This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam. If you're a parent, you probably told your kids a thousand

times your room is a mess, clean it up. Managers tell their employees to get organized. Here in the

United States, we elect presidents to go clean up Washington. In the next half of our show today,

we explore a very different idea. What happens if we treat chaos as our friend instead of our

enemy? Tim Hartford believes we should do just that. He's the author of Messy, the power of

disorder to transform our lives. He joined us recently for a live taping. We were just blocks from

the White House at NPR's Weekend in Washington. It's an annual event that brings together public

radio fans and supporters. Tim Hartford, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you very much, Shankar.

I want to begin by playing you a piece of music, Tim.

How did that piece of music come about? What's the story? It's beautiful, isn't it? Two of my

children were born to that. It was played by Keith Jarrett, great jazz pianist in 1975 in Cologne.

And if you had been there two or three hours before the concert, you would not have expected

things to go well. Keith Jarrett had just refused to play. And the reason he had refused to play

is because he had arrived on stage, met the piano. He was supposed to be completely improvised,

by the way. The whole thing was going to be improvised. Met this piano and realized that

there had been a mistake. And the thing was literally unplayable. Without a tune, black keys were

sticking. The pedals didn't work. The upper register of the keyboard was harsh and tinny because

all the feltered waterway. And most importantly, it was too small. So it didn't have enough volume

to actually reach the back of the Cologne auditorium. And so of course he refused to play.

And the organizer of the concert, who was this young German girl, she's just 17 years old,

desperately tried to fix the piano, to replace the piano. She managed to get it

somewhat in tune, but basically she couldn't really improve on it and she couldn't get it replaced.

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