Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
Here are some quotes from JACK WRIGHT on free improvisation. I received them from the project4newmusic mailing list and thought they might be of some relevance to this discussion. Not being a "trained" "musician," I consider myself to be a free improvisor, as well as a looper, and, like John Cage, believe that all sounds have merit as music. It all depends on how you listen. Jim Bailey I now turn you over to Jack. 1995 This music is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last few decades and is still practically unknown. Most people seem to be puzzled by it or have misconceptions, even fear. All other forms of music, including Jazz improvisation, have a tendency towards conscious differentiation and identification of the player with the musical choices made, that is, at least some structure (song and style) that is decided upon that has an identity and meaning set apart from others and given a priority. Free improv tends on the other hand to dissolve the importance of such priorities at the musical moment of choosing, since all choices are valid and all standards of good music are put in question, including that played moments ago. Our limitations -- attachment to clinched formulas, our best ideas -- are what stand in the way and we struggle against them. Technical development on the instrument in the traditional sense is optional, for some even hindrance, to the extent it predisposes our judgment as to what is musical. A kind of musical insecurity is even good for improv. A careful and attentive choosing is involved but not as means to an end. Since choice can go any direction, this music tends toward an exaggerated full ear-open listening to what is going on around you for guidance; in fact since you do not identify with and defend your own sound, you find yourself listening to your very own playing with interest and surprise, reacting to it as you do to others'. Free improv opens the door to dissolution and immersion in sound and silence, in which we hear a playful voice behind us always suggesting, "why not this?" We find with surprise, given our previous experience with music, that rather than resulting in a breakup into individualized units, improv tends toward a whole since we have nothing to go on except each other. It is a music that fully reflects a disillusionment with the fundamental impulse of previous musics to organize and control nature, and for this reason cannot be expected to advance its players in the so-called music world of career and conquest with which such control is allied. Free players are open to being inspired by others regardless of experience or status; the true teacher is the learner... What I have described here is only the empty form, the energy, not what we end up with. What fills it and gives the music its meaning and character is our individual struggle with it and with ourselves. This is a new music and has hardly begun to be explored; it is what we make it. The potential for transforming our relation to music and to each other is not fully imaginable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- October, 1996 Each free improvisation, and this pertains especially to the solo, is a very particular, unique path, all laid out in advance. However, we do not know the way, and we are, some might say, hampered by the deliberate loss of whatever one sense we should usually consider the most reliable. We are not allowed to see where we are going, that is the only rule, so all the other, unaccustomed senses scramble to the forefront. We have our eyes (ears) closed as if their normal configurations would surely mislead us; our feet or our nose will have to do all that enormous work. We might have the impression that we can only witness what happens, that we have let the path take over; if so then how could we be so highly engaged. At any rate, we can only feel our way, imperfectly of course, shifting from tense confusion to relaxed and ecstatic awareness to the humiliation of finding ourselves utterly lost. There is not a single position that our consciousness can take that is left out; the path covers the whole topography from start to finish, that is, it certainly can. Even and especially our lostness is right where we should be, hardly a consoling thought. Only afterwards are we allowed to think we knew what we were doing, even to know we were on a path at all.