"If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying"
About this Quote
Hawkins is sneaking a dare into what sounds like a friendly pep talk. “If you don’t make mistakes” isn’t a scold about sloppiness; it’s a warning about playing it safe. Coming from Coleman Hawkins - the tenor saxophonist who helped turn jazz into a language of personal voice - the line reads like an aesthetic manifesto: risk is not a side effect of creativity, it’s the proof of it.
The subtext is about improvisation as character. In jazz, especially the Hawkins era of swing tipping into bebop, the “mistake” is often just a note that hasn’t found its justification yet. You can hear this in the way great players turn a stray pitch into a new path: repeat it, reframe it, harmonize around it, make it sound intentional. Hawkins is arguing that artistry isn’t the absence of errors; it’s the ability to metabolize them in real time. Perfection is for rehearsals and respectability. Performance is for nerve.
Context matters: a Black bandleader and innovator working inside an industry that demanded polish while also treating experimentation as disposable. “Trying” here isn’t abstract self-help; it’s professional survival and artistic agency. The sentence is blunt because the stakes were. If you’re never wrong, you’re probably not discovering anything - you’re reciting what already gets applause. Hawkins’ genius move is to redefine “mistake” from embarrassment into evidence: the audible footprint of someone pushing beyond the known changes, beyond the known self.
The subtext is about improvisation as character. In jazz, especially the Hawkins era of swing tipping into bebop, the “mistake” is often just a note that hasn’t found its justification yet. You can hear this in the way great players turn a stray pitch into a new path: repeat it, reframe it, harmonize around it, make it sound intentional. Hawkins is arguing that artistry isn’t the absence of errors; it’s the ability to metabolize them in real time. Perfection is for rehearsals and respectability. Performance is for nerve.
Context matters: a Black bandleader and innovator working inside an industry that demanded polish while also treating experimentation as disposable. “Trying” here isn’t abstract self-help; it’s professional survival and artistic agency. The sentence is blunt because the stakes were. If you’re never wrong, you’re probably not discovering anything - you’re reciting what already gets applause. Hawkins’ genius move is to redefine “mistake” from embarrassment into evidence: the audible footprint of someone pushing beyond the known changes, beyond the known self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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