Classical improvisation by a Danish American Jewish comedian, Victor Borge

I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue because 1) I want to, 2) it's my blog, and 3) Borge is wonderful.

Victor Borge never got the memo saying that classical musicians stopped improvising sometime during the middle of the 19th century. So, when a fiddle player wanted to perform a tune that Borge had heard, but never played, Borge simply improvised an accompaniment. It's a bit over the top at points, but then Borge is a comedian. Watch how the two men interact act with one another. There are points where one or the other doesn't quite know what's coming up, so they have to look and listen.

 

 

Pay attention at about 3:13, in a slow section (stuck in the middle of all the fast stuff). At about 3:43 Borge starts a nice counter melody; from 3:54 to the end it's nuts, with a nice counter melody in octaves at about 4:02. Notice the nice hesitation for the very last note, a skillful touch.

Howard’s Jam II: Go with the flow nation

I’m bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle and because the next edition of Howard’s jam is coming up this May 17th. You might want to check out this earlier post: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (at Howard’s Party).

Jamming has come up over at Morton’s joint, so I thought I’d say a little more about how things work at Howard’s Annual Birthday Bash and All-Hoboken Jam Session.

First let me reiterate that Howard’s been living in Hoboken for some time, 25 or more years I believe. He’s been active in the Hoboken music scene for at least that long. He knows a lot of people and, wouldn’t you know, many of them are musicians. Thus the people who attend this bash know one another, some better than others, naturally.

For the past three or four years Howard and a few others have had a jam session that would met every two or three weeks, usually at Howard’s place. That group has been fairly stable. Howard plays guitar and sings. So does Pete. Doug – who’s played with Howard longer than anyone else in the current group – plays bass; he sings as well. Pavel plays drums and is a Russian working in the USA and living here with his family. Vinnie plays harp (that is, harmonica), though he wasn’t able to make it to the party. I play trumpet and bells (cowbell, agogo).

We perform every once in awhile, but mostly we just jam. Over the years we’ve developed a repertoire of most rock and folk tunes, including a few turns written by members of the jam (Howard, Pete, me). While we do have routines on tunes we play regularly, they aren’t particularly rigid. And there are tunes were the idea is take the jam wherever the moment leads us. These tend to be Grateful Dead tunes; Fire on the Mountain is a favorite. And sometimes stuff just happens.

That’s how things began last Saturday, the night of the party. The front room on the first floor had been designated and set up as the music room. There was a drum set, microphones and speakers, amplifiers, and a keyboard. Sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 PM us core jammers were all there, as were other people, milling about. Howard started playing a simple two-chord riff on his guitar. Pete and Doug joined in – I forget in which order. Nor do I remember when Pavel started in on drums.

 

But there they were, noodling away. People were entering through the front door, walking through the room to the kitchen (& the food and the liquor). Talking, munching, milling. And I was sitting on the couch in the front room, oiling the valves on my trumpet, setting out my bells.

Are they just messing around? Is that a tune they’re playing? Sounds like SOMETHING but I don’t recognize it. What should I do?

I joined in. Just made up something that seemed to fit. And we played whatever it was for awhile and then stopped. Then, I believe, we played one of the tunes we’d been working on. But I forget which one.

And then another. More people came in. Some of them had their instruments. Which they got out, one by one. Got ‘em out, set ‘em up. Joined in. Pretty soon we were playing this or that song that wasn’t part of the regular repertoire. But someone knew it, otherwise we wouldn’t have been playing it, right?

The crucial thing is that WE was no longer the core jam group, the five guys I mentioned up there in the third paragraph. Other people were playing – guitar, keyboard, electric fiddle, and various shakers and rattlers – and singing. Oh yes, the singing.

Somewhere in there three women sitting on a wide bench started doing routines – synchronized hand gestures, leaning this way and that, just like Motown groups did. Who planned that? No one.

That’s how these things go. Here and there around the room other people were playing bells and rattles. Lots of things happen. No one plans anything. Well, not much.

Pretty soon the women started doing simple kicks, while remaining seated. Of course. Before you knew it, Guitar Dave (that’s how I think of him) was wailing away on his acoustic and joined them in their kicks. About this time I was into some kind of trumpet solo, and I – from my seat on the couch – also join up with the kick brigade. Which was ‘kinda awkward, and must have looked ridiculous. But who cares?

It was fun.

Somewhere each and everyone of us from the core group put down our instruments, went into the kitchen, and got some food, and some liquor. And other people filled in on the music. We weren’t actually necessary since there were many musicians in the crowd. They really didn’t need us. The real point, I suppose, is that there is no firm distinction between “they” and “us.”

Somewhere during the evening, this happened (I’m copying a note that Doug had posted to Facebook):

Group mind can be used for good. For ex: late Sat. @ Howard’s. The trumpet player (you) were playing repeating sixteenths on A. I picked it up on bass. Then - then we got on the same page and walked it up the progression, driving the previously listless vamp up a notch. The jam took off. All of us listening and hearing and doing: group mind - used for good. Another reason to adore making music.

You listen, you follow along, you play, someone follows you, and so it went. All night long. It worked because we were comfortable with one another. And because we shared a wide repertoire of songs and riffs. Whatever happened, you could somehow fit in and go with that particular flow.

As for that opening piece that we did, it turns out it wasn’t a tune that anyone knew. When Howard started playing that riff, he was just playing that riff. Getting the fingers loosened up. Checking the feel of the guitar, the sound of the room. We jammed it into, well, a tune.

Now, can we reconstruct what we did, and do it again? Who knows? Maybe, yes. Maybe, no. Something from nothing.

* * * * *

That guy in that picture up there. That’s Howard, though not on this occasion. That was last summer and an outdoor concert by a group he plays in, The Gordy’s. This guy here, that’s Guitar Dave:

And the people in the next photo, they’re members of The Gordys too. And they’re doing something silly. I bet they didn’t plan that routine:

As the concert moved along, people got up and started dancing. Like this:

The blonde in front is Howard’s mother. The woman behind her is Howard’s wife. Howard’s somewhere off to the left, playing his guitar.

For the next photo I think I was standing more or less behind the band and looking into the audience. But how do you draw a line between the band and the audience?

See that red-haired woman to the left of center? She was at the party Saturday night. She was one of the women doing the Motown routines.

These guys are Howard’s sons:

And that’s the moon over Manhattan:

How to Jam with an LLM @3QD: Claude on reason, art, and the future

My new piece at 3 Quarks Daily is up:

Three Dialogs with a Friendly Alien: Claude 3.5 Sonata.

My two “laws” are relevant here:

Benzon’s 1st Law: A state of the art LLM is useful in proportion to the user's intelligence, knowledge, & creativity.

Benzon’s 2nd Law: If you want to know what it's like to drive a car, get in the driver's seat and go.

