Arctic Echoes ... A 1-Chord Piano Improvisation!

[quiescen]

Here's a 'lesson piece' I did to show students how to improvise using certain limits. Enjoy!

If you like, please share.

[ted]

Nice to see you're still in circulation Edward, and furthering the cause of improvisation. It seems to me that the things which impart life to improvisation are primarily phrasing and rhythm; whether one uses few or many keys and chords doesn't matter in the end. Dare I say it, even the precise harmonies used are of far less importance than feeling the flow of phrase and rhythm. This little exercise held its interest through the internal accents and phrasing. For example, in the left hand passage around 0:30, you are playing a myriad of unequally accented notes. That's where the life resides. Without this, it would just be a static harmony, smooth arpeggio or the like.

In other words, the "how" of improvising is infinitely more important than the "what". And yet in discussions by the classical and jazz diehards and experts, in nearly every endeavour purporting to teach improvisation, all we get is the "what" - static, drier than dust harmony - in the form of barren combinatorics. As if all music can be reduced to learning combinations of notes, then stringing those combinations together in rhythmless sequences using hidebound rules, the reasons for which, if they ever existed, are lost in the mists of antiquity.

In my experience it is very hard for an older person to acquire this  primitive improvisational flow. Or more correctly, I have never been able to impart it to an older beginner. In other words the deficiency could simply lie with me. I think it has something to do with getting rid of conditioned inhibition. They can memorise thousands of chords and have a tremendous analytic knowledge but still can't do anything dynamic.

I think you are on the right track though, and wish you luck.

  

[quiescen]

Thanks Ted. Appreciate your kind words. Ya ... what I tell students usually is that you don't need more than 2 or 3 chords to get into the flow of improvisation. This lesson piece was really an experiment to see what I could do with one chord type .... the rootless 6/9 chord.

[destini]

I can't agree more with what both of you have said. Phrasing and rhythm - exactly. Varying note lenghts and using accents it is possible to give a vibrant and dynamic feel to even a one-note passage, which I was demonstrating just recently. Then I played a chromatic melodic line without paying respect to intervals and dynamic accents whatsoever, and - what do you think, - it sounded very dull.

Definitely there is more to improvisation than an ability of using memorized patterns and good knowledge of harmony - these are more necessary when notating a piece. Plus, we can't really rely on our store of knowledge while playing real-time - there is an imminent latency between thinking about something, comprehending it and using then. I think of improvisation as of more meditative activity, when mind is calm and one isn't hectically searching for suitable patterns, but just expresses oneself spontaneously and at a certain moment could even be surprised by a phrase that turned out to be unexpectedly good. I think a true improvisation is when a musician him- or herself doesn't know what will happen next, and it isn't possible when one abides by the rules strictly.

I mean, I've looked through a book on improvisation once, and all that it consisted of were short passages, dozens of them, and an author was granting that if you learn them all, you could mix them and a result would be an improvisation. I don't think so, I think it's a gimmick.

[pianoplayjl]

Amazing that you know how to use only 1 chord! I thought 3 chords were the minimum to produce a quality improvisation. You proved me wrong. I enjoyed it very much.

JL

[quiescen]

:-[In my experience it is very hard for an older person to acquire this  primitive improvisational flow. Or more correctly, I have never been able to impart it to an older beginner. In other words the deficiency could simply lie with me. I think it has something to do with getting rid of conditioned inhibition. They can memorise thousands of chords and have a tremendous analytic knowledge but still can't do anything dynamic.

I think you are on the right track though, and wish you luck.

  

Thank you. Getting rid of inhibition or, as I like to put it, 'trusting intuition' is, I think, the most important thing a beginner in improvisation needs to be able to 'move forward' with the music ... mistakes and all.