To Start

Posted on Dec 7, 2009 in Improvising, Thoughts | Comments Off on To Start

I thought I’d post a few thoughts I had on improvisation a number of years ago as a start to my blog.

The nature of improvisation
08/26/2003

I have often wondered why it’s so difficult for improvising musicians to convey in words what the act of improvisation is.

As improvisers we may not know how to put into words what we are actually doing when we improvise; it’s a non-language based real-time experience that (I feel) is related to a certain personality type. In my mind true improvisation is when the player doesn’t know what he/she is going to do.  So how can you explain that? You are trying to be in the actual moment, reacting to what everyone else is doing and adding to that.

Musical improvisers at the highest level are true collaborators and understand the process of teamwork, collaboration, supporting and reacting to real-time changes in structure and motifs far more fully than any other collaborative working group; a software development team for example. I found it very strange when I was in a corporate environment how poorly teams worked together and how individual ego’s, personalities, and points of view would take precedence over doing what was really needed to get a project out the door.

This is not to say that this doesn’t happen when musicians get together, certainly ego’s and different interpretations make for a less fulfilling musical experience. But at it’s highest level there is a degree of collaboration that occurs that I like to think is the “communal mind” or “collective consciousness”. It’s when the musicians are communicating in a non-verbal method where their ego or sense of self fades away into a collective consciousness with the other musicians and the audience. To me this is why music is such a high art form and at its highest state is a self-less, ego-less experience.