Vasyl Lomachenko Judo Chop: Improvising inside the lines

Photo by John McCoy/Getty Images Expertise always seems more than a little mystical. When the jazz pianist’s fingers flurry across the keyboard, smooth notes and jagged all crashing and winding together in a flawless, improvised fabric, we don’t hear the complex, interlocking web of chord shapes and modes guiding his way. It’s not the Mixolydian flat six against the inverted dominant thirteen that moves us; we fixate, as we’re meant to, on the sound, and the feeling. So powerful are those feelings that we can’t help but marvel at the unbridled creativity that must go into them. That kind of genius, we think, is a language anyone can understand, but only a chosen few can speak.

But genius is…