Moment-by-moment commentary of a group (in this case duo) improvisation as promised. BTW, yours do not have to be as wordy as this one, and you are very welcome to take a short snippet of your performances (30 seconds, 5 seconds, whatever) if you are short on time…

0:06 start

Here’s pretty much the kind of opening I did at the last class. I know Murray’s not quite ready yet (nor, I’m gambling, is the audience), and I jump in, make a bold statement, hoping to shape the rest of the performance in those stark tones

The sweeping, fluttering gesture’s fairly comfortable to play (a choice partly dictated by the fact that we’re performing cold without a warmup), and I also know there’s a few other places I can go with this—I’m familiar with the technique. I’m hedging my bets with the harmonics at the 11 second mark, saying that I may go there, or set up an alternation. I abandon this for the moment, save it maybe for later, because the ultimate tactic I decide to pursue does require the harmonics…

0:06–0:35 initial tactic

After the initial few cycles, the tactic comes to me (almost like a collapsing of likely possibilities)…

The tactic deployed at this point, for me, is to play in any available gap left by Murray (and, I think, he was pretty much doing the same at his end).

Interesting thing about doing three consecutive gigs across three consecutive evenings is that the speeds of interaction get quicker. This opening ‘section’ took both of us by surprise. There’s no warm-up, and we’re at the densest point (in terms of information and gestures) of the whole evening; if nothing, things relax a bit after this.

Another thing is that Murray and I have been performing together, on and off, for about ten years at this point, and I trust him to make good choices, and, on a selfish note, I trust him to make me sound good. In the past, my strategy used to be to throw him any kind of random garbage, and watch him transform that initial impulse into beautifully crafted porcelain… but I’m not doing that here: I’m pushing for a little more parity and obliqueness of logic.

0:35–0:50 overlap

This tactic was, at least for me and at these speeds, an ‘imperfect’ algorithm. This imperfection of my judgement leads, for example, to the performance sounding like Murray’s doing an ‘answer’ to my ‘calls’. That latter point is really ’cause my reflexes are a little slower than Murray’s, and so while he jumps in straight after me, my reaction has a greater latency. (So the temporal grouping goes: Murray… Han, Murray… Han, Murray… Han, Murray… an illusory grouping.)

Another thing it leads to is (accidental) overlaps of our gestures. There’s an interesting sound we stumbled upon here that, to me, should sound like a foreground-background setup, but it’s difficult to decide who’s foreground and who’s background.

0:50–0:53 breakout

Two gigs ago, we did entered an analogous serendipitous zone (in that case, if was a hocket, a cheap trick that, from an inexperienced audience point of view, sounds amazing, but really easy to do) and, discussing it afterwards, we both thought we stayed there a little too long. So I figure it’s best to exit this foreground-background setup sooner rather than later. My exit gesture is (apparently) picked up my Murray, which gives me slingshot out of there.

0:53–1:14 solo

The slingshot didn’t land me anywhere other than an empty space, and I’m lazy, I can give Murray a solo and be entertained, reserve my energies for later after he’s taken us somewhere else.

1:14–1:38 back to duo

I wanted to push it back into the dense zone, and if there’s a missed opportunity in this performance, for me, it happens here. Murray’s taken this to the sparsest place, and rather than letting him go further out there, I jump in.

Now I’m pushing it back to the 0:06–0:35 initial sound, but Murray’s staying pretty much in his sparse place. I can’t exercise that initial tactic of course, so I’m, in a sense, doing a duet with a phantom Murray.

1:38–3:07 overlap redux

I briefly return to the higher register flutterings I did during the 0:35–0:50 overlap to indicate that I haven’t thrown that out yet. Like the 0:11 harmonics, I’m hedging my bets and keeping options open.

But, I think, Murray takes this as an opportunity to overlap… and I just play all the time, see what Murray makes of it. I figure he can handle making this sound musical (and I won’t worry about that at all). I alternately try and stay out of, and jump into, Murray’s (pitch, gestural and timbral) space: I want to make his life difficult.

3:07–3:49 separate ways

At some point, I think I feel I pushed Murray way to the stratospheric register… so I head bass-wards. We’ve been occupying overlapping registers for most of this, I think it would sound cool if we headed to extremes. I still set up the mid-register flutters to plug the gaps, to set it up as an almost accompaniment to the other voices, and to indicate to Murray that I’ve got that register covered, you can stay up there.

3:49–4:28 transition

Not sure why I played an almost normal chord here, but Murray takes that as a signal to change, and I take his change as my own cue to change. Having set up the harmonic at the 11 second mark, that’s an obvious place for me to go. I’m making this a gentle transition from the flutter to the harmonics (touching on the bass portamenti on the way). I’m trying to indicate two things to the audience: that I haven’t forgotten any of these elements—I’m still a juggler—and (vanity point here) that I have the chops to make this transition. I’m also keeping options open in case Murray throws a curve ball.

4:28–5:55 pseudo-balkan fiddle music

I wanted to get a pulse going. I would have preferred if Murray ignored the pulse, but he doesn’t.

Instead, possibly triggered by the (part-accidentally) melodious harmonics, he enters pseudo-balkan fiddle territory. I’m a total sucker for this, and get a real kick every time Murray goes there. If I’m the accompanist in this situation, that’s fine by me…

5:48–5:55 transition

Murray’s pushing away from this semi-idiomatic moment from about the 5:48, but I want to stay here. He builds on small staccato gestures, until I’m pretty much persuaded to leave this space.

I begin to think, at the back of my head, that I should be looking for endings.

5:55–6:30 the New Music violinist

Murray goes to the New Music violin cliché zone. Not sure how I should respond here… He catches my off guard, and I fumble at this point and do a few scrapes and scratches. Pretty pointless guitar playing I think. But, when Murray transitions to pizzicato, my gestures are retroactively justified: see? we’re swapping places. (Still later this becomes, for example, rough vs. smooth sounds.) As I said, beautifully crafted porcelain.

6:30–7:28 final tactic

When you’re being thrown a bunch of stuff, this is where the Oxley-Taylor tactic becomes useful. All I do is match my transitions/jumps to Murray’s, and offer a bunch of transitions myself.

Still looking for the exit, even if I am pretty happy where I am.

(Incidentally, if you’re looking for the ‘leap’ in a technical, guitaristic sense, this starts at 7:03 and again at 7:38… it’s that voice-like sound from the guitar; I’ve never done that before.)

7:28–8:30 looking for an exit

The overlap here, where we serendipitously land on parallel docks, was something that I though might also indicate to Murray that an exit was near… I’m slowing things down (not in terms of sound, but the number of elements being juggled), like shifting gears before the breaks goes down.

There’s a brief hocketting moment at 8:14, but, remembering our discussions about what happened two night ago, I push to break apart this simple, cheap thrill quickly by throwing a couple of uneven gestures.

Not exactly the ending I hoped for (I wanted something a little more decisive), and we’ve done much better at other times, but I can live with it.

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?