The first one may not be obvious, not if you think of LLMs as purely mechanical objects where you just push a button and it’s off to the races. No, they are complex and quirky. You have to mess around with them in order to get them to work for you.

By now I’ve logged hundreds of hours with LLMs, mostly with ChatGPT, but more recently with Claude 3.5, which is now my go-to bot of choice. Many of these hours involved careful and systematic exploration and probing. Others involved just casual look-ups, such as: “Tell me about the Johnstown flood.” And still others involved insane nonsense jamming, just seeing if I could surprise the LLM, and if it could then, in turn, surprise me. Sometimes those had me laughing myself silly. The Green Giant Chronicles is a good example of this; so is AGI and Beyond: A Whale of a Tale. I’d say that the best way to get to know an LLM is to figure out how to get it to make you laugh.

As for Benzon’s Second Law, that’s obvious: Just do it!

Adam Neely is not worried about AI musicians out-jamming human musicians

AI is Doomed to Fail the Musical Turing Test

0:00 Intro
3:54 Part I - Musical Turing Tests
10:56 Part II - Thinking Like a Human
20:17 Part III - "Not music"

Jamming at the Clef Club in Philadelphia

Just around the corner Ethan Iverson has a post about listening to the late Tootie Heath (jazz drummer) reminisce with his friends at the Clef Club in Philadelphia in 2014:

The unions were segregated. James Reese Europe inaugurated the Clef Club in 1910 for black musicians in New York City, and in 1934 another Clef Club — AKA Local #274 — opened in in Philadelphia. The rolls of Local #274 included John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and the three Heath brothers.

On October 6, 2014, several of the old guard gathered at the Clef Club to share a glass and tell stories. Tootie Heath was the guest of honor, for he hadn’t been around his hometown all that much in recent years. Everyone else there that day didn’t have far to drive.

I was going to make a comment to Iverson’s post, but discovered that you have to be a paid subscriber to make comments. So I’m making my comment here.

* * * * *

I once played in a jam session sponsored by the Philadelphia Clef Club. It was in the late 1990s. I was living in upstate New York at the time (Troy), but I was commuting to Philly for a consulting gig with Conrail (now CSX). I'd stay in Philly two weeks at a time and then go back home to check the mail and so forth. That left me with a couple of weekends in Philly that I had to fill with something.

I decided I wanted to go to a jam session. The thing is, I'm a morning person, so the idea of a jam session starting at 1 or 3 AM did not appeal to me at all. Looking through some local entertainment weekly I found notice of a Sunday afternoon session sponsored by the Clef Club. I could make that. It was held in a large room above a funeral parlor in northwest Philly.

I got there with a friend (my boss on the consulting gig) and we took a table. As I recall we were the only white people in the room. Food was available from the kitchen, so we bought ourselves some and listened as the jam session got under way. I put too much salt on my greens.

At some point I was asked up to play. I forget the exact logistics of that, maybe I'd put my name on a list when I arrived, I don't remember. But this was the sort of session where a small stable of regulars would play. The rhythm section was professional, but the rest of us were not – though the sociology of music is complex in a way that is not well captured by a simple distinction between professional and amateur. Anyhow I had a grand time on “Song for My Father” and perhaps one other tune before I returned to my seat for the rest of the session.

Shamisen Girls Ki&Ki - Tsugaru Jongara Bushi

The shamisen is a traditional Japanese instrument. As you can see, it is a bit like a banjo, with a long narrow neck and a resonator covered with a stiff membrane. However, the banjo has four or five strings on a fretted neck and the resonator is round. The shamisen has three strings, the neck is not fretted, and the resonator is roughly rectangular. The strings of a shamisen are struck with a plectrum and also plucked by the left hand. Banjo players strike the strings with their finger-nails or with picks and generally do not pluck the strings.

Notice the use of vocal signals and glances during the performance. For the first 20 seconds or so the women are tuning their instruments. The two women then play a unison melody up to about 0:57, then one of them (on the right) gives a vocal signal, they stop the melody and the one on the right takes a solo. I assume it is improvised. At about 2:09 they are playing in unison once again. At about 2:16 the woman on the right begins soloing and the woman on the left stops playing. At 3:49 the soloist gives a signal with her head and they begin playing in unison, for awhile, but quickly diverge, playing parallel melodies having similar rhythms. As far as I can tell, the melodic streams have equal prominence rather than one supporting the other. The two women have obviously been playing together for awhile and have developed routines, routines that require and would reward further analysis. Sometime after 6 minutes or so the two streams converge and they women play in unison to the end. Notice that the tempo fluctuates a bit here and there.

Dizzy Gets Dizzy

Jamming for Peace [Iraq in 2003]

I wrote this on March 24, 2003, two days after the event it describes, a protest march in Manhattan. We were protesting invasion of Iraq. In view of the current state of war in the Middle East I thought it worth bumping to the top of the queue.

It was Saturday, March 22, 2003, the day of the big peace demonstration. I got off the PATH train in mid-town Manhattan at about 12:30. Five minutes later I was in Harold Square, home of Macy's, checking out the demo. I’d agreed to hook up with Charlie Keil between 1 and 1:30, so I had a few minutes to get a feel for the flow.

People filled Broadway from side-to-side for block after block. Here and there I heard drums and bells and a horn player or two, but no organized music. Shortly after the Sparticists passed (they’re still around?) I noticed a trombonist standing on the sidewalk. Just as I was about to invite him to come with Charlie and me he headed out into the crowd. I let him go his way as I went mine.

I arrived at 36th and 6th – our meeting point a block away from the demo route – at about 1. Charlie arrived about five minutes later, with two German house guests. We were to meet with other musicians and then join the demo, providing some street music for the occasion. None of the other musicians had arrived by 1:45, so we waded into the crowd searching for the drummers we could hear so well – one of our musicians arrived about ten minutes later and managed to find us in the demo. We made our way to the drummers and starting riffing along with them, Charlie on cornet and me on trumpet. I could see one guy playing bass drum, another on snare, a djembe player or two, and various people playing bells, a small cooking pot, plastic paint cans. Then I heard some wild horn playing off to the left. I looked and saw the one-armed cornetist I’d seen playing in Union Square in the days after 9/11. Charlie and I made our way toward him and joined up. Then I noticed two trumpeters and a trombonist a few yards behind us.

So there we were, a half dozen horns, perhaps a dozen percussion, all within a 20-yard radius. We’d come to the demo in ones, twos and threes, managed to home-in on one another’s sounds, and stayed in floating proximity for the two or three mile walk down Broadway to Washington Square. Sometimes we were closer, within a 5 or 6-yard radius, and sometimes we sprawled over 50 yards. The music was like that too, sometimes close, sometimes sprawled.

