Jazz vs. Improv

With improv, there can be an absence of percussion, rhythm, melody. It allows for that. Group improvisation is mainly concerned with listening and reacting to what the others in the group are doing. But there's also solo improv albums where the improvisor has to come up with the goods himself.

''Has there been a movement in improv akin to the Marsalisization of jazz?''

Not really, as far as I can tell (It doesn't sell enough records, heh, but i have only been hearing this stuff for abt 3-4 years).

I prefer improv: It's far more fun, more interesting music. But I would buy much more jazz if i had the money.

''What record is just improv?''

Yeaterday i was listening to Bark!'s Swing album. It's a guitar, electronics, percussion trio. Its on Matchless records. they have a website.

I prefer Improv because it doesn't have all the spiritual crap in it, I played AMM next to 'Ascension' the other day and the latter just sounded like a ragged drug-rehab gospel singalong in comparison

Has improv. taken on a new meaning? I thought it had always been part of Jazz - since Dixieland - in the form of spontaneous modification or creation of a melody over a chord structure. If you mean Free Jazz (as in everyone improvising together) I think that's a different matter...& I have to admit I like Coltrane's Meditations for its sheer power, butb can't pretend that I understand it. Some of my favourite Jazz is the early avant-garde stuff (Dolphy etc.). Has anyone else heard Collaboration West by Shorty Rogers et al - unbelievable - a kind of wild avant-garde played by West Coast musicians, recorded back in 1953....8 years after the war - it does me 'ead in!

derek bailey hates being called "jazz": ditto amm

x is "influenced" by y => x=y??

Genre classification can only go so far before it gets silly. 'Jazz' only gives a guide to the instrumentation used. Names cannot describe the variety within the music.

though this does not apply on improv as I have heard improvisors on 'rock instruments' (guitar), 'classical instruments' (piano, violin) and, yes, jazz (saxophone, etc.) as well as electronics and so on.

Dave- don't get the point abt spirituality of 'Jazz'. Yes, some of the 'greats' had a spiritual belief in god. But what abt Coleman? Why don't you dismiss rock as well as that has a 'christian' wing.

x= Derek Bailey y= Stefan Jaworzyh

x not equal to y as SJ only uses DB's playing as a starting point. There are differences.

But Y is nevertheless influenced by x.

x is actually y. y is actually x.

I'm outta here!

Some improvisers of my acquaintance use the term "non-idiomatic improvisation" when they can be coaxed into an objective summation of what they're doing--which, by and large, they see as distinct from free jazz, and the same for the free-jazz players I know, for the most part. The "non-idiomatic" part comes in, I gather, from trying to break free of all idioms and preexisting musical touchstones/thinking in their playing, moment to moment, whereas they generally consider free jazz, even at its wiggiest and played by whomever, a primarily emotional tradition originating with black musicians and, ultimately, older forms such as the blues and gospel. So, even though some improvisers make very emotionally affecting music, it is not primarily an emotional music, which free jazz is, in this reckoning, and free improv is music in which the musicians rigorously attempt to excise all sense of history, musical and otherwise, unlike much free jazz, even now.

So, while free jazzers improvise, improvisers do not play jazz. That's what I gather, and for the most part it makes sense to me. And I'm sure there are any number of musicians and recordings that make the above distinction seem artificial at best. Thoughts?

I don't think that one can talk about this thoroughly without discussing -- or devolving into -- racial politics very quickly. By which I mean to say that I think that "improv" is a useless term as applied, and that it's usually only applied by folks for whom the phrase jazz implies improvisational music by black musicians with chops, and for whom black musicians with chops are intimidatingly "other" (due to their blackness or their chops, or both). I think that the phrase "jazz" necessarily implies some connection to blues music, but I also think that very little music does not have some connection to blues music.

Excising history is still being historical no?

Well, the fact that the non-idiomatic/free-jazz breakdown among my circle of acquaintance tends to fall neatly along racial lines certainly indicates to me that it's an issue. I don't know that it need be a combative one, though, as these guys do collaborate across that musical and racial divide all the time. And then there are white improvisers associated with the European tradition whom, I would argue, are actually more accurately classified as free jazz under the aforementioned rubric: Peter Brotzmann, for one.

And, yes, Bob, good point as well. Even some of the most "ground- breaking" improvisers tend to settle into a sort of pattern of "exploratory" playing eventually--here I'm thinking of Evan Parker. I love many of his recordings and have enjoyed seeing him play live, but once you've heard him do that circular-breathing snake- charmer arpeggio thing a half-dozen times or so, it offers little more musical illumination your average shred-metal guitar solo.

