John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong found themselves seated on a park bench overlooking a city.
Music drifted through the air from every direction.
None of the musicians were visible.
ARMSTRONG: That’s a funny thing.
COLTRANE: What is?
ARMSTRONG: All that music… and I don’t see anybody making it.
Coltrane listened.
COLTRANE: They tell me machines compose now.
ARMSTRONG: Compose?
COLTRANE: Songs. Symphonies. Jazz. Country. They imitate almost anyone.
Louis whistled softly.
ARMSTRONG: Well, that’s one talented typewriter.
They laughed.
A melody floated past that sounded uncannily like a forgotten standard.
ARMSTRONG: It’s not bad.
COLTRANE: No.
ARMSTRONG: That’s almost the problem.
Silence.
COLTRANE: Why do you say that?
ARMSTRONG: Because music’s always been more than sounding good.
COLTRANE: What else is it?
ARMSTRONG: Somebody standing in front of you saying, “This is how I survived.”
Coltrane nodded.
COLTRANE: I spent years trying to reach something beyond technique.
ARMSTRONG: Everybody remembers your solos.
COLTRANE: They shouldn’t.
ARMSTRONG: No?
COLTRANE: They should remember the search.
Louis smiled.
ARMSTRONG: You always were the philosopher.
COLTRANE: I wasn’t searching for new notes. I was searching for a different way of being alive.
A train passed.
Its rhythm reminded them both of a shuffle beat.
ARMSTRONG: You know what made jazz different?
COLTRANE: Tell me.
ARMSTRONG: We had to answer each other.
If you played something surprising, I had to respond before the moment disappeared.
You couldn’t pause the universe.
COLTRANE: Improvisation is responsibility.
ARMSTRONG: Exactly.
Can a machine feel responsible?
Coltrane looked toward the skyline.
COLTRANE: Perhaps it can imitate responsibility.
ARMSTRONG: That’s like imitating hunger.
You can describe it.
You can’t skip lunch.
They both laughed.
Nearby, a teenager proudly announced his computer had written five hundred songs that week.
ARMSTRONG: Five hundred.
COLTRANE: Quantity has become inexpensive.
ARMSTRONG: Which makes attention expensive.
Coltrane smiled.
COLTRANE: That’s beautifully said.
Another piece of machine-generated music began.
Perfect intonation.
Perfect balance.
Perfect production.
Neither spoke until it ended.
COLTRANE: Do you know what I missed?
ARMSTRONG: Tell me.
COLTRANE: Hesitation.
ARMSTRONG: Hesitation?
COLTRANE: The moment when a musician wonders whether to leap.
The uncertainty before conviction.
That’s where personality often lives.
Louis nodded.
ARMSTRONG: I used to crack notes.
Lord knows I cracked plenty.
Sometimes the crack was the whole story.
People heard me reaching.
Coltrane closed his eyes.
COLTRANE: Jazz has always loved the sound of someone becoming.
Not simply being.
A machine may arrive fully formed.
A human being arrives unfinished every night.
A young saxophonist approached.
“Mr. Armstrong,” he asked, “Mr. Coltrane… should we be afraid of these machines?”
Louis looked at John.
John looked at Louis.
Finally Louis answered.
ARMSTRONG: Don’t compete with the machine.
Compete with your own fear.
Coltrane continued.
COLTRANE: If the machine can produce a million notes, then your task is no longer to produce notes.
It is to produce necessity.
The young musician frowned.
YOUNG SAXOPHONIST: Necessity?
COLTRANE: Play only what had to be played because you lived the life that brought you to that note.
No machine can inherit your childhood.
No machine can mourn your mother.
No machine can fall in love, lose faith, recover it, or spend twenty years trying to become kinder.
It may resemble those experiences.
It cannot remember them.
Louis stood.
He lifted an imaginary trumpet.
ARMSTRONG: Technology changes every generation.
Folks said microphones would ruin singers.
Records would ruin concerts.
Television would ruin radio.
Every invention scares somebody.
Then he smiled.
ARMSTRONG: But every audience, sooner or later, asks the same question.
“Who’s talking to me?”
He looked around at the invisible speakers filling the city.
“If the answer is nobody…
the music may be flawless.
But it’ll always leave one chair at the table empty.”