Theory & Impro Practicing Improvisation

[Colin the Bear]

My first CD player with A-B repeat button gave me the "Where have you been all my life?" feeling. Not so good for the neighbours when I was learning "Take five". 🙉🤬

 

[Pete Thomas]

My first CD player with A-B repeat button gave me the "Where have you been all my life?" feeling. Not so good for the neighbours when I was learning "Take five". 🙉🤬

Could have been worse, my neighbors had to put up with me learning Ascension.

 

[thomsax]

This meant (for me) a whole lot of 'tape playing, stopping, rewinding and re-playing'.

A creative person is helping out to "practice improvising". I have always been open for new inputs. When I was playing football, working as chef, playing the saxophone, building ....... . I learned songs by recording, reel to reel, a song 8-10 times from the radio/grammophone. Less rewinding ..... . I also took down the speed on the reel to reel and played it an octave lower on sax. It helped me because lots of songs were in concert E and A, even concert B. I got used to play in F#/C#, B/F#, C#/G# without knowing what I did. I learned that later. My sax became best friends with the electric guitar. I played sax in a guitar style. This was a slow way to learn. The new technique/equipment is better but I often meet players that are good players but I think thier tone/sound is too mainstream.

When I moved to countryside I became a better player. I could play more sax. No neighbors within a distance of 800 meters. Is the way we live holding back sax players? I think so. The more I play the better I get. I like J.T. Brown (too early or too late with a heavy vibrato) and slide guitar.

 

[Pete Thomas]

• Some people feel that improvised music should be free from pre-conceived ideas and be spontaneous, in-the moment.
• Others feel that practicing licks and patterns (“all 12 keys!”) and doing transcribing is very important and is key to successful improvisation.

This seems to be basically describing two different genres, as opposed to improvising in general, or improvising in one specific genre.

The first point might apply to so-called free or avant garde jazz (or music).

Second point generally applies to mainstream jazz, blues, rock country, pop im pro which in nearly all cases has an underlying chord/harmonic structure - the simplest being one chord or a two-chord repeated vamp that you may get in funk or modal jazz typically.

I've been involved with both/all and I never minded admitting that when I was studying or doing jazz/blues impro it was not "pure" impro as I always had that structure to fit into and very often a "vocabulary" of existing licks or patterns which I used either because I couldn't think of anything else spontaneous or just to make it sound more authentic or generic.

What I do think is the less complex a harmonic structure, then the more genuinely creative I can be because I tend to think purely about melody - e.g. if there's just one chord the issue of wrong notes is not an issue because (a) I have an idea (almost subconsciously) of the notes that won't be wrong because I might know a basic scale or two that I can frame the melody with (but not exclusively)

Totally free music is of course very different because in that case I may or may not be thinking about melody, may be basing what I play around texture or other abstract concepts. Often it may be constrained by being reaction to other performers I am hearing.

But then also a lot of what people might call free music can very often have structure. For a while I was working with Maggie Nicols which was billed as, or assumed to be, free jazz but it was rare for a piece to have no pre conceived structure.

 

[Pete Effamy]

EDIT
This was in response to Mike M (post #13) about playing too many notes. For some reason the quote didn’t copy.

Whilst the point you make about playing too many (fast) notes could be about ego, in my experience it isn’t. It’s the simple fact that of them having little clue about any part of improvising over music which has lots of structure. Harmonic, melodic, time, arrangement and style / genre structures, plus playing in an engaging / perhaps emotive manner.

It’s “rabbit in the headlights” waffle. A fairly normal thing too and most of us will have succumbed unless a better - developed musical brain has been attained already.