Improvisation 12/22

I feel that this piece more or less represents my current approach to solo piano improvisation.

End of Semester Recap

I went through a lot of artistic change during my first semester at Oberlin. I couldn't even say what the net result of it is. If anything, I may have returned to where I started at the beginning of the semester. But if I have no more answers than I had in the fall, I sincerely believe that one can achieve meaningful personal growth through the process of asking and exploring the questions. Here is a summary of some of my important experiences and thoughts from the first semester.

Listening: My musical tastes have gotten all over the map, both literally and figuratively. A couple of the recordings that have had the most impact on me lately:

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar: Marwa and Bageshree

A recording of the great vina player live in Seattle, accompanied by two tampboura players. Dagar eschews dazzling virtuosity for a very slow, drifting, spiritual type of music. His sustained tones and long, beautiful glissandi are entrancing and deeply evocative. The music moves at an almost imperceptible pace, but when it reaches its peak, you'll feel it.

Paul Bley: Open, to Love

Bought this solo piano record a year or two ago, but never listened to it that much until recently. I've been deeply affected by the way Bley uses space in his music, letting a single note or chord hold out against nothingness and silence for what can be almost and excruciating interval of time. I've really taken to heart the way he combines subtle abstraction with poignant, melodicism.

Koachiro Miyata: Shakuhachi-The Japanese Flute

A release of solo shakuhachi music form Nonesuch record's excellent explorer series. Although it is in a very foreign musical language from mine, I found that this music really adhered to the same aesthetic that I was trying to follow, of simplicity and directness of emotion. This is beautiful and unpretentious music.

Thoughts on music:

-Anything can be an influence on you as an artist if you will let it. This does not always have to take the form of concrete musical ideas that one learns from listening to music, it can be merely an aesthetic or mood that inspires you to create art.

-Sometimes there is value to simply trying to do something different from everyone else. It is more important, though, to be yourself. If you let your art be an honest reflection of your natural self, then you will have a product that is original and different from anything else.

I should also mention again my work with the experimental music collective (a name we are considering changing, but it'll do for now.) Functioning in this group demands listening on a level beyond any other music I had previously played. Trying to fit in to the pure sound focus of the improvisations has forced me to develop many new extended techniques on the piano. The group had its first performance several weeks ago. Hopefully there will be more in the future.

I'll be spending the month of January in Oberlin (there are no classes that month.) I'll be playing my original jazz compositions with a trio featuring Zach Hobin on Bass and Zaire Dearden on drums. I'm very excited to be working with these two excellent musicians. I also hope for a lot of collaboration and experimentation with whichever other musicians will be around. It should be an extremely interesting month.

Hiatus

As of two days ago, I decided to take an extended break from any type of long-form composition. This decision may come a little late as I have already not written anything of that nature for over a month anyway, but it helps to make a declarative statement like that. Spending a lot of time with various composition students at Oberlin made me do some serious thinking about the way I write. I have never developed any kind of methodology to composing. I tend to begin at measure one with only a vague idea of what I want to write, and I keep going from there. This approach can be successful. I've written several pieces this way that I am quite proud of. My discussions with fellow students who have devoted themselves to being full-time composers has shown me that these people have a thought process that I don't have, the ability to hear music on a much more developed level before writing it. The process of writing is merely a realization of their ideas, rather than the process by which the music is created. Is this the only way to write music? I don't think so, but when I decide to resume long-form composition, I want to deeply reconsider the way I go about writing music. I will restrain myself from saying anything more about this right now, as I feel I have become maybe a bit too analytical about my artistic process lately. I already have enough to think about as I dramatically reconsider my approach to playing the piano, and my friends are probably getting tired of hearing me bitch about this stuff by now.

I will say, that I have exempted jazz composition from this hiatus. I feel comfortable doing this because it is really quite different. For the jazz musician, writing and playing are really two parts of the same process. Jazz composition has been quite fruitful for me lately, and I'm producing a body of work that I'm very happy with. I am currently hoping to explore this material as well as many of the pieces I've written over the last six months or so over January term at Oberlin, ideally making a recording of original music.

