Valentine.

The truth is, I never gave much clout to today's holiday.  Not since I was a kid.  And the best thing about it was just getting a bunch of little notes, many of them with pictures of Garfield and an unfunny pun in a thought bubble, from classmates paired with candy.  The candy was really what was fun.  And opening the envelopes.  What kid doesn't like getting "mail?"  And I seem to recall one Valentine's Day when I was sick, and my Dad brought me a pink, heart-shaped sugar cookie while I was sniffling under the covers, a down of used tissues engulfing my little head.  Now that I think of it, that was pretty great.  But it didn't have that much to do with any holiday.

I'm not down on Valentine's Day, I just don't live with a necessity to have a "special day" for love.  I know I'm not the only one.  And I suppose I understand why this holiday exists.  The sentiment is still very beautiful.  But I think I must be lucky... if I don't see a need, it's because I feel love all the time. 

So for today's improv... it started out as a lullaby, and transformed itself into a nocturne, I guess.  Pretty basic chord structure, almost completely tonal, a little stodgy.  Nothing groundbreaking here, but perhaps a good exercise in staying within a standard harmonic plan.

Here we go, Day 184: https://ia600804.us.archive.org/13/items/Improv21412/20120214202932.mp3

Asymmetry.

I may have mentioned before that I'm a bit "ruined" for improvisation by my classical roots.  When I sit down to play, I want everything to be a miracle.  Or at least I want it all to wrap up in a nice little package.  Which is so strange, because I tend to like things askew.  I've always liked the wonky smile, or the one eyelid closing a little more on that side only.  I especially like the single dimple.  And funny how I think scars are special. 

Sure, symmetry has its place.  And even has beauty.  But I find more balance in the imperfect.

So why can't I just let my stuff be?  I am frustrated by a lot of these improvs because they're not anything that I would ever showcase.  They're not well-constructed, and even I, the person who made them, can't make any sense from them.

And I wanna know... why am I not okay with that?  Why can't I just extract ideas from them, and consider them sketches?

Maybe I don't want to put sketches out in the world... and by my own promise, I must.  Maybe if I weren't putting these online, I'd be a lot more comfortable with them.  But if I weren't putting them online, I probably wouldn't be doing them so regularly.  Hmmm....

Here we go, Day 183: https://ia600806.us.archive.org/28/items/Improv21312/20120213212832.mp3

Rest: as a treasure.

Our bodies are machines.  It's fascinating to me how we need fuel, just like any working thing that we've built, to function.

Not just food, but sleep, too.  What is it?  What is happening to us when we go to that vulnerable place?

I had a dream the other night that I was improvising very well.  And I'm sure that I was actually hearing something that my mind had created in sleep.  Now... to reassemble it. 

Tomorrow: diagrams for dream-music extraction device.

Here we go, Day 182: https://ia601406.us.archive.org/13/items/Improv21212_543/20120212210806.mp3

Fado.

Saw fado last night.  How I miss it so....  It's incredible how one can fall so deeply in love, and forget completely what was without.  I am not a drop Portuguese, and yet, fado finds something in me that was unearthed until I met it.  And now I am more myself because of it.  Silly, I know.

But there are things that we are searching for.  And we often don't know what they are.  We spend our lives scraping at glimpses of what we might catch, of what might satiate us, of some impossible answer.  And even up to our deaths we don't know what the things are that we seek, but we feel strongly the compulsion to want them, these otherworldly feelings.  And that's what they are, if you want to know.  We are hunting down feelings.  "Feelings" as a sensation, physically, psychologically, and emotionally.  We seek to experience the undefinable, uncommon feelings.  The ones that take us far, far away from ourselves, and simultaneously give us an acute magnification of what we call our soul.

The only word I know that comes close to what I'm attempting to describe is "catharsis."  But as far as I'm concerned, it's incomplete.  At least for me....  It's not necessarily a purging I'm looking for.  It's a knowledge.  Or an expression.  Or an understanding, perhaps.  Well, as I said, we don't know what it is exactly that we are searching for, and that includes me.

