Almost twenty years ago, I was a music student in a jazz school near Paris. For the piano class, there were four of us pianists taking lessons at the same time around the piano, so each student could observe what the other was doing during the exercises, and then we’d often share our ideas. It just so happened that diminished chords featured from time to time in our studies and discussions. Their particular construction made them a little more perilous than other chords, and we regularly wondered how best to deal with their presence in a piece, both for the voicings and for improvising.

At the time, I was regularly having fun creating systems of thought, some of them to get me off the beaten track of jazz harmony, to improvise and accompany differently. What we call playing out of the harmony. So one day I decided to replace all diminished chords with lydian chords, without worrying about harmonic meaning or a possible problem with the underlying melody. And for instance $D^{dim}$ chord would become $D^{#11}$, played as a D major triad in the left hand and an E major triad in the right. In this specific case, most of the time, to my surprise, this worked quite well by ear, as on Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered for example. Call it a risky reharmonization, or a trial and error game.

This is just one of many examples of experimentation that have enabled me to get out of my comfort zone, and little by little, to break down the barriers of my piano playing and improvisation to realize that it’s possible to play almost anything, it really depends on the chemistry between a number of ingredients - intention, listening, timing, rhythm, sound - all of which needing to be handled and developed with care (or not) and choices made. And if I played a wrong note, there was a very high probability that the right one was the key right next to it (another fun and risky assertion to play with), so I could adjust on the spot. I could almost caricature it by saying that the choice of notes is no longer important, but I guess the melody simply becomes a pretext and a context for making music. It implicitly directs all the other factors, like a quiet conductor with a strong direction.

Regularly, my colleagues and teachers, interested in what they had just heard, would ask me what had just happened, and I explained that I’d made an empirical choice. They were perplexed. In the end, in the midst of other study subjects, it was a fun creative way of avoiding boredom, surprising myself and the audience. I think it’s a tactile and psychological approach to the instrument that eventually became unconscious and organic, helping develop a certain vocabulary.