Perfect pitch for a jazz improviser is a bit like a super power. Audiation - the audio equivalent of visualisation - is a key part of jazz improv. Having absolute pitch means you don’t have work quite as hard to translate those ideas onto your instrument (it’s still work though).

I’ve studied Pat’s playing a lot and transcribed several of his solos. The “muscle memory” seems to be a huge part of his playing as he has so much great dorian material under his fingers and he knows how to connect all those ideas really well, and how to repurpose them over various other chord types. WRT perfect pitch I think that must have helped him to build all that vocabulary in the first place. I’m just wondering whether he retained the ability after the op and how he related to it in his playing.

Coda - “absolute pitch” is a biological phenomenon. People recognise a C as easily as we recognise the colour red. “True pitch” is a variation where people play an instrument for so long that they can remember the sound of a pitch on that instrument. It’s a slower, less reliable process. Many people get the two confused