The Juggling Act Cont'd a.k.a. Multi-Dimensional Quantum Improvisation

In the Juggling Exercise, I spent some time talking about what it means to improvise. My answer to the question was mostly concerned with remembering to listen and react carefully. I started to make another point that although all the lines and chords we play might seem to pop spontaneously from the sky, they developed slowly over long periods of time to form a network which we constantly attempt to navigate in new ways. Another big part of my point, although I didn’t state it as explicitly as I would have liked, is that a small amount of material can be stretched to fit an enormous amount of different contexts. An old voicing in a new situation can sound totally fresh and exciting. There is an almost exhaustive list of all the many possibilities this kind of thinking can provide in Mick Goodrick’s Voice Leading Almanac Vol. III.

With this said, I’d like to discuss a point which Dave Liebman goes into great detail about in his book, Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony. Once we have a network in place, we know which notes go over which chords, and also which chords don’t go over which chord, and are confident enough in our knowledge and our ears to exploit this relationship to create tension, that’s pretty much the end of the story, right? (Wrong of course. I can’t help think of how it’s taken 8 years to understand in any kind of practical sense the possibilities of triadic voice leading that Mick Goodrick has revealed and I’ve been describing). But supposing that we were going to assume that our harmonic development was as complete as it could ever be. In other words, let’s assume we’re performing.

As mentioned in the other article, when it comes time to perform, there is no time to think about a new chord. When you practice you can work on expanding your vocabulary, but when you perform, any chord or lick that hasn’t been totally internalized seems to never come out at all or come out sounding awkward and out of place. So who hasn’t played a standard after a few days of not practicing or not having looked at that tune or played in that key for a few weeks and felt totally stale, totally bored, like all you can do is the oldest tricks in your book?

Well this is good news, because it means that you have a strong harmonic network that you are able to navigate instinctively. You have chords and scales and arpeggios and know how to weave them together seamlessly to create a more or less continuous stream of sound. This is a big accomplishment. But it’s really only half the story and in some ways could be construed as preliminary work before the real game starts.

The real game at this point in time, not when you’re practicing but when you’re actually playing (to get back to Liebman), is to use compositional devices, most of which end up being rhythmic inside a tonal context (which is outside of Liebman, ironically). Now everybody knows they’re supposed to do this, but maybe they don’t think they’re good enough or smart enough or dumb enough or bad enough or any other kind of enough whether it makes sense or not. All it really boils down to is concentration and intention. Everybody can build up the will power to develop and utilize concentration and intention.

Intention is very simple: you want to do it so you do it. You set out saying that you are going to develop a rhythmic motive, maybe only two beats long, for an entire chorus. So when you play you are very careful to notice what the first thing you play is and then you consciously recognize that this will be the source of all that will follow for the next 32 bars. Now concentration comes into play. You can’t forget what you are doing and just start absentmindedly playing the changes. Of course you will forget at some point in your chorus, or decide intentionally to change strategies momentarily, and that’s okay. In fact, your solo will probably sound better for it. But you must have the concentration to reign your mind back into line and continue to do what you were doing originally, supposing that you still remember what it was.

Now as this game develops the next step is to use the material from those moments of un-intention when your mind wanders as motivic material for the next chorus. In other words, when you play something accidentally but rhythmically distinctive, try and store that idea in the back of your mind so that when you’ve exhausted your first motive you don’t just pick a new one, you draw from some earlier material in your solo (or from another musician playing). Even uneducated listeners pick up on this sort of stuff. They notice the patterns, and therefore notice even more strongly momentary breaks in the patterns. So to finish one pattern and then start creating a new pattern from earlier contrasting material is very effective. Now, if you can make it to the end of 2 choruses while doing this, you’ve come a long way with great intention and concentration. But the true test at this point is if you still remember the first motive, and can then play a 3rd chorus which combines ideas from both of your first two choruses.

By the way, when you’re playing this way it should become obvious that the first thing you play is terribly important because everything else will stem from it. For this reason, when you start thinking this way you might find very little variation in the kinds of rhythms you are able to use regardless of song or style. But you will slowly grow out of this over time as your ability to concentrate deepens and the length of the material you are able to remember increases. Start with a single two beat cell, move up to a bar, then two bars, and then maybe a whole phrase. Imagine being able to play a 4 bar phrase and then play something else with the same rhythm and general contour again over different changes but displaced by an 8th note. How cool would that be?

Supposing anybody ever actually reads all of this, do you notice a parallel between the method of improvising described in this article and the subject matter of all the articles in general. In a way, these articles are like a musical composition and follow the same rules.

Now who thinks that they can do all this and still give a good amount of attention to the rhythm section? This is where you start having to make aesthetic and philosophical decisions. There is no right balance or constant balance, but a push and pull of mental energy and attention. Maybe next time I’ll give an example of how such a constructed solo might look and sound. What kinds of variation are there? How do we take all those stuffy classroom-y terms like diminution and inversion and turn them into things that are actually cool and emotional in a modern jazz context?

In a way this is like the difference between a map and the real three dimensional world. The chords and arpeggios and scales are like a road map, they are the paths that exist to get from one point to another. But once you bring in rhythmic concepts to your playing, this brings depth to the navigation, this brings the material off the page and into the real world, this creates an entirely new dimension to what you play. All the chords and arpeggios are still there, still being used and exploited, but they are now secondary and the real message is something deeper. Of course, none of this is enough if you don’t bring emotion (yet another dimension) to your playing. How to balance our minds and our emotions is the real essence of the jazz game.