 

When the march slowed to a stop, one of the djembe players would urge the percussionists to form a circle. The horn players executed punctuating riffs as one person after another moved into the circle’s center to dance their steps. These young women clearly had taken African dance classes. When the demo started to move, the dancers dispersed into the crowd, the circle dissolved, and we starting moving forward.

Sometimes the music made magic. The drummers would lock on a rhythm, then a horn player – we took turns doing this – would set a riff, with the four or five others joining in on harmony parts or unison with the lead. At the same time the crowd would chant “peace now” between the riffs while raising their hands in the air, in synch. All of a sudden – it only took two or three seconds for this to happen – a thirty-yard swath of people became one. Horn players traded off on solos, the others kept the riffs flowing, percussionists were locked, and the crowd embraced us all. You walked with spring and purpose. Even as the crowd chanted “peace” I was feeling “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in my mind and in my step.

The tribe was rising.

Things got jammed up as we got to Waverly Place – the street that runs just north of Washington Square, the demo’s end. One of the cornet players looked off to the side. I followed his gaze and saw the trombonist I’d passed when I’d first reconnoitered the demo in Harold Square. His horn was pointed to the sky, slide pumping away, as he worked his way toward us. He settled into “All You Need Is Love” and the other horns joined him in sweet, crude, rough harmony. I was hearing John Lenon in my mind’s ear, along with the sardonic horn riffs answering the treacly refrain.

Leaving us wanting more, that’s how it ended.

The Mighty Art Ensemble of Chicage, with Guests, Berlin, Oct. 31, 1991

Art Ensemble of Chicago:
Lester Bowie - trumpet
Roscoe Mitchell - saxophones, percussion
Joseph Jarman - saxophones, percussion
Malachi Favors Maghostut - bass
Famoudou Don Moye - drums, percussion

00:30
5:40
24:44

Art Ensemble of Chicago + Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy:
Gerald Brazel, Earl Gardner, Jim Sealy - trumpet
Luis Bonilla, Jamal Haynes - trombone
Vincent Chancey - french horn
Marcus Rojas - tuba
Vinnie Johnson - drums

27:31
42:20
47:00: In the still of the night
51:55

Art Ensemble of Chicago + Amabhuto Male Chorus:
Max Bhe Bhe, Ndonda Kunze, Joe Leguabe, Thomas Moyo, Kay Nxumalo, Jack Nyoni, David Serame - vocals

59:44
1:08:40
1:13:45

Art Ensemble of Chicago + Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy + Amabhuto Male Chorus:

1:19:40

There's a better way to teach music to kids [who are born to groove]

Sammy Miller, We’re Teaching Music to Kids All Wrong, NYTimes, Sept. 23, 2023.

Opening paragraph:

Each fall, as school starts up again, music educators witness a familiar ritual: Eager first-time students squeak on a clarinet, suppress giggles at the noises coming from the tubas and zealously hit a bass drum a little too hard. It’s a moment characterized by excitement, enthusiasm and the anticipation of new beginnings — which is why it’s so disheartening to know that many of those kids will eventually quit their instruments.

And on about this and that, and then:

Rather than fixating on funding, let’s look at taking a whole new approach. Educators lament that, as with other courses, band can frequently fall prey to “teaching to the test” — in this case, teaching to the holiday concert. A class that by definition is meant to be a creative endeavor winds up emphasizing rigid reading and rote memorization, in service of a single performance. We need to abandon that approach and bring play back into the classroom by instructing students how to hear a melody on the radio and learn to play it back by ear, and encouraging students to write their own simple songs using a few chords. (The dirty secret of pop music, as Ed Sheeran has explained, is that most chart-topping songs can be played by using only four chords: G, C, D and E minor.) So start with just one chord, a funky beat and let it rip — and, voilà, you’re making music.

It’s often been repeated that “music is a language,” yet we’re reluctant to teach it that way. When we learn a language, we don’t simply memorize phrases or spend all day reading — we practice the language together, sharing, speaking, stumbling but ultimately finding ways to connect. This should happen in music class, too. Music should be a common pursuit: Ask any dad rock weekend band or church ensemble how it experiences music, and the performers are likely to tell you it’s not a chore but a way of building community.

Most important, we need to let kids be terrible. In fact, we should encourage it. They’ll be plenty terrible on their own — at first. But too often kids associate music in school with a difficult undertaking they can’t hope to master, which leads them to give up. Music does not have to be, and in fact, shouldn’t be, about the pursuit of perfection. And the great musicians have plenty of lessons to teach students about the usefulness of failure.

All together now:

We also teach language through immersion, so let’s focus on creating an immersive experience in the language of music. Kids learn best when they’re part of communities filled with people of all skill levels for them to play along with, listen to music with, mess up with and just be silly with. Parents, this means you. Don’t let instrument instruction simply be something you nag your kids to endure. Music was never meant to be a lonely vigil. Play together. Make noise together. Find joy together. Take out an instrument and learn a song that you and your child both love.

While you're at it, check out: 

 

 

Available at: 

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/4p67bahh
Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/5vjf3kjt
Google Play: https://tinyurl.com/39rz43vp
Kobo eReader: https://tinyurl.com/5bmkjsme

And there's my handy-dandy five step program for improvisation.

Cuban trumpet

I don’t know Cuban trumpeters like I know jazz trumpeters, so commentary will be light to non-existent.

Cuban Fantasy (Machito)

“Cuban Fantasy” seems to have be composed by Ray Bryant, and it seems like everyone in Latin music has recorded it. This recording is by Machito, who, with Mario Bauzá as musical director, is known for putting Cuban rhythms to big band arrangments, which he does here.

The trumpet solo starts at 2:40. Notice the “Summertime” lick at c. 3:43. I believe the trumpet soloist is Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros (see below for more Chocolate).

The unison phrase that’s used to end each chorus and the turn as a whole, it’s been driving me nuts for the last couple days.

Some guys (Cuba Feliz)

I know nothing about this, but it’s lots of fun. It seems to be some guys in Cuba playing their trumpets to, with, and at one another. The fun starts at about 1:17. Watch the gestures and they play their trumpets in the stairwell of their apartment building.

Listen to the different kinds of sounds. And the neighbors joining in with hand claps. Nice duet at sunset starting at 3:40. Listen to how they echo and harmonize with one another. A nice conversation.

El Manisero (Mario Bauza)

I don’t recognize the trumpet soloist. But I don’t think Chocolate quite has that upper register. The whole section is hot.

Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros

From Eddie Palmieri, “Columbia Te Canto,” on Lucumi, Macumba, Voodoo (1978). This is not your nana's salsa. Palmieri is taking it to a whole other place. This piece is longish, over 10 minutes. It starts slow, in an elegiac mood, and then shifts into a guanguancó rhythm, where it stays ‘till the end. Chocolate enters at about 3:04, playing call and response with the vocalist.

