I'll do a solo here
April 27th, 2026
Glass boardroom, catering served, good AV system, a lot of Montblanc pens. The opposite of my old dark, grungy, smelly, and awesome band rehearsal room, fifteen years back, filled with guitar amps and setlist notes and private jokes on the wall.
But what happened next felt familiar.
Senior partners preparing a pitch. One would mention a key message, loosely, the way a musician might hum a motif before committing to it. Another would run through a segment almost fully, then wave their hand at the next part — the equivalent of "I'll do a solo here." Nobody seemed worried. Nobody ran it from the top. What looked like scattered annotations on a music sheet the night before was, the next day, a full functioning jazz quartet that appeared to have been rehearsing for months.
It was mastery pretending to be casual. The scales so deeply internalised that improvisation stops being a risk and becomes just another way of playing something you already know.
I've been here before, both with music and design — comfortable enough with the material to jazz through a presentation, fill a silence, find the phrase when it isn't written down. What I hadn't expected was to feel it again here, in a glass boardroom. Watching people perform in a different instrument, with the same ease.