Jazz And Improvisation Sunday February 25, 2007
A little chill-out tune while you read:
There is a crucial difference in terms of the way in which performers approach music. If you are playing in a symphony orchestra of if you are playing a piece of chamber music, you are trying, often against fairly heavy odds, to find out what somebody has meant when they said something. And I think that a jazz player, for example, is saying what is in him. He puts very much more of his total personality into what he does. I think he’s a much happier individual in many ways
If you can understand what it means to be disciplined and to be accurate, committed and involved with something which is purely notated, and also be capable of being free, of being able to step outside the inhibition that notation produces, and do something which is your own and relevant, then I still think that is probably the highest form of instrumentalist talent there is. And it is only the really great instrumentalists who can do that, who are free of their instrument to that extent (Derek Bailey 1980 Improvisation: 87 and 93)
Improvisation is one of the key factors to jazz music. It’s not unique because other musicians use it, but it’s more important than with other musical forms. The aesthetic and ethos of jazz is improvisation. Rock guitarists sometimes do it, but more in the spirit of an indulgent flourish than creative exploration. Bach used to be improvised, but the classical genre emphasises different values that Derek Bailey in his book Improvisation (1980) describes as “petrifying”. It is, he says:
Formal, precious, self-absorbed, pompous, harbouring rigid conventions and carefully preserved hierarchies; obsessed with its geniuses and their timeless masterpieces, shunning the accidental and the unexpected; the world of classical music provides an unlikely setting for improvisation (29).
I’ve not been to many classical concerts but after the last one, I decided I didn’t like it. The music was fine but I found the overall experience rather suffocating. Lie down on a sofa, get up for some coffee (black espresso please), is my idea of enjoying classical music: I don’t like being confined to a chair, in a formalised and reverential occasion.
I do love some classical. When I’m in the mood for it, Bach fits the spot like no one else – OK so he’s Baroque, but that’s close enough. Haydn hits the mark, and sometimes there’s nothing like Mozart. But the more I think about this, its overall aesthetic compared to jazz, the more I start to agree with Bailey. He describes three stages to learning: “choosing a master, absorbing his skills through practical imitation, developing an individual style and attitude from that foundation”, noting the situation where this gets “reduced to two stages and the hardest step, the last one” (69) gets omitted. Classical is imitative, emphasising received compositions from great masters, acting as a mould which a musician is supposed to inhabit. A Mozart score thus becomes a text. And like reading Dickens in a literature degree you have to identify and deconstruct its parts and devices – a legitimate activity – except in the case of music, playing and expressing oneself, doing it oneself, is thereby neglected. A Creative Writing degree would equate better to musical training, but in practice the latter is more like a Romantic Literature degree. Compare this to a Dictionary of Music and Musicians definition of improvisation: “The art of thinking and performing music simultaneously” (cited in Bailey: 84), and Bailey continues:
Music is precious and performance constitutes a threat to its existence. So, of course, he has to be careful. Also, the music doesn’t belong to him. He’s allowed to handle it but then only under the strictest supervision. Somebody, somewhere, has gone through a lot of trouble to create this thing, this composition, and the performer’s primary responsibility is to preserve it from damage. At its highest, music is a divine ideal conceived by a super-mortal. In which case performance becomes a form of genuflection (85).
When you put it like that, and it’s undeniably true the classical world tends towards this, it sounds pretty grim. No wonder, I get physically and socially uncomfortable sitting on a classical concert chair. Bailey notes that the training musicians receive is inimical to improvisation, and if indeed it’s the highest aspect of music whereby you make it your own while adding something personal and unique, this is undesirable. And this subject, fixed form and creativity, has wider social ramifications. In February 2007 I have just heard a BBC report noting the formulaic nature of education, with the corollary that students respect it less and less and resort to plagiarised or purchased essays from the internet. It may sound unprofessional to say this, but who can blame them? I’ve experienced not one but two MA situations, where in each case much of the intellectual content consisted of superficial how-to-study advice seen in popular self-developmental books from Waterstones: not only formulaic, but profoundly dumbed down. At postgraduate Masters level. In the first MA, she used The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. In the second MA, (another) she used learning-style exercises a colleague described as what he did when he was 15 years old. I refused to engage with the first situation – and later, that lecturer commissioned me for a university project. I didn’t even attend the second MA situation; I saw what was coming and wanted no part of it. My colleague walked out: it was frustrating, condescending, and ultimately just a waste of time.
Improvisation is a dynamic related not only to music, but also to educational theory and practice where it concerns creativity. In my undergraduate degree about twenty years ago, I was annoyed at the constraints imposed on me in the form of the conventional academic model. I reasoned that the books I was reading were not confined to that model; they were more creative authorial works, with original ideas that could not properly be embedded in a citation context. I realise now, but didn’t understand then, I didn’t have the experience or ability to do the same thing: I needed the citation model as a foundation for my work. However, no one acknowledged me on this point or tried to support me. There’s a scene in the film Dead Poets Society that summarises this issue. Robin Williams (Keating), lover of poetry, teaching, and carpe diem, works hard to get the boys to find their creative voice and express it. One of his teaching seniors disagrees: he advises that it’s his job to teach a strong foundation leading to a competent if not excellent graduation, beyond which and only then can the student seek creative expression. So the question is then when, exactly, are you supposed to be creative, improvising, and original, and does anyone care or support you on this? Throughout the vast majority of the education system, the answer is ‘never’ and ‘no’. The government has acknowledged that creative output is a large part of the UK economy, and has recently supported substantial and excellent programmes trying to understand and implement it better. The commisison I referred to above concerned a web site I built designed for teachers and artists working in the area of creativity, called www.thinkingsite.co.uk (no longer exists). But for the most part, what’s happening is this: fostering creativity is used as a strategy to benefit disaffected and disadvantaged sectors of society. That’s OK, but actually it needs addressing in a more mainstream context.
