For context: Bill Evans is one the great jazz pianists of the 20th century and played on the most significant jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. In this 1966 documentary Bill talks about ‘the creative process and self-teaching’, and a lot of what he says seems to agree with CF. Interestingly the interviewer is Bill’s brother, and a less accomplished pianist.
Disclaimer: I am a beginner at CF.
Some themes I see that agree with CF:
- criticism of people incorrectly approaching learning an advanced skill
- instead, approach learning advanced skills by learning basic, understandable, accurate, ‘elementary’, sub skills
- doing things too hard for you or approximating them in a ‘vague’ way will mean you can’t built on them and will lead to confusion (getting stuck)
- free up conscious space for learning more advanced skills by automatising sub skills.
All the quotes are transcribed by me from audio and there may be some mistakes.
@ 11:42:
I see this in a lot of people that come to me for advice.[…]That they tend to approximate the product, rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way, at any elementary level - regardless of how elementary - but it must be entirely true, and entirely real, and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it an be real and true about it. And I think this is a very important thing: that you must be satisfied, to be very clear and to be very real and to be very analytical at any level. You can’t take the whole thing. And to approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives one a feeling that they’ve probably more or less touched the thing but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion.
I think here Bill is saying that these people want to do advanced things and their incorrect approach is to try to approximate the advanced things, rather than seeing the advanced things as being built from smaller, understandable, elementary parts, and approaching those. And that the approach of trying to approximate advanced things vaguely just leads towards confusion.
@ 12:35:
It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic view point at the beginning and knowing that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and he has to enjoy the step by step learning procedure.
He says here that this learning procedure is general and is true of any subject. He also says that one has to enjoy the learning procedure.
@ 15:00:
It is better to do something simple which is real… it can still be satisfactory but it’s something you can build on because you know what you’re doing… Whereas if you try to approximate something which is very advanced and don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t advance, you can’t build on it.
Do simple things you can succeed at because you can actually build on those.
@ 15:47:
You could be too cautious to the point where you never discover anything. I think you need to have a certain adventurous spirit. But…over a long period of time, you need be really aware of what is accurate, and what is not. And when you’re adventurous you need to know when you succeed and when you don’t succeed.
You need to be able to judge success and failure to learn.
Now the whole process of learning the facility of being able to play jazz is to take these problems from the outer level in, one by one, and to stay with it at a very intense conscious concentration level until that process becomes secondary and subconscious. Now when that becomes subconscious then you can begin concentrating on that next problem which will allow you to do a little bit more and so on and so on.
Automatisation. Freeing up conscious mental capacity for further problem solving.