Practicing Freedom

I've recently had to seriously reconsider and adjust my attitude towards playing "free."

The most important accomplishment was to adjust a misconception that I had let take root in my mind, that playing free was not real piano playing. This does not mean that I didn't take the music seriously. The jazz avant-garde is a very large part of my identity as a musician, and I have nothing but reverence for the great practitioners of this art form. I merely thought that free jazz did not demand the same things from me as a pianist that more conventional playing did. When playing free, I was so concerned with spontaneity that all idea of technique was pretty much lost. I would whip my fingers carelessly around the keys wherever the moment took them.

Another problem was that it had never really occurred to me that one ought to practice playing free. To me that seemed to defeat the purpose of a medium that so heavily relied on intuition and the inspiration of the moment. I did sometimes improvise freely during my practice sessions, but when I did this I always tried to create one coherent piece of music, as if I were improvising in a performance. I would never stop to examine what I was playing or develop on any of my ideas the way I would practice navigating the changes of a jazz tune. This does not actually constitute practicing.

As of the past week, I have started finding ways to develop a vocabulary for free-improvisation and make this a part of my regular practice sessions. So far this has meant devising atonal "licks" and practicing them the way I would a jazz lick. Memorizing licks does seem very much contrary to the nature of free improvisation. I thought to myself however, that when I practice a line taken from Miles Davis or Bill Evans, the eventual goal is not to be able to use that musical idea in one of my own improvisations, but merely as a way of developing the dexterity and knowledge of jazz vocabulary necessary to create my own lines while improvising.

For a long time I resisted practicing this way, thinking that doing so would make my free playing more contrived, and not true free improvisation. Hopefully, developing some amount of consistent musical vocabulary to use in free improvisation will actually help me gain a greater level of freedom in my playing.

On Influence

The subject of influence has been a big one for me lately. There are a number of questions that I have been asking myself that I would like to throw open to all of my fellow musicians/artists/thinking individuals.

It seems that we spend our early, formative years as artists assimilating information from many different sources. For jazz musicians, such as myself, this tends to consist of listening to records by the greats, figuring out whose sound you like, and learning how to imitate those sounds. There have been countless musicians who have made great impressions on me, and whose work has affected the way I approach music. To become an artist, one must be able to synthesize all these sources and put them to use in creating original art.

An anecdote: In my first week here at Oberlin, I attended a jam session with some of the other jazz students here. While I was waiting for things to get started, I sat down at the piano to play a little bit. Without thinking much, I dove into a modal improvisation, using typical McCoy Tyner-style stacked fourth chords. Another musician heard me and said something to the effect of "It's good to have a McCoy Tyner guy hear, everyone else is into Bill Evans." I know he meant it as a compliment, but it raised a lot of problems for me. Certainly we don't train ourselves as musicians (or in any other discipline) merely to fit into one established school of playing. I don't want to be identified as a Bill Evans follower or a McCoy Tyner follower or any such bullshit. I must admit though, that a lot of this was on me. I had essentially sat down to the piano on that particular occasion and intentionally decided to imitate McCoy Tyner. I could not deny the influence that he has had on my playing, but I don't want to let myself fall into something like "Okay, now I'm doing my McCoy thing, now I'm doing my Herbie thing, now I'm doing my Cecil thing. "

The problem that I now confront is how to synthesize these influences into one cohesive approach to making music. How do I use the things I learned from Mccoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor and everyone else all at once, without sounding like any of those people?

This gets even more problematic if you view influence in broader wider terms. There are a lot of figures outside of jazz who are equally important to my music. Composers such as John Adams and Morton Feldman, for example have had a huge impact on me. How can I reflect this in my approach to playing jazz?

I know that I am not the first person to raise these questions. Nor are they questions that necessarily have answers. Perhaps this synthesis of styles and influences is a process that one undergoes innately as one continues to study. In any case, recently it has felt necessary for me to put more deliberate and conscious thought into the matter. So anyway, I'd love to here all of your feedback, anecdotes, asides or completely unrelated comments.

I have been too busy to do any proper writing lately.  This will hopefully change eventually.

