While I have to plead guilty to a certain facility with rhythm and phrase, harmony in any common practice sense is a complete mystery. My teacher was a noted professional pianist and composer and he did his best to teach me functional harmony, poor man, but he eventually gave up. I am not helpless at creating in traditional ways, especially ragtime and romantic idioms, but the trouble is that I always end up sounding like the composers I admire most. I can go through the motions at the intellectual level but it isn't my native language, put it that way.
That's quite a bit of self-awareness, in the best sense of the term.
Oh, sorry, about calling you "Tim" instead of
ted — my mistake. I don't actually know anybody named Tim. Senior moment, I guess/
You know, I didn't want to say so at first, but unless my ears had gone mental for a while, I was hearing in the harmonies that space between voice-leading and strictly vertical harmonies (the type susceptible to roman-numeral analysis), that, notably, Debussy and others used so well.
For me, your improvisation is a good lesson in how to occupy and fill that space with something that is much better than a mere pastiche of copying somebody's style.
There is going to be influences, of course, but well, I'd call it a gumbo in the best sense of the word. A very sophisticated gumbo, with a mix of the elegant and the raw.