Rainfall in a Strange City

[ted]

A post to celebrate Dave's return to the forum, this is the second half of a gently evolving organic improvisation from last week. I shall be seventy-seven this year and I think it's time to give my mind absolute freedom to just let all aspects of the psyche, soul, stream of consciousness, whatever you like to call it, flow without hindrance of intellectual overview or control. It's fifteen years since I decided to embrace free improvisation and I think I have improved, but I might be wrong. However, I really think that all the stuff talked about improvisation, what chords and notes to play and a pile of other prerequisites, is total nonsense and destructive to the deeper creative impulse.

The title is purely nominal. I'm not a gifted impressionist like Neil and I hardly ever start out with a priori images. Far more important that listeners ascribe their own meanings to what they hear.

I had to degrade the recording somewhat to fit the size restriction of course.

[furtwaengler]

I have had a chance to listen through unimpeded with enjoyment. It seems there are different levels. About 16 minutes in there is an appealing development which continues and then 20 min and 28 min further shifts that get in deeper and deeper. Thinking about this being just part of a recording had me wondering if there is a natural course these shifts are a part of as in the golden ratio or Fibonacci series in nature. It's just interesting where the shifts appear in light of it being half of the actual session.

[ted]

Thanks for listening Dave, glad you like it. What you observe is certainly interesting but I can assure you there was no conscious intervention toward that end. However, this does not imply the absence of such proportions and many unconsciously generated features have been brought to my attention in the past. I recall Bill Harris, an improvisation enthusiast and professor, alas now gone, from Middlebury College once asked me if I realised I repeated almost every idea exactly four times, albeit imprecisely. He was right but I hadn't the slightest notion I was doing it !

[furtwaengler]

I'm not implying conscious intervention; rather a natural flow of events...more like a weather system coming and going.

[ted]

Okay, in that case I think you could be onto something. I have long maintained that effective organic improvisation is at some deep level of the brain a complex nest of chaotic (in the mathematical sense of that word, not the common parlance meaning of disorder) feedback loops. To take a crude analogy it operates like one of those elliptic pendulums which were popular a few decades ago, or like the Lorenz equations trying to predict weather (perceptive comparison there on your part I think !) Except in music the number of loops and their interactions are much more complex, infinitely so in fact. Of course I could be quite wrong, the whole notion is purely my own conjecture, but it is strange how your observations and those of other listeners align to what might be termed models of morphogenesis.