The Experimental Music Collective (for more on this read Doug's july 20th post over at stainonsilence.blogspot.com) has regrouped in Oberlin with several new members.  Besides the warm fuzzy feeling it gives me to see our little family grow, there are a lot of new possibilities and challenges that this expanded line-up brings.  In freely improvised music, a greater number of musicians calls for even greater levels of focus, self-control and communication amongst all involved.  The larger ensemble means a greater number of ideas are brought to the musical table.  Although this is clearly a good thing, it can also make it more difficult to find a common ground in an improvisation.   Think of how two people can carry on a continuous and thoughtful conversation while absorbing everything the other person says.  If there are say, seven people in the room, the conversation can split into factions, and topics of discussion sway uneasily and chaotically. 

Nevertheless, the challenge has been a welcome one for all of us.  This Sunday, a somewhat reduced version of the collective convened for what has been one of our best meetings.  The music had a level of continuity which had been very elusive.  This had been the subject of an argument amongst several of us over the summer, whether "form" and "continuity" were possible or desirable in this type of music.  On this particular night though, there seemed to be a natural flow in the transition between various sections of the music.  Solos and duets emerged naturally out of the ensemble for very effective contrasts.  It was a very satisfying night of music.  

Hopefully there is much more of this to come.  

Evan Parker's Marxist Revolution

I recently rediscovered the Evan Parker album The Topography of the Lungs, which I bought a few years ago. Over the course of a couple of listenings, I tried to sort out the logic and arc of the jagged interplay between Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Han Bennink, with much more success than when I first heard the album. It was like a revelation to me, to hear that in the midst of the atonal, pointillistic improvisation, I occasionally heard snatches of melody and tonality (See the end of Dog Meat) as well as some passages that even loosely suggested the type of interaction between members of a more standard jazz combo.

The liner-notes that Parker penned to the album also were elucidated to me on this second appraisal. A great focus of his notes from 1970 was the importance of musician owned record labels, as a means of staying in control of ones artistic output (this record was released on Incus records, co-owned by Parker and Bailey.) The first time I read this, I didn’t quite know what to make of Parker’s seriousness on this matter. To him, the need to be in control of recording his own music was as vital as basic human rights. As I have matured as a musician over the past few years, and encountered other dedicated artists, I am starting to understand Parker’s mentality. This time when I read his liner-notes, to me it struck an obvious parallel to the ideas of Karl Marx regarding labor and capital. Marx believed that those people who had the skills necessary to produce things should be the owners of the machines they used, and that the class of people who created nothing but owned the means necessary for production should be eliminated. Similarly to Marx, Evan Parker sees it as equally imperative that musicians should own the means to record and distribute their own music. There are no direct mentions of Marx, however Parker does quote a passage from Aldous Huxley’s forward to Brave New World, “Only a large scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency towards statism.” According to Parker, there is in this music “a clear motivation by essentially the ideas stressed by Huxley.” As examples of musicians who have moved toward decentralization by founding there own record labels, he cites his own label, Incus as well as Sun Ra’s Saturn Records, the Instant Composer’s Pool and others.

Today there are even more artist owned record labels: Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf, Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar, and Jack Dejohnette’s Golden Beams to name only a few. However, there has been no revolution. The record business is still controlled by the big players. The main problem that I would point out is that most artist-owned jazz labels have been primarily self-serving. Most jazz musicians who opened there own labels did so to promote their own music. Of course in this competitive business no one can be blamed for doing that, however many isolated efforts will not bring about any real change. Perhaps the best role-model is John Zorn’s Tzadik record label. Through this label, as well as his venue, The Stone, Zorn has tirelessly promoted experimental music, including a large number of artists with very little wider reputation or commercial viability. Considering what Zorn has done through his own efforts, one can only think that a greater coalition of creative but business-wary artists could accomplish It is cooperation between many that will change the outlook of artists today.

It’s quite possible that I am overreaching in my interpretation of Parker’s liner notes. It’s true that he makes no direct reference to Marxism of any sort. But, whatever his intent was, the idea inherent in this writing is a beautiful one: music as an affirmation of freedom.