A QUICK LOOK AT THE NATURE OF IMPROVISATION/COMPOSTION

I recently had the pleasure of spending a fantastic week at the end of June attending the Lute Society of America’s biannual seminar in Cleveland. The performances were drop-dead beautiful and the lectures, workshops and classes where fascinating. What was particularly dear to my heart, though, was the general trend of much of the discussion, among students and faculty alike, which was focused on the nature of improvisation and strategies for approaching it, and its relationship with the compositional process. Of course, this was as applied to music in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th centuries. To my delight, though, we found that there is basically no difference between how improvisation was approached in the past and how it is approached today in jazz, blues and popular music. Sitting among some superb musicians and some of the leading scholars in Early Music, I found that many of the issues under discussion were exactly the same as what we used to hash out decades ago, as improvising blues musicians, over bottles of cheap wine in a basement studio in Brooklyn; indeed, we found the answers to some burning questions back then and I was able to take many of the conclusions we had come to and offer them as constructive contributions to our discussions in Cleveland. There were a number of surprised nods of agreement among some very learned heads on the observations and solutions I offered. We discovered that as musicians, regardless of academic background, we all face the same challenges when improvising and composing and are all equally creative in dealing with the concepts associated with the two, and their application. Where can the fine line between composition and improvisation be found? Can it even be found anywhere at all? It’s a fuzzy line, seemingly more of a messy smudge that obliterates the end of the one word and the beginning of the other (and vice versa). I’m not sure if they are as much two distinct forms of expression as they are just dual aspects of one primary creative process. The answers to questions like this are never easy to sort out and more often than not, if not being impossible to answer, turn out to be a complex mess. I don’t expect to find all the answers here, but I do hope to explore some avenues of inquiry (...and to add to the confusion it pays to remember that things are not always as they seem, nor are they otherwise).
There are "compositions" that, as documents, may very well be no more than a record, a snapshot, so to speak, of an ongoing creative process of improvisation. This is a view shared in the visual arts by abstract expressionist painter Wilhelm deKooning. DeKooning felt that his paintings were never really finished, and that those canvases taken from his studio and exhibited publicly were only documenting a stage, a thin slice, of what was going on from day to day in his creative process. He felt that his life—spent in a constantly evolving act of painting—was his true artistic statement. The paintings, as documents, were incidental. It’s almost as if he viewed the whole concept of "the work of art" more as a verb than a noun. Ornette Coleman seems to share the same point of view: in the liner notes of his 1959 recording, Change of the Century, he states that, "In a certain sense there really is no start or finish to any of my compositions. There is a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving strands of thought that link all my compositions together. Maybe it’s something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock". It’s interesting to note that Coleman, the consummate improviser whose recorded works are largely improvised, refers to his works as "compositions". Apparently the line was pretty fuzzy for him, too. This begs to question as to when does one stop calling the process of creating "improvising" and call it "composition"?
As far as the documentation of an improvised performance, Derek Bailey—that arch-improviser—in his book, Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, adds this to the discussion: "Essentially, music is fleeting; its reality is its moment of performance. There might be documents that relate to that moment—score, recording, echo, memory—but only to anticipate or recall it." On the basis of this statement we can conclude that music, by necessity, has no choice but to be experienced as an ongoing endeavor, in the flux of time, from performance to performance; it, puts the real experience of music in the forefront and squarely in the "Now". This is fertile ground for the performance of improvised music. Bailey also says that improvised music is best heard live and then forgotten as soon as possible, the implication being that the more you listen to a recording of an improvised performance, the less you’ll get out of it. While I don’t deny that there are real benefits (and real pleasure) to be derived from listening to the recording of a hot solo by your favorite performer, over and over, it’s also true that the overall artistic value of recording such performances can indeed be a hit-and-miss thing (eg. "Emergency", by Tony Williams & co.). Often it is most valuable solely as a reference document of or for the performer.
Be that as it may, the practice of documenting improvisation is not a new concept and goes back a surprisingly long way. We can catch a glimpse of it with the recercar. Recercars are written records of improvised performances that occur most commonly in the lute repertoire of the 16^th century. In 1508, Joan Ambrosio Dalza, published a number of abstract, free form recercars that play primarily as improvisations. By mid century, Francesco da Milano was publishing recercars that, while still retaining a loose feel, come across as being much more organized. As time progressed the form of the recercar became formalized to the point where it morphed into the fugue. It, in effect, became an established compositional form and virtually unrecognizable from it progenitor.
I believe there is a direct correlation between the recercar, as it appears on the printed page, and, say, an ECM recording of Ralph Towner playing a live concert of improvisations. They didn’t have audio recording equipment in the 1500s and couldn’t catch everything, but what they did was write down is what they remembered of an improvised performance. They wrote down their best licks. To take it a step further, they may have strung some of their best licks together, in a pleasing way (and in a satisfying way, possessing a greater measure of internal rhetorical coherency), to form a composition. In my own experience, blues solos that began as improvisations in performance eventually, after playing them literally over a thousand times, were edited to the extent that they became composed solos. I could very well have written them down and called them recercars. There is a clear connection here that spans centuries. Examining the evolution of the recercar throughout the 16^th century nicely illuminates the close symbiotic relationship that improvisation and composition share; it serves as an archetype of what goes on within the mind of the individual musician. The process of thoughtful organization of spontaneous musical ideas, as illustrated in these works, is probably the clearest link I can find in the fuzz between the two disciplines.
Crawford Young, being the genius that he is, approaches the issue from the opposite direction, saying, " Improvisation is really only memorized composition". Seab Meador once told me that he learned how to play guitar by listening to as many records as he could and stealing as many riffs off them as he was able. In this fashion he eventually built an aural library, a lexicon of licks that he could draw from when improvising. I believe every improvising musician can relate to this as we have all done the same thing. The really fun and creative part is when the moment comes, usually in performance, where you morph those riffs into something else: something all your own. These are the moments that you eventually find and develop your own voice, where you find ideas that you want to preserve, where you may have the urge to compose a vehicle with which to preserve them. Thus we have moved from composition to improvisation and back to composition; we’ve come full circle, and the process will renew itself when someone hears our riffs and adds them to their own improvisational vocabulary.
I’ve also heard improvisation referred to as "spontaneous composition", but I believe this may be stretching it a bit too far. Composition implies intent; it implies a desire to preserve a specific musical idea for duplication in future performances. A purely improvised performance expresses no such intention, it functions completely in the "now". True, ideas born of improvisation–truly inspired ideas–that make a deep impression remain to become parts of possible forthcoming composed works. But in this capacity they are not spontaneous, they are willfully manipulated. Anyone who has improvised an inspired solo knows that doing it is not a conceptual thing, it’s an experiential thing. The thinking is peripheral; it’s really a matter of doing. It’s spontaneous. Is it composition? I don’t think so. It’s a matter of expressing something else, and what hat that something else is, is a matter for an essay all by itself.
This little excursion has the potential to quickly turn into a book–or at the very least a series of posts. I’m just getting started. Every time I put down an idea it generates three more. As far as I can tell, improvisation and composition are intertwined in the ultimate symbiotic relationship. Although it often appears that one cannot exist without the other, I won’t go so far as to say that all composition is the product of improvised ideas; there are always exceptions. I’m not yet satisfied as to whether they exist as two independent entities, or as two aspects of the same creative principle, or both. There are too many factors to consider to come to any immediate conclusion. So, for now, I’ll leave it at this.

