Real improvisation

[Christian Miller]

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

I too would tend to advocate the ‘just getting on with it’ approach haha.


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[JazzPadd]

Great thread idea and enjoyable reading, though a little abstract for me. I appreciate references to the greats, etc., but that’s a little too far afield from what I’ll ever be capable of doing. So for me, improvisation is real when it’s recognizing one’s limitations and doing something creative and spontaneous within them. And it’s especially joyful doing that in the company of others, which heightens the spontaneity, though I also enjoy sole improv.

[RLetson]

Is there any other kind?..Free jazz IS improvisation..

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

Just a niggle: Scientific experimentation is quite carefully structured, since the goal is the extraction of reliable data from carefully designed situations.

And another, smaller one (a niglet?): The free writing I'm familiar with is a technique for getting the invention process moving--it was once a common classroom exercise to get students off the dime. The material generated might or might not wind up in a finished piece of writing, but its primary purpose was to get the writing process rolling. (Student: I don't know what to write about. Teacher: Look at the assignment and write down whatever goes through your head, even if it's "I have no idea what to say." Eventually something will break loose.)

Of course, there have been all manner of experimental techniques for generating copy that let the raw material be the final product, but in my experience most of that is neither interesting nor esthetically pleasing. But what do I know.

[Christian Miller]

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.

This seems to me to reiterate and somewhat expand points I made above.

It seems to me that the Tristano has been incredibly influential on today’s jazz education - from my limited knowledge it seems that we can trace ideas like melodic minor harmony and practicing with a metronome back to Tristano in the late 40s. And this assumption that jazz is about the improvisation, and the best jazz is that which is most purely improvised in the moment is certainly one I associate with school.

(This despite how - specific? - the style and vibe of that school’s music is.)

I hear this sort of thing a lot - for instance someone might say, I went to see this famous jazz artist two nights in a row, and it was all the same - the solos, the tunes - and this might be seen as disappointing. Whereas if they'd seen just the one night they'd have been knocked out, being none the wiser.

(OTOH at one point at least every conversation I had with a young jazz musician was them agonising about their process. It seemed a bit self obsessed tbh.)

Anyway I'm not going to say it's bad, or even necessarily that I disagree (I like improvising carte blanche when I can) but those specific values are not necessarily native to jazz, or specific to them. And there are many jazz musicians who didn't work that way, as Steve Swallow pointed out in that interview above.

Good music is, presumably, good music, regardless of how it's created.

For example, no one would complain if you went to hear a touring orchestra play Bruckner's Fourth Symphony and they played the same notes. OTOH Bruckner was an excellent improviser in life (comes with being an organist, it seems).

So, what I think I would appreciate in the discourse is a way of discussing the great many informal composition and arrangement processes that go on in jazz that aren't quite dots and paper on one hand and pure Rollins-like improvisation on the other. I think that's where a lot of our practice as musicians actually lives.

[Cunamara]

How should we evaluate the difference between the definitions and opinions of those who claim to do real improvisation, and those who dispute real improvisation exists?

Hey, let's shoot straight over to the heavy stuff: does free will exist? I mean, that is basically what we're talking about here. Are we even able to truly improvise or is all of our performative behavior conditioned and programmed? Brilliant minds over the course of humanity have not been able to answer the question as to whether there is free will. In my much more mediocre mind, I have come to the conclusion that we have freeish will. For example, the universe does not appear to be totally deterministic and that randomity does happen, which may open the door for free or freeish will.

(Puts psychologist hat on) Improvisation involves making decisions: play this note rather than that note, this set of notes as a phrase rather than that phrase, etc. It feels like those decisions are made instantaneously, but we know from looking at functional MRIs that decision-making takes a lot more time than that. What we experience as decision-making is the end result of a process that's been happening up to seconds in advance of our awareness of it. Much of our decision-making falls back to prior learning. Often we do not create a new decision as much as we select a previous decision and repeat it or a variation of it. People we consider master improvisers, at least in part, have a much larger vocabulary of accessible musical choices available to them.

