Bent Notes, Riffing, and Phrasing: Music in Literacy

Sometimes my writing is hard to read and understand. What in the world is this guy trying to say? Not too long ago I purposely published a post with roughly three-fourths of its meaning left out to leave room for an inference earthquake. I saw instantly its failure when a reader commented essentially “I’m confused. What are you trying to say?”

I understand. Believe me, it's not intentional. I always want you to understand. Being understood is my core motivation, it’s why I keep going back to the masters, studying how they make themselves understood or purposefully misunderstood.

Failure is inevitable, however, if you aim high.

It's what I miss most in AI text, the missing ingredient, no risk, no layering, no controlled ambiguity, no conundrums to ponder, no undertones, overtones. No failures in surface clarity.

Depth? The grooves in a car tire. There is no music in computational prose. The tyranny of syntax puts down even the tiniest pockets of jazz, bluegrass, rock and roll.

The masters—and we have our share here on Substack—teach us how to ride syntax like a bull, to fly it like a jet, to play it like a violin, if we learn to read them right.

Like coming around to Little Walter.

Once you've listened to enough Little Walter, once you've spent every day for two years at his feet, slowing him down in the Red Box, crawling inside his breathing patterns, packing him up and moving him to different keys, draw bending on bronze and stainless reeds to find his bittersweet bite, tongue blocking and rocking to dramatize the story, finally you learn. You get the point of Walter.

There has not been nor will there ever be another Walter. Yet there is no end to him in sight.

We have all that he had to give, he's gone to us, but inside his blues harp I run into Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Lear, touchstones in my psyche from younger days.

You can never master them. Nor him. No one can, though many have found their way to new spaces trying to get close. He can teach you from his grave how to breathe if you listen carefully.

This is how we must teach our students to read if we truly value their voices—not for plot or theme, but for the blue notes, the bent notes, the long train whistles, the tongue slaps.

Let them crawl inside sentences with telescopes, slow them down, let them marinate in cross-cultural sauce, take them apart, imitate them, find the bittersweet bite of carefully chosen word that makes the difference.

It’s what I miss most in AI text. It’s unmistakable. I miss the personal voice we try so hard to bury in corpse speak in the professional worlds. Unfortunately, we bury it in advanced classrooms, too.

There is no music in computational prose, no improvisation, no coming around to you, Little Walter.

The difference between living prose and AI writing is like the difference between Little Walter wailing on his harp and a MIDI file of "Amazing Grace."

AI prose marches forward, putting one word in front of another, with the grim determination of a committee report, every sentence calculated for maximum inoffensiveness, each paragraph as predictable as a tax form.

Just like those textbooks that read like they were written by a committee of drowsy bureaucrats trying not to offend anyone, AI text has all the soul of a corporate mission statement translated into Latin and back again.

Both share that same bloodless perfection—grammatically correct, logically sound, and dead as disco. What's missing is the blue note, the bent phrase, the writer's breath fogging up the glass.

Real writing, like blues harp, needs to catch in your throat sometimes, needs to make you lean in close and wonder "what in God's name is this person trying to tell me?" before it breaks open and shows you something.

The core of this message is acoustic: We learn to write by reading like musicians learn to play, not by memorizing rules but by living inside the masters' work, slowing it down, feeling how it breathes, tasting its grit and reveling in its grace.

Study the way Little Walter bends notes until you understand how Baldwin bends sentences, how Morrison makes prose sing the blues, how Robert Frost lowers you into the ground.

If we want to protect human writing from synthetic contamination, that’s what we need to teach, not how to craft thesis-driven five-paragraph persuasive essays for a meritocracy, but how to create the intimacy of music in language that means something real and vital.