A few years ago, Bob Dylan was asked how he responds to people who say he has a bad voice. His answer was unforgettable:
“Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: ‘Well, that’s very kind of you. But voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead, they matter only if they convince you that they’re telling the truth.’”
That story brings to mind something Ornette Coleman once said after hearing the iconic cantor Joseph Rosenblatt for the first time.
“I started crying like a baby,” Ornette recalled. “[Rosenblatt] was crying, singing, and praying all in the same breath. I said, wait a minute. You can’t find those notes. Those are not notes. They don’t exist!”
Felix Mendelssohn once remarked that words “seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.”
All three quotes touch the same essential truth: music is not about perfection. It’s about honesty. Dylan reminds us that “pretty” doesn’t matter if it isn’t real. Ornette shows us that sometimes what’s most real can’t even be notated. Mendelssohn argues that music speaks where words fail. In each case, the message is the same: the most powerful music tells the truth—by any means necessary.
It took me years to understand why certain Jewish melodies, no matter how many times I practiced them, never felt quite right on the piano. My teacher would say I played them “perfectly,” but something still felt off. The notes were all correct, but the soul was missing.
That realization deepened when I started learning blues melodies. They often looked simple on the page—just a few sustained notes. But when I played them as written, they still didn’t sound right. I began to notice that the recordings I loved were doing something the page didn’t capture: they bent the notes, stretched them, slid between them. The real music was happening between the notes.
This becomes especially clear when you listen to Billie Holiday sing My Yiddishe Momma. The way she sings the “ah” in “Ma-ah-mma” isn’t one note or two—it’s something in-between. She slides into it, bends it, breathes into it. The sheet music doesn’t show you that. But that’s where the truth lives.
A classical teacher might have said she sang it “wrong.” But how ridiculous would that be? Holiday’s version, to me, is more powerful than most others—even those sung by people who actually had Yiddish-speaking mothers—because she imbues every note with soul, not accuracy. Like Dylan, many wouldn’t describe her voice as conventionally “beautiful.” But it’s honest—and it hurts. That’s the goal.
Ben Sidran puts it perfectly in There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream:
“In the blues, the voice is not used with precision, as it is in most Western music… [The singer] slides into the tonal center, in order to test the best route to the truth. The meaning is delivered in the manner. This melismatic sliding around the note is also a central feature in Jewish cantorial singing.”
Precision, in both Black and Jewish musical traditions, is not the goal. Truth is. The idea isn’t to hit the note right in the center, but to approach it with feeling—to arrive at it your own way. The soul lives in that space between the notes. That’s what was missing when I played those melodies “perfectly.”
Recently, I found myself in the exciting—but slightly intimidating—position of sitting with one of the most important composers in American music: Mike Stoller, of the legendary Lieber & Stoller songwriting team. They wrote “Hound Dog,” “Stand By Me,” “Kansas City,” and so many other classics. Stollar also studied piano with the legendary stride pianist James P. Johnson. About his first lesson with Johnson, Stoller once remarked, “It was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson—except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fats Waller.”
Anyway, I told Stoller something I’d always felt but never voiced: “If you play most Jewish songs exactly as written, or most Black spirituals exactly as written—or, and I mean this as a compliment, a lot of your songs too—they just don’t sound as good. I think they’re meant to be interpreted soulfully. They’re not written for precision. They’re written for truth. Does that resonate with you?”
He lit up. “Absolutely,” he said. “Back in the early ’50s, Capitol and others would record our songs with their artists, and we never liked the results. So we became record producers—to protect the intention of the songs. If we couldn’t be the ones singing or playing, we needed to guide those who did, to make sure it sounded the way we heard it in our heads.”
That line stuck with me: We became producers to protect the intention of our own songs.
To Lieber & Stoller—and later, to Burt Bacharach and others—the written notes were just a sketch. The real magic came in the phrasing, the rhythm, the bend of the note, the breath between syllables. And that’s not something you can fully write down. It has to be felt.
Even “Hound Dog” illustrates this. I grew up loving Elvis, but when I tried to play that song exactly as written, it never felt right. I had to bend it, reinterpret it—feel it.
And Stoller himself had mixed feelings about the Elvis version. “It was originally written for Big Mama Thornton,” he told me. “It was a woman singing to a man. Elvis turned it into something else entirely.” After it sold seven million copies, he laughed, “we had to see some merit in it!”
Ironically, Stoller almost didn’t live to hear that version. He was on the Andrea Doria when it sank, killing 51 people, rescued only by a broken lifeboat and a freighter. When he arrived back in New York, Jerry Lieber was waiting on the dock.
“Mike, we’ve got a smash hit.”
“Big Mama Thornton?”
“No. Some white kid named Elvis Presley.”
What a life. What a journey. And through it all, the goal remained the same—not perfection, but intention. Not accuracy, but honesty.
Before Louis Armstrong, musical success was measured in precision. After Armstrong, everything changed. The new gold standard was individuality. Be yourself. Tell your truth. Bend the note. Slide into the center. Cry, sing, and pray—all in the same breath.
And in that breath lives the story of American music—shaped by the raw honesty of Black and Jewish traditions, where truth matters more than technique, and where the space between the notes is where the spirit lives. That’s why I’m especially excited for June 11th, when Béla Fleck joins the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for Rhapsody in Blue—a piece born of this very same spirit. I hope you’ll join us to hear Béla’s truth in his interpretation of Gershwin’s masterpiece.