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When you do a dup-dup. You have to follow that with didoop-baboop.
or dudaboobtidoop.
or dugickitydoo
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02-14-2025 08:23 PM
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Genuine, innovative improvisation is like sincerity--once you can fake that, you've got it made.
But serially--some quick notes accumulated while reading this thread, associated terms that do not amount to a definition but do suggest the size of the territory we're wandering around in:
Invention, which might suggest "creation ex nihilo" or "a novel item assembled from existing and/or newly-fabricated components and available materials." The fact that most music (and art in general) is a social activity suggests that the ex-nihilo option is unlikely--though some free-jazz practitioners seem to keep trying.
Improvisation, which suggests an invention constructed in real time with little or no specific preparation--making it up as you go along, perhaps with no predetermined shape or end.
Variation, which is the degree of freedom from previously devised constructions. From the audience point of view it might appear to frustrate or deny expectations, or it might just be a matter of "That's an interesting/surprising/clever way of getting from A to B." Assuming that A and B are part of the audience's repertory of possible events or conditions.
Chops, which is to say technical command of one's medium/instrument. Add a large inventory of component experiences (conventions, traditions, exemplars, vocabularies) and you enlarge the possibilities available when it's time to improvise.
All this from a jumped-up folkie who notoriously never takes a solo in a group context. (Though he improvises in small ways when singing, sometimes voluntarily. Never do it the same way once.)
BTW (says the former English teacher and not-entirely-retired professional writer), language is, despite the efforts of teachers and handbooks, not static, and not just on the scale of centuries. That is a foundational understanding of linguistics and part of the reason lexicographers will always have jobs. I am old enough to have witnessed several generations' worth of semantic change--often to my chagrin when I was teaching, and still an occasional annoyance when I have to deal with a sensitivity editor with a thin skin, deficient sense of humor or irony, and slender understanding of words' histories and ranges of meaning.
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And what do you think about improvisation in a different type of jazz .... eg improvisation in free jazz?
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this is awesome
Originally Posted by Mick-7
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Easiest/best way is to just ignore it. You do you. All of us would be better at "improvising" if we spent the time working on [whatever we believe] improvising [to be], rather than arguing about it on a forum. Originally Posted by pauln
Talk about the 1% of the 1%...
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Or with a piece of music; you can improvise over a backing track- no other musicians needed to have a conversation with (of course the track was created by someone, so there's that...). Originally Posted by Heybopper
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And I have no answer for pomposity. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
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I don't want to change the direction of this discussion but I feel like asking another question to those who are convinced that "TRUE IMPROVISATION" exists: do pianists and guitarists improvise chords?
Do you think it is possible to play a chord with a "new" fingering that has never been studied BEFORE playing it on stage?
Ettore
My not improvised book
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What does pomposity mean? Originally Posted by ruger9
Ive been told it has my picture by it in the dictionary but I always just pretend I know what it means and have never bothered to look it up.
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Underrated comment Originally Posted by emanresu
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Never been studied by that player before playing it onstage... yes. I don't think anyone is going to discover "the secret chord that's never been played" lol. Originally Posted by equenda
I don't want to change the direction of this discussion but I feel like asking another question to those who are convinced that "TRUE IMPROVISATION" exists: do pianists and guitarists improvise chords?
Do you think it is possible to play a chord with a "new" fingering that has never been studied BEFORE playing it on stage?
Ettore
My not improvised book
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If someone don’t understand the harmonic theory underlying a given jazz standard-as suggested by the compositer,-how could we improvise or write a variation on the theme correctly?
HB
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Good question. The answer appears to be - historically - perfectly well thank you very much. Originally Posted by Hyppolyte Bergamotte
"Understanding" may be less important to musical creativity than modern music education might suggest, and always seems to be lagging the developments in actual music. Theorists are most often conservatives - looking back at common practice and defining what has gone before. Zarlino and Schenker are obvious examples. Why did late Renaissance madrigalists from Gesualdo to Monteverdi write all that crazy stuff? Expression, a desire to connect to the words. The "rules" were broken in service of the text and emotion of the music.
Baroque composers did not 'understand' harmonic progressions as well as those following on from Rameau did in terms of fundamental bass and so on, but they wrote some of the defining "tonal" music of all time, including JS Bach who was skeptical of the practical value of Rameau's theoretical ideas. Their musicianship was built on apprenticeship starting in early childhood, not formal study in the way we'd understand it today
In jazz, I don't actually think jazz improvisers necessarily "understand" the harmony of standards very well even today - at least in terms of how these often classically trained composers would have recognised. Sondheim's theoretical take on All the Things You Are is not the same as a jazzer's. Jazzer's understand how to play ON mid century popular songs - not write mid century style popular songs with clever lyrics, classic changes and singable melodies. Jazz musicians typically train by spotting patterns and modules in popular songs and working on things to play on these, II V I's, turnarounds and so on; and the original changes are often altered to accommodate this approach. The aesthetic of jazz improvisation was never quite the same thing a the Tin Pan Alley songbook, even early on - jazz being something layered on top of an existing song with post-romantic harmonies drawn form the 19th century tradition. Blues is an obvious example of this - no-one could define blues theoretically in Western terms and yet it was a part of jazz right from the get go.
