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The Art Of Improvisation
-
adrian d'souza
Improvisation is about summoning and assimilating one's musical
and life experiences, accumulated musical vocabulary, energy,
sensitivity, listening skills, ability to interact and
communicate with the other musicians involved during the
performance, in order to create a meaningful statement.
Developing a rhythmic understanding and feel to articulate one's
ideas comes intuitively from listening to, imitating or
emulating the vocabulary, phrasing and rhythmic approach of the
masters who have preceded us. Even attending concerts where one
can observe the physical approach to expressing the music, is an
essential foundation. The prospect of becoming an articulate
improviser is not something that will happen quickly or easily.
The creative talent needs to be nurtured and encouraged. More
importantly, art itself needs to be nurtured and encouraged.
Musicians must be exposed to other art forms in order to develop
artistic sensibilities and heightened levels of perception.
Improvising is one of the most difficult challenges for any
musician. It requires the player to be a master instrumentalist,
understand composition, harmony, orchestration, arranging,
transposition, have a quick, facile mind that can work
simultaneously with improvising rhythmic, melodic and harmonic
structures and be able to hear many parts at once. It involves
articulate use of musical vocabulary to convey personal
experiences, fantasy and emotion, using the tools acquired from
formal education to incorporate unconventional, altered
tonalities and harmonies. It also involves use and exchange of
rhythmic complexities within the time signature. In order to
gain fluency and articulation in the execution and distribution
of rhythmic patterns, phrases or solos, rudimentary study is
necessary to achieve dexterity and independence.
Creativity is vital to the art of improvisation. Human nature is
about creativity. We are created and we are here to create. From
a creative mind springs forth improvisation that is not just
scholastic, but that which contains empathy, affecting the
listener. Then there is the imagination factor or the artistic
level of the performer. This is the deciding element in the
pursuit of true greatness. This inspires the merely competent
from the truly inspired and original artist, and, holds true in
all areas of artistic endeavor.
Finally, if you stay on the path of mastery, rather than trying
to becoming the master, where you are supposed to be complete
and there is nothing more to learn ( a misconception ) ...which
cannot be achieved due to the evolving nature of the human mind
and music, eventually you develop and recognize your own voice,
and reach levels of maturity and subtlety in your approach to
improvisation and creativity that you could not have imagined in
your early stages.
Jazzmatically Speaking
-
adrian d'souza
No
two musicians while playing are going to feel exactly the same
emotions, or even reach the spontaneous creative moment at
exactly the same time. It is precisely this interplay between
the performers of differing emotions and staggered peaks of
aesthetic creativity that constitutes the essence of Jazz. This
type of music triggers an artistic collaboration between
musicians, constituting a platform for innovative multicultural
music. In Jazz ,the modern encounters vibrant tradition in
dynamic fusion, where the performers interactively explore
themes of tradition and modernity. Jazz is panoramic in that it
spans all three temporal dimensions. It involves looking at
one's roots, while working in the present and gazing into the
future. One uses the word "Jazz " reluctantly in times like
these, for clearly the idiom as we have known it, once a central
rhythmic and harmonious facet, has now become one of the
elements that has reached far beyond the boundaries of any one
pigeon-holed music. To put it in more basic terms, Jazz is no
longer the sole bag; it is rather one of many tools in a larger
and more capacious bag that is cosmic in shape.
Musical styles do not exist in a vacuum. They are born in an
evolutionary process with other styles. An education therefore
which involves an extensive exposure to a variety of styles
would be vital to the development of one's own. And the more
extensive the exposure, the more vibrant and fecund will be the
achievement of one's own distinctive style. Young artists filled
with the turbulent juices of early enthusiasm, but only the rare
ones can channel these drives, reducing them not one whit in
their meaningfulness which touches the many sources of internal
expression.
Right from its inception down to the postmodern times,
improvisation, has been the underlying factor in Jazz, through
all its metamorphoses. Postmodern musicians do not improvise in
the usual sense of variation on an acknowledged base. They begin
without any preconceptions, total spontaneity ; a course of
thinking with no prior guiding thought, decision with no prior
agenda. No style dominates. There is only a demonstration of
timeless eclecticism.
Free Improvisation - A Paradox ?
- adrian d'souza
Free
improvised music is most often viewed as an idiom with certain
different or peculiar sounding characteristic timbral
properties, structure, idea of form, praxis for performance etc.
