Safety First

the opening piece of The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of Kevin and myself at october 2008 Stet Lab in O’ Riada Hall

commentary of the first minute and a half..

the track link is this:

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i decide to open using the teaspoon.. it’s one of my favorite tools, much lighter than a steel tone bar enables me to do fast slides across the strings or across the length of the string/s..its great for mallet-ke bouncing ((might use it to try to get that deep low resonant sound i found last week while playing with Kevin– possibly the lowest frequencies i can get with this guitar and they were hiding right where i usually find the highest ones: above the bridge pickup)) and of course like scratching the side of the spoon across the strings, this another thing that can be done extremely fast.. at the first hit (0.00) it sounds like the wah is halfway down, better push it all the way because i want all the highest waileyslidey sounds to be available.. don’t really worry too much about where Kevin’s at, think i want to use the very high frequencies.. i tap the strings quite fast (0.08) and move into sliding mode just after that and alternate between flat slides and side scratches.. K seems to be on a similar territory of fast swooshes so i think this will work.. might be a mixture of the politeness of the situation/context and the stormy rain around us that s me into upping the acidic content of the atmosphere.. need some distortion (0.33) .. will it work? let’s see.. scratching fast on the first few seconds gives certainly a loudness boost, some kind of break from the previous mood, at first it doesn’t seem to generate a reaction in K, but here he is.. getting louder and slightly more percussive (0.43).. i continue on the fast scratching and percussive mode for a while, then decide for a more sustained sound (0.52) to leave some space to K and focus a bit more on what he is doing.. after 5 seconds feel i can’t sustain that any longer and move into a percussive space (0.57) then need to dull the sound with the wah (1.01) and then start the bouncy percussive thing close to the bridge (1.03), alternated with more fast slides (1.09) seems like i tried the low frequency trick but not sure the pick up setting is the right one, then scratching hell ( 1.11-1.16) and things seem to get a little out of control, and that’s not a bad thing because normally it’s when i lose control than the interesting things start to happen..drop the spoon and pick up the wooden mallet with the felt tip.. a little hardcore break for a few seconds and then rotate the mallet and let it bounce on the strings.. distortion is on, the tone gets a little more dramatic…

Is improvisation the pursuit of the novel or the unknown? Possibly the shedding of boundaries?

I’m attracted to improvisation because of something I value. That is a freshness, a certain quality which can only be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get from writing. It is something to do with the leap. And when you go out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown. If through that leap you find something then it has a value which I don’t think can be found in any other way. I place higher value on that than on what you can prepare. But I am also hooked into what you can prepare, especially in the way that it can take you to the edge. What I write is to take you to the edge safely so that you can go on out there and find this other stuff. But really it is this other stuff that interests me and I think it forms the basic stuff of jazz.

Steve Lacy quoted in Derek Bailey (1992), Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London: British Library National Sound Archive), pp. 57–58.

Or is improvisation about finding possibilities within the set of resources that surround you—your context, your environment? Is it an engagement with the musical eco-system?

What happens is what happens; is what you have created; is what you have to work with. What matters is to listen, to watch, to add to what is happening rather that subtract from it—and avoid the reflex of trying to make it into something you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan), pp. 2–3.

Or are these ideas not quite as disparate as they might seem? or are they both unsatisfactory?