Jazz Musician Plays Acoustic Guitar While Undergoing Brain Surgery, Helping Doctors Monitor Their Progress [Video]

Unlike many col­or­ful expres­sions in Eng­lish whose ori­gins are lost to us, the com­par­i­son of major­ly con­se­quen­tial tasks to brain surgery makes per­fect sense. One false move or mis­cal­cu­la­tion can result in instant death. The chances of irre­versible, life-alter­ing dam­age are high, should a scalpel slip or a sur­geon mis­take healthy brain tis­sue for dis­eased. This can hap­pen more read­i­ly than we might like to think. “It can be very dif­fi­cult to tell the dif­fer­ence between the tumor and nor­mal brain tis­sue,” admits Dr. Basil Enick­er, a spe­cial­ist neu­ro­sur­geon at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Cen­tral Hos­pi­tal in South Africa.

An oper­a­tion Enick­er led makes the pro­ce­dure seem like just as much an art as a sci­ence. Dur­ing an “awake cran­ioto­my,” the sur­geon and his team removed a tumor from the brain of Musa Manzi­ni, a South African jazz bassist.

To help them mon­i­tor the oper­a­tion as they went, they had him …