You Don't Need to Be Loud to Move a Mountain

This story is part of our Taste series, where we ask people who have devoted their lives to a craft one simple question: what is good taste, and how do you get it? OB Nelson stops answering questions midway through our conversation and starts describing a street corner in New York. A lamp on a pole. Two people leaving a restaurant at night, taking a slow walk. He was holding a single note at a rehearsal, he explains, and the note was that scene - and his pianist, technically flawless, resolved the chord with something that missed it entirely. "He was correct," Nelson says, "but the chord combination wasn't interpreting the information I was trying to pass across." OB Nelson That, in one story, is OB Nelson's whole philosophy: being correct is not the same as saying something. And in a city, and a music culture, built on volume, he has made a career out of the opposite bet. That quiet can carry more. That a pause can be the loudest thing in the room. Nelson did not come to jazz through record collections or music school. He came to it through empty churches. After services ended, he would stay behind at the piano, playing long after everyone had gone home, until one day the playing tipped into something else. "I had one encounter where I was in a trance and started to hear sounds, and they were quite unusual," he recalls. "I started to fall in love with that sound. I built a very strong relationship with it." Only later did a friend put a word to what he was doing: jazzy. Later still came the discovery that people had been building this sound for over a century, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. "I firstly had a relationship with the sound," he says, "before I even knew that it was jazz." Ask him to define that sound now and he reaches for a phrase that could sit on the cover of his eventual memoir: beautiful chaos. "Jazz is founded from a mother word, improvisation. It is playing without direction, but in a coordinated way," he explains. Where a regular musician moves from one key to the next along a template, "as a jazz musician, you have to move a little bit zigzag to arrive at the next destination. It's not scattered. It's a beautiful chaos." Thi…