TuneBlog

New Year (almost), New Blog

For various reasons, I’ve decided to move the ‘ol blog to a new address.  I was conflicted about doing so, as tumblr has been quite good to me for the past nine months or so, not to mention the fact that I’m losing the tumblr specific (so far as I can tell) “reblog” feature that I recently have found so useful.

Still, it’s hard to deny Wordpress, both for its design and for its features.  I think I’ll have to pay a flat fee for some features, but once it’s all set up it could become the all in one kind of website I am looking for.  So.  My apologies for any inconveniences, but please reset your bookmarks.  The link follows:

On Free Improvisation

Free improvisation can be many things, two of the many possibilities being “amazing” and “dumb.” What distinguishes one from the other is a tricky matter to dissect, mainly because there are a ton of factors that go into even attempting a free improvisation. To be clear, what I’m referring to here is not free soloing. I’m not talking about playing a head (some semblance of harmonic and melodic material), then soloing based on that head, rather than any specific instructions (chord symbols, key signatures, etc…). Many of my favorite tunes fall into this category, from Herbie Hancock’s “Madness” (Nefertiti), to The Bad Plus’ “Knows The Difference” (Suspicious Activity), to a tune by drummer Matt Mayhall that I played on my senior recital at Capital (“Skibble”). Tunes that are written in this manner present some of the best potential for creativity, in my opinion, not only because they are a showcase for both compositional and improvisational skills, but also because the solos that occur are more truly of the moment than traditional solos over changes. No matter how different two tenor saxophonists’ personal styles may be, if both of them take a chorus over “All The Things You Are,” each solo will have commonalities that make them comparable to one another. By contrast, a tune that has no instructions for soloing other than those implicit in the head itself are completely dependent on who is soloing for their end result. This is a short summarization of one reason that I really like the “time no changes” approach, but again, this is not what I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about is walking up to the bandstand/recording studio/rehearsal space with no preconceptions and improvising an entire tune on the spot. As I said initially, this kind of thing can go remarkably well, or remarkably unwell, depending on lots of variables that include the backgrounds of each individual musician, etc etc until infinity. And there are of course more obvious factors that affect the quality of the improvisation, most notably perhaps the individual abilities of the musicians to be simultaneously attentive, assertive, and unselfish. Attentive because good free jazz involves communication of the (perhaps) highest degree, assertive because it takes a certain amount of boldness to declare your ideas as they occur to you, with no backdrop or safety net to hide behind or be caught in, and unselfish because when one of your fellow musicians displays the aforementioned boldness by declaring their own ideas, good music usually only results if that idea is accepted and cultivated by the group, as apposed to being steamrolled by one’s own insensitive declarations. Take this improvisation by trumpeter Brandon Sherman, listen to how each idea floats by the group and is either pulled down from the sky to enjoy, or left to pass by, fleeting and missed. Then contrast it with the last free jazz jam you heard (complete with a litany of saxophone noises you didn’t think were possible), and you’ll understand the distinction I’m trying to make. Now, I will be the first to admit that I haven’t listened to enough truly free jazz improvisations to discuss them with any sort of authority, but I would softly suggest at this point that the end result of such an endeavor almost invariably makes more sense (all other factors aside) both musically and meaningfully if there is some sort of groundwork laid upfront. And I know that initially this idea suggests that the improvisation is no longer the truly free improvisation I made pains to delineate at the beginning of this post, but what if this groundwork was not a short melody, or a scribble of an idea on a page, (as it very well could be), but rather the words of a poet, read and ingested for the first time just moments before the music begins?
The first (and tragically, only) fully improvised experience of my undergraduate career occurred in this way; With a professor speaking one line of a Lorca poem, and then looking at the three of us expectantly to see what we would do with that line. The music that we made in response wasn’t great, but my guess is that it would have been far worse had we not all at least been attempting to express something in particular, instead of just waiting for something to happen while we goofed around on our instruments. The result was freely improvised from start to finish, but we occupied a somewhat similar headspace nonetheless. And if words (in poetry or otherwise) can be the inspiration for compositions, why not improvisations as well? In a genre that is perceived (rightly or not) as being saturated with incoherent and cumulative noise-making, perhaps this idea, and others like it, is a means of bringing some sort of direct meaning into entirely improvised music, other than the short-lived appeal of something that is truly spontaneous.

I have been mulling this idea over for some time, and tonight began writing a series of improvisational sketches that I hope will inspire good music in the future. These will mostly be words on a page, albeit particular words, and in some cases I have determined I’d like to include a bit of musical context as well. In some cases maybe one chord will be enough. In others I may have something more specific and lengthy to say about the words on the page, and perhaps what I have to say will in the end constitute a melody, or a head in its entirety. But of course what happens after that, and if the head ever gets played again, is entirely up in the air. The idea is similar to another of Brandon Sherman’s improvisations, one that is based on a short piece of music that is written the night of the gig itself. In my case, I’m going for something a little more specific, but I hope the music works out half as well. A few weeks away from the School for Improvisational Music’s Winter Intensive, I hope that I can share the results with you soon.