Listen to the masterful way he floats over the underlying rhythm. His trumpet line is very fluid, but thick, like honey. This outing ends at about 3:38. The ensemble does this and that, Eddie Palmieri gets in his licks on piano, and then they begin to ride it out. Chocolate enters at 7:54, and is joined by vocalists at 8:10.

Yuliesky González

You're on your own here. Yuliesky's hot hot hot!

This is an EXCELLENT video about improvisation.

I particularly enjoyed the opening material about Charlie Parker. I didn't know it, but it wasn't surprising either. Here is a link to Thomas Owens' dissertation on Parker's improvisation. 

Timings for the video:

0:00 How Charlie Parker Improvised
0:35 What is a "motive"?
1:36 Parker's Language
1:56 Elan DARE intro
2:16 Myth 1 - Improv Is creating something brand new on the spot.
4:23 Myth 2 - You can't practice improvisation
4:55 Planning an improvisation
5:54 Different types improv
6:15 Myth 3 - Improvisations are unplanned
7:26 Myth 4 - Improv comes naturally to people
8:30 What can you do?
8:43 Tip 1
8:55 Tip 2
9:28 Tip 3
9:49 Tip 4
10:15 Tip 5 BYE 

There are a number of useful links on the YouTube page.

Ellen Alaverdyan has her first lesson in improvisation

Good stuff! 

(See my five-step plan for improvising.)

Thriving and Jiving with Music @3QD [+ Liszt & Roma music]

I’ve got another post up at 3 Quarks Daily:

Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of Music in Everyday Life

It’s a lightly revised version of my introduction for a book Charlie Keil and I have just published:

Check out this blurb from Steve Feld:

Who says a peace manifesto can’t be deep fun? The wisdom of collaborative practice rings bells on each page here, inviting us to dance in the streets of a world still within reach. Get with the beat of this drum!

As I note at the end of the article, Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, is the third book in a series: Local Paths to Peace Today. The first book, We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody's Business, Nobody's Job, is about a simple concrete step the United States can take in the direction of peace, to create a Department of Peace in the Federal Government, which was originally proposed by Benjamin Rush in 1793 – and is currently proposed in H.R. 1111 proposed by Rep. Barbara Lee of California. Breaking up large nations and corporations would create a bit more free-play in the world, allowing for greater cultural variety and local autonomy. We lay that out in the second book in the series: Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary. The goal of Playing for Peace is to sketch out a basic educational regime, a paideia, to use some Ancient Greek terms, that can provide a framework, an ethos or 'moral character' in which we can create a new world that is both more just and more joyful.

You can find a table of contents and a description of each of the articles in the book at this post from July 29, 2022.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, I’ve been re-thinking music. It started when Charlie Keil asked me to see what I could find about Beethoven’s capabilities as an improvisor. I quickly found quite a bit, some of which I’ve blogged here, Beethoven was a supremely gifted improvisor – From the testimony of his contemporaries [the past isn't what you thought it was]. I’ve known that Beethoven was an improvisor for some time, as were other classical composers. But I didn’t quite realize how central it was to their musical practice. Something I learned from reading around in Dana Gooley’s Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music (2018), which I’ve not yet finished. Thus Carl Czerny, perhaps Beethoven’s best-known student, wrote an instruction manual on improvisation, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829).

Leaving liturgical organ music aside, improvisation didn’t all-but disappear from classical music until roughly the middle of the 19th century, and even then the idea of improvisation remained as a kind superior and purer form of music. This led to romantic ideas about Roma (Gypsy) music, which Golley notes (p. 266):

Grellmann’s pioneering Versuch über die Zigeuner, for example, from which many nineteenth-century writers borrowed, described music is the one “fine art” the Roma people cultivated, but said nothing about improvisation in connection with music. Nor was improvisation a dominant marker of gypsy character in the novels of Walter Scott, which played a disproportionate role in disseminating ideas and images throughout Europe. Liszt’s Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859), a book probably ghost-written to a considerable extent, was thus a pioneer in giving great emphasis to the improvised character of the music. It set out to challenge prevailing comical and fantastical stereotypes and celebrate the musical gypsy as a kind of unsullied, primitive artistic genius, and to this end it used improvisation is a key literary motif: “Gypsy art [l’art bohémien], more than any other, belongs to the domain of improvisation, and cannot subsist without it.”

Improvisation here is not only a metaphor for the wandering, day-to-day existence of the gypsies, but also for an intensity of expression and direct transmission of feeling absent from music produced through mediation and reflection. The music is strong and vital because it is “so eminently inspired, so little dominated by the laws of reflection or constraint, so spontaneous, and until recently so inseparable from improvisation.” In gypsy performances there is furthermore no conflict between the player’s authenticity of expression and the formation of communal bonds.

This reads remarkably like ideas that developed about jazz in 20th century America.

This idealization and etherealization of improvisation seemed to parallel the solidification of the idea of a musical work as a kind of fixed Platonic ideal. Here I must confess that I didn’t realize that that conception stood in need of solidification. For I had implicitly assumed that it had always been there. And for me, of course, that is the case. That’s what I learned, just as I had learned that improvisation was this exotic and mysterious practice. These two conceptions go hand-in-hand: the fixed and eternal work, exotic improvisation. Those conceptions were worked out in the middle of the 19th century.

It seems that the existence of a written score is not itself sufficient to support the idea of the fixed work. That idea is projected onto the score, but does not arise from it, perhaps because even the most carefully notated score must still be interpreted.

There’s more, about music and childhood. I’ve made some notes about that here, Liszt, childhood, and improvisation.

More later.

My Jazz Education 8: Learning to Improvise, Part 2 – the Buffalo years

Though I’ve written quite a bit here and there about my general experience as an improviser I’ve also written more specifically about learning to improvise in three previous posts:

My Early Jazz Education 6: Dave Dysert

My Jazz Education 7: Learning to Improvise, Part 1

Frank Foster in Buffalo

High school jazz [It wasn’t done]

Though Dave Dysert is one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had – he’s one of the five fathers to whom I dedicated my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil – and he laid some of the foundations on which my improvisational skills rest, he never actually worked with me on improvisation. This seems strange in retrospect, but at the time it’s just how things were, as I remark in this recent post, High School jazz [it wasn’t done]. The Part 1 post covers what I learned up though my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins and a couple of years beyond, which my major experience was in playing with a jazz-rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion. This post picks up with the dissolution of that band in the spring of 1971 or 1972 when the founders of the band – Jon, Mal, and Steve – graduated from Johns Hopkins.

