A one-legged rant about the nature of jazz improvisation....

by Minim Pro @ 2010-08-23
Randomly and mysteriously over the weekend I have contrived to do something to my Achilles tendon which kept me up all night thanks to the pain and has left me marooned on the sofa with my leg propped uselessly on a pillow.

Well aware that a Monday demands a new post and with this self-imposed deadline hanging over me like the proverbial sword of Damocles, I thought I’d take this opportunity to have a bit of a rant. Without further ado then, I want to deal with a statement that, although erroneous, gets bandied about so often that it is now accepted as one of the truisms of jazz education.

Jazz improvisation is real-time composition

No it’s not. If you were to set out to compose a melody to any given chord sequence, you’d never come up with anything as busy, and melodically dense as the average jazz solo. This is immediately obvious in fact if you listen to compositions by jazz musicians. The tunes jazz musicians write are invariably simpler and use fewer notes and more space than any of their typical solos.

At its worst, the purpose of a jazz solo is to impress and show off ability and facility; at its best it communicates true human feeling and carries emotional resonance. Either way, the devices it employs to achieve its purpose are not the same as those employed to compose melodies.

Think about world famous melodies from other music such as the ‘Ode to Joy’ (from Beethoven’s 9th symphony) or the largo from Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’; think about Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or The Beatles ‘Let it Be’; for that matter think of Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You Porgy’ or Jerome Kern’s ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. Simple melodic statements such as these are rarely a pre-requisite of the jazz solo.

Talk to any jazz musician and ask him how he learned to play solos. The answer will invariably be ‘by copying other musician’s solos’ and not ‘learning to play melodies’. Whilst it sounds like it should be true, and makes for a seemingly deep and insightful sound-bite from jazz gurus and sages, improvisation is not real-time composition – it is improvisation, which is something different. So what is Jazz improvisation? For me it is a thing in and of itself. It is the reaction of a musician to a given situation on a given day. It is a capturing and reflection of a single moment in time, a fleeting ephemeral snapshot of the world around the soloist as it appears to him in that particular moment.

It is affected by the size and nature of the audience, the players around him on the bandstand, the personal circumstances of his life, the stage he is at on his own musical journey, the source material of the tune he is playing, the weather outside, the zeitgeist of the society he lives in, what he had for breakfast and, in short, everything that has conspired in his existence to lead up to the moment he starts the solo.

This is why, despite the wonders of recorded music, listening to a record will never match the experience of hearing jazz live and this is why improvisation and composition are two utterly different things. The composer composes for his audience whereas what an improviser plays is affected by his audience. In that sense, the listener is part of the performance in a way that he can never be with pre-composed material.

A definition of the nature of improvisation is a hugely complex area and no doubt there would be as many definitions as there are those who would attempt to define it. Nevertheless, what I am sure about, what I would bet my bottom dollar on is that it’s not ‘real-time composition’.
Until next-time…

http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/08/23/a-one-legged-rant-about-the-nature-of-jazz-improvisation-9228468/