Musical improvisation in jazz happens in a collective using shared forms, structures and language, making the performance a conversation, negotiation, or debate, unique to that moment. But how does the musician prepare for such a performance?
To start with, let's examine improvisation - the act of dealing with contingencies as they happen.
We all improvise. Almost everything we do in life involves being flexible to random occurrences, and yet getting where we want to go. We can all improvise music too. All it takes is participation - though our first efforts may lack coherence. It's the best way to start. We will immediately identify the priority of communication, and therefore, what is missing from our skill set.
The bottom line is that those who improvise, become better at it the more they improvise. From a negative perspective, you could say that those who fail to make plans, by necessity, become the best improvisers. Maybe that's true for some musicians too, but in my experience, playing improvised music is a deep joy I share with many dedicated and well-prepared musicians globally.
Preparing to be able to create on the spot, more than anything, means learning to be fully in the moment: assuming as little as possible, so that we can be fully aware of what is going on, and participate. We get this just by participating as much as possible in group improvisation. For the committed improviser, further self-preparation involves considering all possible contingencies, and honing the skills to confront them. A martial artist is a good metaphor, because of the immense discipline and deep study of all relevant skills required for mastery of the moment.
In music, the true art of improvisation happens when more than one musician is involved. It's about the negotiation. Solo improvisation has it's place - at the very least it's a part of the process of developing ideas for the main event, but it is not true improvisation in the jazz sense, because of the relative absence of outside influences, which means one can easily follow habitual paths towards well-practised themes.
This introduction will hopefully make it clear that practising, for the musical improviser, is completely different from practising for any other kind of musical performance. It's not harder or easier - it's just different.
The difference is present from day one of the process. Most music is studied in a linear manner, with the performance of existing compositions as our end game. Practising for improvisation is a laterally-focused process - better to learn to play that Bach prelude in all 12 keys by ear moderately well, than to nail it in one key. Then move on.
An improviser is perfecting a process, not a result.
EAR TRAINING
The central agenda in developing an ability to improvise music is Ear Training. The more we can recognise from what we hear, the better we can respond. A rule of thumb is that everything practised should have some aspect of
ear training/expansion built into it. Once we have performed something to the point that the ear-hand coordination is well established, we should move on. Otherwise we are just developing the
mechanical, and our right brain disengages.
First important point is that, though literacy is pretty crucial to an intellectual left-brain understanding of musical structure, that understanding is useless to us as improvisers until we know it "by heart". Far better to learn music by ear, as it enters through our right-brain, which is where we need it for making music.
The improviser must from the outset take on the internalisation of musical structures, horizontal (rhythmic), vertical (harmonic), and combined (melodic), so that they can recognise them, and then develop the ear-hand coordination to be able to include within their own performance, everything that they hear. A disciplined approach to this starts with what I call Grid Work, which forms the technical foundation of everything we do.
They must also know the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic language that will be used to communicate.. This is the most fundamental element, precedes even the ability to play an instrument, and starts with just concentrated listening. I am repeatedly confronted by students who want to learn to play jazz, but don't listen to it. Everything that comes out of me as an improviser and composer, is a product of my musical aesthetic, which is the selective sum of everything I have listened to. That which has resonated with me enough to work its way into my reservoir of musical vocabulary. The people that I improvise/communicate with best will be those that share more of those musical references.
The next part to this process is to develop that language into a personal one on our instrument. This has many routes, and I will deal with the details of these later. It usually starts with mimicry of musical performances that resonate with us. If we do a lot of this without going further, but really internalise the sounds, it is already massive. If we can also go beyond this, analyse what is happening, and learn to apply the ideas to other situations, we go even deeper, and here we start to develop our own voice.
TIME
Ultimately, if all other things are equal, what governs how we prepare for improvisation, is how much time we are prepared, or have available, to spend working on it. If you have a full-time job and a young family to look after, then as long as you have an opportunity to play together in a group with other like-minded people once or twice a week, and you listen to as much music as possible, you will develop.
If you can add 2-4 hours of preparation a week, then focus on content - learning tunes and absorbing language from performances, then developing your own ideas from that. If you have 6 hours, then add some grid work on chords and scales, working in a way that best informs the ear - like playing through key areas around a resolving cycle of 5ths.
Beyond 6 hours, you have room for a fairly complete pracise agenda, which I will go into in part 2.
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