Anyway, I guess this is all coming about because of fado... which is sort of like my gold coin on the way to the treasure chest.  I don't only know myself better because of fado, but I know you better, too.

So today's improv: a recent perusal through world-music inspired classical pieces brought me back to this favorite Spanish tune that I've heard a lot in flamenco and in Albeniz's music.  I really do love it.  Anyway, I thought I'd grab it for the day.  The improv itself is a bit wayward and incomplete.

Here we go, Day 179: https://ia600800.us.archive.org/26/items/Improv2912/20120209215630.mp3

Caterwaul.

I almost didn't post tonight.  My internet went out, and upon calling the cable company, discovered that there was an outage in my area.  Act of God.  Nothing I could do about it.

On my way to bed, I saw that the lights on my modem were flashing again.  That's how dedicated I am.  Now, 3:10 am, I sit again at my monster information slab, and blog today's post.

So, I'm not a singer.  Never pretended to be one since the 8th grade (when I totally pretended to be one... I used to sing opera at the top of my lungs when I thought no one was home.  Carmen, La Boheme... famous arias, what have you... never with the actual words... just the melodies on la or some made up foreign words.  Once Dad unexpectedly floated down the stairs after I had been belting for about fifteen minutes, much to my adolescent embarrassment...)

Anyway, that being said, today my body needed to get some song out.  So, to either your curiosity, dismay, or delight, this is what is on the improv for today.  Words are improvised as well, so, sorry about all that.... :P

And there's real live caterwauling, too!

Here we go, Day 178: https://ia700806.us.archive.org/14/items/Improv2812/20120208151234.mp3

Creak.

It's so funny!  I hear that bench creak in EVERY single improv.  All of the ones from my apartment anyway.  It's the sound of me leaning over to press the on and off button.  Teehee!  It literally makes me laugh sometimes.  It's so very distinct to my ears now.  It is the sound of improv.

Also, how is it possible that Duane Reade has every heart-shaped novelty imaginable, but no heart stickers??  TRAVESTY!  My student has been requesting them ALL YEAR LONG.

Ah, the sticky heart.

Here we go, Day 177: https://ia600802.us.archive.org/12/items/Improv2712/20120207214755.mp3


Zombies.

Silly classical pianist!!  Why would I say such things as to exclude improvisors from any of the minutiae that classical musicians brood over?  That really wasn't my intention yesterday.  I think I was just a little overwhelmed with my web of thoughts.  It's really hard to conclude anything justly when you're not taking into account everything else, and when you take into account everything else, it's really hard not to be befuddled.

Okay.  Scratch everything from yesterday's post.  Probably, mostly: the improv itself.

And on to tonight's improv.  I'll take guesses as to what it's about.

Here we go, Day 176: https://ia700807.us.archive.org/2/items/Improv2612/20120206212657.mp3

Webs.

With not much care for football, I spent my Superbowl Sunday at a nearly empty jazz show in Brooklyn.  It kind of got me thinking, though, about training.  Maybe I've already covered this in one of my blog entries, but I'm sure that this improvised writing always flows in new directions, too.

So, Jesse's music is, for me, anyway, somewhere between improvised and composed from top to bottom.  And the parts that are influenced by classical are heavily so.  The reason I bring this up is because watching him play made me think of the way we train ourselves to play music.  I can't comment on how jazz players are trained, because I've never had any of that.  But I can say, from my years of experience as both a teacher and a student, that a lot of classical study is specifically to train muscle memory.

Now, this MUST be the case for jazz players to, in some ways.  I know that they go through scales and arpeggios and so forth as well.  But it makes me wonder if that is why I have had such a hard time getting comfortable with improvisation.  I'm having to trust my hands to play something that they've never touched before.

I remember once that I was trying to get my student to imagine a sound, and then try to make that sound.  Imagery is something I use a lot of with my students, because it's hard to describe a difference in vibration without attaching it to some kind of mood or feeling.  And, after all, why would you care if you made a color change if it didn't provoke something in us?  When her mom came in at the end of the lesson, I reviewed with her the lesson.  She said something like, "well, but how does that happen?  Doesn't it work the other way?"  Well, yeah.  To the listener.  But it's the artist's job to create that image to begin with.  If an image comes from a performance, it's not often just by chance.  I tried to explain that if a musician just works with the colors that happen to occur on their own, the palate becomes very limited... the imagination has to be engaged in order to expand beyond the possible.  I'm not sure she understood, and maybe I'm not even explaining it very well here.

