Free improvisation

The fine line between revelatory adventure and aimless noodling

Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and performer, and he improvises in that idiom too. I might have been expecting something like Keith Jarrett, but Ramin started straight in with jagged rhythms, dissonant harmonies and extremes of dynamics and register. You can hear the first minute and a half on Facebook. The older recording below conveys some of the flavor of the performance I saw, though it's shorter and less extreme.

When I say Ramin’s playing is intense, I mean that I could feel the piano vibrating the floor through the soles of my snow boots. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone play a piano that fast or loud, certainly not for that long. But he didn’t just hammer away with his fists and elbows. Once in a while, we would come to a clearing in the forest, and there would be some nice lyrical parts, still dissonant but more serene and reflective. Those parts were my favorites.

I brought along my friend Derek, who teaches pop songwriting at NYU and who lives in a very different musical universe than Ramin does. He knew what he was getting into, and was a good sport about it. We were talking afterwards about challenging art and listener accessibility. Derek’s goal is to make music that can be enjoyed by the largest number of people possible. I am a little bit more of a snobby hipster than he is, but I am still basically a poptimist. I only met Ramin recently and don’t know him that well, but based on our conversations so far, I don’t get the sense that he feels any hostility toward his listeners. He seems like he’s just making the music he needs to make, and if the rest of us can follow along, great, but if not, well, what are you gonna do. I can respect that. Maybe my music would be better if I was less concerned about whether other people like it. Or maybe it would be much more annoying!

Ramin is a hugely better musician than I am, but I have done some freely improvised performances too, some of which have been on the order of an hour long. I love playing that way, but it’s a high-risk/high-reward situation. When free improv comes together, it’s the most transcendent aesthetic experience I have ever had, but when it doesn’t come together, it’s horrendous. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word improvisation comes from Latin improviso, “unforeseen; not studied or prepared beforehand.” That’s the whole thing, right? You can’t predict what’s going to happen, and it can be a delightful surprise or a very non-delightful surprise.

I respect the sanctity of in-the-moment creativity, but I like order and structure better, and my current favorite creative musical strategy is to use improvised music as a sample library. The best ideas are spontaneous, but larger-scale structure is hard to do in the moment, and the computer makes it easy to assemble the pieces together into a pleasing shape. One of my main sources of inspiration for this practice is In A Silent Way by Miles Davis. I did a podcast episode about each of its sides.

I have made some music by editing jazz improvisation too. My former bandmate Catherine Sikora is a saxophonist who is fearlessly committed to performing and recording solo improvisation. Here’s an example.

I asked Catherine if she would let me sample and remix her tracks, and she graciously agreed, as long as she didn’t have to listen to the results. I haven’t attracted much interest from any other listeners either, but I think it’s some of the best music I have ever made.

Here’s another of Catherine’s improvisations, along with my remix.

Catherine’s music is very sampling-friendly because she’s recorded cleanly and in isolation, and there are natural phrase boundaries at each breath. I love her playing, and have learned a ton from it, but it requires disciplined focus to listen to it. Given the level of disciplined focus that she brings to her playing, that seems like the least I can offer, but it’s also a difficult state of mind for me to attain. I live in a noisy environment, both physically and mentally. By adding beats and repetition, I give my weak attention a handle it can hold onto.

I have also made a lot of music that consisted of recording and editing my own improvisation. Here’s a jam on harmonica I did over some loops.

This is a structured harmonica improv: I inhale as long as possible, then exhale as long as possible, and repeat.

This is an unedited first-take synth improvisation.

This is heavily edited synth improv, exploring an alternative just intonation tuning system.

I can look at a lot of my listening interests as coming from a desire to balance freedom and structure. The thing I loved the most about the Grateful Dead was their ability to bring a large audience along with them into some very far-out spaces, because there was the implicit promise that it was all going to resolve into a singalong chorus at the end. The Dead had their musical limitations, and decades of hard drug abuse didn’t help, but at their peak, they were fearless explorers, and hearing a long chaotic jam resolve into a tender Jerry ballad is one of my favorite experiences in the world.

Much as I love the larger idea of the Dead, and some of their actual recordings, they can be a drag at the individual song level. In the same way that I like using free improvisation as a sample library, I also like using Dead recordings.

The Dead are as hard to remix as Catherine Sikora is easy. Their music is full of cool ideas, but they didn’t often realize those ideas cleanly in sound. This did not stop John Oswald from making his breathtakingly ambitious Greyfolded album, and it hasn’t stopped me. But it is a challenge. The main problem is musical clutter. Every member of the band plays pretty much all the time. It’s symptomatic of the fact that everyone in the band recognized Jerry as its leader except for Jerry himself. His refusal to give direction made the Dead a true musical democracy, which sometimes resulted in a bubbly Dixieland-jazz-like interplay, but also sometimes made you wish Jerry would impose some more order. Here’s a representative quote from a Rolling Stone interview he gave shortly before he died:

I’ve never been able to sustain an idea and get it down. It’s hard for me to do it with music, too, as far as that goes. I feel like I’m swimming upstream — my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that’s difficult for me.