But our preoccupation with soloing on a tune's harmony is perhaps a more modern phenomenon. Lester Young was known for saying 'never tell me the changes' and Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Art Pepper seem to have followed on from this more melodic tradition, in contrast to players like Coltrane. AFAIK, the widespread use of chord symbols comes surprisingly late in the jazz story, well into the bop era.
This is only compounded by post-bop composers and beyond with their often quite personal approaches to harmony. How exactly Wayne Shorter came up with chords may have not been obvious to any of the musicians in his band, including Wayne himself. Transcribing the composer's solos on his own music, it's notable that to me he often seems to be improvising on the theme rather than the chords - a classic 'horn' approach, while Herbie will typically take a more chord scalar approach on each individual chord which has since become the standard way to approach post-modal/non functional tunes - a typical 'pianistic' approach. Neither approach requires a deep dive into the 'why' of the chords.
In fact it can be stranger than that - in Wayne's solo on ESP his approach doesn't seem to mirror either the approach of the composition (which is largely pentatonic and feature the classic semitone bass move he uses in a few tunes) OR the typical choices that we might make in modern jazz theory class.
For most working players, I think that's the first thing we would do to solo on an unfamiliar chart - plug and play the chord scales.
That said, Michael Brecker famously worked for years on soloing over the most difficult harmonies purely by ear. Now ear driven note choices can often be understandable theoretically, but that doesn't mean that a conscious understanding of music theory was in the driving seat when the music was made. There are many obvious example of this type of thing from pop music - McCartney may not have known what a Dorian mode was when he wrote Eleanor Rigby, but it is both analytically reasonable and completely irrelevant to the songwriter's creative process to call the melody Dorian. It seems most likely to me that the pathway to being a good songwriter is more built on learning and writing thousands of songs than learning the scales and playing alphabetti spaghetti.
Intuition is powerful and our greatest friend. The conscious mind's desire for control shouldn't be humoured too much.
And so on and so forth. etc etc.
TL;DR you don't have to be able to compose the way a composer does to be able to play their tunes. Your understanding can be different to theirs and it can work really well.Last edited by Christian Miller; 02-15-2025 at 10:46 AM.
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Yeah additional TLDR … the harmony as a jazzer understands it for improvising is usually a simplification or approximation of the harmony as the composer wrote. Especially for American songbook tunes, but also probably for the more Composer Composers of jazz — Duke, Mingus, Jobim, Shorter, etc.
A leadsheet for Dolphin Dance for example is a reaaaaalllly cheap imitation of the composition itself.
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And where is the mutual cooperation of the musicians? Originally Posted by ruger9
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You play what you know. Same as speaking a language. You know the words, grammar, etc, and you use that to make your sentences. As I'm doing here. And I could say just the same thing in the future only a different way.
I heard an old police chief say once that liars repeat themselves. Truth-tellers say the same thing in different words because they have nothing to hide. Playing what you know doesn't mean repeating exactly the same thing over again.
So playing spontaneously does not mean you're not using what knowledge you may have. In fact, the more the merrier.
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Perhaps you should post the dictionary definition of “conversation?” Originally Posted by ruger9
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Ohhh not bad. I really like this. Originally Posted by ragman1
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However, there is such a thing as the quality of improvisation ...?
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We have this topic pop up every 6 months or so, and it's always people talking past each other.
My sense is that it's because of this dialectic process when you're learning how to improvise:
- When you know nothing about improvisation, it feels like this mysterious process, and that the musicians are creating everything out of thin air, on the spot
- Then you try to improvise and make everything up yourself on the spot. It sounds terrible. Maybe you try the chord-scale "play E dorian over Em7" approach. You're not playing obvious clams. But it still sounds terrible -- directionless, meandering, unmusical.
- Eventually, you start to wise up. Your ears get better, you start picking out lines on solos, you find a teacher that takes pity on you and starts showing you how to actually sound good. You start learning vocabulary. You go beyond sounding "not wrong" but actually good (or at least not bad).
A lot of people at this stage assume that because their improvisation relies on a lot of pre-memorized vocabulary, that every jazz player must be doing the same thing. And you really can find great players who are using almost all vocabulary they've worked out ahead of time. So this seems to prove it. Then you get very smug at the very notion of "pure improvisation." Don't those rubes know how improvisation actually works?
But in reality, it's more complicated than that.
I am not going to get bogged down into a semantic argument; I'm going to keep it practical. I'm not going to get philosophical about what constitutes a "lick" or a "line," or whether one can truly play something unique that you haven't played before. Honestly, who cares.
I'm going to use this heuristic: when you start to play an idea, do you know that it's going to work? Is it something you know that you can play without fail, and that you know is going to sound good before you even hit the first note? Or is it something that you're not 100% sure is going to work, but you're going to go for it anyways, and use experience/ears/intuition/the spirit of the moment to guide you? That is a distinction that any experienced improvisor intuitively understands. If you don't understand it, you need to go play more gigs.
