Is improvisation now anti-pop (or even the anti-pop)?

I don't think this is the issue. It's more to do with listeners getting used to hearing consistency and perfection in music (drum machines, sequencing, heavy production, digital recording, etc.) and improv is by nature pretty much at odds with that kind of sound.

you earn your name with that assumption, but i wholeheartedly disagree. pop music is as full as it has ever been with really fucking skillful, not to mention creative, musicians. for every britney spears who may not exactly meet the standard definition of having great technical skills, there's a christina aguilera or a justin timberlake who has phenomenal skills.

I think he means skills in terms of improvisation, but I could be wrong.

I was kind of expecting something like that. (I don't automatically dislike all manufactured pop--I just discovered that one of my favorite bachatas was recorded by a duo who were brought together by producers and hadn't met before that--although maybe that's beside the point).

My assumption is not false though: "if pop is something that can be manufactured using performers who have minimal technical skills." Do you deny that is true? I think I was pretty carefully about how I worded it.

When "producing" today can include actually writing and recording the music, it's a bit of a fine line.

I'm gonna guess yes but that's just me. Again, I could be completely off.

But that said, the composition of pop music, ie. the activity of how you generate the catchy pattern/hook/riff is usually through something that would, if listened to in the moment, sound an awful lot like an improvisation: ie. people doodling and circling around an idea over and over, changing it actively all the time as they reach for "the one"

i don't see what's different about living in, say, christina aguilera's world or patsy cline's world or emmett miller's world.

I was also interested in the difference between living in Oum Kalthoum's world rather than living in Diana Hadad's, or living in George Lamond's world rather than Ismael Rivera's. I realize these aren't widely shared interests, but I wasn't just talking about Anglophone pop music.

(xposts un-noted above)

Not necessarily.

i'm not sure there's a substantive difference between the typical boy or girl group concert of today and a jackson 5 or four tops concert of 35 years ago. as long as there have been records to re-create -- i.e. you need to go back to the advent of recorded music -- pop concerts have been choreographed/composed/whatever to match those records. in an every era, there are some performers who have the skills and desire to break out of that routine and others who are happy just playing along.

What about classical musicians, who might be phenomenal technically yet can't improvise? Ornamentation yes, changing notes and phrasing here and there, but not improvisation.

lip-synching is an old tradition in pop! watch almost any televised musical performance of the '60s or '70s, for example.

and as for sinatra, in his heyday it didn't matter what he was doing onstage because his fans were screaming so loudly no one could hear him anyway. i have this on good authority from my mother, who was one of those screaming teenagers, and from my dad, who had to put up with mom's screaming.

They do it on the subway trains in chicago! Oh yeah, freestyling totally counts. There were these amazing kids freestyling in this train I was on about a month ago. I seriously stayed on the train two stops past my stop just to be able to listen to them a bit more.

Yep, three minutes per side too. In fact all those early 78 rpm jazz singles were three minutes long. Everyone from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington managed to cram improvisation into three minutes, so it definitely can be done.

okay, forget television, what about just normal concerts!?

xpost - I thought "My Favorite Things" was a 45.

Lots of noise artists improvise with sound. Personally, this is what I listen for in noise music -- the ability to create fascinating layers of sounds in real time. I'm more interested in how they created those sounds than the level of difficulty of performance.

Is there anything less pop than noise?

(many xposts)

of course it can. as noted above, rappers do it all the time, as do rock guitarists and r&b singers and all sorts of other musicians working today. but improvising on record is inherently different from improvising live, because once you've captured a single performance on vinyl or disc or whatever, you've codified and written it for all time. which begs the question of what exactly makes an improvisation an improvisation. especially when you start repeating the same improvisation in all your subsequent performances.

My comments have focused on the latter, although perhaps that wasn't the intent of the thread.

I would also postulate that pop songs with improvised elements (i.e. Parker) certainly do carry a certain minimal virtuso requirement in order to be "successful" as pop. Whereas the non-technical, sound-based improvisation I wrote about earlier runs completely contrary to that, and is (in all cases?) strikingly anti-pop.

(xpost to stence -- really? I have yet to hear it! I can hear the "Don't Talk" melody, though. Anyway, I wouldn't assume that the "average" pop music fan (whatever that means) would consider "Fennesz Plays" melodic in the least, which was what I was trying to say)

Calling '50s and '60s pop "old" and "traditional" pop is completely ludicrous in a thread about a technique that was at its popular peak during the jazz age!

I think I've bit off way more than I can chew in this case. I'm not enough of a music historian. (I ate lunch and returned humble.)

That Derek Bailey book about free improvisation is really interesting

I have it, but I find it hard to get into it. I've never finished it.