I guess that what I'm trying to say -- and Bob, too, I think -- is that many of these "non-idiomatic" players are kidding themselves. Given time and inclination, I could point out all sorts of jazz noises from most of the players at, say, the High Zero Festival. Moreover, I know that quite a few players at that festival would object to any suggestion that they are not playing an emotional music -- whether these are also the same players who would agree with me about the uselessness of the label "improv" I will not speculate. I do think, and suspect that you will agree, Lee, that the question of jazz's emotionality as opposed to (or, better, in contrast to) improv's emotional neutrality can be seen as pretty loaded with race politics.

I have the suspect that most of today's non idiomatic impro has spread out contemporary practises that have refused the role of the composer as defined by romantic aesthetics. in a way a great degree of improvisation is in a great number of musical traditions.. fuga.. indian classical music and others... so the link is not so necessary but of course we define impro today something that hjas his roots in african american free jazz and conemporary classical sensibility. this make things hard to analyze...

Funny you should mention the High Zero/Red Room guys, cause that's exactly who I'm referring to here (I live quite literally around the corner from the RR). A lot of the playing I've heard the Red Roomers do is both intensely emotional and at least tangientially related to jazz in sound or spirit from time to time. But they also place a premium on getting outside those game trails and patterns that most other musicians accept as part of "doing business," musically, on a day to day basis. And to my ears, they succeed more often than not. They may be playing intellectual games with themselves at a certain level, but the results are there.

And true, the issue of white players vs. black players, intellect vs. emotion--or even the dreaded "intuition"--is very loaded indeed. But my framing of improv vs. free jazz was in part derived from talking to guys like Vattel Cherry (bass) or Lafayette Gilchrist (piano) who happen to be black, who happen to have a very different perspective on what they're doing as opposed to what the Red Room guys are doing, and yet have no problem playing with them. I would no more tell you that what Vattel does is more emotional somehow than what John Berndt does than I would tell either one of them to their face. Somehow, though, they manage to take the differences they both see in stride. I'm not suggesting that everyone holds hands and sings "Kumbayah" together all the time, especially not here in Baltimore, but in my experience the folks involved don't try to pretend no difference exists.

Does that make sense?

It's all improv, with varying degrees of structure and tradition behind it. You can go from a bunch of people with miscellaneous instruments sitting in a room together deciding to make music with no prescribed key center, tempo, chords, etc. to a quintet who decides to improvise within the parameters of a 50's style bebop group, changes and all. Or you can go from one end of the spectrum to the other in one song, it's all music.

As for free music being codified...I certainly think there is a very specific style of playing free jazz that came out of the 1960s innovators like Coltrane, Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Ayler blah blah blah that is just as much a tradition as other styles in the history of jazz now. It's been at least forty years, and while a lot of people are still carrying on that style, a lot of people are finding new ways of doing things too.

I hate it when I end a thread (or kill it).

Sean, Derek Bailey's short book on improvisation is at least an interesting start to answering questions like yours. It makes some of the distinctions already brought up by people in this thread.

(I'd say jazz has been a grudging term for all involved rather than just the "out" players but that's a spicy meatball) I think this thread got to the stage where everyone was nervously looking at each other like who's gonna start it. But I taunt fear! And I'm on hotmail. It's purty difficult to continue this without toedipping into race politics because fact glaringly remains that as much as I know it to be an outrageous generalisation the pop idea is jazz=black + improv=white, despite improv's roots. This post will be corrupted by all sorts of universalist notions but be clement, Atlee.

It's telling that we(I'm assuming everyone here is white just like every other jazz fan I've come across but if ur black soz) invoked arid "emotion" rather than the dreaded SOUL term: i can see what dave q means, a kind of selfconscious cynicism/fear of being mawkish, trite above all fake. Look how people struggle within themselves in regard to HipHop or Reggae nowadays. But it's this selfconsciousness that enables someone to perceive SOUL as something distinct from the music and thus having a distinct ((((()))) effect on the music rather than being an inherent thread precisely because they feel a fundamental detachment from it. Hence the excising, of finding it instructive excising emotion, roots et al. Experimenting as opposed to just DOING IT. Is this an equally deluded individual counterweight to universal spiritualism or is this a more realistic "emotion" rather than SOUL, a selfconscious white restraint cos the rest of the body locked you out. So you can blithely say, like dub not reggae or instrumental over lyrics, i prefer Improv rather than jazz cos "it's more interesting". That said, a Brotzmann will never be content to experiment; yet I think I'd still be able to tell which was the white guy if i heard him and say, Frank Lowe after another.

"Does knowledge of one enrich one's enjoyment (or playing) of the other - how? "

If you "release" a record is it enough for the revelations in your music to be personal? That's for listeners to decide I guess. So is it then unfair to criticise? Bah. But I can't say I'm so au fait/enamoured with Improv to judge its individual merit rather than its relationality to jazz. I still interrogate by difference cos that's how I came to Improv.

((((()))) and inside this weird thing should have been (obscurant? corrosive? or just exclusive?) Ahem

i thought it was the lizard people momentarily peeking at us thru yr screed

They like Improv, you see

Yusss