My commissioning lecturer summarised the situation in two ways, that the government have acknowledged the importance of creativity but don’t understand what it is – and I’m deliberately blending here the two concepts of ‘improvisation’ and creativity’. It is difficult to understand and define, but it’s possible nonetheless to develop constructive schemas. Bailey says about improvisation:
The lack of precision over its identification is, if anything, increased when we come to the music (jazz). It has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of free improvisation are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it (99).
In the sleeve notes to the beautiful and best-selling jazz collection of all time, Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis, musician John Burns compares jazz to an oriental art of calligraphy built on immediate spontaneity. It’s probably sumi-e he’s thinking of, although he doesn’t actually give it a name: Once a stroke is painted, it cannot be changed or erased. This makes sumi-e a technically demanding art-form requiring great skill, concentration, and years of training This is an excellent summary of what jazz/improvisation is: poetic, concise, and accurate. And the oriental allusion is not without significance. Bailey says:
The emergence of free improvisation as a cohesive movement in the early sixties and its subsequent continuous practice could excite, I imagine, a profusion of sociological, philosophical, religious and political explanations, but I shall leave the exposition of these to authors with the appetite and ability for it (99)
Appetite? It’s tasty food. Bruce Lee discovered and developed an improvising approach to martial arts and blazed a creative trail in that world, challenging the status quo: the vast majority of karate and kung fu training is a production-line method suitable for commercial advantage and pedagogic convenience, unsuitable for personal empowerment which challenges the feudal authoritarianism on which martial art culture rests. It’s crap, basically: I’ve seen a great deal of it and it blocks and impedes learning and growth, both physically and psychologically. Lee developed a series of aphorisms with ideas like this, expressing the personal and improvising aesthetic: “Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own; all fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability; the truth is outside of all fixed patterns; always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself; do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it”.
Lee got his ideas from Zen and people like JD Krishnamurti. It was revolutionary, and yet paradoxically he’d said nothing new; what he did essentially was reinstate an attitude and pedagogy that was denied and kept secret in Oriental post-feudal society. In Japanese martial arts for example, you find a philosophy expressed in the words sho, ha, ri, referring to three training stages where the first is learning the foundation, the second is mastering it, and the third is improvisation. Bruce Lee made people very angry; some think his untimely death at 33 was the result of a secret ‘death touch’ adminstered by people annoyed to see him give out the secrets.
What Bailey says about music also applies to education and the martial arts: for much of the time, the third improvising stage of creativity simply disappears. It’s more challenging than the earlier production-line stages, more empowering, and the artist who pursues it has a creative ownership which is intrinsically rebellious.
It’s arguable of course to what extent improvisation is evident in jazz, and this has further historical dimensions. Does jazz in 2007 have the same improvising quality as it did in its early New Orleans days? Bailey is pessimistic:
It was probably during the 1950s that jazz first gave signs of running out of steam. By the 1960s it had moved into a series of changes which led Rex Stewart in 1965 to prophesy ‘in the foreseeable future most of the vitality and beauty of this US art form will be found only in other countries in an adulterated form’ (64).
Bailey describes the change to “simple mechanics” based on “tunes in time” (64) which no doubt makes more sense to a musicologist than me, but I can tell the difference between Art Blakey and Miles Davis (two of my favourites) and what is now popularly called ‘jazz’, some of which is just easy-listening instrumental. He says “Jazz, whatever the reasons, seems to have changed from an aggressive, independent, vital, searching music to being a comfortable reminder of the good old days” (66).
Two points, though, about ‘the good old days’. First, it may be true that what appears as improvisation is mostly just a reconfiguration of what’s already been done; someone like Derek Bailey is more qualified than I am to say that. But secondly, the point is for anyone listening to jazz maybe the ‘good old days’ is all we have left of it so it’s understandable if it’s still played and enjoyed, from a time when “aggressive” and “independent” improvisation was alive.
Keith Jarrett is someone people either like or don’t like. He doesn’t come from the conventional jazz culture or lineage, and had for example a classical piano training. I find that mostly irrelevant, and his understanding and appreciation of improvisation is exceptional. I find his physical mannerisms rather irritating, and the same for his grunting and moaning which is only very marginal here – a clip showing him in improvising mode, prefaced with some of his ideas about this subject:
Comment
While the archival, looking back nature of much jazz playing today is worrying, there are still a lot of young players still striving to say something new.
— Peter Bacon · Feb 25, 09:00 PM · §
Hi Peter, yes I’ve been informed (by a jazz artist) that Wynton Marsalis in particular is advocating the re-establishment of traditional values. I think that’s OK when it means let’s not forget the old school stuff and what was achieved – and continue to enjoy it, in my case – but if it becomes a fixed establishment culture, that’s something else.
I do value the innovative, improvising spirit of jazz – it’s what got it going in the first place, and is part of what we appreciate now when we look back and see new creative expression, that sometimes was rejected when it first appeared. Someone else advised me (I’m not an expert) that this applied to bebop: people said it wasn’t jazz. And we now recognise it as one of the great jazz categories.
At the same time though, I think there’s a danger with an ‘anything goes’ approach which appears as new and creative, but actually just dilutes what jazz is about with other kinds of music.
— James Lomax · Feb 25, 09:20 PM · §
nice work. i´ll be back.
greets
thomas
— thomas cheney · Mar 8, 01:53 PM · §
Really good to find sites where experimental music is taken seriously. The more i explore the less i know!?
— Mark Wells · Jun 8, 06:42 PM · §