We are still in the period which would be called summer reruns, so this is short, but it is something which has stuck in my mind, so it’s in line with the mission statement.
In fact it has stuck in my mind significantly better than the interview I read it in, so if any of my massively erudite readers can find the source I’d be really grateful. I think the interviewee was David Sanborn; if not him, then someone of roughly that status and genre; a solid and successful team player in the world of jazz, but not what you’d say was one of the first rank.
However, it was an unusually interesting and frank interview, as a sort of career retrospective. Sanborn (if it was he) reflected on the nature of improvisation. The things which stuck with me were:
Most of the time, improvised music is a bit of a trick. It’s not really being created in the moment; the player is just sticking together patterns and motifs from their memory and repertoire.
This is how everyone learns jazz, the idea is that yas you get better, you move on and transcend this stage so that you really are making it up anew as you go.
But actually, the whole thing is a cheat; everyone’s actually just playing their patterns. And it works; Sanborn (I think) suggested that most of his best and most famous work, live and on record, was put tighter like this.
However, there were a few moments across his career when he really did feel like he was doing it right and truly improvising.
And he believed that there were some people – a very small minority, perhaps not even all of the greatest names – who did it all the time.
As I say, it’s stuck with me; I think it’s potentially got a lot more application than just in music. And, of course, I think it might be very relevant in a world where we have systematic, algorithmic methods to reassemble atomic patterns, and a debate over whether they’re doing the same thing as we do when we’re genuinely creating.
Anyway, I hope you’re all enjoying the summer.
The great “free improv” guitarist Derek Bailey wrote a very interesting short book on Improvisation. A lot of it is about trying to break free of those habits and tricks (fail again, fail better…) - one crucial element is deep listening and responding to unexpected cues from the environment and other players. What he produced is barely listenable to most ears, because as listeners we expect themes and cues we can latch onto to make sense of what we are hearing. And even to people with a mild interest who have got over that unfamiliarity to see the virtue in his practice can find that it can all sound the same… But it’s a music which teaches you how to listen to it. Finding intelligibility in the freedom is difficult and also enjoyable once you accept the aesthetic premises.
Coming at it from the opposite end, I’m fairly sure I remember reading a part of Billy Connolly’s memoirs when he was talking about how he got into comedy, and having had absolutely no formal training or knowledge about how the industry generally worked, would instead just make up whatever on the night and go with that.
What was most interesting though is that it wasn’t until he started to achieve reasonable success and began talking to other comedians that he then realised that most other comedians *weren’t* doing that - he had absolutely no idea that pure improvisation was considered unusual and impressive and simply assumed it was the norm.
It would be interesting to know how much of this distinction is obvious to the true improvisers and how other, non improvised work ends up sounding to them.