Why Do We Care About Improvisation?

What is the qualitative value of improvisation? How has an act, or a mode of activity, become a thing that, like any other seemingly neutral / innocent object -- a shoe, a cigar, paper of a certain color and texture, rubber, an odor of turned earth, a sliver of soap -- can serve as the focus of a kind of fetish? Perhaps that last statement irritates with its insistence upon symptoms and the psychology of symptoms (some thinkers find there is no psychology other than that of symptoms...), but, in looking at the current state of "criticism" in the context of the incredible challenges presented to it by the continued viability and persistent emergence of predominantly improvised music, I can't help but feel that some chronic disorder has crippled the discourse.

Most often, our knowledge of whether a given piece of music is improvised is arrived at a priori. Often, we know courtesy of our knowledge of the musicians involved that a piece of music is improvised, or the title of the piece in question tell us as much. Or we recognize AABA forms, heads-solos-head routines, and know where improvisation begins and ends in some quantifiable sense, a personalized theme statement being considered "less" improvised than a few choruses balanced only on rhythm accompaniment. We're told, never mind HOW Gene Ammons plays "Angel Eyes", he "dispenses" with it on the way to blowing, blowing, blowing, and listen to the new ballad melodies her constructs in his solo... We often think that a "surprising", to paraphrase Balliett's still-famous and still-useful formulation, musical gesture is an indicator of improvised content. We also often interpret a high degree of improvisation to be the guiding principle when we detect a great deal of sympathetic / responsive ensemble dynamics; we believe when can hear a dialogue as process in these signals. But are all these aspects of improvisation inherent in the act and its creative progeny, or are they really the tissue, always thickening, of listening habits and aesthetic expectations? But what really of the musical work itself, standing on its own?

This last question, I feel, begins to push us into considerations that because they seem so basically unanswerable, loom with even greater significance over the discussion this essay-esque endeavor into language hopes, ultimately, to be. Because what is the musical work and where is it to be located? Is the full creative reality of music to be found in the performance itself, or in documentary evidence of that performance? It may seem obvious to say that live performance and recordings are just different media, and that the former is a far richer, far more capable, medium than the latter. And there's something nice and Platonic about this relationship between ideals and forms. But, as Cage demonstrated now more than 50 years ago, with 4'33", the performance is a wholly open system -- open to intrusions, interventions, distractions, deviations from the score, in short, the quotidian intentional potential in the space and the people, performers and artists, occupying that space. 4'33" is the Duchampian "ready-made" transported to the realm of sound, music by virtue of nothing more than the designation that, well, "this is music", even when silence does obtain. A performance is overwhelming in its profusion of signals: glances, grimaces, smiles, noddings of the head, shakings of the head, spasmic movements of arms and legs and torsos, sighs, coughs, sneezes, shouts, cheers, applause, turnings of score pages, motions of tuning and re-tuning, entrances and exits, stroking, bowing, plucking, striking, rubbing, exhaling, inhaling, opening, closing, muting, gestures of conducting... And, in some cases, this field of activity contains information which tells us what we are witnessing is unmistakably improvised: fingers held up to indicate the number of choruses to take, for example, but also much more subtle indications that musical form is being generated extemporaneously. And yet, isn't this information still a surplus? And how does this surplus it relate to the sounds we are hearing, for wouldn't we agree that music is still primarily a sonic reality? This is one advantage the recording has over performance. Recordings can be said to distill performance and render the intimate study of its constituent sounds, if not in absolute isolation, at least primarily in the context of the sounds that precede and follow it within the performance itself. So, is the musical work best perceived through all the senses, or just the ear? If the former, how do we define the excess, the non-musical -- if we choose to do so -- and to what use or uses is it put. Like Newtonian energy, is cannot be destroyed, only transformed... (And I'm not intending in this instance to speak of intentional "supplements" such as visual material [paintings, film], text [libretti], or dance, for e presence of such material impels the "content" in question" into some other "form" greater and lesser than music.) If the latter, are we simply left with Dolphy's "[w]hen you hear music, it's gone, in the air, and you can never capture it again."?

