A good friend asked recently about my many passions. Specifically cooking. He wanted to know how I co-relate the art of cooking with playing music. He didn't necessarily see the connection. Like music performance, creative cooking utilizes positive thinking and gives our brains a chance to produce creatively. The method of how we use our brains in the creative process of music performance is identical to the concept of how I create flavor profiles. I always parallel the art of cooking with the art of music application. The halibut steak for example is the melody. The seasonings are the harmony, and the cooking is the rhythm. Passions give us the opportunity to produce creatively. Having passions are important for artists, in my view, because they offer smart platforms with how we choose to think and use our time. Passions help to simulate the creative areas of our brain and visceral thinking. Cooking helps me with how I play music. How? It constantly challenges me to come up with sophisticated ideas and gives me a method to present them. A big part of cooking is about timing, interpretation, preparation, reflexes, intuition, visualizing, and often, in the moment improvisation, which is a significant component of jazz performance. Things though, don't always go as planned in the kitchen. What do you do then? You must think quickly on your feet -- just like improvisation in jazz and inner-group comping. When we cook and use our brains constructively and creatively, the obvious objective is producing a pleasurable result. If you're being taped for a visual production while cooking, as I am with my Cooking with Jae show, it really ups the level of difficulty because it challenges your time management capabilities. You can become easily distracted. In jazz performance, having the ability to focus and produce in the moment is of paramount importance. Creating flavor profiles are like producing various rhythms, melodic motifs or harmonic progressions in music and helps to sharpen improvisation consistency. It's not about instrumental application or technique. The necessary thought requirements of creating flavor profiles helps to prepare and sharpen the creative areas of the brain which helps to fuel and nourish creative output. Yes, passions are very important, and cooking is certainly one of mine. My passions enhance each other. Not take away.
Jae Sinnett hosts Sinnett in Session, The R&B Chronicles, and Students in Session on WHRV FM. He also shares his love of the culinary arts on Cooking with Jae on Facebook every Sunday at 6 p.m. Plus, catch up with past episodes.