I continued practicing the trumpet, which would have included improvising along with records. I don’t recall whether or not I had purchased any of the Jamey Aebersold play-along records at that time. These are records of jazz tunes played by a rhythm section, but without any horns. A horn player could then practice improvising along with the record. Whether or not I’d started working with such records, I eventually would and, in time, built up a modest collection.

In the Spring of 1973 I signed up for trumpet lessons in the adult preparatory division of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. My teacher was Harold Rehrig, who had spent most of his career playing with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Though he had some familiarity with jazz – he knew of Dizzy Gillespie – he wasn't an improvisor. That's not why I was studying with him. I wanted to improve my technique. He helped me with that; in particular, he worked on my breathing. We also worked on the Haydn Trumpet Concerto, for which I composed two cadenzas.

Then it was off to Buffalo. I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo for the Fall of 1973. As I also wanted to continue working on jazz improvisation I checked the catalog and discovered that the music department listed a jazz improvisation workshop led by Frank Foster. I’d never heard of him, but looked him up in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz and discovered that he’d spent a decade with Count Basie and then worked with Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan and others. He was free-lancing in New York and flew out to Buffalo to conduct the workshop (and, I assume, teach other courses).

At first I was very self-conscious in the workshop. (I didn’t take it for academic credit, but simply audited it.) To be sure, I’d had a lot of experience improvising solos in The Saint Matthew Passion. But that had been a jazz-inflected rock band. None of the tunes had complex chord changes; I was mostly improvising over one- and two-chord vamps. I assumed most of the players in the workshop would be music-majors. Could I hang with them?

Yes, after a bit. The workshop met for a single two- or three-hour session a week. There were, I don’t know, 20 or so players in the workshop at any one time, which was a bit crowded. It meant that no one got much playing time. We’d do two, maybe three, tunes in each session, with each person taking a solo. Frank would write a tune on the chalk board, melody and chord changes, explain important features of the tune, including how to relate scales to chords – “harmonic relevance” was Frank’s term – and we’d run it down.

I remember that in an early session, perhaps the first, we did Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage.” I thought I’d acquitted myself reasonably well. But another player in the workshop, a tenor sax playing, pointed out to me that another trumpet player was hitting the changes. Implying, of course, that I hadn’t been. Whoops! And double-whoops, because that tune doesn’t have complicated changes. I felt intimidated by another trumpet player in the workshop, Billy Skinner, because he was so good. I don’t know whether or not he was formally enrolled in the workshop or was just one of the local musicians who’d show up every now and then.

I’d write each tune down in a music notebook and then work on them. I often wrote out exercises based on the chord changes for a tune. We must have gone through I don’t know how many tunes in a semester; I believe I hung out in the workshop for at least two, if not three, semesters. At this point I don’t remember which tunes we covered, but there was “Blue Bossa,” “St. Thomas,” “Dexterity,” “Giant Steps,” and several of Frank’s tunes, including “Simone” and “Who’s That Rockin’ My Jazz Boat.”

I’m sure I hung out in that workshop my first two years at Buffalo (73-74, 74-75) and perhaps my third year as well. That workshop was perhaps my central educational experience in learning jazz improvisation. That’s where I came to terms with chord changes and with bebop, which in many ways remains the central jazz idiom, though it has long been eclipsed by other styles. I spent as much time working on tunes I picked up in that workshop as I spent on the courses I was taking the English Department, where I was getting my degree. Of course I also continued playing along with records. I did that a lot, and have done so most of my adult life. I pretty much assume that anyone with a serious interest in jazz does it.

The school also started a big band, which I played in, sharing the lead and second trumpet parts with others. This was led by Milton Marsh. We played standard professional charts, some tunes arranged by Marsh, and maybe even a Frank Foster tune or so, I don’t remember.

Independently of the school I played in a quintet organized by Simon Salz, a guitar player I’d met at the workshop. We only had a handful of gigs, one a New Year’s gig at St. George’s Table, a fairly well-known Buffalo club and restaurant. We were fronted by a female vocalist and the band more or less existed to support her.

I also played in a Saturday afternoon jam session at the home of Mike Fuda, a physics professor at SUNY Buffalo. Mike played drums and there were a handful of other musicians including Ed Wood on bass, a tenor player named, I believe, Sammy Calveteri, and his friend, Angelo Briandi, on trumpet. We played a lot of bebop. Sammy was excellent – he'd been a full-time pro at one time – while Angelo was not so good. He played the heads very well, but couldn’t improvise. However, he did have good weed.

These were very informal sessions. We’d show up at Mike’s house in the early afternoon. When enough musicians had shown up, we’d start jamming. If Sammy was there, he’d call the tune. If I didn’t know the melody I’d sit out for the first few choruses and then, when I’d had time to absorb the tune, I’d play a couple of choruses. After we’d played three or four tunes or so we’d stop playing and gather around the dining room table to chat (and smoke weed). Then we’d play some more tunes, break to chat and get high, and so forth.

We did this for fun. We weren’t getting ready for some performance. And, while there were generally others around who weren’t playing in the jam session, we weren’t performing for them. We were just making music and hanging out. I figure that this is the basic, the most fundamental, music-making arrangement. A situation that is clearly divided into performers and audience, that’s a secondary, a derived social arrangement. To the extent that this secondary arrangement predominates in our society, to that extent we have lost our way.

How do we recover that basic situation?

* * * * *

One final note. Late in the Spring of my last year at Buffalo one of my musical compatriots heard of a big party where there’d be a jam session.

“Charlie Keil will be there.”

“Charlie Keil, the Charlie Keil, the man who wrote Urban Blues?”

“Yes.”

“He’s here at UB?”

“Yes.”

I’m not reporting the exact words of the conversation. I’m just making them up. But something like that conversation took place. I was rather taken-aback that I’d spent five years at UB and didn’t even know that Charlie Keil was on the faculty there. I’d read Urban Blues sometime late in the 1960s and, like many others, had been bowled over with it. And now I would be jamming with him. Little did I suspect how closely we’d be working together in the 21st century.

More later.

Beethoven was a supremely gifted improvisor – From the testimony of his contemporaries [the past isn't what you thought it was]

My own encounter with improvisation was indirect, fitful, indirect, and almost accidental. I started taking trumpet lessons in the fourth grade. Initially I was in a group lesson with two clarinetists, my friends Billy Cover and Jackie Barto. We were grouped together because each of us played an instrument pitched in B-flat. I remember that before long I was starting to fall behind the other two.

Then I started taking individual lessons. My teacher was blind. He’d come to the house once a week. That went on, I don’t exactly recall, for a year, when I switched to Mr. Dysert. I stayed with him until my senior year in high school. Somewhere along the line I started making up my own tunes. Thus when I joined the marching band, I made up march tunes. I’m pretty sure I didn’t think of this as improvisation.

