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.