(Ep3mis2) What are the relevant factors involved in a mistake?

Discussion

Mistakes Require Standards

A mistake requires a standard of some sort against which the event in question is judged to be a mistake.

If someone were to say "Make up a new word using any letters" and you replied with the word "xxxmmmttt" they could not then claim that you made a mistake in how you spelled the word. Because there were no restrictions on possible spellings it made it impossible to have misspelled the new word. So, any mistake requires some standard of correctness, or of non-mistakes against which the mistake is being judged.

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What Are the Standards in Jazz Against Which Mistakes Are Judged?

What are the standards of correctness for jazz performance that makes mistakes possible? The answer to this question can be found by considering the virtues that can be found in a successful jazz performance.

What makes a jazz (or any musical) performance be a good one?

Exciting, rhythmically interesting, creative, sounds good, complex with merit, in time, well coordinated amongst the players, melodic, swings, grooves, flows, happening, emotional, alluring, charming, dynamic, tells a story.

These features can be contrasted with what, generally speaking, would count as mistakes in a musical performance:

boring, repetitious, dull, unimaginative, out of tune, ill-coordinated, mundane, typical, ungroovy, all the same, repulsive, awkward, and so on.