A life in jazz.

Saxophone for twenty-plus years. Piano longer. Jazz and classical. And here's the part nobody believes: almost none of it happened in a practice room. Music ran in the family, so there was always someone to play with, but the real learning happened on stage. Months would go by without touching the horn; then a call, a bandstand, tunes I'd never heard, and you walk out and make it up in real time. Those nights had moments where something clicks and you level up, mid-song, in front of everyone. That was the practice.

I carried a chip about it for years: if only I could sit and practice eight hours a day like the real pros. So I quietly assumed I wasn't much of a musician, while the people listening couldn't imagine I didn't practice. I've retired that math. The stage reps were the training: hear the phrase, hear where it wants to go, hear what's missing. All under pressure, with no net. Everything after, from reading a patient to reading a codebase, turned out to be the same skill with different raw material.

Jazz musicians don't follow sheet music. They hear what's missing and fill it in. That's the whole method, and it transfers. Improvised my way into vet school, improvised my way through a clinical career, and then improvised my way into building AI systems, with no formal training for any of it. I never rehearsed any of this. I learned it the way I learned music: live, with the tape rolling, in front of people counting on it to work.