Or maybe Kool-Aid man?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Archive for the ‘Improvisation’ Category
Sometimes I feel like experimental improvisers can be a lot like alcoholics—they don’t know when to stop. I was going to keep these thoughts to myself but something happened during Mobtown Modern’s performance of Cobra last week that made me want to put it out there: I think I became the person that you’ll read about further down in this post. We’d been playing for close to an hour—not quite by my watch—and the performance could/might have reached a logical conclusion point. But I was so excited about what the group might be able to do if we did just one more cobra, I turned to the audience and asked, “Should we do one more?” And then there was this line from Baltimore Sun critic Tim Smith’s review of the show:
It might have been wiser to quit while they were ahead, though; by the time they played the last round, the diversity of contributions had lessened considerably.
Ugh. Let me explain a little more. I go to a lot of improv shows and there has been a high frequency of times I leave vowing to never speak of what I’d just witnessed and wishing for that 2 hours of my life back. Now that’s not to say that there couldn’t have been some supremely beautiful or bona fide compelling moments within that two hours, but I think that the old adage “you should leave your audience wanting more” should start being heeded. Maybe I’m being a little unfair, but if I’d heard a coherent, cohesive one-hour, or 45-min, or hell, even a 30-min improvisation recently I’d be less inclined to raise my voice.
In most of the long form improvisations I’ve heard in the not so distant past there seemed to have been several moments when the session could have ended to make a cohesive statement. Instead, these cadence points arrive and inevitably someone on stage gets a little too self-indulgent and mistakes the natural end of a piece for a big solo opportunity. What follows is generally a very similar process to what had just unfolded: 1) the players start mimicking the sounds that are already happening, 2) then they gradually begin introducing something contrasting, 3) and commence a really long build-up that may peak up to 10 times, 4) followed by a very slow decrease in activity and volume, and finally 5) the audience sits rigidly during an uncomfortably long silence praying that no one on stage is inspired any more. I love it when the musicians finish one of these long pieces and then look around at each other on stage and then invariably say, “Should we do another one?” That’s the best. Though I believe that nearly every audience member wants to scream, “NO!!!!!!” nobody ever says anything. Then the players decide to do a “short one.” And the band plays on. And on. And on.
But rather than just complain here, I’d like to make a sugggestion: what about a time limit? (David Byrne makes a really great point about time constraints here. Thanks to Bill Mill for that tip.) Rather than basking in the comfort that you can ramble on for over 30 minutes hoping that inspiration may strike if it’s failed to up to that point, why not try and aim to create a solid, focused, complete, and meaningful statement in, let’s say, 10 minutes? Hardcore folks probably won’t like this idea since it imposes an unwelcome parameter in a musical genre that tends to shun any kind of constraint. But I think that would be more challenging for the players. And likely more engaging for the listeners. Parameters like duration (of the shorter variety) might be worthy considerations for free improvisers who haven’t matured enough yet to sustain a long form session.
There are two types of experiences to keep in mind here—the experience of the audience member and the experience of the performer—and I’ve been on both sides. The joy and excitement you feel as a performer during an improvisation might not translate to joy and excitement to an audience member. How do you know when you’ve reached that point? Are audiences just stupid if they don’t “get” what you’re playing and can’t stay focused? Whose fault is it? When does self-indulgence become over-indulgence?
As an undergraduate music student, I had the great honor of studying with the legendary saxophonist Yusef Lateef for a time. Yusef’s on another level in terms of the thought process and execution of improvised music. Notice that I said “improvised music” rather than jazz or bebop. (His own term for the kind of music he plays is autophysiopsychic music, meaning music which comes from one’s physical, mental, and spiritual self. Read all about it here.)
Yusef’s got an incredible wealth of knowledge, but is extremely picky about terminology. Jazz, he contends, is a deragatory term derived from a colloquialism for the male ejaculate. And he professes to not know what bebop or any other stylistic label is or sounds like. If you go to Yusef and want to learn to play bebop, you should tell him that you’d like to learn to play in the style of Charlie Parker or Cannonball Adderley, and so on. Once you get on the same page w/r/t terminology you’ll be fine.
For Yusef, improvisation is complete and utter spontaneity. If you begin playing with preconceived ideas or parameters of any sort, you are not truly improvising. As I got deeper into my studies with Yusef, I said to him that it seems as though the more you learn—the more licks you play in twelve keys, the more vocabulary you internalize, the more tunes you know, the more scales and patterns and patterns and patterns you drill, the more great artists you transcribe and learn to perfect their every nuance—the harder it becomes to truly improvise. His response was simply, “You understand.”
