Improvisation

 

Improvisation

“Improvisation is a way of achieving identity”

 ~ Alfred Nieman (composer)

I have often described my different roles as a drummer as being like a painter. When I work in a cover band, I need to play the hit songs, accurately, as they were originally recorded to truthfully entertain a crowd. So, there are rules and guidelines to follow without room for my personal ideas (or improvisation) – much like a contracted house painter.

Now when I get together with Soulstorm (an improvisation jam band) I am now more like a freeform Picasso-like painter that defies rules and tries new techniques that are non-conventional. In this band we do have various songs or themes that we have developed but play them differently every time we get together. We also create many new ideas, I think, because we are wide open to reacting to whatever happens at that moment. 

We record every time that we are plugged in to capture that spontaneity of what jamming brings. It is very educational to yourself and your personal development when you hear the playback - best listened to a day later. At the time of playing, you and your brain are just too busy listening, playing, reacting, adjusting – to easily process what is going on while you are in the moment. It is very humbling and often eye opening, in a good way, to hear the things you have created when improvising freely. 

As we delved deeper into this project of musical improv, I started to investigate the act of improvisation and found a lot of research has been done on the subject.

In her book “Making Music for the Joy Of It” Stephanie Judy writes:

“Improvisation draws us directly to sound. We can read music but not listen to ourselves play because our attention is consumed by the business on the page. We can play from memory and not listen because our attention is consumed by the effort of remembering and the fear of forgetting. But we cannot improvise and not listen. Improvisation demands we attend to our sound.”

Yet, our history is flawed in that improvisation has had a bad reputation for the last century among classical musicians and formal educators. To the point where some kinds of music were deemed “proper music” and all else was - not. So, why is it that someone who is at home with their instrument, who can memorize and play complex parts with great skill – feels they cannot improvise?

Simple. It has been bred out of us. 

Conventional music training constrains the improvisation impulse by the value it places on written music and on “being right”. Giving ourselves permission to play what we hear in our minds or what our fingers mindlessly find for us is all that is needed to begin to improvise comfortably. 

“The only thing that stands in the way of improvising

 is a reluctance to take the first steps”

~ Mildred Portnoy Chase (author of Improvisation)

There are different approaches to improvisation. One is the structured kind that builds from what we already know. Patterns that you practice during technique building – scales, arpeggios, licks and progressions – are all materials to draw from for structured improvising. This method allows for genius without having to enter unfamiliar territory.

Unstructured improvisation is not unlike a child’s approach to experimenting with an instrument or their voice and often results in sounds that trained musicians spend a lot of time trying not to make. Which can reveal to us the potential of our expressive range – something we might have never discovered otherwise.

I was one of those students in school band that felt I had my musical impulses moulded into an “acceptable” form by well-meaning teachers who had a low tolerance for improvising. It wasn't until later, after decades of playing in cover bands and doing studio work that I found some like-minded players that wanted to just improvise. 

Now, almost 10 years later and we (Soulstorm) still get together regularly for what we call the therapy of just jamming. As always we record and, our wives can't wait to hear the latest session - all of it! And, it has gotten so good and we play so intuitively together that we have once again been asked to perform at our local art gallery - where it all started with an acoustic spontaneous jam in the sun almost a decade ago...

“To improvise means to have fun with something 

– to change it around and make it different”

 ~ Willie Ruff (Jazz French horn & bass player; Mitchell-Ruff Duo

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