1/17/25 Is There a Best Way to Improvise?
No.
Improvisation can take so many forms. By its very nature, it is exercising your musical freedom.
If that’s the case, then are all improvisors equally good? Or are there good improvisors and bad improvisors?
Without making any good or bad judgements, I think it’s safe to say that there are some improvisors who keep our attention better than others, if that is a fair barometer of effectiveness of improvisation as art.
So, what keeps our attention?
First, let’s see what loses our attention.
Someone who seems to be rambling on a not making any point. There doesn’t seem to be much sense to what they’re doing. It may not sound bad or wrong, it just doesn’t hold our interest because nothing much is being communicated.
My students know that I call this “wandering in the desert.” It’s not enough to just play chord tones or scales that follow the chord changes. Yeah, maybe they’re not wrong, but that doesn’t make them worth listening to.
What keeps our attention is logic and story.
Logic means making sense. It’s our ability to communicate an idea and the listener’s ability to follow a train of thought. In fact, as listeners we often bring our own meaning to music. And that’s because music is so similar to speech--we want to figure out what’s being said or communicated. So, we are naturally trying to make sense of what we are hearing, and when an improvisor plays a series of ideas that seem to make sense, it holds our attention. We get it!
So, how does an improvisor hold your attention?
Well, first of all, the improvisor needs to have something to say.
The act of improvisation starts with an idea, with the sense of having something you’re trying to communicate to someone else. If the idea is only: “I need to start talking now because it’s my turn to talk but I have nothing to say so I’m going to play scales and chord tones,” that’s not really communicating anything.
“My baby broke my heart, let me tell you about it”—that’s a need to share something. Or, “I’m so in love with you and let me tell you why”—that’s saying something important to someone specific.
Having something to say not only holds the attention of the listener, it holds yours as well. And when you start with an idea that you want to tell someone, it helps if you then think of it as an idea you have to tell someone. Making it urgent forces you to come up with details.
So, what are the musical keys to holding attention?
• One of the best ways is by sequencing an idea or motif--repeating something with a slight change, so that it’s obvious what the idea or motif is, and it’s also obvious that you have moved it down or up or changed the last note of it, or something like that. There is a sense of logic the listener can follow.
• And story, which is the ability to take these logical ideas and weave them together in a way that creates a larger narrative—a story arc where we as a listener can follow an extended train of thought, as in a jazz solo of several choruses, as it passes through varying musical terrain.If the sequencing of a motif is a paragraph of short sentences, an entire solo is a chapter of a novel.
But how does an improvisor actually do this?
They look into their bag of tricks and grab something.
• Melodic ideas—what happens if I take a piece of the melody of the tune, and explore it over different chords? How does it have to bend and change to fit the harmony. What if I come up with an entirely different melody for this tune? What are some other lyrics that could inspire new melodies.
• Rhythmic ideas—what is the main groove of the tune? What if we play with that? We could play an interlocking rhythm that works with the existing groove or we could play against it, creating a new cross rhythm against the groove. We could isolate part of the groove and repeat just that, possibly in conjunction with sequencing a melodic idea.
• Harmonic ideas—what if we focus on exploring scales and arpeggios that are not in the tune? Overlaying new harmonic ideas, maybe in between the existing harmony.
I wrote a blog story last year about this: 9/12/23 Is There a Secret to Improv?
These are just a few examples of how an improvisor can use the language of music to speak clearly to a listener and hold their attention.
So, maybe all improvisations are not equal. And maybe there are a few tricks to developing good improvisation skills.