Marc Myers’ JazzWax wraps up a four-part interview with Denny Zeitlin, packed with good questions, and answers that give insights into an intriguing man. For decades, Zeitlin has maintained parallel careers as a jazz pianist and a practicing psychiatrist. Myers asked him how empathy plays a role in both pursuits.
When I’m doing my most effective work as a musician playing with other musicians, I try to lose that positional sense of self so I can enter their musical world
and merge with what they’re doing. With a patient in my office, I do my most effective work when I’m able to enter their psychological life so deeply that I can really seem to feel what it is that he or she is feeling. Yet in both cases, there’s a part of me that is still available, that is able to pull back and observe the process that both of us are in.
To read all of the interview, go to JazzWax.com. For a piece I wrote about Zeitlin in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, go here.