Experience before Understanding: Some Thoughts About Improvised Music

Free improvisation has been at the heart of my music making for most of my adult and performing life. It is one of those practices that you can do for decades but not actually improve on your abilities. Wary of that, I’ve tried to be as analytical as possible with my own practice of free improvisation, whether solo or with others. I don’t know if this level of analysis has ever had a meaningful impact on my sound, but it has certainly changed how I talk about it over the years.

The appeal of this for a lot of people I speak to is the “newness” of it. When listening to improvised music, you are theoretically hearing a sound or combination of sounds that has never been heard before. That’s obviously not the only appeal, otherwise people wouldn’t record music in this style, or form groups to do it in, etc. But encountering that “newness-above-all” attitude early on in my improvising life was one of the things that made me determined to figure out how to tell the difference from one improvised set to another, besides an affinity for the instruments being played or the people manipulating them.

A Year Joyful and Tragic: An Explanation of why I play Irish Music

I’m coming up on a year anniversary of going to a local Irish session, and of really working on acquiring a repertoire and vocabulary in this style. During that time I’ve learned - certainly not mastered - somewhere around 120 tunes. I use the ‘tunebook’ feature of the website The Session to help keep track of these things, but some of the tunes added are placeholders, so those don’t count. 

I can’t say completely what compelled me to do it. My only session experience was at this same session near me, in 2014, when I had absolutely no Irish repertoire, but a curiosity, and a desire to push myself further into folk traditions after spending some time at a Swedish fiddle workshop (also playing accordion) and getting my butt kicked by the details. I did what I now understand to be the mostly verboten thing of sort of ‘busking along’ with tunes I don’t know - and played a Swedish polska for them, by request. But I did also record, and from that recording, painstakingly transcribed a single tune. Not knowing any of the vocabulary, having very little idea of the ornamentation or variation that is often employed, this was not an easy process, and my attempts to actually learn the tune suffered for that reason. (I later learned, in this attempt, that the tune was called the Wicklow Hornpipe, or Sonny Murray’s, and actually learned the tune properly).