improvisation (with or without a net)

My first instinct is to say that it usually says so on the tin. But not always. Since we're concerning ourselves *mostly* with recorded product, another question that's raised is whether or not "pure" improv is ever particularly successful on record. (Then of course there's the question of whether or not there can ever be "pure" improvisation. More questions. Someone better get in here with an actual idea or two, quick.)

I find that I really like improvisation that is somewhat tweaked in the studio, a la Teo Macero with Miles' fusion stuff, or Holger Czukay (can I go a goddamn day without typing or saying his name?!) with Can. Not just a straight-up no-frills "real-time" jam; rather, a series of jams that are shaped/manipulated (some would say "made less authentic") through the use of studio technology. Jams can grate on the nerves (except 'Pangaea,' and, well, any other live Miles recording), but in the hands of a skilled producer who knows how to assemble them artfully, thoughtfully, and surprisingly, they can be amazing.

I will say, though, that Horde Tour-esque bands will be the first to die in the Revolution. No, Mr. Popper, it would NOT be sweet as hell if you played a 20-minute harmonica solo. That is, unless your tubby ass has a heart-attack during said act. (Oh, shit - is he dead? I can't remember; oh well.) The problem is, most rock guitar improvisation is just lazy.

Differences in improvisation (I'm thinking specifically of guitar- based improv here) obviously depend to a large extent on how the musician approaches his instrument. In the latest edition of The Wire, Johnny Greenwood says something like, roughly: "Some people play the guitar like it's a phallus, but I want to play it like a clitoris." This makes a lot of sense to me. To carry the metaphor even farther, it could be said that bands like the Black Crowes, etc., try to play their guitars like phalli, but they're only painfully mediocre strokers. Their solos are the equivalent of halfheartedly wanking their semi-soft cocks. They don't have enough fire in their playing to get fully hard (God, this is gross - I'm sorry!), but they're not sensitive enough to know how to handle a clitoris.

Phew, I'm glad that's over with now. Anyone care to jump in where I left off?...

When I very first started getting into jazz and didn't really understand it, I thought, "Why is something so much better because it was made up on the spot? Isn't the idea itself the important thing? How can you tell, anyway?"

Improvisation is at the heart of a lot of what I value in music. A given number of human beings, listening to each other, interacting, having a conversation, that's what it's all about (except when it's not). There's a freshness and honesty that I think is definitely apparent when musicians are really playing 'in the moment' and not pumping out tried-and-true phrases like machines.

What seems to be lacking in rock improvisation for me(I'm thinking about instrumental solos here) is any real sense of group interaction. It doesn't really MATTER if Eddie Van Halen is being creative or playing the same thing he's played 1000 times, because what's going on around him won't change. He (the typical rock soloist) doesn't have to listen to or think about anyone but himself. That's fine, since rock music obviously has very different values than say, jazz or Indian classical music.

Are there many song-oriented rock bands today that have a more flexible approach to their song structures (live anyways), without turning them into bad hippie jams?

As someone mentioned earlier, much of improvisation is simply rehashing in smaller chunks composed variations. But a piece improvised can leap in wild, exhiliarating ways that a composed piece cannot. A good performer, on the other, should render the point moot as far as whether a piece sounds "improv'ed" or "composed"--as it is their interpretation which will lend either avenue life and dynamics.

Without a good vehicle, you can have a great improviser who can't explain his/her intentions, or a technically proficient robot.

But all-out improv? Let me first specify that there has been a ridiculous amount of this in Chicago over the past five years, as most of you could probably guess -- on pretty much any given night, there's some assortment of acoustic guitars players and guys with laptops playing somewhere. So perhaps I'm just burned out on it -- after a while, you start to feel like all of that improv is actually more conventional, and more the same than composed stuff is. Which makes complete sense: composition gives you the time to be suspicious of your first impulses, and to make sure what you're playing is unique and worthwhile in and of itself.

Favorite sort of improv to play: the shoegazer idiom. You know: work the song into a frenzy, hold your guitar inches from your amp, kneel down and tweak your delay pedal studiously. Radiohead seem to be doing a lot of that in their shows, now that I think about it ...

