moe.

I'm going to be honest here.  When I do these improvs, I usually do a small handful of them, not just one, and then listen back to choose which one I'm going to post.  Because I think that if I only gave myself one shot per day, and were stuck with that one, it might get in the way of my creativity a bit (or maybe what I mean to say is that it might cause some intense anxiety, perhaps even some hyperventilation)... or maybe I'm defeating the purpose by giving myself a bunch of shots.  Well, in any case, I'm going to keep doing it this way, at least for now, because I just can't let go that much.

So anyway, the problem with that is what do I pick if they're all so different, but each explore something that I find important?  I like some more than others, but sometimes the others were an experiment to try something new.  For example, the first one I did today was very nocturne-like.  And in my opinion, it's very pretty, and sort of dreamy.  I like it, and for me, it creates a pleasant atmosphere.  The second one is super different.  I started on a B-natural, and tried to stay physically centered around that note... in a lot of the improv, you can't hear it much at all, because I'm holding it down the whole time.  You hear overtones and stuff, but not the B itself, except now and then.  It was interesting to do, but maybe not as interesting to listen to.  Or... maybe MORE interesting to listen to... I really have no idea.  The other two were also both very different.  One expansive and resonant, covering the entire range of the piano throughout... the last was short, sweet, cheery.

So pondering this choice made me wonder... when we share music, who do we do it for, and why?

Okay, I guess I need to pick now.  Eeny meeny miney...

Here we go, Day 6: https://ia600500.us.archive.org/0/items/Improv82011/Memo-8.mp3

Tinto Verano

After sitting in the park, watching the sky get dark, and deciding I better hit it back home, I got in about 2 minutes before the stormiest storm began.  Made myself some skirt steak and an avocado salad.  And decided I should probably have some red wine.  The only red wine I had was opened over a week ago in a hotel room somewhere in Connecticut, and wasn't finished, due to utter exhaustion, but also because it wasn't so top of the line.  Anyway, I stuck it in the fridge so it wouldn't go completely bad (can't waste alcohol, you know...), and decided to mix it with some lemonade to create a lovely summer drink.  I've had this before, mind you, when I was on a six week stint in Cadiz, Spain.  They call it tinto verano.  It's effing delicious.

Anyway, listen to this while it rains.  Sort of fits.  I like it, anyway.

Here we go, Day what is it, 5?  https://ia600703.us.archive.org/23/items/Improv81911/Memo-6.mp3

I might as well add this one, too.  It's so much more rainy summer night, thinking of Spain, with a glass of tinto.  Plus, I think my mom will like it better.  Here we go, Day 5 part 2: https://ia802607.us.archive.org/6/items/Improv281911/Memo-7.mp3

Time for rain.

Everyone complains on rainy days, and I'm not really sure why.  For me, they're some of the best days ever.  Rain is a very sensory experience.  Sound, smell, feel, sight... and even taste, if you want.  Everything about the rain, I love.  Yes, even when I have to walk in it.


Today, I'm going to reference time.  Music lives.  Especially in improv.  You know how I know?  Because in one moment it exists, it expresses, it breathes, it makes mistakes, it falls apart, it builds up, it speaks, it evolves and unfolds.  And then, it's over.  And what happened in that moment of living never happened before, and will never happen again.  It's a translation of the soul, and is as unique in its moment as any of us, or any other thing in nature.  Even a recording is just a photograph of what happened in that moment, and what we have in that photograph is just a memory.  


What happens in a moment of music will never happen again the same way, just as you and I will never happen again once we pass.  Yet somehow, during the course of a piece of music (and even throughout the evolution of music as a whole), what happened then is essential to what happens now, and to what will happen in the future.  And what happens in the future depends entirely on what is happening now, which depends on what happened already.  It is predetermined, and its not.  Once a choice has been made, it's very difficult to go back and try to reroute onto a different path.  It's not impossible, but getting back there entails yet another path.  One of the scary things, and honest things, about music is that you can't take back anything.  There are always consequences.  And since this is the truth about how the world/universe/evolution/humanity works, you can see why I would say that music lives.  Fwew.  I'm rereading this, and it's just a conundrum of wordplay.  Let's leave it to the experts.


