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.
What I settled on, or what I keep coming back to most often, was this idea of musicality. I never understood it as a kid when the strict Ukrainian piano teacher of my youth talked about it - but apparently I was capable of it sometimes. Learning to apply some of these frameworks to improvised music was a lesson in abstraction. Improvised music can truly be anything, due to the fact that an improviser can come from any tradition and bring that with them into their music - but probably by the numbers, there’s more of it with high levels of volume and sonic density than the opposite. And within that I started to be able to hear phrasing, line, rhythm, harmony. The ability of human beings to project patterns into chaos is a curious skill. I also don’t know if I would be able to improvise without it.
The seeds of this were planted in the 6th grade when my mother presented me with a copy of Pharoah Sanders’ Karma, which, anchored by a 30+ minute version of “The Creator Has A Master Plan”, was probably the closest to jazz she and her family ever enjoyed growing up. It came at a time when buying new music was a 2-3x yearly occurrence rather than a sometimes daily one as it is in my adult life, so I cherished it, even the bits that seemed chaotic or noisy to my inexperienced ears. When a friend’s mother overheard me listening to this around the same time, she denounced the screaming saxophone as “not music, just noise”. And at that point I dug my heels in, listening even deeper for the evidence to confirm my conviction that she was wrong.
There are many people who are very good at writing about this type of thing, or at least are well practiced in it. Most of my consideration of this happens in the commute to and from a gig, alone, and almost never spoken aloud. A lot of them feel like thunderous revelations while swirling around in my head, but then I sort them out enough to get them on paper and I feel like I’m writing a grade school book report. I recognize that there is an academic-level conversation going on about the subject of improvised music that I should probably be paying attention to, and I’m sure once I finally get to Joe Morris’ book “Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music”, I’ll probably be due to update this post.
On a recent commute, I was listening to Alice Coltrane’s Transfiguration, a live album from 1978. This is not an album of free improvisation, but it has extended sections of free playing, moving away from and back toward themes that feel rooted in Gospel and Blues. I’ve listened closely to this album probably something like 50 times since I got it - it is probably somewhere in the top 15 of albums I’ve paid the most attention to. In part this is because of Alice’s voice as an improviser, which from my first hearing struck me right away as having a searching quality. Where other voices were more declamatory, telling you how it was, Coltrane seemed to be searching for something. From that point, I knew I wanted to be able to ask the questions like she was asking. And it seemed like free improvisation would be the context in which to ask those kinds of questions.
Of course, free music has developed quite a bit since the 70s, to the point that when people are deliberately trying to evoke what free music sounded like in the 70s, they often use signifiers in the descriptions of their playing - things like “Energy Music” - “Cosmic” or “Spiritual” Jazz. Tenor saxophonist Ras Moshe laughs when those term is brought up - “as if the whole lineage of jazz isn’t spiritual?” I think he’s right in a deeper way. There certainly has been a lot of crass and commercially produced jazz that would seem to serve no purpose besides providing camouflage for the passage of time. But a lot of what has moved me the most has some quality of searching to it - not always necessarily couched in a spiritual framework, but containing a certain restlessness about things as they are.
That searching is really important, and to me it is independent of the actual novelty of the sound. Listening for that quality is what enables me to like some freely improvised records more than others, to favor certain players or groups more than others, in music that is otherwise aesthetically similar. It’s shocking to me, in turn, not that there is music that exists that is loud and chaotic and punk as fuck in attitude that sounds utterly regressive to me - but how often it happens.
When I try my hand at free playing, whether alone or in groups, I usually think about one of two things:
- the idea that I have an inner voice and language that I am trying to “learn how to speak” through the abstraction of musical concepts such as pitch and rhythm - and that learning to be a better improviser comes from clearing and maintaining the pathways of synapse, nerve, and bone that take the inner voice to your instrument.
- That I am, instead of dealing with the dissolution of musical values as being somehow opposed to the idea of free expression in music, trying to celebrate every simultaneous possibility that exists out of what is happening. In this framework, becoming a better improviser is about testing your perception, your framing, your decision making, in order to make better sense of the options others give you.
These aren’t mutually exclusive categories for me, but it is easier for me to understand the former when playing solo and the latter when improvising with others. The former seems like presenting a snapshot of a continuous process. The latter is about moments, and what you can do to work with (or against) others to shape a moment.
There is a strain of thought in improvisation that really challenges me, though, and that is the idea that Free improvisation is distinct from music - to the point that any attempts to introduce musical frameworks to free playing are inherently a dilution of the concept. I struggle with this in part because it gives the notion of Free Improvisation a godlike unattainability, given we are usually doing this on tools created for music-making. But I also struggle with seeing free improv as being distinct from other musical practices, as not being on the same continuum as traditional music or dungeon synth or the songs I write. To me, they all require some manner of choice in key, tempo, density, and volume, even if the options may include “none” or “all”. Free improvisation to me is a celebration of the world of possibilities that I had once been taught were meant to stay distinct - rather than a rejection of that world. I will always retain the memory of Pharoah Sanders working toward the altissimo range of his horn from the restrained spiritual that begins “Creator”. Freedom might always be defined by the boundaries you first witnessed someone transcend.
But I see that for some, that attempt to distinguish free improvisation and hold it apart from other music (or indeed, from music itself) is a part of that searching quality. I can and do improvise people with this attitude, and we can do a set that is satisfying to both sensibilities. This works when there is an interest in communication that overrides any of the fancy philosophical underpinnings of what we each believe about our improvisation practice. Usually the only times I feel genuinely dissatisfied with improvised music, playing or listening, is when there seems to be no interest in communication at all. When the sonic information being shared by two or more players doesn’t change in response to what others are doing - it’s like soliloquies from multiple plays being read at once.
I have to take some responsibility here - I have contributed to many a bad set by simply being in a weird mood, by making assumptions or pre-judgments about other players. In those cases I feel like I’ve already described the music before it has happened, rather than observing and participating in the music that IS HAPPENING. In this case it’s like working backwards from an outcome I’m not invested in.
So listening to “Transfiguration” for the 51st time on the way to the recent gig, I found that I was still hearing something unanswered in Alice Coltrane’s searching. I projected a different pattern onto a stream of notes I had heard played dozens of times before, heard rhythm and lines in places that seemed previously devoid of them. It was as new in that moment as the first time I’d heard it, as new as the sets I sometimes catch at the bookstore and arts collective that has hosted improvised music since I moved to this city something like 17 years ago now. The notes and gestures were the same as they’ve always been on that album. My ears were different.
I like to think that my own improvising contains some of that searching quality, if only because I perceived a similar quality in all the players that truly moved me. But I know that sometimes my restlessness with the way things are sometimes overwhelms the ability to ask the questions I think I should be asking. Artistic analysis can have diminishing returns. And in those moments I remember - music moved me long before I ever thought to try and understand why it did.
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