How Ensembles Work

At the heart of every great performance is great ensemble work. Without ensemble work, the performance cannot come to life. Individual performers play their part, possibly brilliantly, but there is no connection; everything seems disjointed. No energy or emotion flows from the piece.

When the ensemble is really ‘on song’, as we British say, the opposite happens. There is crackle and spark. The performers respond in the moment to each other’s actions, words, sounds and gestures. The play, the dance or the piece of music ‘comes to life’. It communicates with us.

Good ensemble work is everything. Like most good things, good ensemble work is not easy. It takes a lot of skill and effort. Most importantly, good ensemble work requires a particular mindset.

In most business contexts, our individualistic culture tends to prevent the forming of genuine ensembles.

But collaborative ensembles have a ‘group intelligence’ – they generate ideas that no single member would have thought of on their own, and they evolve highly functional group behaviours.

Our goal in business should be to go beyond ‘teams’ – which are often teams in name only – and to create genuine ensembles.

Being part of an ensemble doesn’t mean that you have to ‘lose your ego’.

Great performers have big egos. Shrinking violets are not driven to put themselves in a public place and invite the scorn or ridicule of others.

But all ensemble performers understand that is literally impossible to deliver a great performance on their own. Not only will they be seen to be ‘grandstanding’, but without the essential connection to their fellow performers, their own performance has no context and falls flat.

Great performers stimulate the performance of the rest of the ensemble.

A lot of their energy is devoted to enabling the performance of their fellow artists, because they know that a sparking performance by the rest of the ensemble will enable and enhance their own performance.

Members of real ensembles watch and listen intently, absorbing everything that is happening and reacting to it. Everyone ‘feeds off’ the performance of their fellows.

When an ensemble is really on song – in a ‘flow’ state – then what is created is no longer a collection of individual great performances but something unique to that ensemble, in that moment.

Individual players do things that have never occurred to them before, but have been brought to mind in the moment by the unique collection of ideas being shared by the ensemble.

Chuck Israels is a jazz bassist who has played with many of jazz’s all-time greats: Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans.

He founded and directed the New York-based National Jazz Ensemble to play music from the entire jazz repertory, from its origins in late 19th century New Orleans to the modern era.

Israels talked to jazz historian Paul F Berliner when Berliner was researching his book, Thinking in Jazz: the infinite art of improvisation, about the experience of playing with a jazz ensemble that is really ‘functioning well’.

The more prevalent situation in a band is of the people really loving each other’s playing, loving the music, and supporting each other.

Recently the National Jazz Ensemble did a concert, and it was just electrifying. Everyone in the band was caught up in astonishment and

pleasure at that.

Every time Sal Nitisco gets up to play, the band is ready to cry from pleasure of the swing in the guy’s playing. Tom Harrell shuffles modestly to the front of the band, and people are deeply touched by his playing. Bill Dobbins plays a piano solo, and people just get knocked out with that. Every once in a while, Joe Temperley will get up and play a baritone solo that’s bubbling over with joy, and he’ll get

the whole band just romping.

There’s a great sense of mutual respect and appreciation in working together in any band that is functioning well. Those are

the high points.¹⁶

Jazz bassist Chuck Israels in conversation with Paul F Berliner

When he was a management consultant, Mark Powell was the chairman of a panel of judges for an international business school competition.

Teams of students from business schools around the world were competing to present the best business solution to a hypothetical case study on an underperforming business.

Powell remembers the winning team:

As you would imagine, there were a lot of good presentations. Pretty much every team came up with a plausible solution. But the winning team really stood out. They actually didn’t have the very best technical solution, but they really impressed the judges. They had clearly bonded as a group – they were working as an ensemble. They’d taken the trouble to go out and buy the same tie for every member of the team. It’s a small thing, but when they walked into the room, it sent out the message that they were a real team. They all had clearly defined roles to play in the presentation, and they performed really well – in our sense of ‘performance’. They didn’t use PowerPoint, they brought some props in with them to illustrate key points and they sketched a few key things on a white board to make important points.

When they came into the room, they immediately engaged with the judges – making eye contact, shaking hands, introducing themselves. Then they told a compelling story about the future of the company in the case study; they painted a picture that you could really believe in. Most importantly, they came across as a team that

you would love to work with.

Theirs wasn’t actually the best technical solution any of the teams of students presented, but it was definitely the best performance – and the judges decided it was a winning performance.

Ensembles are not hierarchical. Every role in an ensemble ‘matters’ as much as the other roles. There are starring roles and supporting roles, but all of the roles are essential to the plot.

The gravedigger in Hamlet (technically, ‘The First Clown’) has 34 lines in the play, while the melancholy prince himself has an astonishing 1,480 lines – but the gravedigger injects some timely black humour into the sad matter of burying the recently drowned Ophelia. He enables a reflection on death, suicide and mortality and supplies the defining image of Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick, his dead father’s dead jester.

No gravedigger, no “Alas, poor Yorick.” The absence of even the smallest part of an ensemble diminishes the whole. An individual instrument may have only a small part to play in a symphony, but the composer has included that part for a reason.

If we want to create genuine ensembles – groups of people who work together collaboratively to create their own unique solution to a particular challenge – we need to suspend hierarchies. Everyone must be equal before the task.

Note the need to ‘suspend’ hierarchy. Most organizations need elements of hierarchy to be able to function effectively. Very few organizations are genuinely ‘flat’.

But organizations also need creativity to help find new ways of doing things and to respond to constant change. When we need creativity, we need collaborative, creative ensembles, and ensembles can’t function with hierarchy – we must take them out of the hierarchy and give them their own environment.