Since 1998, most weeks I have listened to the album, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. I have loved music my entire life, but jazz in general and Miles Davis specifically are special. There are a lot of parallels to how a musician approaches jazz and to how I have approached pastry. A jazz musician learns technique and fundamentals of music and uses these building blocks to create in the moment. I have always placed more focus on learning techniques and the fundamentals of pastry—including pastry cream, pate a choux, biscuit cuillere, pate sucre, lemon cream, chocolate cream, and sabayon—as opposed to focusing on learning any individual dessert. I have learned plenty of classic desserts along the way in pursuit of learning the individual recipes and techniques needed.
In my mind, I believed knowing the building blocks would allow me to create new things that I would not be able to do if I focused only on how to make a hummingbird cake or a pineapple upside down cake.
As I learned more, I quickly was able to branch out from making the classics and started going in my own directions. Working for the Ritz-Carlton really gave me the opportunity to go down this path as we had so many daily opportunities to create French pastries for tea and for our daily offering for our club level, not to mention banquets. I trained myself and my team to keep around core items and to, on any given day, create new pastries using the core items. I did a demo on this concept in 2007 called pastry creations where I just brought a huge variety of creams, fruits, garnishes, cakes, bakes streusels, and just improvised creating desserts for an hour or so.
When I am creating plated desserts and showpieces, and composing buffets, I am always present in the moment. I always have an idea of where I am going, I have a plan, but if I am honest, the result is almost always created in the moment.
It was never intentional that I approached my work this way. It was just how I have always looked at pastry. It was only as I got older that I realized this was kind of a jazz approach. This approach to looking at pastry is not why I am writing this though, but it is just background highlighting how much I love jazz music and the similarities in my approach to pastry with that to jazz.
The reason I am writing this is because of a video I came across on YouTube.
The video is of Herbie Hancock telling a story of when he was playing in the Miles Davis Quintet. They are playing a concert in Germany, and during the song So What, which is the first song on the album Kind of Blue, Herbie Hancock plays the wrong chord. He tells of the feeling that we can all relate to, where we do something, we know it’s terrible and we freeze. He then goes on to tell how Miles Davis, paused after hearing that chord, and played notes, that made his wrong chord, right. Miles did not see it as a mistake. He saw this as an event that happened and that he had an obligation to do what he could to deal with this as it was. Herbie Hancock used the phrase “Turn poison to medicine.”
This story stayed with me. I keep thinking about it. I, like many chefs, am very quick to point out mistakes, and if I am honest, freak out about them. Watching this video, completely changed my thinking. When there was a mistake made, it was way more important for me to see the reality of the situation, and to contribute to turning poison into medicine.
This is not always easy, there must be a culture where mistakes are accepted as part of life. Where there are high levels of trust, and where everyone is pushing in the same direction. When this culture exists, there are still mistakes, but then the team is there to turn poison into medicine.
