A TIME FOR LOVE. Is improvisation always needed?

[Uffe Steen]

As the title says :
Sometimes like here, I feel a need to stay away from impro and use
my creativity in the inner lines to feature a beautiful tune in its own right.

[Jimmy blue note]

There's always improvisation, but it may take the form of the way you decide to convey what you hear in the moment. There's more music in the realization of a personal chorus than in 10 verses of thoughtless reflexive licks.
Beautifully done! So many great ideas and textures.
Love your reading of a tune I really love. Love the harmony on this tune.

[Bob_Ross]

There's always improvisation

+1
When I was in grad school at NEC we'd routinely have these debates about whether classical music performers are "just" playing the material, as opposed to imparting some personal editorial decisions (aka improvising). I am firmly of the opinion that a composer cannot possibly convey all of the details of a musical performance such that the player doesn't have to bring some of their personality and interpretations to any given rendition. There's always some aspect that is unspecified, and so the performer has to make a Game Time decision as to how it will be specified.

It's simply a matter of degree as to how granular those decisions & specifications will be; super-fine, and it gets called "Classical music" or macro 10,000' view and it gets called "Jazz/Improvisation"

[Jimmy blue note]

+1
When I was in grad school at NEC we'd routinely have these debates about whether classical music performers are "just" playing the material, as opposed to imparting some personal editorial decisions (aka improvising). I am firmly of the opinion that a composer cannot possibly convey all of the details of a musical performance such that the player doesn't have to bring some of their personality and interpretations to any given rendition. There's always some aspect that is unspecified, and so the performer has to make a Game Time decision as to how it will be specified.

It's simply a matter of degree as to how granular those decisions & specifications will be; super-fine, and it gets called "Classical music" or macro 10,000' view and it gets called "Jazz/Improvisation"

It's a spectrum. Glen Gould saw Bach as a template and his personal insights took his communion with Bach into the realm of playful reinvention. David Leisner was one of the most inspired interpreters of the classical repertoire but he demanded strict adherence to a formalized set of protocols.
Given this wide set of parameters when a written page is involved, taking a tune as a head and changes is even more deeply invested than Art of Fugue and figured bass. So much of the harmonic language, voicings, the dynamics that speak to the relationship between melody and chords... these are things that a mature jazz musician takes for granted and for a large part, are different everytime you play a tune.

The first time I listened to Coltrane with Tommy Flanagan and there was one track How Long Has This Been Going On? with Flanagan playing the tune solo, no improvised chorus, I thought "Is this jazz or coctail music?" (I was just a kid learning about jazz back then) and it bothered me. But the more I learned, the more I saw playing the head with personal investment is in deed playing a duo with the composer. There are decisions to be made about every aspect of the performance. All those things are personal choices that require mastery or at least high proficiency in the craft. If it touches people and it's yours, that's your composition...that's what improvisation is.

I attended master classes that Fred Hersch used to hold. He would hold the player to the letter of the composition, especially when performing Monk whom many players take great liberties with. He taught me that when Monk included something as small as an eighth note rest, it could change the entire structure of a piece and thereby change the structures of improvisation to be respected and interpreted. That was an eye opener; the respect for the composer and that sacred relationship when performing.
The more I play, the more I'm reassessing my relationships with the original composers. The best improvisors have craft, but more than that, they have respect.

That's the way I see it.

[Bob_Ross]

playing the head with personal investment is in deed playing a duo with the composer.

I love ^^^this perspective! Thank you for that.

[Uffe Steen]

Thanks for all deep-insights :-)

[rpjazzguitar]

Some players insist that the head of the tune be played exactly as the composer wrote it. Others take liberties, sometimes to the point where the original tune is barely recognizable.
Trio Corrente's version of Garota De Ipanema (Girl From Ipanema) is incredible, but barely the original tune. Robert Glasper played a barely recognizable version of Stella at the Blue Note a few years back. Just to name two.

OTOH, if you're playing, say, Cole Porter, he may not need any help with his melody.

Neither way is wrong, IMO.

[Christian Miller]

I’m firmly of the belief that the mystique around improvisation is a side effect of classical music’s removal of it. In fact in every other musical culture practically, composition, improvisation and performance lived in a continuum and play a practical role in the every day musical life.

Just a fact of life for most musicians, another tool to advance the cause of music, and another way to connect to something deeper and older than oneself.

When jazz came along as a contender for art music status in Western culture (followed later by other genres) those people saw improvisation as the dividing line between the musics, whereas of course centuries earlier Bach had been upsetting the congregation with his sick ad-hoc reharms of Lutheran Chorales (their displeasure was such that it was entered into the church records) and improv in general was not just common but indispensable to the performance of that eras music.

On the other hand much great music called jazz is actually more composed and worked out than many would think.

Anyway, the only thing that must be served is music itself and this was done handily. Nice one.


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[Uffe Steen]

Thanks, Christian

[James W]

I’m firmly of the belief that the mystique around improvisation is a side effect of classical music’s removal of it.

If there is a mystique around improvisation, I'd put it more down to a misunderstanding of what it is and what it involves rather than the fact that it is not central to a form of music that is not central to most people's lives. I mean, improvisation also isn't really a feature of most pop music either and perhaps a bit more in rock music.