1.) In an interview with Yo La Tengo, David Keenan posited - jokingly, but not - that the main thing that seperated jazz from rock improv was that there had yet to be a generation of jazz bands who had "transcended their chops," without it turning into Horde-tour boogie woogie jam band wank or Van Halen/Steve Vai running up and down the scales. But is that true? Fushitsusha, The Dead C, Sonic Youth, Caspar Brotzmann...all these artists improvise "freely" (for lack of a better word), allowing themselves to move into areas of abstraction, bum notes, etc.

2.) Has anyone here heard the newest Spring Heel Jack record and if so, what were your thoughts? (For those that don't know, SHJ collaborated with a group of jazz/improv-ers, and edited, arranged, and otherwise fucked with their sounds in the digital realm. And no breakbeats in sight.)

Revive.

Revive because I am reading Derek Bailey's book.

Which is pretty great by the way.

it is! i lost my copy years ago. ;_;

And how about repeating his TV series based on it while you're at it, Channel 4

This is a funny thread, because you know I used to read this board all the time, but I stopped and have since become immersed in improvised/improvising music... trying to formulate a response I feel like Dale Cooper explaining his methods.. Improv is just a completely different idiom, and it asks different questions (mostly) than what are being asked on this thread. (obvs Bailey does an excellent job of explaining this -- that book changed my life!) one thing: the improvisor has a completely different sense of Time (in the greater sense, not the musical sense) than someone playing composed music. In some old paperback I was reading (something like "20th C. Experimental Music") it explains how free improv of the AMM school, and cats like Bailey I guess too, come as much from Cage and Indeterminancy as from jazz, which to me makes a lot of sense. It's zen, it's the moment, and it's the sum of its environs and feelings -- we might categorize this as "Vibes". Just soak it in and let it out, man. This brings us to the question of SOUL. Many great improvisors will have spent hours and hours practicing boring technical shit, and then when they are really letting loose you see how they've just shot straight out of sight of all of that. When you're in the moment, when you're really getting zen on it, you're going straight from the soul, straight from the subconscious, and that's what makes improvised music more fascinating to me -- there is no conscious mind when you're completely in the moment, and of course the subconscious is 100000000000000000x more powerful.

It's not really that dichotomous, though, really, except to the thoroughly western mind, because of our history of dividing the two worlds in the name of hierarchy. the illuminati have obvious motives for suppressing improvised art.

Yeah, but sometimes practicing all that "boring technical shit" helps you reach much greater heights when you do completely let go.

exactly.

people that play quickly realise that you are quite limited if you can't actually play. i thought learning theory was actually going to limit. god i was dick when i was young.

cage vs jazz is odd too. cage wasn't quite anti technique. remember david tudor?

*limit me

If I recall correctly, Cage had a problem with improvisation, at least in the jazz sense, because he thought it involved too much ego. He liked chance because it removed personality from music, bringing it closer to nature. Where improvisation, from one vantage point, is very much about personality.

anyone remember cage saying anything about jazz, i remember him saying he liked william russel, i've read lots on cage and can't recall him ever explicitly critising jazz. i can only imagine him saying something like wot he said when he was listening to rock n roll, "i don't understand this music" then whoever he was with said "that's because you don't listen" and cage was all like :)

i guess he rarely had problems with different musics per se, just what he thought was and wasn't forward thinking, or interesting.

i must read that derek bailey book, does anyone know if there are any plans to do anything with his book of ideas about approaching improvisation on the guitar, that would be really interesting to look at.

To be honest, I usually find Derek Bailey kind of boring on record. I'd still be willing to see him live though.

I'll see if I can dig up the quote about improv. I think it was in Conversing with Cage.

You know who DOES have a lot negative to say about jazz is Derek Bailey! One of the surprises (for me -- I don't know a lot about Bailey) so far is how he engages people like Steve Howe and Jerry Garcia about improvisation within their idioms and pretty much gives them the floor, but when it comes to jazz he is harshly critical of so much after bebop, especially the idea of "schools" of instrumentalists where players model their work after others (the John Coltrane school of sax, etc.)

little late for that.

xpost

Haha, oh shit I forgot.