An excerpt from a poem by T.S. Eliot.  I won't put the entire thing here, because no one wants to read an entire poem in a blog.  I'll just write the title so that you can look it up if you want to.  


An excerpt from Four Quartets: Burnt Norton:


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


Here we go, Day 4:  https://ia902701.us.archive.org/35/items/Improv81811/Memo-5.mp3

Be like children again.

I'm probably getting this post in way too late to be considered for today's entry, but here it is anyway, and as far as I'm concerned, IT STILL COUNTS.  I'm a night owl.  It's just a fact of life.

I spent this beautiful evening doing work in the park, then watching the first 25 minutes of a bad play that should've been a good play, leaving early, finding booze, getting invited to a spontaneous stewed lamb, roasted potatoes, kale and salad dinner, eating it atop a friend's apartment building out of the pots with our hands, with lovely views of the GW Bridge, the Hudson River, and the few sprinkles of stars that Manhattan gets to see on clear nights, all with a gentle, clean(ish) summer breeze.  It was a night to remember.  And with lots of good conversation, too.

Matthew, turns out, has been dabbling in improv, too.  It so happened that he had been contemplating some of the same things that I have been contemplating.  One of them was musical language, which I briefly wrote about yesterday.  (He can weigh in here if he wants to about that.)  Another was the idea that the people who are best at creating music are the young, because they know nothing, and the old, because they know everything.  I had mentioned that I wanted to be like a child again, because they just do what they like to do naturally... no inhibitions or predispositions.  They explore the world, every little bit, and end up discovering beauty and interest in things and places that most adults wouldn't give a second thought to.  Why, as adults, do we ignore the details?  And why do we disallow ourselves to follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole?  (Shoot, as I edit this, I'm realizing that I'm opening a door into an entire chapter of discussion.  I should probably just quit with what I've got.  Let's see if I can word my way out of this.  Hmmm.  No.  Let's just jump to a new paragraph while the night is still young at 2:41am.)

I understand that as adults, we have responsibilities to ourselves or our partners, and people that depend on us.  But why do we care so much about what is thought of us that it prevents us from trying new things that we're interested in?  Is it because we only want to do things that we'll be automatically good at?  Is it a time issue?  Or maybe not wanting to spread ourselves thin... as Vlada suggested, not wanting to be mediocre at the things we invest ourselves in.  It all makes sense, but somehow I'm not okay with that limitation.  It's hard to know how to get out of that... I guess in some ways this whole project is a way out of it.  We'll see in a year.

So today, I wanted to try something a little bit different.  Yesterday I tried to conceive an entire conversation in Mandarin (free improv), and while it might have been fun, I ended up not really knowing what I said (played).  Today I tried to use a little bit more English (classical) in my improv.  It's much less dissonant, and certainly more harmonically structured.  I still have a lot of trouble with an automatic ingrained chordal structure, but it's definitely more towards a sort of "classical style."

I'm going to put two improvs on for today.  The first one is pretty straight forward, and I got a little scared that it was going to end up sounding really corny.  The second one was a kind of take on a Bach solo cello something or rather, not really a suite, since it's not very dance-like, but in that vein.  It's all for the left hand.  Oh yeah, and sort of strange... they sound kind of similar.  Is that normal?

Here we go, Day 3:
https://ia700709.us.archive.org/35/items/Imrov181711/Memo-3.mp3
https://ia600705.us.archive.org/35/items/Improv281711/Memo-4.mp3

你 听！

I remember being a kid in a piano lesson, and my teacher would say, "You have to listen!"  And I was like, "Uhh, yeah.  I know.  Umm, I'm sitting right here."  And then one day, my teacher said that same thing, and it dawned on me the breadth and depth of all of the sound that was ringing in my ears, but that I hadn't been listening to.  I thought, "Geez! I want to listen to all of that stuff, but it's HARD to hear it all while I'm doing all this other stuff with my hands!"  Now I wonder if I ever even learned how to listen at all....  Bummer.

I think I listen better when I improvise.