The best way to express how and why I feel these questions do impinge upon our appreciation of music, however, is to engage is a troublesome comparison. Phil Niblock is a composer who utilizes electronic manipulations of conventional instrumental sounds to investigate the interstices of the static and the developing, to enlarge if slowly the microscopic sonic details of micro-and over-tones, and to question what the raw materials of music are, sounds as material realities or sounds as actually the collisions of forces in material reality. Niblock's music, suspended between minimalism and maximalism, thus overlaps with much of contemporary "electro-acoustic improvisation" in terms of aesthetic concerns. Not only that, but Niblock's music bears a more than superficial resemblance to "eai" at the sheer level of acoustical composition. (At another level of superficiality, Niblock's surname even sounds like the best descriptor of his strangely translucent but architectonically massive works). If one were to hear Niblock's Five More String Quartets and the Keith Rowe / Toshimaru Nakamura collaboration Weather Sky blind, back-to-back, would we really know which piece is improvised and which composed? And why is this difference important? This is really an unfair question for many of us, as it asks of us to "unknow" too much, but it does raise the issue of why we often want so badly to know something about the circumstances of which and, indeed, out of which a work is made -- one of the substances being our own listening selves.

Why is improvisation, especially the collective improvisation we find in "Dixieland", "free jazz" and "AMM Music", so valuable to us?

1) Improvisation indicating attainment of creative genius on the part of the artist.
Here improvisation is considered in very existential terms, an exertion of will and intelligence upon that which is inhospitable. No improvisation emerges ex nihilo, and there is no inevitable opposition between free improvisation and preparation. But this point-of-view instrumentalizes this musicianly experience, maybe summarized best as training, in order to elevate certain improvisors to celebrity status. As such, this valuation also allows us to conflate the personality of the work with the person of the maker.

2) Improvisation as a kind of magic.
We may marvel at the unities possible in coordinated individual action and extrapolate from this that the improvisors are able to summon some ineffable spirit, Muse. We are encouraged in this case to discard our rational explanations for what we are hearing and accept the transcendent nature of the music. Trances, shamanism, engrossment so radical one's sense of identity becomes displaced: all these reactions draw from some well of "magic". the implicit obverse of this valuation is that such states are much more difficult to achieve with written music, and that, in fact, written music is even a betrayal and imprisonment of generative forces. (The tables of primitivism turned...) What is also interesting about this particular view of improvisation is that it justifies all kinds of chaotic meandering and megalomaniacal ranting on the part of the members of a given ensemble. Not only are ALL sounds legitimized by the program of spiritual liberation, such indiscrimination is entirely necessary. That is, the event of improvisation itself is more highly valued than the product of improvised music-making. The transcendent entity sought out by these listeners always already exists, a gap to be filled with any kind of noise that meets their basic expectations. The irony, if such that it is, of course, is that if each member of an orchestra were to follow his or her part in a symphonic score with complete fidelity or literalness, without any regard for what is occurring within their musical vicinity, not only are they being perversely more willful, if not purely Self-expressive, than their free jazz counterparts, but the resulting chaos could be wilder than the most unfettered of blow-outs. Why? Because the common vocabulary of the score itself makes the ground on which the figures of communication breakdown stand out in even greater relief.

3) Improvisation as a model of effective communication and, by extension, community.
Is the improvising ensemble a polis? Do the relationships which obtain between the musicians in the sphere of collaboration serve as instructive metaphors for our own daily interactions? This for me is the most attractive of the reasons to award improvisation some special status, and to pay attention to it as if it were a phenomena in some classic sense. But the very seductiveness of this model more and more encourage me to resist it, as difficult as it may be to offer counter-examples to it. I am aware, though, that the idea appeals to me as an American, educated with reference to principles of democratic procedure, equality, etc., as well as to someone who has looked for workable definitions of social justice in the writings of Marx, Althusser, and Foucault. Do I want music to agree or to challenge my predispositions? I may give lip service to the latter, but, if I continue to avoid a revaluation of the improvising ensemble as polis, such behavior only proves that I want only the former. Simultaneously, nothing made exists outside of history and does not bear the deformations of ideology. Musicians, such as the (I feel) brave ones who participate in AMM, may indeed intend for the very means by which their music is created to carry some social provocation. But we have to be careful not to allow such intentions to disenfranchise though in the audience who wish to offer dissent. The irony of some very free-sounding music, such as Miles Davis’ 70’s electric bands, is that they may in fact be the most disciplined, the most susceptible to tyrannical influence, of all gatherings of creative individuals. There is a singular vision at work in the 1975 Osaka performances documented on Agharta and Pangaea. Michael Henderon, Pete Cosey, Sonny Fortune, Al Foster – they all seem to be hearing with Miles’ ears, and the profusion of intense sounds seem still to issue from Miles, or to be implicit in his playing. Contrast this with the second great Quintet with Shorter, Hanckock, Williams and Carter, especially the justly celebrated Plugged Nickel performances. Here is an ensemble edging around freedom “with a small f”, as John Litweiler has it, Miles just one probing appendage reacting to stimuli from an unplaceable but central nervous system.

