Music and the Musician (A series of essays by Femi Temowo)

'There is nothing new under the sun'.

Is it the role of the musician to create or do we have no choice but to imitate because that is all there is to do?

What is pure improvisation?

As a musician, one of the biggest challenges I have faced and still regularly grapple with, is the quest to achieve the ability of pure improvisation and also the honing of the ability to create in every single moment. This quest has presented me with several different obstacles; the most obvious of these is the question, what is pure improvisation? In searching for an answer to this question, I have listened over and over again to the musicians who I consider to be pure improvisers. Before getting into that maybe I should define what I mean by pure improvisation. 'The ability to weave melody and rhythm over and through a set of harmonic changes whilst adhering to the relevant form and structure without the excessive use of pre-prepared ideas.' Sound vague? Ok, consider the Yoruba adage, 'ona kan o wo oja' which simply translated means, there is more than one route into the market. In western terms you might say, 'there's more than one way to skin a cat.'

If we look at any piece of music as a journey, you need to make a transition between two points. You have many options about how to get from A to B, now imagine that it is a journey that you make on a regular basis. You can find a route that works or decide on a different route every time you leave point A for B. The latter is what I refer to as pure improvisation, the ability and willingness to take melodic, rhythmic and harmonic risk. The risk element of it being that you have no idea what is going to happen whilst travelling but you know which direction to travel in. This need for risk taking only applies in a scenario where improvisation is the focus, i.e. it is unnecessary for a musician playing behind a pop group like S-CLUB-7 to even consider this level of risk because it is uncalled for in that music.


Are we improvising?

The beauty of jazz and improvised music is that it requires just as much attention to form and structure as any other form but it also gives you the freedom of improvisation. Without delving too greatly into the history of the music itself, one can pluck great names from the deeply rooted jazz tree that have helped to weave this rich tapestry of improvised artistry. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis. All these great names have added more inches to the tapestry in their own way, and there are many others.

Now let's go back to the original question, are we improvising and creating in the moment, or are we just playing something that someone else has already played? To answer this, I had to look at music as a language, one vast mode of communication that has spawned many dialects. Take for example a child 'Sam'; born into an environment where the language is based on Latin, Sam begins his linguistic journey by imitating everything he hears around him. By the time Sam is three years old he can already speak but will only begin to learn how to theorise what he already knows how to do. So he starts by learning the alphabet, then learns to arrange the same alphabet into words; words that he may already know how to use in conversation. Finally he learns to construct sentences and is introduced to grammar. As Sam gets older he begins to find his own unique way of using the language to express different emotions and feelings. Although he has pre-learnt all the words he uses on a day-to-day basis, Sam doesn't necessarily get up in the morning and plan every single word he's going to use throughout the day. What he is doing then is improvising using a collection of words and sentences. Some of the words or even colloquialisms might be unique to him and his circle of friends or the particular dialect and these things are instantly recognisable by others who use them. So, suppose that Sam gets into a debate on a train about the current state of the politics in his country, he will need to convey his opinions and feelings using a combination of all the words he knows. Nobody would have ever spoken what he has to say in the way that he feels to say it but none of the words are new.

Much in the same way musicians who hail from the jazz and improvised music background learn all their vocabulary from the great masters who went before them (these represent the adults around Sam when he was growing up), they spend hours leading into years of practice perfecting the tone, timbre and beauty of their voices (Instruments). Some musicians, in fact most modern musicians then go on to expound on the science of their art. In the same way that Sam would have learnt about grammar and articulation, jazz musicians study the captured emotions of the elders in order to find structural rules that define the way they understand what they already know. In doing this they develop the language of jazz and depending on individual levels of understanding one can learn to speak fluent jazz.

Surely the freedom that comes with being fluent in a language is one that brings with it an unparalleled sense of satisfaction. Using myself as an example, I remember arriving in London in the summer of 1986 and feeling very self conscious about the fact that I could speak so little English. It didn't take me very long to get to grips with the English language purely because it was everywhere around me. I can still remember quite vividly the feeling of not wanting to speak in case I said the wrong thing or used an incorrect word or even pronounce a word incorrectly. As I added new words to my vocabulary, it felt as though I was attaching a new feather to my wings each time until there were enough for me to take flight.

The Creative force of improvisation

I believe that improvisation is by far the most powerful creative force in music. It is in this moment that we can truly loose ourselves from the captive environment of the intellectual mind and soar outside of what we consider safe and predictable. I also believe however that there is an index link between creativity and technique. Consider someone sitting behind a piano for the first time, every single note that person plays in the first 10 minutes, will be pure improvisation regardless of how constructed or nonsensical it may sound. This is undisputable because that person would have never played those notes before. However in doing several tests with volunteers who are not musicians, I found that after about 10 minutes, repetition sets in and shortly afterwards, boredom. These volunteers then stated in later interviews that the only way they feel their boredom could be overcome is by acquiring some level of basic knowledge about the instrument that would enable them to create therefore give them something new to play. I concluded from these tests that by striving to acquire better technique, we are automatically increasing our propensity for strong creative improvisation.

How does good technique affect creativity?


There have been many debates in many dressing rooms and green rooms the world over between musicians trying to discern the meaning of good technique. I am of the opinion that it is three fold,

• The ability to play in time across a wide range of tempos.
• The ability to convey feeling and emotion by manipulating one's instrument's sonic capabilities.
• The ability to play exactly what it is that you hear in you inner musical ear.

I have heard many musicians who think that it stops at the first point and so they aim not to improvise but to play a library of pre-meditated licks over very fast or painfully slow tempos. Other musicians tend not to stress themselves out too much about the physical aspects of their instrument; instead they concentrate large on the emotional challenges of playing music. All of these in my own opinion are incomplete but there is no musical law that requires that we strive to achieve all the above, it is merely a matter of self-conviction. For me the only important thing is that if you choose to pursue one or all of the above points that you do it with actual integrity and without ignorance.