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.