swingin’ cohered. Yet in and of itself the musical practice we call Big Ears is significant, signifying and symbolizing the requirements for communicating with depth and feeling, conversations beyond the surface, dialogues that change, heal, even transform. 

Two writers and thought-leaders turned out to be key for our deep dives into deep listening: Stephen Covey and Otto Scharmer. First, Covey.

In the classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey outlines levels of listening, starting with purposeful non-listening: ignoring. (There’s a positive role for ignoring when we’re being mindful and focused, in meditation and in deep work, but that’s a post for another day.) Then there’s pretending, barely listening. Just picking out parts of what someone says Covey calls “selective listening.” 

Covey’s final two stages of listening are where we at JLP begin: attentive and empathetic. “Attentive listening” is where we begin to really tune into the person we’re listening to. We focus. We truly hear them and feel into the meaning of what they’re saying. To harmonize, to more deeply tune into tone and intent, we listen not just with our ears, but with our hearts. Covey calls this empathetic listening. 

Practicing Empathetic Listening

The first four types on the Covey Listening Continuum are from within one’s own frame of reference. Even when we move past ignoring, pretending to listen, listening partially or selectively, to being more attentive to all that’s said, it’s still from within our own personal vantage point. But when we listen not only to the words in our heads, but with feeling from our hearts, that’s when we begin to grok the other person’s frame of reference. Listen, be silent, totally focus on him or her, and hear/feel what they are saying, and even the space in between the words. 

Then manifest the empathy by saying back what you hear they are feeling: 

“That sounds [emotion].” 

“I’m sorry to hear that. It must be [emotion].”

“Sounds like this has been [emotion].”

Then listen more deeply, empathetically, to what is said next. 

When they finish, pause for a few beats, and summarize what you understand them to be saying:

“What I hear you saying is . . . Do I have that right?”

“Is there anything else?”

Sayin’ Something after Listening

Listening is an essential social skill and practice. We practice tuning into the words, inflections, and meaning of others to better understand, then respond more ably and adequately to situations in the moment. This is what jazz musicians do: listen deeply to one another on the bandstand and thereby support and challenge each other to rise to the occasion affirmatively in the moment of improvisational creation. When done well, yes, we can say that we’re swingin’. 

Yet a further extension is when the listening-response, leader-role player dynamic is so good that you feel it and are moved. When this occurs, I’m reminded of the title of Ingrid Monson’s excellent work on the interactive and interdependent genius of jazz musicians: Sayin’ Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction.

Generative Listening

The image below of the four levels of listening in Otto Scharmer’s Theory U gives a sketch outline of a developmental process that begins with rote listening from a frame of habit. Next is an empirical frame of listening, factual data. Scharmer’s third aligns with Covey’s model: empathic, a slight variation that connotes an embodied feeling of another’s meaning and experience. The final is generative. 

This is the final JLP level of listening. As you can see above, this level of listening incorporates and open mind, heart and will, listening from SOURCE. 

There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe. Connection to this Source leads to the emergence of new realities—discovery, creation, renewal, transformation. We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.

—Joseph Jaworski, Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation

This mystical level of communication is when you and another or others go together into flow states, in the pocket, of a field of an emerging future coming into being. This level of listening is essential especially now in our in-between liminal space of pivot from an old paradigm of human interaction to something new and potentially better. If you’ve been in love and time seems to suspend or have listened to music so deeply that you feel one with it and all else, streaming tears of joy, you have tapped into this Creative Source. 

Start with attentive listening, then empathetic, and then experience listening and communicating to create an emergent future. That’s what jazz musicians strive to do. You can too.