Friday, July 05, 2013

"You can't improvise on nothing, man."

--Charles Mingus to Timothy Leary

Santoro, George. 2000.Myself When I am Real : The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Via Google Books, URL http://books.google.com/books?id=qdWqrp9z5isC&lpg=PA270&pg=PA270#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed 7/5/2013.

Sometimes appended with "You've got to improvise on something." http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2008/07/between-bullshit-and-plagiarism.html.

6 comments:

  1. Great site and found you when I was looking up the Keystone Korner in SF. were I use to be almost every Monday night for Great shows of all the talent in the Bay Area. I'll be back.

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  2. DEF improvisation: "any time an individual spontaneously embellishes or transforms received material" (Brooks 1998b, 268-269).

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  3. Grisman and Garcia have an interesting discussion along these lines in Rodgers 1994, 55. Gris says improv is mostly stuff you already know, unless you are Cecil Taylor. Garcia says "You'd have to be somebody like Sonny Rollins, playing all solo without any structure to follow, so your free of all the structures of familiar combinations of chords. If you subtract all that, and you're playing without any regard to a structure of any kind, then you might have a shot at free improvisation, and even that's hard to do. Derek Bailey tries to do that. He's an English guitar player, and he plays with all kinds of different people -- Yo-Yo Ma, Steve Lacey, jazz guys, classical guys, Indian guys, people from every different musical idiom. His playing sounds almost completely random. It's not pretty at all, it's just stuff. But he says 'I'm right at least 50 percent of the time.' He's got a sort of statistical approach to improvisation, which is interesting. If you're suspending rules, there are no mistakes."

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  4. When the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis commented on the "Free Jazz Improvisation of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman he said: "This guy's head is screwed from inside out!!!"

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