Something special happens when time is embraced -- when time is the medium and the inspiration. Improvisation is stepping into a strangling demon called time and making him dance. Improvisation is surfing on the waves that normally crash down upon us, bully us. Don’t cry -- thrive, glow, make your person show, because who else could play that on the horn?
You can’t take back anything. Butterfly-wing-to-monsoon reactions are already in motion. That’s just one of the many humbling properties of time. There’s a big tendency to fight them. How many of our actions, conscious and unconscious, are a struggle against our inevitable mortality, i.e. wealth, children, health, religion, art? How often is our mind in the convoluted pool of the past, or projected into the inevitably false prophecies of the future? Generally, it seems, we’re somewhere else from where we are. But what if we studied time, prayed to time -- it is our God, -- painted time with rhythm and melody; what if we created the time at the time? Would that not be the ultimate focus, the ultimate exhalation of the only true time that exists -- Now!?!
While there are other genres like blues and swing that are attached to a general label called "Jazz," without dispute, if there is no improvisation, there is no Jazz. Of course, there is a method. One can study harmony and melody, and learn how different notes react to the chord and each other. However, mere theoretical knowledge often results in the amateur practice known as ‘running the chords.’ The player is simply noodling through the appropriate scale for each successive chord. Though a lifetime of serious practice is necessary just to get on the bandstand, this mechanical "improvising" is not the subject here. The improvising I am talking about occurs in the magical moments of pure reaction and creation which true players, like Juju priests, can summon.
In Jazz, it always takes a new prayer. One night’s invention becomes the next night’s idiom. Perhaps that’s why in less than a century jazz music has gone through a thousand (r)evolutions.
At one point in my life, I was reading Kerouac’s largely improvised On the Road and listening over and over to Charles Mingus’ manic concert, "At Antibes." In a way, they touch upon the same shit. Both got something stirring in me, an energy that exceeded the limits necessary and acceptable in say, a bank, a job, or even a school. I wanted to write, create, and travel all at the same time. You could feel the freedom. While that form of freedom is discouraged in corporate-style America, in other cultures, it is used in the path to other mental states.
Qwali singers, from the Islamic mystical sect of the Sufis, spontaneously create intricate melodies as the energy of the music and jumping crowd increases intensity. The concert is not supposed to end until the singer reaches a higher state of enlightenment. Similarly, the frantic babble of speaking in tongues and Gospel ‘testifying’ are absorbed into the language of Jazz.
While the potential spiritual energy of improvisation has been embraced on the fringes of Christianity, generally, it has been branded as Satanic. In the Western tradition, music that included any kind of percussion-driven song has been associated with the Devil. The Church has even banned certain harmonic intervals that bristled with too much dissonant friction. We don’t like to let the Devil run rampant in this country. You will never hear "At Antibes" on most Jazz stations. Most people want their jazz radio to soothe them, so they can numb their minds as they transport themselves to and from their shitty jobs. But I digress...
Kerouac filled himself up with drugs and caffeine, and would supposedly write novels in as little as three days. He would use a single banner-sized sheet of paper in his typewriter in an effort to ride the flow. The soundtrack to his writing is Be-Bop, an equally frantic musical language whose creation was driven by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. As Jazz, due to hefty entertainment taxes during World War II and a depleting national interest in the music, was making the transition from dance to listening music, Bop players pushed the limits of swing to the highest level of musicianship. Improvisers challenged themselves with tougher harmonies, creating lines on a higher level of melodic and rhythmic complexity than anything that had ever been conceived before.
As musical history was being made, these supreme players must have been more than listening; they were anticipating, feeling the direction that the new music will lead. Be-bop just happened, it wasn’t planned. Likewise, during the creation of his art, Kerouac could not have been overly deliberate -- at points, his work must have been as uncensored as a writer can be.
Like a boxer, the trumpet player reacts to the blasts out of his trumpet, gingerly walking a delicate road above a shifting rhythm section.
The Buddha says to destroy the ego; it is the source of suffering. Did Jimi Hendrix’s wounded hand really feel pain as he glided a melodic feedback bomb, and crashed it on the ground of "Machine Gun?" Did John Coltrane know what he looked like, or what he was wearing, as he sonically screamed prayer to the Supreme? How was Charlie Parker able to produce a sound through a piece of metal that seemed to make everyone think he was God?
Einstein pioneered the perspective to view everything as waves. Everything would then be rhythm. Some think the Universe started with a Big Bang. Relatively, it would have had to have been very loud anyway. Waves are music, the oceans are music, the earth is music, the solar system is music and we make music back. Sometimes we improvise it, so that the waves of sound from each musician not only harmonize with each other, but with the waves of life around them.
Miles Davis liked to record in New York because he felt the city’s energy gave the recordings a certain tension.
That is why Parker, almost at the brink of destruction, breathed such a beautifully tortured Lover that will undoubtedly send currents of goosebumps into living humans centuries later. The goosebumps are from the communication of humanity, emotion, and honesty -- inherent qualities in the improvised act of creation.
What about Ornette Coleman, who destroyed all the rules and stretched for a purer improvisation? Why would the Hindus have one deity for both creation and destruction? Why would angry purists kick Coleman’s ass and break his instrument, forcing him to speak through a plastic horn? How could he then learn to play so beautifully through that plastic saxophone?
Music is something different to everybody because it is everything, something, and nothing all at the same time. Tell me when a computer can understand that. Can you understand that? I can’t. But I know its true, even if it is beyond comprehension. Rhythm is the space between the beats, melody is the space between the notes, molecules are the space between atoms, and atoms are mostly space. We exist in and exist of space.
Lao-Tsu says, "The saucer is made out of clay, but it is the emptiness inside which makes it useful."
Sun Ra says, "Space is the Place."
An improviser dares to step into this void. He does not know what his next note will be -- the note before will tell him. At its highest level, the player is completely engrossed in the moment, with no choice but to play what he feels -- which has something to do with how you feel. React. Don’t listen to Jazz silently. The beauty is in the communication. Communication is the truth in the void.
-David Ellenbogen
The author is an occasional Jazz DJ at WKCR-FM in New York City, and has broadcast weekly radio shows in Binghamton, NY and Accra, Ghana (as DJ Abruni [white man] #2). He has recently completed studying to be an English Teacher and is working very hard at "running the chords."