I know, I know, hold your jets. I’m getting to Beethoven.

I supposed learned the term “improvise” when I became interested in jazz at about the same time. Improvisation is what jazz musicians did. What I did, read music, was right HERE. What they did, improvise, was over THERE, in alien territory. What I was doing when I was making up those march tunes, that didn’t fit into this scheme at all. It’s just something I did. I also made-up bluesy lines and tunes, like what I heard on some of my jazz records. But NO, I wasn’t improvising, because, remember? improvising is over THERE.

As far as I can recall the first time I was both improvising and (subsequently) thought of it as improvising was in a rehearsal of a rock and roll band I’d just joined, The Saint Matthew Passion. We were rehearsing “For What It’s Worth” and were riffing at the end. I decided to add some more elaborate riffs. Once I started the band liked it. From that moment on I had a solo at the end of that tune. I took solos in other tunes as well. From that time on I was an improvisor.

The point is simple. I lived in a culture where regular music was music you read from written notes. Improvisation was this mysterious process done by these other people. It was also special, special, mysterious, and OVER THERE. 

* * * * *

That’s not how it was in Beethoven’s musical culture. He lived in a milieu where advanced keyboard players were expected to improvise, where, indeed, the last slot on a concert program was often left open for improvisation, which was expected to be the best music on the program. It’s only recently – yesterday if you must know – that I knew that. Oh, I’ve known that Beethoven was an improvisor for a long time, like Mozart and Bach before him. But that improvisation was so highly regarded, I hadn’t known that. Given that, one would like to know: Why’d they stop improvising? I’m reading about that and want to read some more before I blog about it.

Right now I want to tell you about what Beethoven’s contemporaries thought about his improvising. I’ve taken these examples from, O. G. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries (1926, 1954).

Mozart, 1787

Mozart was a renowned improvisor and toured Europe as a six-year old, dazzling the powdered wig set.

Beethoven, who as a youth of great promise came to Vienna in 1786 [really in 1787], but was obliged to return to Bonn after a brief sojourn, was taken to Mozart and at that musician’s request played something for him which he, taking it for granted that it was a show-piece prepared for the occasion, praised in a rather cool manner. Beethoven observing this, begged Mozart to give him a theme for improvisation. He always played admirably when excited and now he was inspired, too, by the presence of the master whom he reverenced greatly; he played in such a style that Mozart, whose attention and interest grew more and more, finally went silently to some friends who were sitting in an adjoining room, and said, vivaciously, “Keep your eyes on him; some day he will give the world something to talk about.”

Johann Schenk (1792)

He was Beethoven’s teacher in counterpoint.

In 1792, His Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian, Elector of Cologne, was pleased to send his charge Louis van Beethoven to Vienna to study musical composition with Haydn. Towards the end of July, Abbé Gelinek informed me that he had made the acquaintance of a young man who displayed extraordinary virtuosity on the pianoforte, such, indeed, as he had not observed since Mozart. [...]

Thus I saw the composer, now so famous, for the first time and heard him play. After the customary courtesies he offered to improvise on the pianoforte. He asked me to sit beside him. Having struck a few chords and tossed off a few figures as if they were of no significance, the creative genius gradually unveiled his profound psychological pictures. My ear was continually charmed by the beauty of the many and varied motives which he wove with wonderful clarity and loveliness into each other, and I surrendered my heart to the impressions made upon it while he gave himself wholly up to his creative imagination, and anon, leaving the field of mere tonal charm, boldly stormed the most distant keys in order to give expression to violent passions....

Johann Wenzel Tomaschek (1798)

A Bohemian organist, teacher and composer.

In the year 1798, in which I continued my juridical studies, Beethoven, the giant among pianoforte players, came to Prague. He gave a largely attended concert in the Konviktssaal, at which he played his Concerto in C major, Op. 15, and the Adagio and graceful Rondo in A major from Op. 2, and concluded with an improvisation on a theme given him by Countess Sch... [Schlick?], “Ah tu fosti il primo oggetto,” from Mozart’s “Titus” (duet No. 7). Beethoven’s magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days....

I heard Beethoven at his second concert, which neither in performance nor in composition renewed again the first powerful impression. This time he played the Concerto in B-flat which he had just composed in Prague. Then I heard him a third time at the home of Count C., where he played, besides the graceful Rondo from the A major Sonata, an improvisation on the theme: “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman.”* This time I listened to Beethoven’s artistic work with more composure. I admired his powerful and brilliant playing, but his frequent daring deviations from one motive to another, whereby the organic connection, the gradual development of idea was put aside, did not escape me.

Evils of this nature frequently weaken his greatest compositions, those which sprang from a too exuberant conception. It is not seldom that the unbiased listener is rudely awakened from his transport. The singular and original seemed to be his chief aim in composition, as is confirmed by the answer which he made to a lady who asked him if he often attended Mozart’s operas. “I do not know them,” he replied, “and do not care to hear the music of others lest I forfeit some of my originality.”

*Known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Mozart composed a very famous set of variations on this unassuming little tune.

Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature

Charlie Keil and I have a new book out (title above). It’s the third book in our series, Local Paths to Peace Today. The first two are: We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody's Business, Nobody's Job and Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary. Steve Feld thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread:

Who says a peace manifesto can’t be deep fun? The wisdom of collaborative practice rings bells on each page here, inviting us to dance in the streets of a world still within reach. Get with the beat of this drum!

You can buy it here:

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/4p67bahh
Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/5vjf3kjt
Google Play: https://tinyurl.com/39rz43vp
Kobo eReader: https://tinyurl.com/5bmkjsme

Contents

Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of this Volume in the Peace Series
Common Glad Impulse
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Paideia Con Salsa
Dance to the Music: The Kids Owned the Day
Jamming for Peace
The Hungry March Band helps Hoboken Celebrate Public Control of Its Waterfront
Peace & Joy Unlimited: The Festive in Everyday Life
Global Green Basics
Reclaiming our species being: Humo Ludens collaborans
Appendix A: Greening the Population Issue
Appendix B: Organizations Charlie’s supported
Appendix C: A trifecta from Charlie Keil on the need for a Global Organization of Democracies

Brief synopsis of each chapter

Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of this Volume in the Peace Series – In 1930 John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that we were heading to a world in which people only worked 15 hours a week. That hasn’t happened. Why not? Perhaps it’s because we (adults) have become so used to work, even at meaningless jobs, that we don’t know what else to do with our time. We need to become more involved in active music-making.

Common Glad Impulse – William Henry Hudson is perhaps best known for his 1904 novel, Green Mansions, which was made into the 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins. The novel was drenched in love for the natural world, which Hudson cultivated in his career as a naturalist. This section contains a passage from The Naturalist in La Plata, in which he asserts that “birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals,” an instinct he termed “the common glad impulse.” That common glad impulse is at the heart of this book.

