Keefe Jackson – Week 2 – Why Improvisation?
Jun 19, 2023
I’m not sure if these thoughts address the question ‘why improvisation’. As someone who has improvised music since starting to play as a child, for me improvisation is part of the ABCs of music, and by extension art and creative activity in general. In this sense my viewpoint is biased — maybe it’s not fair to ask me, or for me to answer this question. But I can share some thoughts about it.
Improvisation is nothing new of course. As a method it has existed since the beginning of art, maybe even since the beginning of the universe. It has played an important role in music since before history, so we can say that it’s an essential ingredient of music. Even when musicians are playing mostly written material, there is some element of improvisation going on, even if it’s indirect or inherited.
In the current era, when musicians say we’re improvising usually we intend to make a distinction between the written part and the improvised part. But is it really that simple? Sometimes when playing ‘improvised music’ we are recycling, repeating, regurgitating; in order to truly say we are improvising we must dig a little deeper. Others say that these three R’s are the basic building blocks of music, a kind of DNA, and that transcending them is not possible.
Another thing we are confronted with is the idea of ‘free improvisation’. I think that this is possible but it’s usually very difficult to tell if the improvising is ‘free’ or not, unless you are one of the musicians involved in the moment of doing it. Usually we are limited by our culture, training, instrument, habits, etc. Breaking ‘free’ of all these things requires another step. So free improvisation is a discipline, and there are as many pathways as there are artists who are trying to get there.
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Recap:
On the 10th and 12th we travelled to Lucerne and Zurich for performances at the Mullbau (Lucerne) and WIM (Zurich). A massive learning experience to take our as-yet home-based work out into the public–we head into week three inviting Zurich-based dancer Angela Stöcklin into our work with scores and prompts for movement-music improv, and thanks to local connections in Locarno, we’ll be presenting a performance at a DIY apartment space this Thursday! See flyer below:
