How jazz boosts my creativity in physics
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Jazz saxophonist and physicist Stephon Alexander tells Dom Byrne how music has made him a better scientist.<br>Your browser does not support the audio element.<br>Download MP3See transcript
Theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander was 12 years old when his father bought him a saxophone at a garage sale near their home in the Bronx, New York. Soon after he heard Ornette Coleman, a pioneer of free jazz, on the radio. “There was this saxophone playing that was completely out there, completely wild,” he recalls. “You could just play whatever you want and make up whatever you want.”<br>Alexander, a jazz saxophonist who now directs the Brown University Center for Theoretical Physics and Innovation, in Providence, Rhode Island, says: “I would not be the physicist I am today if weren’t for my practice as a musician, especially as an improvisational musician.” He credits it for making him “more fluid and flexible mentally in terms of approaching and attacking physics problems,” some of which he ponders while watching performances in New York jazz clubs.<br>In the final episode of Creativity in Science, a six-part podcast series, Alexander also lists his former high school physics teacher Daniel Kaplan as a key influence. He says that Kaplan, a professionally-trained jazz musician, taught him that “intuition is the lifeblood of a good physicist.”
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Transcript
Jazz saxophonist and physicist Stephon Alexander tells Dom Byrne how music has made him a better scientist.
Stephon Alexander 00:08<br>He was the one that really impressed somebody, the importance of intuition.<br>He said intuition is the lifeblood of a good physicist, of a great physicist.<br>David Payne 00:18<br>This is Creativity in Science, a series brought to you by Nature Careers.<br>Stephon Alexander 00:24<br>I would not be the physicist I am today if weren't for my practice as a musician, especially as an improvisational musician.<br>Working on my improvisation, just actually improvising as a musician, somehow makes me more fluid and flexible mentally in terms of approaching and attacking physics problems.<br>David Payne 00:42<br>…a podcast about how science and creativity go hand in hand.<br>And about how one can nurture the other.<br>Stephon Alexander 00:52<br>…and it turned out to really work for me.<br>It really helped me become a more creative physicist, to think about ideas that I ordinarily would not have thought of.<br>David Payne 01:02<br>This time, a physicist who skillfully weaves his passion for jazz Improvisation with his understanding and teaching of complex ideas.<br>Stephon Alexander 01:20<br>Hi, I'm Stephon Alexander. I'm a theoretical physicist, and the director for the Brown University Center for Theoretical Physics and Innovation, in Providence, Rhode Island, a small, beautiful state with a lot of ocean.<br>And I'm also a jazz saxophonist.<br>Yeah, how I got interested in music started way back when I was eight years old. My family immigrated to the Bronx, New York.<br>My grandmother, who had been in the country for about a decade prior, sent for us, and so it was always in her mind that I would become a concert pianist.<br>So she signed me up for classical piano lessons starting at eight. I did not enjoy practicing the piano, as I think most young people probably don't, but I continued with that until I was 12 years old.<br>But then my father brought home a used saxophone from a garage sale.<br>He actually bought it from a former New York Yankees pitcher, I believe.<br>His wife, I think, bought it for him as a birthday present, but he never played it.<br>So my dad got it for a very cheap price. But the saxophone was really not introduced to me as something you have to practice, right?<br>So it started there, and then I had a little radio, one of these radios that would, you know, old school radios, where you turn a dial.<br>And I used to randomly, you know, surf radio channels back in the 80s.<br>This is in my little attic room in the Bronx.<br>And there was this saxophone playing that was completely out there, completely wild.<br>And it said, this is the music of Ornette Coleman. And this is free jazz. I was like, oh, this free jazz thing. What does this mean? You could just play whatever you want and...