There's about the same level of improv in Metallica or Steely Dan as there was in Duke Ellington or salsa. That's possible. I'm not very familiar with Metallica (or metal in general).

would you consider someone like Sinatra an improviser? A singer who doesn't take solos, but is great at doing variations on a melody? Probably. I'm not all that familiar with Sinatra, but I think I know what you mean.

have you ever listened to call in rap shows where people phone in and freestyle over a beat laid down by the DJ? Those can be hilarious and are one of the few places where improv happens in a totally populist mainstream media context. They do it on hip hop radio stations in LA and the Bay Area, and I'm sure elsewhere.

I think I may actually have heard this sort of thing. I don't like rapping much, but freestyling is certainly an example of improvisation in music. (And don't some people--at least in the undie scene--use it as a way to mark off "real" hip-hop from whatever would be considered watered down?)

Jordan, I don't think I realized what you were getting at when you asked me if by improvisation I primarily meant soloing. I definitely didn't mean to limit it to making the whole piece up from scratch. (I was thinking of heterophony as an example that isn't really soloing, but is one of the things I like in traditional Arabic music.)

Not if Public Enemy or Blue Cheer or the Yardbirds or the Regents or the Del-Vetts or Dave Baby Cortez or the Electric Prunes or the Who or the Byrds or C-Bank or Tricky or Phil Spector or Trent Reznor or Kurt Cobain or the human beatbox guy in the Fat Boys have anything to say about it, I don't think.

But you make a good point about types of improvisation that don't require virtuosity but are clearly anti-pop.

x-post, yeah I was starting to think along the lines of what chuck just posted except that made me think of something else I want to say--

Jump ahead to the part where Baily talks to Gavin Bryars about why he abandoned free improv and returned to composition- that's where the book stops being a survey and starts to make arguments for and against the enterprise of free imrpov. Bryars says that he was noticing that over and over at improv gigs there would be a tentative quiet beginning, a build up to a big loud blowout, and a gradual decrescendo to tentativeness again. After a few years of seeing this macro-structure of implied narrative emerge in the middle of so-called total freedom he felt like a certain exhausting sameness was staring him in the face. It's a scary point and born out by many- but of course not all- free improv gigs I've seen .

Which is this (not a statement, but a question):

When fans of a particular form of music that is considered "pop" in the broad sense want to mark it off in opposition to pop, what sort of elements do they point to? I think one of them would be the presence of improvisation. Another might be noise.

Maybe I should really be talking about what people say about music, the discourse around the music. (That would be trendier and also more achievable than trying to discover what pop "really" is, which is almost certainly the wrong sort of question to ask.) Maybe that's what this thread should really be about.

When people say "This is 'real' x, not that watered down pop x" isn't improvisation something they will point to in order to make that case (at least in some genres)?

I feel obligated to follow the score.

This seems in fact to be common to both the AOR (co-opting of prog into pop) and punk ('reaction to prog') strains emerging at this time.

'If pop is something that can be manufactured using performers who have minimal technical skills, then it makes sense that improvisation would tend to disappear, since it requires being able to skillfully do something musical in real time.'

I'm not sure about the 'musical' bit. What I tend to enjoy in free improv is what constitutes musicality is questioned -- you could have something that you might think that is totally banal thrown in and made to somehow fit and work within the context. And surely people who make pop can acquire technical skills over time or work with other people who have these, and something in real time could be done.

Plenty of free improv that doesn't work - but I like it how 'chops' aren't enough, and the crowd get to know it real quick. Like everything, it builds its own cliches but the fact you can keep working with different people is a way out of that.

(Improv has always had its tensions with classical and those were really bought out in the bryars-bailey discussions on that bk)

Is there really a genre where you think the majority of fans think "chops" are enough?

Computers do sometimes improvise, but that is more likely to cause you to say a lot of four letter words and scream out not-very-nice-things about Bill Gates rather than enjoy the improvisasion :-)

virtuosity is not in itself a virtue either

however virtuostic improvisors want to improvise /groove on playng diverse note configurations, invention of heuristics (in the case of structure) and once again, experimental computer/processing

that there is little improv at pop concerts, ie no 20-minute britney-boogie-down, people at pop shows just want replication, not surprise, not thought
it is a pity bands don't jam like they used to (eg Jeff Air, Mothers)

some ppl like it, not all.

and I can't get anything out of solos when you're supposed to be improvising with a few other ppl though of course I'm not ruling it out that someone might feel like doing a solo and it might fit.

On the other hand, he has set up a label (Incus) to make records and to promote the stuff he does and other players he likes (and esp) company week (where his ideas are tested to breaking point) so if the records don't 'work', (and this is pointed out in his biog) that matters.

good thread