Anyway, all of this I bring up, because this is, I suppose, a classical person's way of thinking.  We develop ourselves to the point where even this, even a color change on a single note, is something that we will spend hours practicing.  So that instead of conjuring static, that one tone conjures despair, or pure joy, or whatever it is we want it to convey.  And that, too, becomes part of the muscle memory.  What is improvised for us could be just having to play on a different instrument.

Someone fill me in here.  I want to know, do improvisors practice getting different colors with the same note, same articulation, same dynamic?  Or are they creating these moods and feelings more with the pitches, harmonies, and flow?  I actually don't know the answer to this, although I do have my suspicions.

What improvisors refer to as "voicing" is basically how one will invert the chord.  But for a classical player, "voicing" is which note or notes in the chord you will bring out in sound and clarity above the other tones, but without changing the written chord.  This is somehow related to what I was talking about, but I'm not sure I can put it into words right now.  My brain is beginning to ooze.  And just like that, I am seeing a really strong connection between jazz voicing, and classical voicing.  The term refers to different things, but I wonder if the effect is somewhat similar.  Hmm.  Questions for later.


And so I guess what I'm getting at ultimately is just the way the brain has to completely shift gears between improvised music and composed music.  This is something I understood when I began this project nearly six months ago, but I must be beginning to understand more thoroughly why this difference exists.  Or maybe I've just completely turned myself around.

Webs upon webs of questions and answers.

Here we go, Day 175: https://ia600802.us.archive.org/33/items/Improv2512/20120205201815.mp3

Moxie.

I was at once soured and flattered when I had heard secondhand my dad's remark about a friend of mine, years ago.

"I like him.  He's the only one who's got enough moxie to handle Mary."

Ahem... handle?

And yes, that's right.  One would need a lot.

Sorry to disappoint dad, but things did not go in that direction.  Much to my mother's delight.  She did not find his charm quite as amusing.

Here we go, Day 173: https://ia600809.us.archive.org/33/items/Improv2312/20120203210939.mp3

Catch.

It's difficult to assess in the moment.

Sometimes, I try to do this.

If I've recorded it, I've at least got a comparison for the time that's passed.

If I haven't, I don't.

If I don't, that leaves me with instinct.

And what I've recorded and compared can give me a clearer assessment of my instinct, which is sometimes right on, and at other moments, tainted by years of analysis.  Which comes only by analyzing my instinct.

What I'm left with is completely subjective.

What's good?  What's bad?

And if you stand back, and ask, "What is going to be good?" your result might not be the same as, "What is good now?"  By the same token, "What is going to be bad?" might not be the same as, "What is bad now?"

Because time is a tricky chemical. 

And we're all completely aware of it, whether we acknowledge it or not.

And philosophy is quite an inadequate antidote. 

Here we go, Day 172: https://ia700807.us.archive.org/4/items/Improv2212/20120202194134.mp3

and... I must put my chorale, too.  It's just so much more befitting.  Day 172, Part 2: https://ia600809.us.archive.org/35/items/Improv22212/20120202195129.mp3

Soul surface.

I had dreams about brioche last night.  Isn't that weird?  I must've been hungry.

So I pulled this poem out just for kicks, and placed it ever so lovingly on my music stand, to see if it might inspire something for today's improv.  It's by my friend, Wendell Smith.

Soul Surface


We are eddies in an oil slick
on a surface we call time
and poetry
one way of being we
until the surface swirls
and the body
of a bird unfurls.

Here we go, Day 171: https://ia600801.us.archive.org/24/items/Improv2112/20120201203515.mp3

Le Cirque.

Yesterday was Restaurant Week stop #3.  Le Cirque.  I went here last night with the same friend I went with last year.  It appears to be becoming somewhat of a tradition for us.  We both love it so much.