I’ve always wrestled with that issue as an improviser and to know that it was something that concerned even a great master made me feel better. When I play an improvised solo in a jazz style, I often feel as though I am putting everyone on. Like it’s not really “improvised” because I’ve practiced so hard to be able to make all the changes in a stylistically correct and hopefully somewhat hip way. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel this way when I hear other jazz players improvise. To the contrary, I even find it exciting to listen to the best Brecker clone even if I know every single lick that he/she is ripping off. I just could never find my voice as a jazz artist the way I feel as though I’ve found it as an interpreter of composed music.
Yet for the past couple of years, I’ve been improvising in a non-jazz style. (I’ll be doing it at tonight’s Mobtown Modern show.) This type of playing suits me. It allows me to draw on a sonic vocabulary that is not constrained by the parameters of style. I play what I hear. It’s exhilarating, refreshing, and utterly freeing. And it’s more along the lines of what I was searching for when I studied with Yusef.
An aside: Here’s a funny story Yusef once told me in a lesson. One day he was walking down a street in New York City when who should happen to be approaching him but Sun Ra. They were friends and so Yusef said, “Hey man, what’s going on?” Sun Ra replied, “I just got back from Venus, man.” The look in Yusef’s eye was priceless as he told me this. He thought clearly that Sun Ra must be nuts but he decided to humor him. “Oh yeah, man. Well, what was going on there,” he replied, laughing as he recalled the encounter. Now some people might think Yusef is on a different planet but his reaction to Sun Ra’s statement that he’d just returned from some interplanetary travel proves that his feet are planted firmly on the planet Earth.
Tomorrow night (Wednesday) at the Metro Gallery, the Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern music series will present a performance of John Zorn’s infamous game piece Cobra. Unlike a lot of the music Mobtown Modern presents, there’s no actual written score for Cobra—the players in the ensemble improvise all the musical material. However, far from being an improvisational free-for-all, the improvisations (or ‘cobras’) are shaped and guided by a strict and elaborate set of rules. Here they are:
I’m going to assume that unless you’ve been involved in a performance of the piece before, that the “score” for Cobra you see above makes absolutely no sense. No worries. As a matter of fact, we (the ensemble and yours truly) spent a good amount of time in our early rehearsals just familiarizing ourselves with the rules, clarifying them, and actually creating exercises that would help us translate them into sound. Before getting into the details of each command though, let’s take a quick look at how a performance of Cobra is actually run.
When you really get down to it, the rules of engagement that Zorn lays out for Cobra are basically a set of parameters that allow the musicians to shape their improvisation. Of course, choosing parameters before starting a free improvisation is nothing unique to Cobra; it’s a common improvisational strategy that allows the musicians to focus their performance a bit. What is unique to Cobra, however, is that these parameters, or rules, aren’t chosen by the musicians, but rather dictated to the musicians by a single leader, or “prompter.” The individual chosen as the prompter brandishes different cue cards, each containing one of the commands, and then gives a downbeat, which signifies the beginning of whichever command is on the card. By doing this, the prompter can exert almost complete control over the formal outcome of the improvisation. (N.B. Remember, there is no music written down; it’s all improvised.)
Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it actually gets a little more complicated fun. Though the prompter has the final say in what command is put into play, the musicians in the group have the ability to make suggestions to the prompter about which cue card should be used next. If you look back at the “score,” you’ll notice that each set of cards is identified not only by color, but also by a part of the body as well as a number. Here’s an example:
One finger to the mouth doesn’t mean to keep the noise down, it means that the guy who should probably comb his hair is suggesting that the prompter call the “Pool” card. What’s that? Well, rather than make this a completely epic post by explaining each command in this space, why not take a gander at the annotated photo set over at Mobtown Modern’s Flickr account, where you’ll find pictures of each one of the cards along with explanations about what they mean. And, of course, to see them in action be sure to stop by the Metro Gallery tomorrow night at 8pm!
Update: Click here to listen to yours truly and Contemporary Museum Executive Director Irene Hofmann talking with Tom Hall on Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast about tomorrow’s performance of Cobra.
The Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern Music Series presents John Zorn’s COBRA this Wednesday (February 24) at 8 p.m. at the Metro Gallery (1700 N. Charles Street). Tickets are $10 general admission and $5 for Contemporary Museum members and students with a valid ID.
