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By day I work in the publishing business, and I'm lucky to be sent to Book Expo America each year where I can meet with other publishers, talk about books, and most importantly, get free books, including books that have not yet been released.
At this year's BEA in Washington DC I picked up a book with a cover that really caught my eye, and it's a book that indirectly has a lot to say about jazz.
On the cover is a lamp with its shade tilted. The working title of the book is A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. The cover claims it will show us "how crammed closets, cluttered offices, and on-the-fly planning make the world a better place."
What is a perfect mess?
Here are some examples of how the authors, Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, feel that mess or disorder can be advantageous:
- The blur of an organizational chart that doesn't pin down employees into tightly defined specialties and responsibilities makes it easier to reconfigure resources around new challenges.
- Good boxers keep bouncing around randomly between blows, not only making themselves harder to hit but also enabling them to create openings in their opponents' defenses.
- Improvisation enables a group of jazz musicians to shift at any moment to address an audience's response to the music, while a symphony orchestra is tied to the music as written.
How mess can change your life
Basically, the authors say that ordered systems do not allow for improvisation or flexibility. A neat and ordered system also requires additional time and energy to maintain, to prevent it from becoming disordered, and often that extra time maintaining the system takes away from time spent achieving the original goal the system was designed for.
 Artie Shaw was an organized man with a messy personal life The other day I was watching a documentary on Artie Shaw called Time is All We Have. Near the end, one of Shaw's many ex-wives talked about how neat and tidy Shaw was, and how messy she was. They had been separated for many years, but ever since living with Artie Shaw she had become a neat and tidy person.
But more to the point, she then said something rather interesting: She said that Shaw would "have to be" a highly organized person to be "the kind of musician he was."
It's highly useful to create ordered systems for practicing music, especially for practicing scales, which isn't the most fun stuff to practice. It's really just a matter of playing things over and over hundreds if not thousands of times which makes the music sink in. Only after that much repetition do the scales become automatic to the point where, as Horowitz might say, you can just "watch your hands play the music" without thinking about the mechanics of it all.
So order has value. It worked for Artie Shaw! It can help us to focus on the things we might otherwise ignore, like practicing scales. And when you dig deep into music theory it's a bit like studying math, memorizing formulas and calculating as many variations as possible.
But the truly great music we all love listening to sounds nothing like math would sound (if it had a sound). You've got to break the rules a little to keep the music fresh, exciting, and surprising. An element of disorder, of contrast, is essential in creating great music. Even the fastidious Artie Shaw's own famous compositions have elements of disorder. Think of the dissonance in his famous composition "Nightmare." There's a lot of harmonic tension in that song which one could consider "messy." And that's really what we love about it!
How much mess is good mess?
Another example of successful disorder the authors give in the book is that of a restaurant chain in New York City that has thrived largely due to its "messy" improvisational structure. While it's a chain of restaurants, each one is nothing like the other. One is an upper crust expensive restaurant, one is a low priced joint specializing in milk shakes, and another is a jazz bar (The Jazz Standard).
"[Their] model for a restaurant is a jazz ensemble.... There's a background theme that's predictable, and the instruments can improvise around it."
In every example used in the book, there is at least some semblance of order, it just may not be immediately obvious to those who didn't create the mess in the first place. Without some semblance of order, the disorder wouldn't make sense.
I believe it's the contrast of order and disorder that makes jazz so interesting. We all know the song "Summertime," but when we hear Artie Shaw and Roy Eldridge change the rhythm and melody, or improvise over the changes, the song becomes new again. It's the element of surprise, the departure from what we expect to happen, that piques our interest. The form of the song is familiar, but Shaw's playing is new.
The song is the structure, the improvisation is the mess. And we like the mess!
But how do we know if we get too messy? 
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