FANA

I



Cool dark waftings, just slightly moist,

slow movements of air hovering

in the clear black spaces

between the upper rafters inside the cathedral.

Serenity of the tomb; the dead.

Cold stone buttresses.

Limestone arches hidden behind

the heads of pillars in the wings.

At the heart of the cross,

at its very center, its altar,

the atmosphere is pierced

by the breath of angels.

Celestial glow.

Stone floor made radiant

by sunlight filtering through

the stained glass cupola above

and floating down slowly,

                     slowly,

slowly on the backs of sifting dust,

the minutae kicked here and there

by Brownian movement, randomly,

settling, ashen.  Shed moth wing scales.

Finally to illuminate the polished marble floor

in a circle of sacred light,

edges fuzzy and fading

to silent shadow along the stone molding

in the corners.

But the circle,

the light,

has cracked the roof of the sepulcher in spring,

laid open the vault door,

and let in the scent of lilacs,

and the rustling of new leaves

fresh in the warming breeze.

It is a smile.

A beat of the Divine Heart.

Mind and Hope.

II

Behind, from below comes the sound of a horn

reverberating along the tiled walls,

a cacophony of shuffles,

foot falls, following after

my steady trudge after

all the others have faded away

down the corridor.

I am alone with the whispering ghosts of melody,

the thoughts of a man playing a horn

alone.