In fact in every other musical culture practically, composition, improvisation and performance lived in a continuum and play a practical role in the every day musical life.

Just a fact of life for most musicians, another tool to advance the cause of music, and another way to connect to something deeper and older than oneself.

When jazz came along as a contender for art music status in Western culture (followed later by other genres) those people saw improvisation as the dividing line between the musics, whereas of course centuries earlier Bach had been upsetting the congregation with his sick ad-hoc reharms of Lutheran Chorales (their displeasure was such that it was entered into the church records) and improv in general was not just common but indispensable to the performance of that eras music.

Improvisation continued to play a role among classical musicians into the 19th century. You can read about people like Liszt and other virtuosi doing it, sometimes in competitions with each other.

[Christian Miller]

If there is a mystique around improvisation, I'd put it more down to a misunderstanding of what it is and what it involves rather than the fact that it is not central to a form of music that is not central to most people's lives. I mean, improvisation also isn't really a feature of most pop music either and perhaps a bit more in rock music.

Maybe, rock musicians do seem to compose their solos more now. The culture of jamming seems to have died away a bit. Consequently; a lot of today’s super widdly rock players are actually quite weak improvisers when you hear them in a jam setting, although there are still some strong ones like Guthrie.

(Obviously there’s more type of improv in rock than just playing guitar solos.)

But bear in mind that in the swing era musicians were often expected to play the same solo that they recorded. So there’s always been a tension between commercial music and audience expectation and musical self expression. But … well, duh.

Obviously many are drawn to jazz because of its centring of improvisation so that expectation can exist early on, which is not itself a bad thing, but you do have to point out why the student is disappointed in their improvisation “not sounding like jazz” that it may come down to their lack of intimate familiarity with the musical idiom rather than anything to do with their improvising process. Ultimately a fair amount of what I do seems to be to stop students demanding so much of themselves all the time. Sometimes I think they need to be told that it’s OK not to be Sonny Rollins.

The more I teach the more I see the musical process itself as quite universal beyond genre and ability level. This process gets refined in most musicians over time, but it’s the same process.

OTOH as my Konnakol teacher pointed out, many jazz players regard themselves as the experts on improvisation, when they are in fact masters of jazz. Not at all the same thing, of course, pace Bill Evans.

Derek Bailey understood this and actual championed this viewpoint, but his cultural context was already different to Bill’s and wider.

Furthermore Derek and others in European improvisation were obviously keen to see a democratisation of improvisation away from established styles and highly trained musicians, something which overlaps with practices such as music therapy and community music, which move away from the idea of “performance”.

It’s something that has become really clear to me working on various historical improv styles, which are tone fair much more idiom focussed than modern jazz, but it has been really instructive for me in what it is and isn’t.

But that’s another subject really.

Improvisation continued to play a role among classical musicians into the 19th century. You can read about people like Liszt and other virtuosi doing it, sometimes in competitions with each other.

Yes - although as I understand improvisation be and a little bit more of a specialist activity into the c19. Liszt was not the average musician, whereas a working player of the baroque era would have had an everyday engagement with improvisation even when playing composed music.

It didn’t entirely die out - improvisation persisted in the French organ tradition up to the present day.

Of course in this era we see a cultural shift in the perception of musicians as skilled artisans and towards viewing them as gifted Artists, and no more so than Liszt. Pushkin was contributing to the posthumous cult of Mozart, for instance. We also start to see the establishment of a clear repertoire in European music.

John Mortensen places the cut off as around the mid 19th century. For example, Henri Herz’s influential stint at the Paris Conservatoire (starting in 1842) which focussed on technical virtuosity and interpretation of literature, an approach of which Liszt incidentally was highly critical.

Here’s a quote from the man, from his 1844 book

“Whatever may be the idea of the glory attached to improvisation when this glory is without alloy and free from charlatanism, the author would still advise his pupils to refrain from engaging in it, except in private, or before such intimate friends as shall have previously consented to pardon the imperfections attendant on instantaneous and unpremeditated performance. As to improvisation in public, to those who look upon it in a high point of view, and comprehend the conditions it imposes, it is the most dangerous ordeal to which a pianist can expose himself, provided he abandons himself entirely to the sway of his imagination.” (Mortensen, improvising fugue quoting Herz)

(Herz himself was an accomplished improviser)

Kind of sets the tone for the next hundred years at least dunnit? Recorded sound and later, social media, just adds to that argument.

And yet in its own profoundly negative way it does identify the issue that plagues students of jazz - that tension between the desire to play jazz the noun - and later to do this with a high level of technical perfection - and to truly improvise. For many the ‘danger’ is the point, and I have heard some players comment that the polished perfection of many modern jazz players may itself betray a lack of ‘real improvisation.’ Jazz may now be subject to the pressure of the traditional (or C19) European Art Music performance context, and its specific demands.

I don’t know about that, but one’s view of it depends on how you frame it, what you wish to achieve and what your own musical context involves. And that’s something it’s always useful to understand clearly although sometimes it’s more a feeling than an intellectual process.

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[Ukena]

Christian, very interesting musings on the history and meta of it all. Maybe you should consider Substack....