Seriously.  I think when I play classical music, my brain is so busy trying to execute what is written on that page, and trying to do it "correctly," that my ears turn off a little.  Or at least they listen in a different way.  The ears listen for precision, or clarity, or phrasing and form.  But not as much to the creation or the question mark or the process.

When I improvise (like I do it all the time, or something... geez, this is just day two), I have to and want to listen intently.  First of all, I'm not burdened by all that pre-written stuff.  I can create what comes next, which is also the challenge.  And if I'm not listening, it won't make sense.  I may not always play what I want to hear next, and sometimes that surprise is the fun part.  Or it just means I'm not as good as I want to be yet.  But definitely, yes, listening is the big key.

And language, too.  The notes might be the same, but the way they are used is totally different.  I mean, there's a reason why there is usually a separation between the classical musician and the jazz musician.  They're certainly not interchangeable unless said musician has had training in both.  I feel like when I'm improvising, I'm sitting down at an instrument that I don't know how to play.  Or speaking a language that I only know a few words of, but trying to construct an entire dialogue.

Well, here's what it sounds like when I try to speak Mandarin:

Day Two: https://ia902703.us.archive.org/8/items/Improv81611/Memo-2.mp3




The first of many. (I hope.)


I was inspired to begin this project by many people and things, most directly by my friend Jesse, who did a project much like this one.  He, a jazz pianist, set out to improvise and record every day for a year, and publish each recording online.  

Well, I'm going to do the same thing.  Except, I don't play jazz.  I'm not an improviser by any musician's standards, hardly my own.  But I'm an improviser in life, and, well, here we go then.  

As a classical pianist of 25 years, it's time now that I explore that part of me that wants to be free.  I've always had a curiosity to improvise, but for whatever reason, (a class got canceled, or was full) I've been siphoned down a different path.  Well, each day is an opportunity, right?  So starting today, I'm going to improvise every day.  And I'm gonna record it.  And it might be bad.  But it might be good.  And I'm gonna force myself to publish it online.  

That's scary.  Because in conservatory, we're trained to criticize ourselves and other musicians.  We hold ourselves to ridiculous standards of perfection and aesthetic.  And as much as I hate being that way, I have been bred into this mindset as well.  So, to publish something on here that I might not be happy with, probably not even good at, is kind of a big deal for me.

There's a lot I want to write here... a lot that I've been philosophizing about over the past several months. I can't possibly get it all down into one little blog note.  But here are at least two stars in a universe of solar systems and galaxies that we can peek at: fear and vulnerability.  Whoa.  

So, we fear the uncertain, and we fear it because we think that it could cause us some sort of pain, emotional, physical, or otherwise.  And so we make ourselves invulnerable in order to avoid that pain, because we're afraid that we could, possibly, maybe end up getting hurt.  Even though, when we avoid that "pain possibility," we're also cutting off the possibility of something really awesome happening.  What the heck?  It sucks, but it's true.  You can't open yourself to the possibilities of super awesome amazing without opening yourself to the possibilities of horrible ouchy pain time.  Well... and that's life, then, isn't it?

One of my fears, and I think a valid fear that many of my musician friends share, is of being exposed as a fraud of sorts.  Someone who claims to be a "professional musician," but then falling short somehow, or being perceived as a hack.  Maybe didn't execute that one difficult passage so very well, or isn't a very good sight-reader (in my case, how true), or wasn't able to harmonize that melody properly, or WHATEVER.  Yeah, I think we're all pretty damn insecure.

And so anyway, I've decided that I'm okay with putting it all out there.  I want to go out on a limb, even if a very shaky one.  I've already said I'm not an improviser.  So, at least you all know that you shouldn't have high expectations.  (And I'm not expecting many, if any, readers/listeners, so ultimately this is more for my benefit than anyone else's.)  But maybe... something awesome will come out of all of this.  Maybe I'll even like some of what I create.

Let's see what happens after one year.  Today, I don't know how to begin.  I don't understand complicated chord progressions on a dime, like some.  I don't know how to read a chart.  I don't know the jazz traditions, where they were fifty years ago, and how that developed into what they are now.  I don't really know anything about improv.  Let's just see what happens. 

(P.S. I know I need to get my piano tuned.  I also apologize for the recording quality... it's nothing fancy.  Just my iphone.)