By doing the remixes, I feel like I’m doing the work Jerry was unwilling or unable to do of eliminating possibilities, rejecting all the mediocre ideas and directing focus on the best ones.

I have an easy time imparting musical judgments, but when I teach creative music-making, that is the last thing I want to. I view my job as creating psychological motivation for my students to push ideas to completion and share them with other people. Some forms of outside pressure are helpful for this, like deadlines, but anxiety about judgment is a massive obstacle, especially for young people. So in my teacher role, I am as supportive as I can possibly be. This is easy when the kids’ projects are in styles that I like and understand, but I never know how to best support the avant-garde weirdos. I never want to tell someone that their track sounds horrible; instead, I try to find out what they’re going for and see if I can help them move closer to it.

It has occurred to me that some of the most musically confrontational students might want my disapproval. Maybe my unconvincing polite face is the real feedback? One student told me that she really valued the way that I would sit and listen to everyone’s projects with my complete attention, with my eyes shut and everything. It was the fact of my attention that mattered more to her than whatever feedback I was giving. Paying attention would seem to me to be the bare minimum requirement of the job, but I also know that sustained attentive listening is rare, especially among college students.

So while I have my preferences, I work hard not to be a dogmatic teacher. I have had some dogmatic teachers myself. The best example was the graduate electronic music composition seminar I took with Morton Subotnick. (I took the photo on his Wikipedia page.) On the first day of class, he laid down the law: no tonality, no regular meter, and ideally no piano-key pitches at all.

I respect Mort enormously, but I find his music close to unbearable. The music I made for his class pushed the limits of my own tolerance, but he thought it was too conservative. I’m glad of the experience, I learned a lot, but it didn’t end up impacting my practice.

Anyway, seeing Ramin Arjomand made me itchy to get back into free improv myself, though more in my preferred jazz-adjacent/jam-band-flavored/lo-fi ambient hip-hop vibe. Now that my kids are older, I can actually leave the house once in a while, so this is starting to feel possible again. I do a lot of improvising on the guitar at home, though I never record it. Maybe I should start, but it is nice to focus on the process without any thought of generating a product.

Like I said above, in my younger days I did a lot of performances that were either partially or completely improvised, in duos and trios and quartets, never for an audience of more than a couple dozen people, and rarely with any positive response. I adored doing those shows, though. And unpopular though this music was, I had (and have) a couple of friends who have followed this side of my musical life eagerly and are vocally supportive. That music matters deeply to them, even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else. I can’t figure out how much it matters to me, or whether it even should. In the moment, free improv can feel universe-encompassing, and I know it helped me to grow and develop as a person, but in the face of all my adult responsibilities, it can also feel self-indulgent.

All that improvisation practice has had one big practical benefit: it made me want to build a lot of improvisation into my aural skills classes. I am not a natural fit as an aural skills instructor! I had a terrible time with those classes as a grad student, because I have never been a proficient music reader, and I can’t sight sing at all. But when NYU’s music theory department invited me to take on some of the pop classes, they assured me that I could approach them using my particular skill set. So while my students do some of the usual sight-singing and dictation activities for their homework, during class, I like to lead them in improvised scat-singing. I collected a big folder of looped excerpts of my favorite grooves by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock and so on. Sometimes we do structured improv exercises, but usually it’s just everyone taking turns scatting for four or eight bars in a continual cypher. Then we talk afterwards about what we noticed, what we were thinking, what we were feeling.

I don’t think there’s a better way to learn how to listen analytically than to improvise. If the backing track has some clear harmonic progression or voice leading, then scat-singing is an excellent way to internalize it. Alternatively, students can (and often do) find melodies that are totally independent of the harmony, taking advantage of the fact that blues is a universal harmonic solvent in Anglo-American pop. Improvising also gets the kids listening to the grooves, the microrhythms, the stylistic signifiers and mixing and instrumentation. You listen differently when you’re hearing an eight bar loop repeated fifty or a hundred times, especially if you have to participate in it musically.

It’s strange to think of improvisation as a thing you can teach, because the mythology is that you just open your mouth and, like, let it flow, man. But people who can improvise effortlessly have been immersed in a certain musical vocabulary, and they know the standard riffs, the cliches and tropes. These are the raw material that makes spontaneous expression possible. If improv exercises creates a motivation in the kids to develop a vocabulary of the riffs and tropes, then I am doing my job. Beyond aural skills class, improvisation is a necessary skill for any would-be songwriters, producers, and performers of many pop styles where nobody is handing out charts or telling you what to play. But it’s also an opportunity for creative growth more generally, and for the personal growth that comes with it.