In a penultimate analysis, the greater complications of treating improvisation as an elemental condition for the realization of creative impulse in a culture of equity and mutual respect is that it begins to fracture as the size of the ensemble increases – that is, as the size of the ensemble becomes more proportionate (and hardly so) to the “world outside”. There have few, if any, truly “free” large ensembles. Even Sun Ra’s Arkestra, which, in works such as The Magic City, achieve an eloquence rare in music, composed, aleatoric, or otherwise, nonetheless always depended upon the conducting figure, the structure, of Ra’s own psychology. Recall also the fate of the Jazz Composer’s Guild, formed following a serious of successful, independent produced concerts of new music stage in New York in October, 1964, primarily under the organizational impetus of Bill Dixon. The Guild tried to extend the collectivity of their musical initiatives into the realm of artist representation, with a special emphasis placed on securing gigs for ALL members. But whatever collective bargaining power the Guild had dissipated as participating musicians struck out on their own, and the organization’s better impulses ended up sublimated in more narrow ventures like the New Music Distribution Service. More contemporary, chiefly Europe-based “big bands” of this sort, such as the LJCO, are more concerned the with charting new course through the labyrinth of systematic confusions linking improvisation and composition that they are with the obliteration of systems per se. The simple fact is that improvisation is a truly inefficient method. In music, this orientation towards process may account for much of what is enjoyable, even luxurious, about the work, but, in terms of the management of large groups of individuals, it’s limitations become as brittle as coincidence. There is an elegance to the idea of improvisation making a greater contribution to the beauty and memorableness of the music being made in small ensembles – duos, trios, quartets. But why limit our metaphors for this model of collectivity? Analogies to successful marriages, family units, and even athletic teams are also appropriate and enlightening. And what of pure solo artists from Art Tatum to Max Roach to Steve Lacy to Greg Kelley (and many more)? How do these artists fit into this paradigm? Must they, like Walt Whitman's microcosmic and macrocosmic protagonists, contain multitudes?

4) Improvisation as a seizing of the present.
Even though we live in the present, the moment itself in all its fullness is ever-elusive. The great paradox of the present is that our perception of it relies on a retrospective vantage. We may admire the real-time interactivity of musicians engaged in free improvisation all we like, but such interaction is often less a factor in our appreciation of the musical act itself than the form we perceive once we gain some distance from the work. If you stand in the middle of the Pampa Colorada in the Peruvian desert, all you will see are patterns of light and dark soil and heapings of stone. Only when you get airborne can you see the gigantic symbols of plants and animals, as well as the "abstract" geoglyphs, thus cleared across the surface of the plain by the Nazca over 2 millennia ago. (To return to an earlier line of questioning, too -- what is more engrossing, the social order that made this massive undertaking possible, the mystical or "unexplainable" aspects of the actual figures and their functionality, or the atmospheric science that explains why there has been virtually no erosion in this area, meaning no force powerful enough to efface these markings?) The next question may be, do the musicians involved experience the present in the same way. If the form of a wholly improvised piece derives from the decisions the musicians make as they perform, and if all decisions from all members of the ensemble are being somehow negotiated within the time-span of a given performance, doesn't cause and effect in the guise of adjustment to the consequences of one's own decisions and those of one's collaborators postpone the attainment of true presence? Either that, or the present is infinite, and eternity is always latent even the smallest units by which we measure the passing of time -- not just seconds, minutes and hours, but also note values.

Before this argument exceeds its own intelligence and presumes to offer any insight into Heideggerean being, it is important to stress that considerations of being in the present through artistic activity begin, if not consciously, to argue its own aesthetics in which a single emotional and intellectual sensation -- in my mind, more akin to Kristeva's interpretation of Lacanian jouissance (satisfying the self) rather than to an abstract notion of perception regarding itself (dissolving of the self) -- occupies a position of predominance.