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? – The late David Graeber argues that fun IS at the heart of animal life, human as well. He asks: “Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious?” He argues that we’ve got it all wrong, from the ground up. Economics – survival of the fit and all that – though important, fails to explain life. Why not reground the whole story on pleasure and play, in freedom. Graeber outlines how we can get started. ”We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms— because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing.”

Paideia Con Salsa – Charlie Keil proposes the people need (at least) three layers of cultural awareness, practice, and loyalty: 1) local, the most intense and richly developed, 2) regional, and 3) a thin layer of planetary culture “so that regions or the peoples within regions do not drift back into aggressing, aggrandizing, state-building, and empire expanding.” The local level could be organized around an Afro-Latin music-dance curriculum, a “paideia con salsa,” that could be seeded at the start and then allowed to grow and flourish as it will. To that end he proposes a pilot project oriented toward the “three Ms” – music, motion, morality – that were the foundation of Ancient Greece’s golden age. A curriculum would be developed and deployed in several local schools and the results studied, refined, and further disseminated.

Dance to the Music: the Kids Owned the Day – Bill Benzon: You know about competitive dance, right? Dance studios compete locally and regionally for prizes, trophies and glory. It’s late afternoon at one such competition in suburban New Jersey. The competition is over, the kids are just hanging out, and then suddenly and spontaneously they begin to dance to hip-hop booming on the sound system, kids, tweens, and teens, all of them, in the aisle, between rows of seats, 100, 200 of them. That’s the world of competitive dance at its best.

Jamming for Peace – Bill Benzon: There was a big peace demonstration in New York City on March 22, 2013. I was there with Charlie Keil; he had a cornet, I had my trumpet. Thousands and thousands of people marching down Broadway. Lots of musicians, mostly drumers, but other horn players as well. We moved from place to place hooking up with various musicians. Sometimes spontaneous magic broke out and a thirty yard swath of people became one in the beat. We ended on “All You Need Is Love.”

Peace & Joy Unlimited: The Festive in Everyday Life – Charlie Keil argues for guiding and coaching children in singing and dancing as early in life as possible, as often as possible. They need to develop their “festive skills” – mocking the dark side, identifying with spirits, birds, animals and plants, drumming, singing, dancing the seasons and Nature's cycles, horn tooting, honk festing, joke telling, miming, rhyming, funny walking, looking ashamed, goofy talking. “They don't have to be taught. They just have to be done, for fun, to enhance primary communication in daily life.” Suggestions for things you can do at home, now.

Global Green Basics – Angeliki V. Keil lays out the core of a “green”, that is sustainable, communally responsible, and joyus approach to living with one another, with other species, plant, animal, microbial, and with the Earth. Establish living areas for all, encourage local self-sufficiency, foster democracy at all levels of organization, renounce governmental debt, renounce war, foster the survival of all cultures, East and West, North and South, halt pollution, renounce nuclear technology, encourage scientific inquiry, revamp science education, and facilitate the free flow of individuals and information. Start now. “We only need to commit our hopes, faiths and love, especially in the form of the actual sharing of resources, to help us over the ensuing dislocations.”

Reclaiming our true species being: Humo Ludens collaborans –- Food for Thought – Charlie Keil has created an exploratory listing of thoughts, directions, provocations, wishes, what have you, pointing toward a re-creation of our local social being in terms of our most basic species being: Humo Ludens collaborans.

Appendix A: Greening the Population Issue – Linda Cree lays out the basic rationale for reducing the population as a necessary step to long-term sustainability.

Appendix B: Organizations Charlie’s supported – With links to where you can find them on the web.

Appendix C: Toward the GOOD, a Declaration of Interdependance and An Appeal

Two parameters: Mechread and parset [plus a note on E-flat]

For the last two years I've been corresponding with a friend of mine from the old days at RPI, Bob Krull. Bob was in communications and did a lot of empirical work on patterns of attention in watching TV. But that's not what we talk about. We talk about music. He' banging away on keyboards and I'm tooting away on trumpet. Here's two notes that I've written to him.

* * * * *

Mechread and parset

And now for something like a model. Actually a pair of them.

One we’ll call mechread, for Mechanical reading. The other we can call parset, for parameter setting.

Mechread: How do we play music from a written score? Unless one is very experienced and skill, one uses mechread. The score gives you a representation of a series of pitches and note values. You call on memory and translate them into a sequence of movements that activates your instrument. The result is a sequence of pitches each of the proper duration. But it doesn’t sound much like music. Too mechanical.

Parset: How is it that I can hear a tune – not any tune to be sure, but many – once or twice an be ready to blow on it fluently? I may even be able to play the melody ‘from memory’? I call up an appropriate ‘engine’, one attuned to the style of tune I’m listening to, set a half-dozen parameters, and I’m reading to go. Picking up those half-dozen parameters is much easier than actually memorizing (via a mechread procedure) the tune. It requires much less information. Of course, the model whose parameters I’m setting, that contains a great deal of (pre-compacted) information.

The thing is, in order to give a musical performance of a written score, you’re going to have to do something like parset. Sure, you can lather on some expression, some of which is likely marked in the score (crescendo, accel., rubato, etc.), but that’s just another layer of mechread. It smooths over the rough edges, but doesn’t breath life into the sound. For that you need parset. Thus when performing effectively from a score, you’re treating the score as a source of prompts to parset.

So now we’ve got mechread and parset going at the same time. And I’m sure mechread is going when I’m listening to a tune in a jam session so I can blow on it three choruses later. You don’t have to have a written score to use mechread. I figure we use a version of mechread to ‘transcribe’ the sounds we hear into ‘inner music’ which we can then ‘pass’ to parset [if we have and have developed the knack].

Now consider this improvisation I did on a Japanese tune, “Kojo no tsuki.”

I worked on it a bit before I recorded it, but never wrote anything down and never deliberately set anything to memory other than the melody. I play the melody, in tempo, fairly straight time. Then I improvise a chorus, freeing up the time here and there. Then I go into a medium swing tempo an continue improvising, going through a couple of choruses until I reach a climax and than, after a very short break, collapse back into the melody, in time, and finish. I’m interested in that first improvised chorus. I can hear it in my mind’s ear as I type. I can conjure it up at will. If I were to pick up my horn and play that tune, I’d have no trouble playing that melody. In fact, I’d probably have to exert a deliberate act of will to play something else. Let’s assume I let well enough alone and then switch into a medium swing like I did in the recording. I’m pretty sure I’d do some/many of the things I did on that recording. But I don’t know how close I’d come to what I’d recorded. Don’t even know if I’d play the same number of choruses. But I don’t think I’d deliberately avoid playing many of those riffs. That would be too difficult, and a bit pointless.