So on the menu... we both wanted the soft cooked egg, which was accompanied with veal sweetbreads, and other delectable little items, but they were all out of it, which was a bit disappointing.  So instead, Marc got the cauliflower soup, and I got the pasta with butternut squash and ricotta.  Mine was good, but seemed almost like a glorified mac and cheese.  But as Marc put it, he "could never get that texture out of mac and cheese."  He definitely won the point for the appetizer.

Main course, I got the Berkshire pork belly (of course, why wouldn't you get pork belly, as long as its on the menu), and Marc got the braised beef.  I definitely won that round... pork belly is just... so... good.  Perfectly crisp top layer, with a succulent and tender base.

Last, for dessert, Marc let me pick both.  So we got a chocolate fondant, and one of my favorite desserts, a vanilla creme brulee.  Both were impeccable.

Usually I can't help but spend a lot more time writing about food, but I'm feeling like I need to get to sleep early tonight... long day tomorrow.  So, with that, I bid adieu.  Goodnight!

Here we go, Day 170: https://ia700800.us.archive.org/11/items/Improv13112/1_31_122_46Pm.mp3

... and where they were before we were...

Okay, so a realization for today is, not only that my parents are real people, and that I can see where they were coming from in all that they did while raising me, in, not just of context of me, but of them...
...
but also that whatever you might start from... well, that's just the start.  And things change and evolve, and now is not the end.  If it began that way, hmm, well, maybe now it's this way.  And tomorrow, we can't know.

... so it is.

Just listen... that's how.

Here we go, Day 169: https://ia600804.us.archive.org/1/items/Improv12012_947/1_30_128_14Pm.mp3

Ebb and flow.

So, my friend, Jesse, does hour long improvs each week and posts them.  I listened to this past week's, and realized something.  Or at least discovered that I had come to a new milestone in my journey.

When I started all of this, the first several improvs were all over the place.  Nothing was tidy, nothing was uniform... it was like looking into a pile of scraps.  Everything was indiscernible.  I didn't like that it made no sense.  Music, even free improv, needs to have some sort of semblance.  So I spent the next many days and weeks trying to pull things back into some kind of structure.

Seeking structure served several purposes.  First, it meant that things would find relationships to one another, and therefore make more sense from beginning to end.  Secondly, structure should imply some sort of direction, which I was lacking terribly.  I could feel that it wasn't there, and it bothered me a lot.  Finally, structure would help me construct a beginning, middle, and end.  There were at least two posts that I tried to create a sonata form, and however you liked or did not like them, I felt like they were "complete," and that made me comfortable.

Now, the detriment of seeking structure.  I didn't (and still don't) know enough about progressions to really be able to structure any improvisation very effectively.  And I think it in fact turned out to make me think too much.  Things got tentative and stodgy, and I would find myself revolving around the same chords or same motives without being able to develop them.  I was so committed to retaining a consistent idea that I couldn't move.  It made for some terribly boring output.  That being said, I think it was an incredibly important step to walk through.  And I know that there will by many times when I still need to keep all of this in mind.

Anyway, getting back to Jesse's improv.  So, I don't give myself a time restriction on any of my improvs.  But if you think about an hour, and how much music fills an hour... it's a really long time.  One hour of music generally fills an entire concert, and that's with breaks for clapping, intermission, and whatnot in between pieces.  One solid hour of playing is like running a marathon.  The reason I mention this is because it would be absolutely impossible to stick with a single idea for this long.

So, as I listened to Jesse's stuff, I noticed that there were wild variances between ideas.  They were all in the same "piece," but completely different from moment to moment.  Somehow, though, it worked, and flowed.  And it made me realize that I didn't need to feel locked in to the same motives or patterns for things to fit... maybe they would just find themselves again in some other form.  Or maybe not!  And that doesn't make it bad.  And that italicized thing was the revelation I think I needed to feel lately.

So today, I let things flow.  They went where they were going to go.  And what's funny is that when I listen back, they connect much more easily than anything I might have forced before. 

Here we go, Day 168: https://ia700807.us.archive.org/27/items/Improv12912/1_29_128_44Pm.mp3