Some players play almost entirely stuff they've worked out ahead of time. Michael Brecker was one of those guys -- if you listen to enough of his playing and start transcribing some stuff, you start to see all the puzzle pieces and how he's putting it all together.
Some players play almost nothing they've worked out ahead of time. This was what the Tristano School was going for. Lennie, Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Sal Mosca, Jimmy Halperin, they all were pretty much going for it all the time. Maybe not 100%, but as much as possible. For NYC guys, Connie Crothers (RIP) taught improvisation this way for a long time.
Is one way better than the other? Depends on who you ask. I've heard a good amount of Brecker, including live recordings and bootlegs, and if he ever had a bad night in his life, I haven't heard it. He always nails it. Nothing is left to chance.
But for guys like Marsh, Konitz, Halperin, they were taking a chance every time they played. Sometimes it didn't work. But many more times it did, and the odds were very good that they were going to play something you've never heard before. That can be a transcendent space, for both a player and a listener.
Sonny Rollins, for me, was the greatest pure improvisor in the history of the music. Not quite as purist about it as the Tristano guys, but still walking a tightrope everytime he played.
Someone downthread pointed out that his solo on "Oleo" on "Bag's Groove" contains a lot of bebop vocab. That is absolutely true. Mid-period Sonny still used a lot of bebop lines, especially for fast playing (keep in mind, at the time of that recording, he was barely 24 years old. It's easy to forget he was actually younger than Trane).
But that changes as his career goes on. Listen to "Night at the Village Vanguard" a few years later (which I genuinely believe is a Top 10 all time jazz record), and he's still using some bebop stuff, but there's less of it.
Then listen to his 60's stuff, post-sabbatical. Here he is playing "Oleo" in 1965. The bebop stuff is almost entirely gone.
Even for guys like Bird and Trane, I think trying to make a determination about whether he was a "pure" improvisor misses some important distinctions. Charlie Parker had a ton of licks, obviously, anyone who transcribes even a few of his solos are going to start spotting them. But he also had that unbelievable ability to stop and start lines anywhere on the beat and make it work. I can't say for sure what was going on in his head, but my gut says that even if he had his vocabulary, he had not planned his rhythmic placements. He was going for it, and he had the rhythmic ability and melodic sense to always make it work. He makes it look so easy, you forget that what he's doing is so risky.
With Trane, he's almost always using vocabulary on some level. "Giant Steps" era stuff is an obvious example. But I think it's more complicated than that. He just practiced so much and and such an ridiculous assortment of vocabulary that he could instantly draw on, he almost comes out on the other side. By 1964 or so, with "Love Supreme" and "Crescent" and the Half Note recordings, he's taking very simple motivic ideas, and building gigantic, elaborate solos on them bit by bit. He may start with a four note pentatonic cell, but he knows every single way to transpose, rearrange, and reassemble that cell instantly. And he can assemble all those ideas with the 11 billion other ideas he's absorbed through countless hours of relentless practice. He's going for it, but not with the lines or melodic material, but the entire structure of the solo. Like a Bruckner symphony in real time.
If you really want to get into this more, John Klopotowski had a great book that dealt with his studies with Warne Marsh. Eunmi Shim also has a Tristano book that gets into his teaching methods. It's out there if you want it.
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I’m blown away by all the smart guys here talking about improvisation. It’s awesome. It’s exhausting and overwhelming. Playing guitar (especially improvisationally) is much easier than all of this thinking. I need a lie down now
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Apropos of your last paragraph...and not to single out any group, some of us are old enough to remember when "gay" meant "happy" and "queer" meant "strange" and "woke" meant "not asleep." So many words turn over and shift their sense so fast that sometimes even the lexicographers can't keep up. Heck even "jazz" as a word evolved, starting as a euphemism for the sex act "Jazz Me Blues" to denoting a movement in music, to referring to fancying up stuff ("jazzing up my truck") to meaninglessly repetitive actions "all that jazz." All think of "pimp." A few years ago I mentioned to a colleague that I was "pimping" for her class, meaning of course I was encouraging my students to take it. She was wildly offended and thought I naively didn't know what the word "really" (i.e. in the dictionary) meant. I smiled and said "When your kids are teenagers bringing this stuff home, I'm going to laugh!" Now of course we "pimp out our ride" i.e. add tacky decorations to pickup trucks. Originally Posted by RLetson
Language is as alive and mutable as the human beings who invent and continue to re-invent it.
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Another likely division in perspective...?
Compare one whose majority of time on the instrument is practice,
e.g., someone in a music program learning new things in practice.
Is it so hard to imagine that the practicing student may more likely
view improvisation as an illusion (yet want to achieve that illusion)?
One whose majority of time on the instrument is from performance,
e.g., playing a few shows each week, learning new things on stage.
Is it so hard to imagine that the performer will much more likely see
improvisation as a real thing (even if it still sounds like an illusion)?
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Christian Miller
you are a true well of knowledge,you blown me away!
HB
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Is there any other kind?..Free jazz IS improvisation.. Originally Posted by kris
And this "type" of approach emerges in every art form see: Jackson Pollock
for the written form there is Freewriting..
and in the more disciplined studies.. in Science..there is Experimentation
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