Don’t Play the Butter Notes
I was on YouTube a few weeks ago looking for jazz-related documentaries when I came across a Harvard lecture series featuring lectures by legendary pianist/keyboardist Herbie Hancock. In one particular lecture, he was talking about Miles Davis and the lessons he learned from having worked as a band member under such an enormously creative figure.
In his lecture, Hancock related a story about a live performance back in the ‘60’s, when he was feeling trapped inside self-created artistic boxes. Although he was playing well, he felt like he was playing the same old things in the same old way over and over again. He said that Miles noticed his frustration, and walked over to him between songs and whispered to him, “Don’t play the butter notes.”
Hancock’s reaction: Don’t play the butter notes? What does that mean?
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Miles didn’t explain. He let Hancock figure it out himself. Hancock decided that instead of playing all the notes of particular chords, he would leave certain notes out. What he discovered, once he did that, was that by not playing the notes that he had grown accustomed to relying upon, he opened himself to new ways of playing that he had not been aware of before. He had thereby broken out of his rut and found a new freedom in his playing.
Watching this video and hearing Hancock talk about this incident on stage, I found myself thinking of how this lesson he learned applied to my own life as a coach of hurdlers. In coaching, as with anything else, it is easy to rely on old ways – tried and true training methods, pet workouts, trusted drills. Sometimes, though, the tried and true can quickly turn stale and dry. We often stick with the known methods because they’ve been proven to work. So we force what we know down our athletes’ throats, even when our athletes aren’t showing any improvements.
I find that I am constantly being forced to make adjustments to workouts and to work-out plans, and that sometimes I have to abandon my plans altogether and go in a whole different direction. Miles was the type of band leader who relied on the musicians he hired to provide creative ideas to the whole group. He was always searching for new ideas because he knew that creativity is something that can only be enhanced by being around other creative people. Similarly, for me, when I feel stuck in a rut, like the workouts aren’t producing the results I want, I will look to my athletes for ideas.
I’ve always said, and I still say, that I’ve learned more about hurdling and about coaching hurdlers from my own athletes than I have from any other source. No amount of clinics I’ve attended, instructional videos I’ve watched, brain-picking sessions with other coaches, etc., has taught me more about the hurdles than my own hurdlers themselves.
The reason being, the education I receive from my own athletes happens in the moment, on the track, in the midst of a training session. A hurdler who is in tune with his or her body, and how it is supposed to feel while going over a hurdle, can provide more specific guidance than even the most knowledgeable coach can. Most often, the brief discussion between reps provides me with insights that I couldn’t have come up with on my own. Sometimes, the communication that takes place between myself and an athlete is wordless, similar to how musicians often communicate to each other – through feel and anticipation and mutual trust.
From the hurdler’s perspective, “playing the butter notes” means relying on certain technical or rhythmic elements that lead to predictably quality times but that also lead to an inability to improve any further. That’s why I find it’s always important to make subtle adjustment to the spacing between the hurdles. Good hurdlers tend to get locked into a rhythm, and once that happens, they can’t get any faster. So the spacing has to be altered to force quicker feet. Or speed must be increased (and perhaps the hurdles have to be lowered) so that the hurdler is forced out of his or her comfort-zone rhythm, into a rhythm that feels a bit chaotic and dangerous. I always say, a hurdler who is comfortable is a hurdler who is slow. And “slow” in that sense is a relative term. Meaning, 13.50 is slow if you’ve been running 13.50 for two years in a row. To get out of the 13.50 run and to dip down into the 13.30 or 13.20 range, that hurdler may need to make some significant changes.
Let me use David Oliver as an example. As he grew older, he found that his body couldn’t handle the training regimen that he had grown accustomed to as a youngster. So he reduced the amount of days he lifted weights, reduced the intensity level of some of his sprint workouts, and as a result he found himself fresher and more equipped to handle the demands of a long season.
Getting back to myself as a coach, I have, throughout my career, abandoned old training methods, only to come back to them years later. I used to always have my athletes warm up with side drills at a five-step pace prior to hurdle workouts. Lead leg and trail leg drills with the hurdles spaced race distance. Three reps trail leg, three reps lead leg, three reps over the top. I abandoned those after a while, however, when I grew frustrated with how difficult it was to get athletes to clear the hurdles properly when doing those side drills. It seemed that when doing the lead leg drills, the trail leg cheated, and when doing the trail leg drills, the lead leg cheated. So finally I just said the hell with these drills; we’ll just go over the top.
Abandoning those drills gave me space to replace them with new ones. Drills such as marching pop-overs and quick three-steps – drills that more closely mimic what a hurdler does in an actual race – and I found that my hurdlers gained a better sense for the need to get both feet off the ground, to get both legs into position on top of the hurdle, how to “run” over the hurdle.
Yet when I found myself charged with coaching beginners with zero experience once again at my new school this year, I dug the old side drills out of the closet and dusted them off, because the only way these kids were going to understand how each leg is supposed to function was to isolate each leg.
And Hancock said as much in his lecture. He said that the aim is not to replace the old with the new, but to add the new to the old. The aim is to constantly be in a creative mindset, to constantly be on alert for methods that need to be thrown in the closet and methods that need to be brought out of the closet. The aim is to constantly be observant of when you may be slipping into complacency, doing the same old same old strictly out of habit and a false sense of loyalty to old ideas.
The other day I was coaching one of my hurdlers and he was doing reps over the first three hurdles out of the blocks. One rep looked really sharp to me and I told him so. “That was a good one Mike!” I exclaimed. He responded by saying, “I felt my hips twist on that one.” Instantly I recognized that I had to watch from the other side. Instead of standing where I could see his lead leg most clearly, I needed to stand where I could see his trail leg most clearly. He had felt something I hadn’t seen. I didn’t know that I should have been looking for it. We had been talking about him being too high over hurdles.
That’s what I mean when I talk about learning from my athletes, and the importance of coaching athletes in such a way that they feel free to provide input. The athlete who just asks “How was that one?” will make the same mistakes over and over again.
Sometimes not playing the butter notes means changing an entire workout plan. Sometimes it means making a minor adjustment in a workout or drill. Whatever the case, it means stepping out of the tried and true and into something new, or into something long forgotten. It means taking a risk, because what if the new method doesn’t work? But that’s hurdling, that’s jazz, that’s life.
The video below is the lecture Herbie Hancock gave at Harvard University. From about 24:00 – 26:00 is the story about the butter notes.
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