From personal observation, it seems to me that people who are master improvisers and jazz are the same people who are able to remember music very effectively. They can, for example, remember a tune they haven't played in 10 years and play it when it's called on the bandstand. Whereas I often still need a chart for songs I've played hundreds of times because I just don't seem to be able to memorize them and internalize them; not surprisingly, I'm not a great improviser. And if I do succeed in memorizing a tune, I tend to be stuck in the memorized version unlike jazz greats who can play the same tune in seemingly an infinite number of different ways.

Based on what we know about the functioning of the brain and the decision-making process, I think the Tristano school is largely kidding itself. And yet at times we all seem to be able to come up with something new that we've never played before and that some people seem to be better at that than others. So it is very likely that our understandings of how neurocognitive functioning operates are significantly incomplete. I don't know that it would be possible to do functional MRI studies on someone actually improvising music because of the realities of giant magnets in an MRI scanner and that most musical instruments involve metal. Maybe one could do something with a singer scatting.

[pauln]

People posit free will by rationalizing, (attributing volition to what they just did), after the fact.

Consciousness, it's leading edge, is many milliseconds delayed behind what the physical body is doing in the present moment of time. This includes the depolarization (firing) of neuron axons, about 100 billion of them, each firing about 1000 times per second, each's about 1000 dendrites synaptic to as many other neurons... that is on the order of 100,000 trillions of connections per second.

If the delay between consciousness and objective present time is 200ms, that's still about 20K trillions of connections within the delay period between reality and consciousness. Even if you alter all my numbers to be as conservative as possible, the amount of activity going on in the brain within the delay period between reality and consciousness is huge. The implication that the execution of ideas and actions originate within the preconscious period of delay, prior to any possible conscious action, is also huge.

I have a feeling that we still know next to nothing about this stuff, although we are encouraged to believe that at the present time we have it all just about figured out (in spite of everyone everywhere throughout time always having held this same confidence, and always having seemed to have been found to have been very wrong when looking back at them).

[wolflen]

People posit free will by rationalizing, (attributing volition to what they just did), after the fact.

I have a feeling that we still know next to nothing about this stuff, although we are encouraged to believe that at the present time we have it all just about figured out (in spite of everyone everywhere throughout time always having held this same confidence, and always having seemed to have been found to have been very wrong when looking back at them).

yep..Its the ol' learning from history trick--not. Though not really a good source of "news" ..the "media" in most forms, in most cities states and countries
basically tell us..in as many ways as possible..we dont know what the kcuf we are doing..but we are optimists..not letting several thousand years of train wreck history
stop us from taking another swing for the trophy..hey..bad news bears..your up!

[lawson-stone]

Is there any other kind?..Free jazz IS improvisation..

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

Not right on science. They don't do "free" experimentation but start with extensive observations of phenomena, extensive reading of previous research, leading to the statement of a hypothesis. They then design a series of experiments to see if the hypothesis can be falsified. It is a highly guided process that is anything but spontaneous or "free."

[JazzPadd]

It’s interesting how this discussion has soared upward to new heights.

Sometimes when traveling I’ll pick a few things to read from my shelves. This time, among them I grabbed Rudolf Steiner’s “The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone.” Had it for decades, but never read it.

He developed this elaborate, and apparently self-serving theory about music originating from an astral plane of sound and color that we visit while while sleeping, but upon waking can only recollect little bits through words filtered through our own experiences.

He had his loyal devotees among artists, etc. though the foundation of his ideas were more or less rejected by science as not having any basis on evidence. I’m in no position at all to elaborate further, it was just some casual vacation reading, and I only add it here because our conversation had somehow evoked Steiner to me.

Back to the topic at hand, and with due respect to the world of thought (which can be quite fascinating), I am thinking with regard to improvisation that in my case motor memory takes over when I’m playing in the moment.

And I agree with Mark, that improvisation is not so much about what we play, but in how we play, the choices made on the fly with regard to form, flow and such, from what’s already there.

[kris]

Improvisation & practising improvisation.
I have my thoughts about the practising jazz solos with backing bracks.
Does the practising with backing tracks make us play learned musical phrases?
We just play everything more confidently because we've been exercised for a long time.
I think this is the so -called learned improvisation ....Maybe I'm wrong.

[Tal_175]

When people claim that player X doesn't use vocabulary or a set of tropes they accumulated over the years, what evidence do they base it on?

Is it because the player sounds original to them? For all they know the player might be using bebop vocabulary in original and highly personalized ways. Even more difficult to detect is if the player has their on vocabulary rather than relying on vocabulary shared by a generation of players. It takes a Phd thesis to analyze a player's vocabulary. That is, an experienced musician has to transcribe and analyze dozens of solos performed for several years to make such a determination. This type of research is done under the guidance of someone who has a vast experience and knowledge on melodic construction.

Even then one only knows about recorded solos of a player, not how the player practices ideas. Some players are very progressive in their approach and always work on new concepts and vocabulary.

A player can also come up with a premeditated roadmap for their solos and improvise around that roadmap. They may use similar phrases but different targets make it sound original. For example here Peter Bernstein talks about making choices before hand so as to which notes to bring out in different harmonic contexts:

[emanresu]

Something like this also works to nice catchy improvisation:
South Park Creators Lecture at NYU #southpark #shorts - YouTube
Well, I kinda see it in impro too.

If agreeing that your playing has to be a "one story", you'd give up a lot of "freewilliness". After the first few phrases. After something started to hook.
Since they all depend on what was before, what comes after (not talking about chords, but the stuff YOU have just played), the free will sorta goes out of the window.

[lawson-stone]

Something like this also works to nice catchy improvisation:
South Park Creators Lecture at NYU #southpark #shorts - YouTube
Well, I kinda see it in impro too.

If agreeing that your playing has to be a "one story", you'd give up a lot of "freewilliness". After the first few phrases. After something started to hook.
Since they all depend on what was before, what comes after (not talking about chords, but the stuff YOU have just played), the free will sorta goes out of the window.

Yep. We're "free" until we play the first phrase. Unless we are just randomly generating notes, the next phrase will be strongly influenced by the first, they will thread together. Still lots of chances for surprise! But yes, free will exists until we make a choice, then we have to live with the world created by that choice. We cannot say "Yes" without also saying "No"

[Cunamara]

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."

I resemble that remark. And I'm old enough to remember that what is now called "woke" used to be called "manners."

[kris]

I wonder where the so -called creation invention is in improvisation.
It seems to me that it is very dependent on the talent of a given musician.
Theoretically, everyone can gain knowledge about jazz improvisation.

[AdroitMage]

Some players are more creative than others.

[emanresu]

Some players are more creative than others.

Whenever that kind of thing gets said, my mind goes up. Like a fast balloon. Comes back with nothing.

[lawson-stone]

One analogy I think of sometimes is the early stages of rap music. Rappers would often have competitions, live, in which they'd stand on stage with some kind of beat pattern going on and literally improvise rap lines--with all the rhythms, cadences, rhyming patterns, hip-hop verbal idioms, the works. Whether or not one likes rap/hip-hop, these competitive sessions were pretty amazing to watch as guys on the one hand worked with a fairly strictly defined form and vocabulary, constrained by a rhythmic pattern, but on the other hand were spontaneously composing lines and mingling them with other stuff they already knew. It was amazing. Maybe compelling jazz improvisation is something like that?

[Litterick]

Thomas Owens wrote a PhD thesis on Charlie Parker's use of motives, 'the building blocks of his improvised melodies.'

His principal motives, about 100 in number, vary greatly in size, shape, frequency of use, and application. Some of the shorter ones are adaptable to a wide variety of harmonic contexts and thus occur frequently throughout the transcriptions. The longer ones often have well-defined harmonic implications, and are consequently rarer. Most motives occur in a number of keys, but some occur in only one or two keys, and a few occur only in a single sub-group in a single key (for example, in improvisations on "Night in Tunisia" in D minor).

[Christian Miller]

People get really snotty about muscle memory


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[GuyBoden]

People get really snotty about muscle memory

Because, Science seems to be undecided about whether muscles have memory.

An Octopus has no typical brain, but moves all it's limbs with apparent ease. How?

Has Neurology advanced enough to know if muscles have memory or not?
The science behind muscle memory - Scope

[Christian Miller]

Because, Science seems to be undecided about whether muscles have memory.

An Octopus has no typical brain, but moves all it's limbs with apparent ease. How?

Has Neurology advanced enough to know if muscles have memory or not?
The science behind muscle memory - Scope

That's interesting, but I don't really care about the science much that for the purposes of this discussion. I'm happy to be entirely subjective, and talk from my experience as a player and teacher.

Guitar playing obviously has a great many of processes that we learn to the point of being basically automatic. They include our basic technique, chord grips and also many licks and lines which crystallise in our playing whether we are conscious of it or not. A lot of practice and teaching is centred around both building this sort of embodied physical knowledge, and also unpicking and relearning it.

But, I would contend, an awful lot of music making is based on this stuff, including a lot of ivory tower stuff like classical music, bebop and so on.

A lot of people talk as if there's a sort of Cartesian split between the physical musician and the hearing musican. Actually the two things are tightly intertwined.

To develop more flexibility in hearing new lines, you also need to develop more flexibility in your physical skills. Playing by ear on the guitar is a totally different experience for me than writing music down by ear. It's nothing to do with do re mi, 1 2 3 or any of that. I hear something and I have a physical feeling as to where it is because I've been playing the guitar for three decades. I can't imagine that I am special or unusual in this respect.

Many people seem to see 'advanced' playing as a sort of divorce from these basic processes and while I can certainly see the value in particular saying 'no' to things that are automatic and glib and seeing what else may emerge there's an aspect to this which I feel can be misunderstood. We are still always grounded in this physical connection. Out society tends to devalue intuitive tacit knowledge and venerate academic explicit knowledge even in something a hands-on and experience based as improvised music, which I think is a profound mistake.

[GuyBoden]

Thomas Owens wrote a PhD thesis on Charlie Parker's use of motives, 'the building blocks of his improvised melodies.'

His principal motives, about 100 in number, vary greatly in size, shape, frequency of use, and application. Some of the shorter ones are adaptable to a wide variety of harmonic contexts and thus occur frequently throughout the transcriptions. The longer ones often have well-defined harmonic implications, and are consequently rarer. Most motives occur in a number of keys, but some occur in only one or two keys, and a few occur only in a single sub-group in a single key (for example, in improvisations on "Night in Tunisia" in D minor).

I've posted about the Thomas Owen's Parker thesis a few times.

We should start a study group utilising each motive in the list over Jazz standards.

[supersoul]

A lot of practice and teaching is centred around both building this sort of embodied physical knowledge, and also unpicking and relearning it.

Dance and movement thinks a lot about embodiment.
A lot of practice is just about one's physicality to the instrument. It doesn't mean you're learning patterns that you will then regurgitate. It more means that you build and maintain a physical sense of what you can and can't do on the instrument. The end goal is that the physicality will become invisible, and what comes out is music and not impressive finger stunts.
Does anyone else feel off if they don't play an instrument for a few days? It can really affect me. When I travel I always bring something to make music on, just to keep that mind-to-sound channel open.

[pauln]

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?

Chords (and arpeggios, double stops, other multi-pitch structures) are certainly included with single note lines as within the scope of improvisation.

If you can imagine the simplest example of improvised chord melody, all the other structures may be grasped as additionally subject to improvisation.