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Vaylor Trucks of The Yeti Trio used this interesting phrase on his band's blog recently: "the correct wrong note."
He describes it this way: "... the ability to drop in a single note or phrase at the exact right time which falls outside of the stated key but makes the music much more interesting.... It is a difficult thing to master, as it takes an innate sense of compositional theory, even when improvising, to pull it off."
Similar to how I see the relationship between order and chaos in jazz, the correct wrong note can only be played once a person has an intimate understanding of music theory. Without this knowledge, a wrong note is just a wrong note. But a wrong note can be (so beautifully) the correct wrong note when it is played in the right context.
Bebop musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie realized this years ago, when they added notes that do not typically belong to the scale, but added them at the right time (on the upbeats) and between the correct notes. It's the context that can make the wrong note, the correct wrong note.
As I wrote in Jazz Is Life: "One must learn the rules, then one must learn to break the rules." You can't just break the rules any old way. There are correct ways to play the wrong way. Hopefully, there are many such ways.
With all that being said, I find the more I dig into music theory the more I find everything is connected. What at first does not appear to belong, does belong. But to find the connection, one has to dig deep. Dig deep enough and you may find that a connection can be made between any note and the underlying harmony, in some distant manner (like second cousins twice removed). Thus, any note can work at any time, so long as the preceding and following notes provide a context for the "wrong" note.
But to the improvising musician, what we hear in our head is what goes. We haven't time to analyse. If it's the wrong note that sounds perfect, it's the right note to play!
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