(delete self)

he is harshly critical of so much after bebop, especially the idea of "schools" of instrumentalists where players model their work after others (the John Coltrane school of sax, etc.)

Here I agree - I mean modeling yourself after someone is the kind of thing that is maybe useful as a student but gets really boring for your audience afterward.

Cage had a problem with improvisation, at least in the jazz sense, because he thought it involved too much ego. He liked chance because it removed personality from music, bringing it closer to nature

This is just way more abstract than I want to get in my music listening.

xpost Bailey doesn't name names (yet) but I was thinking he was talking about people like Sonny Stitt and Cannonball Adderley.

Yeah, I know exactly what he was talking about. Although I find Cannonball Adderly's playing very distinctive.

Cage's main objection, or what I remember of it, was that jazz improvization is too patterned, too predictable. Not that the New Music (do they still call it that? Cage & co.) couldn't be at least as patterned, even in use of devices for breaking oh through past ego. Kyle Gann pointed out that Mr.Antiego was one of the strongest, most recognizable musical personae evah.But who can *overcome* a sense of familiarity, and keep me listening? Cage sometimes, Adderly sometimes, Miles, Trane more often. It often helps when you've got somebody gving weird cues (Cage, Miles) and a good editor (Miles had Teo Macero, fairly often.) And some people even edit compositions out of improvisation, like Benny Goodman's said to have put his own name on transcriptions of Charlie Christian solos, and some rock groups have filed jam experiments down into songs, like the Monks did: " We might start with eight chords, but let's see how it works with two, or one. Maybe ten pages of lyrics, down to four lines."

Transcription involves *some* editorial decidering: "What note is that? Let it be this."

living up north you get to meet a lot of people who played with/knew derek bailey and pretty much everyone i've met doesn't really give two shits about whats good and what isn't good, a mistake i made when i first met some people by constantly babbling on about different records and players, i mean they know their stuff, but when it comes to what they listen to, we listened to john lee hooker, pharycyde some villalobos. from my impression, with his playing and his talking about music, derek just liked to piss people off, be as difficult as he could be.

Everybodee be difficult. A lot of acting, both in and out of performance stage!

"In some old paperback I was reading (something like "20th C. Experimental Music") it explains how free improv of the AMM school, and cats like Bailey I guess too, come as much from Cage and Indeterminancy as from jazz, which to me makes a lot of sense. It's zen, it's the moment, and it's the sum of its environs and feelings -- we might categorize this as "Vibes"."

Nyman, yes?

I think if it ws just 'letting it all out' no one would've been practising this music. It sounds like a very banal thing to keep doing. Also the role of 2nd viennese school has to be acknowledged (esp Webern) in the make-up of early music, and not just US experimental music.

And basically they all seem to know their stuff from a technical sense but I think many of the players wanted to get out of the comfort zone from merely playing off the page, so improv ws a gd way to do that, especially when you get to Company week. If anything, they know their technical stuff so well as to have been bored by it. This is why classical music ("New complexity" movement, etc) came up w/'impossible' scores. It all works together as I hear, so the args about whether Cage ws bored by jazz or improv musicians were bored by the score and jazz are false divisions -- they both worked 'with' each other and drove each other to the new.

"Yeah, but sometimes practicing all that "boring technical shit" helps you reach much greater heights when you do completely let go."

I'm sorry if I misspoke, this is almost exactly what I was trying to say.

xyzzzz -- yes, it was Nyman, purchased from a garage sale, strangely. No, I don't think it is banal at all to let your soul be exposed day after day. at least, it's only as banal as the one exposing his or her self. When folks who played with Coltrane talk about his greatness as a musician, they often (from what I've read) can't separate it from his greatness as a person or as a spiritualist. Cage, too, when talking about his influences says things like "I loved Marcel Duchamp. Marcel was a friend of mine." (and when i listen to cage and read things he's said it gives me a fond & glowy feeling, I have to say)

I like clocker's anecdote about knowing-people-who-knew bailey. it shows how personal improvisation really is. an 'academic' approach to it is an interesting idea, but it's a very BIG thing isn't it.

speaking of nets :(

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