That’s more or less how unnoted composition happens. I think.

Bonus: E-flat

Learning to play in Eb

I’ve been working on the key of Eb (trumpet, Db concert), 3 flats. The fingering are not particularly difficult, but I gather I’ve not spent much time playing in it. It wouldn’t come up much in Out of Control, which favored sharp keys because of the guitar. And for some reason, not otherwise.

Not that I’ve kept log of what keys I’ve been playing in and for how long. Rather I deduce that I haven’t played in it all that much because getting really comfortable in it has been taking a lot of time.

A couple of years ago I created a blues in Eb. Why Eb? Beats me. Likely I was just noodling around and when I had a lick that I like, well, it turned out to be in Eb. So when I developed it into a tune, the tune was in Eb.

Anyhow, I developed the tune itself but didn’t do much with it. Then I laid off the horn for a couple of years on account of a neighbor who didn’t like me practicing. The neighbor moved out a couple of months ago, so I started practicing again. That’s when I started working on this Eb blues. This time I decided to really work on it, which means improvising. That’s when I discovered that I wasn’t really fluid in that key. So I started shedding.

What’s that entail? It comes down to two things: 1) improvise, improvise, improvise, and 2) off the cuff exercises. The exercises are patterns in Eb, scalar patterns and arpeggios. I’d pick a figure and then start at the bottom of the horn and work up and then back down. I’d move back and forth between improvising and these little patterns. It’s been taking me WEEKS to get REALLY comfortable.

What’s that, really? If I stick to tried and true pathway, that’s easy enough. But I want to be able to move (potentially) anywhere. That’s tougher. I might be improvising within my comfort zone, but some lick doesn’t quite work out the way I’d intended. I want to be able to go with the new, the unintended thing, the ‘mistake’, and work on it, take it even further out, and then come back. Getting that kind of fluidity takes work. And moving back and forth between improvising and patterns is the way to do it. When I hit a snag in the improv, I turn it into a pattern and work on it. So the pace of the back and forth tends to be in minutes.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be really comfortable in Eb.

Street-corner fascination

It Shook Me, the Light

Bump! This post is from 2010, but it's been on my mind lately. So I'm bumping it to the head of the queue.

 

During the early 1970s I'd played for two years with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion. Modeled on Blood, Sweat, and Tears and on Chicago, the band consisted of 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet (me), and trombone. On “She's Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.

On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn't make it. The sax and I started our improv. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good.

And I tensed up.

It was over.

After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it — “that was nice” — enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been. Did he know what had happened? Or, if not ‘know’ exactly, did he sense a special magic in the performance? I ask because performers and audience often have a very different ‘sense’ of the same performance. Perhaps the guy was just complimenting us on our ‘freak-out’ chops, not on any magic in the music.

That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but also fearing it. A child of the 60s, a very geekish child of the 60s, I’d read quite a bit about altered states of consciousness, as they were called in the scientific literature. I read around in the secondary and tertiary literature on mystical experiences, and even a bit of the primary literature – though just exactly what’s the point of reading a mystic’s account an ineffable encounter with . . . . well, with what, exactly?

I knew such things happened. And now, in little more than a couple of heartbeats, now I too knew. But what is it that I knew?

Other than the experience itself, I knew that what all those people had been writing about was real. It’s not that I doubted it. Still it’s one thing to read about walking on the moon, even to see video footage and photographs of space-suited men walking about. It’s another thing to be there oneself.

But how can one experience be so powerful, so polarizing, that it haunts your thoughts and echoes through your soul for years afterward? What is the human nervous system that THAT can happen? In attributing the experience to the nervous system – as opposed, say, to an encounter with the divine, I do not thereby mean to dismiss it – oh, that? that was just a burp of the nervous system. We cannot dismiss it. The nervous system is us.

Now the memory's faded & the ambivalence too. But I'm playing better music now than ever I did back then. I’m talking not so much about technique – that comes and goes – but about expressive power, about ‘authenticity.’ Is that authenticity and echo of that experience?

Who knows?

* * * * *

Such experiences are common enough among musicians. Over the years I’ve collected accounts from books and articles. Here are some from Jenny Boyd, with Holly George-Warren. Musicians In Tune. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

 

Patty Smyth (p. 161):

When I have had those experiences, I'm singing by myself. I've had those moments when I do feel the voice coming through me, and I know it's coming from out there. It's a certain tone in that voice that makes me feel that way. It chokes me up.

Cece Bullard (pp. 161-162):

It's like you leave your body. It's like you're dizzy and lightheaded and yet right there. My hands just seem to throb, like a pulse almost. It's the best feeling in the world, bar none. It took me a lot of singing lessons before I finally connected with that feeling. The first time it clicked and I connected, I nearly fell down, and I started crying.

Sinéad O'Conner (p. 164):

A lot of times I shake uncontrollably. I can't control the shaking, and it's not because I'm nervous, it's because I'm singing. It's because it's coming out and it's making me shake. It feels like being drunk, it's like an out-of-body experience. There are times when I've done gigs — and it doesn't happen every time you do a show or every time you write something — but they've told me stuff I've done onstage that I'm not aware I've done.

Branford Marsalis (p. 173):

High, you feel high. It's easy to do it physically, but it's hard to do it mentally. I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit. The sublime cannot be routine. Three times, and you never forget them. It's with a combination of musicians, it's never just me.

Ringo Starr (p. 176):

It feels great; its just a knowing. It's magic actually; it is pure magic. Everyone who is playing at that time knows where everybody's going. We all feel like one; wherever you go, everyone feels that's where we should go. I would know if Paul was going to do something, or if George was going to raise it up a bit, or John would double, or we'd bring it down. I usually play with my eyes closed, so you would know when things like that were happening . . . you've got to trust each other.

Huey Lewis (p. 179):

I find it more of a group experience for me. You look around and all of a sudden the song is playing and singing itself. It’s just like a wave that you ride. It’s tremendously exhilarating; it doesn’t take any energy and you look around and say, ‘Yep, this is it!’ It happens quite often but not for long periods of time. Almost at every gig that will happen somewhere for a fleeting moment. Some gigs it happens more often than others, and those are the good gigs.

Eric Clapton (p. 185):

It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes at a certain point. Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not something I could experience on my own. . . . other musicians . . . an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at one point. It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another musician. But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They're all transported toward the same place. That's not very common, but it always seems to happen at least once a show.

I don’t for a moment think these musicians are all describing the same thing. But just how many different things they’re describing, that I don’t know. Branford Marsalis says, “I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit.” Eric Clapton says that “it always seems to happen at least once a show.” Are they talking about the same thing? How could you tell?

Whatever it is, this family of musical experiences, it visits us in this devastating performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “One hand, one heart” by Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa.