Jordan Walker

I picked up the flute ten years ago, almost by accident. I was sitting at one of my sister's piano recitals when I watched someone play, and I just knew. I pointed at the flute and told my parents that was the instrument I wanted. I never really put it down. I held first chair through my last three years of school, and I kept playing long after the lessons stopped.

For a long time my relationship with music was pure intuition. I could read almost anything put in front of me and play it well, but I could not have told you what was happening underneath the notes. My ear was always a few steps ahead of my understanding. Closing that gap is the whole reason I am here.

Jazz found me in my junior year of high school, when my band director handed me one of her saxophones and pushed me into the jazz band. Flute and sax sit close enough together that improvising came quickly, even when I had no idea what I was doing. I was hearing bebop lines before I had the technique to play them, before I even knew the word for them.

Everything I know about theory, I taught myself. I am a lifelong music fanatic, and video game soundtracks did a lot of the early teaching. I learned piano so I could finally understand chords and what each one does to the feeling of a piece. I treat the guitar like a graph of music theory, a way to take an emotion and lay it out in space: a note as the zero dimension, an arpeggio as the first, a chord as the second, a progression as the relationship between them.

Those homemade models carried me a long way, but they also showed me where teaching yourself runs out of road. What I was missing was not notes, it was language. Theory, at its core, is a shared language. If you cannot speak it, you cannot really play with other people or get your own ideas across. So now I am stepping out of single player mode and into the room with everyone else.