5) Improvisation as freedom from cultural norms, history, and the hegemony of "authorship".
If this reading of improvisation appears to be contradictory to (1) above, allow (4) to mediate between the two positions. The emphasis here is on improvisation as a process of discovery. Consequently, there is a de-emphasis upon genre, classical unities, the paradigm of the narrative arc, closure, and certainties. The danger of this reading is perhaps is what is assumes about resistance. Though I do believe that this attitude towards improvisation as an entry to any and all possible musical worlds has allowed musicians to expand the range of their instruments with extended techniques and to find a home in the improvising ensemble for new and previously neglected instruments, including electronics, I also acknowledge that very traditional ideas of innovation and the avant-garde are at play here. Theoretically, oppositional hierarchies -- binaries -- do determine the logical relationships between composition and improvisation, composing and performing, tempered and non-tempered sound, tonality and atonality, program music and absolute music. But in practice we know that the modes of production to which these abstractions refer are much more fluid, even slippery. Think of famous pieces of music such as Coleman Hawkins' "Body and Soul" or Bunny Berigan's "I Can't Get Started". Here are solo improvisations that we praise because they are classically structured and, despite their "spontaneous" origins, they achieve some immortality (re: memorableness) because they "sound composed". they are entire "songs" unto themselves. To take a more contemporary example, consider the magnificent MIMEO / John Tilbury collaboration The Hands of Caravaggio. Our colleague Brain Olewnick, in his perceptive and superbly explanatory review of this collectively improvised piece, praises it as "[perhaps] the first great piano concerto of the 21st century"! Again, the music achieves something more than simple excitement. Maybe the infinitive I want is "to astonish". Whatever the word, the music "rises" to a level we do not generally expect improvisation to reach, except rarely. Do we only value improvisation when it "works", and does the fact that it ever works at all redeem all the occasions on which it fails?

Leaving these questions aside for a moment, it is important to grasp that an avant-garde mentality is completely imprisoned by binary relationships; that is to say, the hell of defining a position against another position is that the identity of that position necessarily depends upon the persistence of that which one would battle or deny. To expand upon Hegel's famous dialectical example, the past becomes for the members of an avant-garde the slave upon whom they practice their mastery, thus they are enslaved by their own need to demonstrate mastery. Moreover, there are "followers" and there are "leaders"... As a result, we can find claims in the criticism that certain ways of playing an instrument, or the setting of specific preconditions for improvisation, represent "last" or "ultimate" means -- the only fit means -- of expressing certain emotions, thoughts, etc. Also, we find more and more that improvisation becomes quantified, and, like the carat count of an ounce of gold, the more improvisation we can measure, the more "pure" (a filler word; "pure" can contain any sense of valuation you choose) we can judge the music to be. Note that, for some critics, improvisation has become THE story of jazz, and proof of the music's vitality is that the trend toward "free improvisation" urged by bebop's pushing of harmonic, rhythmic and tonal boundaries is viewed as an evolutionary advance.

What accounts for this line of thinking? It's times like these when I wonder if the racial and cultural fundamentalist, Stanley Crouch, like so many other conservative pundits active in the American mass media, hasn't already won his culture war. His constant harping on "tradition" and practice not just of excluding but savaging musicians who do not meet his criteria makes for an ideological travesty, not the least because he forces the conflict raging inside himself upon the rest of us, but chiefly because he has managed to take over the terms of the debate, to set the tone, and to force those who would serve as a corrective to him into a reactive posture. Hence, we let Stanley have "blues" and "swing", repertoire and ensemble components, his stock of down-home colloquialisms and plagiarisms from Joseph Campbell once-removed via Albert Murray, and we state, "fine, whatever, the joke's on you, because IMPROVISATION in the music's defining characteristic, and, furthermore, IMPROVISATION, like ethics, transcends critique and claims of cultural ownership."

To which I posit: "Huh?" As I look at the contemporary improvised music "scene", I also see that music is being extended in many other ways as well, and often is ways more true to jazz's tradition of being indiscriminate in the source musics from which its practitioners borrow: Matthew Shipp collaborating with electronica artists and DJ's; Steve Coleman, as he has for some time now, working with rappers and the ever-increasing panoply of African-American urban musics; Uri Caine interpreting the works of Mahler; John Zorn and Jewish musical traditions; Dave Douglas and string quartet literature; Gianluigi Trovesi and Italian folk themes; the Joe Harriott / John Mayer Indo-Jazz Fusions; Michael Moore recording a program of Bob Dylan songs; Kurt Elling and his inclusion of sometimes radical literary sources in his music... The list could go on. What primarily interests me at this point is why these efforts often get treated as gimmicky and less conceptually significant? I would submit that even the worst failures among the examples I've provided above (your choice, not mine) can still be more interesting and pleasing to the ear than the free improvisation that, no matter how rigorous, fails to spark. By the same token, these musical experiments that we feel will date as quickly as yesterday's headlines may be more present, more about "now" as it presses with more and more weight upon our psyche, than a freely improvised piece, and that there is something protective about our dismissal of work ambitious to achieve contemporaneity.

