Just had an article I wrote published in the Stanford Jazz Workshop Newsletter. Here's the link and the text is pasted below.
http://www.stanfordjazz.org/newsletter/newsletter_jun09_snow.html
The Art of Improvisation: A Musical Life in New York City
I
remember being twelve years old and at my first SJW placement audition,
and Gerard Carelli asked me to play something. I had never played jazz
before, and wasn't sure what he wanted to hear, so I asked. He said it
didn't matter, just play something. I played a piece we had performed
in wind ensemble that year, but I didn't have the sheet music - I
improvised. That week I had my first experiences playing jazz and
improvising with other musicians, but really I had been improvising in
various contexts for my whole life. Improvisation is how we navigate
the world as individuals, it is how we learn and grow and how we
disclose our selves to the world and to each other.
Fast forward: I arrive at Tribes, a small art gallery in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan, run by a blind poet named Steve Canon who's
been there for forty years. I greet the other musicians (clarinet,
viola and double bass), unpack my trombone, and we arrange ourselves in
front of the small but attentive audience. A moment of silence, and
then we begin. The first sounds are soft and delicate, airy but urgent
murmurs. We are testing the waters, setting the stage. We are playing
but mostly we are listening, waiting, focussing. Gradually a theme
develops, the first strains of melody rising above a bubbling sea of
texture. We carry it and support it in turns, filling in many more than
four voices. Now the sea is churning, and like waves the melody is
breaking and spraying. Now there is both more space and more urgency as
we continue to increase the intensity, rising in a crescendo to a
frenzied peak and then crash! it breaks open into multiple disparate
pieces and comes drifting back down to earth. We end with a low drone,
again airy but this time calm and peaceful, we finish.
The band is Scavenger Quartet, an improvising chamber ensemble. The
other three musicians are primarily "classically trained," meaning only
that they got their start playing written classical music, whereas I
started by playing jazz. The larger point is that we all have our own
relationship to music and our own experiences playing music, but now we
are coming together and developing our own language of improvisation.
We decided early on to commit the group to open improvisation, to
perform without any prearrangement of material, although in rehearsal
we have often used predetermined forms or other material as fuel for
our improvisations. The result is often chaotic, but over time and many
hours of work we have gotten to know each other's playing very well and
the music has become quite focussed.
The main challenge in open or free improvisation is that you are
not only navigating a framework but composing that framework as you go
along. Every note, every gesture creates a context for the next. Every
piece, every performance opens up new avenues for group exploration and
over time you grow more comfortable and confidant with each other.
Personalities emerge, you begin to hear all that individual history
wonderfully coalesce into a shared group identity, and the music takes
on a clarity and force.
It's a little bit like living in New York City. Eight million
people all with their own stories, their own perspective and their own
direction. It's overwhelming but over time patterns emerge, forms
emerge. What at ground level seems like chaos is actually a carefully
coordinated system that works according to its own self-generated
logic. It works, because everyone functions as an individual even
though we are all interconnected, contributing to the whole. It is an
improvised composition.
The New York musical community is unique. Nowhere in the world is
there such a high concentration of highly talented musicians of all
genres. In fact it seems wrong to refer to a "New York musical
community" because really it is hundreds, even thousands of
communities, each with its own character. I feel it is a wonderful time
to be a young musician in New York, though not everyone will agree. It
is true that it is becoming increasingly hard to make a living here as
a musician, especially a creative musician, but the fewer financial
opportunity costs there are for experimentation mean that a lot of new
music is taking shape. In the same way that the decline of the big band
era during the Great Depression contributed to the development of bebop
among musicians on their own time, off the clock so to speak, the
current economic climate in New York (which actually started with 9/11
as I am told, since I have only lived here for four years) makes it
easier to take risks. The result is an environment where almost nobody
is really getting paid, which actually translates into strong,
supportive communities in which to develop your music.
Ultimately I feel that finding a supportive musical community is
the most important factor in developing as a musician. This is where
the Stanford Jazz Workshop succeeds so uniquely. Where else can a young
musician, even one lucky enough to have a jazz program in their middle
or high school, find such a large, vibrant, open community of
musicians, all committed to supporting each other's growth?
The openness is key. I felt as a student, and later as a teacher at
SJW, the strong sense that everyone here was learning, both from each
other and from the music. Students and teachers alike getting together
for after-hours jam sessions, picking each other's brains over lunch,
going to concerts every night to hear our peers and mentors present
their music. There is an incredible vitality here, where every student
is a teacher and every teacher is a student. This fluidity and openness
is the essence of improvisation, the idea that every moment holds an
opportunity to create and grow.