                                           Saxophone,

baby's wail, child's singsong,

lovers' moans and orgasms,

souls of urban men and women.

Soul of a black Heart.

Sound disembodied

as if the man had grasped

the spark of divinity and swallowed it,

inhaled it deep into his gut

and, with chakras swollen and blazing,

until his whole body and

soul were charged with its energy

and he could contain it no longer,

put horn to mouth and blew,

exhaled this power,

this transcendent smell of hallway piss,

taxis home at dawn,

spare change and turnstyles clicking,

muffled in the heated blast of

air-conditioner exhaust,

and suit after suit after suit

are stuffed in as doors slide closed.

Exhaled and gave all

for free.

I know him:

his thin, angular black face,

buffed, black leather skull cap,

small grey goatee

and horn perched like a brass bird

springing from his mouth.

Singing.

Tail grasped berween white teeth and

black lips.  Serene stance.  Singing reed.

The spirit of Africa hidden

in the simple mystery of what lies

behind his sunglasses, in his eyes.

He plays in the old style

with a quick, shallow vibrato.

But he really doesn't care much about style.

He doesn't have to.

He plays the tender standards,

the old standbys, the naturals.

But he plays them fresh,

he plays them new.

III

Stopping, bathed in sound,

I close my eyes

and still see the holy geometry

etched in the crimson light on the

insides of my eyelids, in a

stained glass mosaic of capillaries.

Corpuscles.  Small flashes of royal blue.

White and yellow.  Forest green.

The figures come to me:

kneeling in a garden by a rock

with lambs, robes and children,

a throng of illuminated faces looking over shoulders.

Translucent.  Radiant,

the low morning light fresh behind them,

shining, silent.

In silence, so swiftly dissipated like

the echo of a cough

or the grate of a shoe on concrete.

Decrescendo; diminuendo.

And finally, the dull click of the turnstyle

or the redundancy of the exit gate clacking closed.

Sterile sounds.

Alone with their echoes.

Only alone and no more.

Sometimes in the rush between stations

on the express,

in the pumping, urgent rhythms of the

shaman wheels, I can hear an

harmonica wailing.

Wailing the blur of steel I beams,

the rushing wall of forced air

at the tunnel's mouth.

The thin reed sound.  The Pan sound,

most fitting for this place

at this speed, stopping at this station.

I get off the train and as the roar recedes

the bare walled catacombs

are left in peace.

The Saints, beggared and in tatters,

plead quietly along the gutters.

The rest continue their pilgrimage,

heads bowed, humble, obedient.

And, eyes closed for a moment,

the light comes back;

the shield is buffed in the sun

on the steppes, where the wheat grows

golden and rippling.

The breeze cools my forehead

and tickles my eyelashes

while my own feeble steps

bring me higher and higher

closer to the open, to cloud,

to sky.

IV

The trains roar below

one after another, a

numbing rumble of mass.

Steel on steel.

Steel disks of wheels

screeching on the rails around

the turns.  Screaming.  Bellowing.

Twenty Third Street and Ely.  Union Square.

Howard Beach.  One Hundred and Twenty Fifth Street.

Watches, shirtsleeves, tense hands and

newspapers.

Minds wiped clean among the broken glass,

skulls crammed with the shifting light of a

television on the livingroom wall.

Mashed potatoes, roast chicken.

Boiled vegetables.

Uneasy pupae hurtling through

the blackness of the tunnel.

Taught cocoons.  Sensitive.

The dead are fallen on the platform,

the dying wander absently among the ruins,

the conductor mouths, the horn

blows three short blasts.

Bedford Avenue.  Smith and Ninth Streets.

Fourth Avenue.

Archways and rafters shatter,

splinter and fly apart.

Lofty spaces collapse,

fading with the whistle blasts

on the periphery, past my temples.

Cromwell's armored citizen army has

smashed the stained glass windows

of all the old churches,

and they have been replaced with plain clear glass.

Only dim fading memories remain.

Only visions vainly glimpsed at.

And finally, all alone again

with the sound of the horn,

the click of the turnstyles in the dim light,

in the corridor under the stained mosaic of cracked tiles:

False place names.  Tag.  Sign.

And me, alone,

one among the wiggling mass,

to worm my way out,

up into the fetid air

to where the wheat no longer grows

on the remains of where once

a cathedral had been;

and where once angels, wings folded down silken backs,

sang in tier upon tier,

and light touched and turned all to gold

there remains only a circle, sacred,

glowing on the station floor.