Why Great Musicians Can Sound Terrible Together

On paper it should be unstoppable. Take the best players you can find, individually brilliant, technically way beyond most of the people they'll ever share a stage with, and put them in a room together.

Sometimes it's unstoppable. Return to Forever or Mahavishnu Orchestra, Audioslave, Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Often, though, it's strangely flat.

Competent, impressive even, and somehow completely lifeless, in a way that a much ‘less accomplished’ band, one that's simply played together for years, never is.

If anyone has had the misfortune to witness A Toot and a Snore in '74 (1974), a chaotic late-night jam session featured John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Harry Nilsson. Fuelled by drugs and alcohol, the recording session was completely messy, out-of-tune, and stands as a painful artefact of a legendary lineup going entirely off the rails.

Why, because individual brilliance and musical chemistry aren't the same skill, and a lot of people assume they are.

Chemistry is about really listening to what the other players are doing and leaving room for it, rather than simply being excellent in the same general direction as everyone else at the same time. It's about knowing, almost physically, when someone else is about to do something, and knowing when to get out of their way and when to lean into it. None of that shows up on a CV. None of it is a skill you can display on your own in a practice room.

A band that's played together for years becomes like the Borg. They've made the same mistakes together enough times to develop an instinct for each other, an unspoken agreement about who takes the space and when. A collection of virtuosos assembled for one night has none of that history to draw on. Everyone is, understandably, playing to their own strengths, because that's the only language they've got in common, and the result is a room full of brilliant soloists rather than a band.

It wasn’t about how good is each of them. It was always, do they actually listen to each other. Plenty of legendary bands are made up of players who, on their own, wouldn't turn heads. What they built together was something else.