Critics and listeners do not naturally extend to improvisation
that does not lend itself to categorization according to
established patterns. This explains either their liking of
certain combinations of sounds and rhythms or referring to it as
cacophony and not melodic. To say that there is form and harmony
in this kind of improvisation seems bizarre and contradictory to
the term 'free'. How then does one explain the way a free
improvising musician negotiates harmony, timbers and rhythms,
relates to the others in the ensemble and discusses ideas of
form which unfold in the music?
In an attempt to explain the above, I will tell you about an
incident that took place with my quartet during a session in New
York. We sat down to work on new material for an up coming
concert. The pianist's unconventional approach to the
composition seemed hip and right away the rest of us moved into
a free state of mind, not thinking chord/ scale relationship or
meter. But after listening to and analyzing the piece, we found
that the changes moved around an F# pedal point and the meter
was 13/4... Every so often musicians experience playing or
hearing free improvised music that fits well into an established
idiom . This however is different from a given piece, with which
we identify as free improvisational music, which is actually to
some extent composed in advance. Free improvisation is not a
kind of music but rather a kind of music making. What makes it
unique is the history of its creation, not the peculiarity of
sound.
The basic element of free improvising is in the improviser's
attitudes towards musical traditions, idioms, genres etc. It has
rightfully been said before that free improvisation cannot
amount to a total exclusion of traditional idioms. Each of us
were raised and fostered within some musical idiom or other.
Each of us has a history which has put a mark on us and
influences the decisions we make. This also applies to when we
make music. All music-making requires a limitation of available
sound possibilities. In order to have any capability to create
music, some form of formalized or implicit principles for
sorting and systematizing the sounds available is needed. The
chosen principles form an idiom, which is normally seen as a
collection of rules for what is allowed, possible and suitable
from a musical point of view. The free improviser, however,
refuses to make any binding choices of this kind. It is
trivially true that all music-making is idiomatic in the sense
that it requires some kind of limitations. This, however, does
not constitute a reason for committing oneself to a particular
set of limitations. It is not prohibited to shape the music
within the borders of some idiom, but neither is it necessary to
keep to it. Particular idioms are no longer viewed as
pre-requisites for the music-making, but rather as tools, which,
in every moment may be used or not used. Musical idiomatic rules
are thus not considered to be valid in any other sense than that
they, for the moment, are accepted by the improviser. However,
in the next moment they may have been discarded in favor of some
other point of view. If this is true, then, it becomes difficult
to uphold any sharp distinction between composers and musicians,
when it comes to ultimate responsibility for the emergence of a
particular piece of music. Of course, a musician may chose to
follow the directions of a composer, but this choice is always
open to revision.
The conception of free improvised music contains a refusal to
commit to any particular tradition or idiom, it no more favors
any experimental or innovative attitude towards music (other
than in the trivial sense that nothing is prohibited and that
the music always is a product of the musician's own and, in
practice, always unique choices). Certainly, free improvisation
has been used as a means to musical experiments and the creation
of new idioms. This is more of a necessity than a coincidence.
An experimental or innovative attitude is useful for the free
improviser, but this attitude is a tool which could also be
discarded. Free improvised music is experimental or innovative
only in as much as it is made by persons whose ambitions are
innovative or experimental. Approaching innovation, traditions,
idioms and rules from this perspective is the key to free
improvised music. The free improviser sees things as they are:
in every moment he or she chooses and constructs the components
of the music which is created, as well as the idiom used for
making this music. In respect to sounds and the improviser's
continuous evaluation of it , the improvising continues as a
series of choices on both levels. This concept is controversial
though, as it suggests that the artistic work is the ultimate
end of the artistic process of creation. It contrasts sharply
against the idea of modernist thinking ,where, the artistic work
is essentially a means for consciously changing reality in some
way or other. The desired changes may be political, personal or
mass-psychological.
Improvised music is considered to be free when it is the product
of a psychological process which has affected the musician,
freeing him or her from the influences of idiomatic codes,
traditions etc. It is necessary to ascribe the designation
'free' to a total limitlessness and accordingly reject every
idiomatic norm, every gesture sprung from anything that is not
personal and revolutionary. Free improvisation here turns into a
kind of psychoanalytic therapeutic method, meant to uncover
those factors in our personal histories that influence us. It
makes us capable of rejecting or at least reflecting on those
factors, enabling us to find our true identity and become '
ourselves '.
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