Is improvisation a kind of philosophical stance? Is it just the name we've given to a principle of human conduct so simple, so elegant, so timeless, and so universal that its reclamation is an end whose good is to be seen as self-evident? I would love to think so, but improvisation is still a human activity, and so I take pause when confronted with rhetoric that would seem to indicate that there are redemptive qualities to improvisation. this is not to say that I am not convinced of the importance of improvisation, or remain skeptical about its potential to be a factor in the creation of works of great beauty that resonate powerfully with the human condition as we know it from our own experience, over- and under-determined as it is. I also know that, as a writer, improvisation can lead us to the most interesting alternative, both in creative and "actual" life. And I have been trying all along to avoid the dangerous, self-referential assertion that all sounds are really about their own construction, construction being a strange choice of diction given the evanescence of sound. I want to know for myself: what does improvisation really create, regardless of medium? I think the crux of whatever answer I would want has to do with the symbiotic relationships that exist between maker, making, and made. Because improvisation is grounded in our perceptions and interactions with the (not strictly Husserlian) phenomenological world, perhaps what it really creates -- and privileges -- so spontaneously is a kind of subjectivity: that of the listener.

There has been something perverse all along in my pretense that improvisation is an essentially performer-centric attribute, or performer-associated phenomenon. Improvisation is much like a regional speech accent, less something one has and more something one hears. Improvisation, once known, once recognized, requires us to re-conceive what the very practice of listening is. Listening becomes less than passive. Our receptiveness to the music, whatever its origins, grows and alters. When you first hear a those organized sounds, you're making you sense of it up AS YOU GO ALONG. Even if the music is familiar to you, each time you hear it, you're performing variations on a theme, your experience guided and mediated by your "present conditions" as much as the memory of that first hearing. The clearest example of this is the experience many of us have had as learning listeners, our tastes becoming more "sophisticated" as we gradually make ourselves aware of the constituent parts -- "that bassline, that harmonic underpinning" -- the tonal and timbral subtleties -- "that's not Kenny Dorham, that's Blue Mitchell" -- and the literal content -- "I recognize that quote from 'Hawaiian War Chant'" -- of the music.

Yet, even still, there is something too soothing, and, at the risk of sounding arrogant, sublime here. For the point I would want to make is that the musicians who make improvised music, by virtue of the actions they take, stand in solidarity with listeners "like us" only so much. Honestly, is what I've just outlined regarding less passive listening really any different from the disaffected teen who believes -- even when Eddie Vedder is hoarsely protesting, "This is not for you!" -- that Pearl Jam's lyrics are really about his life, and tell his story. This is why, beyond the fact that he was simply the better tunesmith, Nirvana will always be the "greater" band; Kurt Cobain was shamelessly covetous of his own misery in his lyrics, which made him so repugnantly human, and therefore unassimilably other. There is a kind of pathetic fallacy at work here, one we must un-commit. Although listening is one aspect of making music, it is only one aspect, and there is a rigor to making. We must recognize that the practicing musician listens in modes that are fundamentally different from the ways that we, the audience, listen. More obviously, the musicians listens from within a knowledge of the inner workings of music, and more often, an intimate knowledge of the individuals as performers with whom he or she is performing, to which the audience may or may not have access. The performer, then, is the location of that musical surplus, which, of course, accounts for why it is a surplus.

Ultimately, we have to make peace with this excess insofar as it does not confirm what we’ve forgotten that we’ve known all along – this is not mere reminding – but interferes between us and quick, complete understanding. Music is possessed of a sheer otherness and even super-humanity, that is, not "superhuman" but possessed of an intelligence abnormal in the scope of what it embraces, a scope that can, with seeming cruelty, reveal how tiny and dependent we, aliens all, are. Think of Bach, Varèse, Cecil Taylor and, yes, the best of contemporary "electro-acoustic improvisation". In this way, I feel like I can begin to chart some reconciliation between my own tendencies to reflect on "the mystic chords of memory... touched... by the better angels of our nature" and to be aware, as Eddie Prévost has written, that "no sound is innocent". If improvisation does contain the kernel of freedom, or perhaps better said, a means of activating self-determination, then it is quite probably a freedom to be mistaken.

Joe Milazzo