Two Concerts and Some Jamming

I have now seen two performances where Donal performed, the first in Killian Hall, which was a preview of the second, his show at the Regattabar Jazz Club, located in Harvard Square.

After the Regattabar concert, Khoa, Sarah, and I got together to jam and to put some ideas out for a piece for the December performance. It was hard to get started because we held back, self-conscious about making mistakes in front of each other. Then I decided, okay, I'm going to play without worrying - no judging - and I think it made it easier for everyone once that initial discomfort was gone.

We decided to pick a melody that we knew well already, so it would be easier to improvise off of. We settled with Amazing Grace, but found it hard to do anything terribly creative with it after a few times through. Then we did some brief minimalist-style improv, and then spent a good amount of time on twelve-bar blues. First, we took turns soloing for twelve bars, then tried a call-and-response model with two people trading off solos while one other person held the bass line. It required a lot of thought to keep our solos within the alloted number of bars for the call-and-response - on afterthought, they were too short, I think. We also found that it was hard to improvise trading off after only 2 bars, whereas 4 was manageable.


A few general patterns in improvised pieces and performances I have observed:

1. When improvising off of a well-known melody, it is good to play the melody in its entirety first, without changing it significantly. This is what Donal did at the Regattabar for his Bach pieces, and what Gabriela Montero does in her improv on Bach's Prelude in C.

2. When playing in a group, eye contact between group members is useful. I saw this happening in both of Donal's live performances. Nothing new here: it's the same for a string quartet or orchestra.

3. Though improvisation is done spontaneously, a lot of planning also goes into good improvisation to prevent collisions. Not just in practicing with the same group of people, to get a feel for what they do, but also to decide on chord progressions, who will take the melody where, and how duets will work. I realized, while practicing with Sarah and Khoa, how challenging it is to make transitions even from one person having the solo to another person.

4. The limit to improvisation is your creativity - and technique.


When playing with the blues form, I noticed that I was employing the same "tricks" to make it sound like blues, like hitting half-steps below the note I intended to land on, and then sliding up to the higher note -- in general, using a lot of neighbor tones. I decided to listen to "Freddie Freeloader" carefully to see if I could pick up more characteristics of blues music, and I made the following observations.

Freddie Freeloader:


(Granted, these are observations from one sample of blues, and may not apply to other blues pieces. However, some of these observations are more general and can apply to other types of improvisation.)

1. Sure enough, there is significant use of hitting whole steps or half steps above or below notes that the musicians intend to arrive on, before those arrival notes. This is also used in the middle of solo lines, and gives the music a kind of meandering quality. Small chromatic scales are also used to "slide" up or down to an arrival note.

2. The tempo is a finger-snapping, toe-tapping tempo.

3. The rhythm in the solo is loose, and skitters across bars so that you aren't really aware of the transitions between bars, only of the larger groups of bars (like four-measure groups).

4. Motifs are often repeated at least twice when they appear.

5. A lot of chromaticism and arpeggios are used, and the 7ths of chords. The piano often has diminished chords, in a Strong-long/Weak-short articulation/rhythm.

6. Sometimes fourths are used to begin a phrase, and fifths are used at the end (between the second-to-last and last). In general fourths and fifths constitute a lot of the jumps.

7. A lot of phrases end with note-bending -- playing a note and then sliding it out of tune -- at least on the trumpet.

8. It sounds like the musicians just have topologies in mind, and just spontaneously fill in the notes in the appropriate style. Sometimes they are running through so many notes that they are in uncertain chordal territory, but they just get back on.

9. The rhythm uses a lot of triplets and notes in groups of three (such as three eighth or quarter notes in a row).

10. The melody that opens the pieces also closes it.

Improv on TED Talks

I found this video on TED Talks (which is also a great treasure trove of ideas on many topics other than music).

In it, a girl takes a handful of cards with notes written on them, has an audience member randomly choose some, and then improvises a piano piece based on those notes as a theme. It's a neat trick and kind of cocky too, cocky in a good way - in the sense that she is so secure in her ability to improvise that she's not afraid of anything thrown at her, even in a setting when she's going to be nervous.

I'm going to try this the next time I practice.

Bach as Teacher

I attended Donal's lecture-recital on Wednesday night, entitled "Bach as Teacher: Classical and Jazz." As I looked around Killian Hall, it was interesting to see who attended - there were some faculty I recognized, including a writing professor and her husband (also a jazz double bassist), as well as David Deveau and Marcus. I saw Xiao Xiao and Khoa too.

Donal performed with double bassist John Lockwood, and drummer/percussionist Yoron Israel. As suggested by the title, the recital consisted of jazz pieces inspired by Bach. Donal took a bunch of different Bach pieces - inventions and well-tempered clavier, I think, and took the bass lines and other catchy parts of the pieces and vamped them to form the basic structure of his pieces. This is one idea to hold onto for a potential piece in our final concert for the improv class. This would be one way to blend the classical I'm more used to with unfamiliar territory.

I was really impressed by the percussionist's single solo that evening. It's unusual for me to appreciate percussion because that's an instrument probably the most foreign to me, my instruments being all melodic. Maybe this class has gotten me to think more about rhythm. It's true though, when I think about it - rhythm can completely change the effect of a piece of music, and is at least as important as the notes. Just imagine the Star-Spangled Banner in triplets or something - that would completely ruin its stateliness. In general just trying to understand what makes jazz sound like jazz has forced me to look at the elements of music more closely.