But those security blankets—tactics, strategies and lexicons—seem now to be liabilities.

A little background: since a set of gigs in late-2007 with Murray Campbell, I’ve pretty much retired the devil-on-my-shoulder improviser. Prior to this, I’d been a more (for lack of better word) ‘careful’ improviser; one that thinks first, thinks second, thinks third, and only then, after careful consideration, maybe (and just maybe) acts.

Although it was with those performances with Murray that I found this other way of improvising, it emerged, in retrospect, as a solution to problems flagged up at another musical encounter in 2007.

How do you evolve as an improviser? Under what conditions do practice and approach mutate? If change is a response to the environment, magic is just ’round the corner since, this month, I was out of my league—out of my depth.

the adrenalin response

In his report on the July Lab, Tony O’Connor wrote that

…Improvisation should be an immediate response, and every time a thought gets in the way, it puts a filter between the event and the response.

What Tony called the ‘immediate response’, Franziska Schroeder terms the ‘adrenalin response’—the decisions you make, the paths you take, during heat-of-the-moment, seat-of-your-pants, real-time performance. This is the response, since those performances with Murray last year, that I’ve come to rely upon. I’ve also come to (and red lights are flashing even as I type this word) expect the resultant choices to be dramatic, imaginative, circuitous and lateral-thinking.

However, on November 10th, in the company of Franziska, this response was exactly what turned out to be a liability.

During the duets with Franziska, I was flummoxed by the context and content—by Franziska’s playing. My adrenalin responses tended towards obvious choices, and the devil-on-my-shoulder would return to say ‘no, no, no, no, that’s a dumb choice, you can’t do that!’ The devil would slow me down, but perhaps more worryingly the number of options would shrink. At various junctures during the performance, I would compute a set of possible routes, but the devil would discount this and that (“that’s obvious, don’t do it; that’s naive, you can’t do that…”), leading to an ever diminishing set of choices. I could almost see doors shut one by one.

It’s ironic that the thing that apparently caught Tony off guard in July was that I was “playing melodies” because what threw me was Franziska’s lines. Lines reach into areas of my playing that I’ve neglected, and I was too unsure of my skills to make an excursion into that territory. Questions that popped into my head during the performance:

How do (should? can?) I even parse that?
How do I make (il)logical translations / transmutations / transformations that can (be made to) make sense within my own lexicon?

It’s no coincidence that, for me, my best contribution to the performance occur when the line rested for a spectral-dynamo-plus-percussion encounter (‘warmed me up…’). Although, if I take a step back, ‘doesn’t have broken glass on the floor’ is probably a more successful improvisation—less safe, not as easy, more of a troublemaker.

But, by and large, if my adrenaline-choice-machine was doing anything, it was always looking for the nearest, most convenient route, avoiding interesting, circuitous options—the ones that lead off-the-edge into ugly-beutiful spaces and serendipitous-contradictory relationships.

playing (and listening) differently

Franziska showed me, beyond a doubt, what options were not available to me.

For me, this is all good: now I need to go find other doors.

After all, the floundering and stumbles of a year ago led, overtime, to a new approach, and I’m optimistic that these new challenges will lead to something else. I very much doubt the return of the devil-on-my-shoulder improviser, but I expect to be playing (and listening) differently in future. I know it will take time to patch up the holes, to lay the groundwork for approaching new choices, and to reinvent and abandon tactics (habits?), but if past experience is anything to go by, in the coming weeks, I’ll emerge from this a different player.

…And that’s my little note of thanks to our guest improviser-saxophonist-theorist.

an unanswered question & a note of thanks

Given my difficulties at the last event, how come I was happily playing lines in a duet with Marian Murray in May (‘don’t eat the red acid!’)? What was so different then?

A personal note of thanks to Kevin Terry and Veronica Tadman for the help running the last few Stet Lab events (putting up posters, flyering, managing the door, setting up the stage, writing press releases, etc). November’s Lab, in particular, could not have happened without them.

There’s also a lot to be said for putting two ‘alikes’ together; be it the same instrumentation, or people who share a name. Okay, AFAIK, tactically, as an improviser, that latter factor doesn’t make an iota of difference, but I can vouch for the former.

Murray Campbell and Marian (that’s Marian Murray) fit that bill, and, as the odd-one-out, I get to play lazy. (And as one of my teachers pointed out recently, improvisers are, to some extent, lazy; we’re often attracted to methods, strategies and practices that get immediate results.)

Here’s one thing that was premeditated on June 12th: the line-up. I figured that by doubling the fiddlers, that they’d be pushing each other to interesting places, or at least out of each other’s way. And all I’d have to do is ride the wave.

So let me talk you through the tactical hits-and-misses of two ditties from the POV of the odd-one-out. Open up the listen page, look-up the recordings entitled ‘nine fifty-nine is divisible by seven’ and ‘toilette bourgeoise’…

nine fifty-nine is divisible by seven

Here’s another premeditation (with the usual improviser’s caveat that given the right circumstances I might change my mind): I decided to walk off stage and let the fiddlers sort themselves out; find their own vibe. Once that vibe was established, I anticipated that it’d be a fairly straightforward task to re-enter the fray, with the added luxury of having plenty of time to think about my (re-)entrance.

Incidentally, Marian, Neil O’Loghlen and I tried something like this in the May Lab with, I think it’s fair to say, mixed results. I thought, however, we might be in a better position to pull it off this time.

I was pushing for an opening with some strong, broad gestures.

Aside: the opening guitar ‘licks’ were a followup to Tony O’Connor’s entrance earlier in the evening (listen to ‘ruined train of thought’). …and, in my case, it’s also a straight Frith rip-off if you’re wondering.

Of course (and I don’t really need to tell you this) it didn’t turn out as expected. The high-energy opening wasn’t, instead becoming a set of semi-autonomous statements.

And this is where things get interesting…

…and all the best laid plans…

As soon as I walk off stage, the vibe changes. Heads to some in-bred sibling of some radiation-poisoned cousin of some Second-Viennese-School-by-numbers. Odd (as in delicately odd), beautiful (beautifully tasteless) and, I think at the time, where the f*ck did this come from? If I was expecting Murray and Marian to push each other to interesting places, I certainly got that.

Secondary problem with this strategy: although “having plenty of time to think about my re-entrance” is indeed a luxury, like a lot of ‘prepared means’, they come with Improviser’s Hazard No. 697: exactly when would be a good time to act?

I’d anticipated that the aforementioned vibe that the fiddlers had setup would remain in place for my re-entrance, but, as it happened, Webern-for-Dummies™ instantaneously evaporated when I sat back in. (Berg-for-Dummies™ would later pop up during ‘what is the avant-garde? (discuss)’.)

Another aside: I thought that the physical orientation of the trio (left-to-right: violin, violin, guitar) would make it hard for me to pick out the individual fiddle players. Murray was playing right into my ear while I couldn’t even see Marian. Turned out, however, not to be a problem, although I found myself interacting with Murray and Marian very differently. All interactions between Murray and myself could be a little more elliptical—the relationship was implicit, almost taken for granted. With Marian, on the other hand, I found myself almost telegraphing a call-and-response; all the gestures were slightly broader, a little more explicit, delivered with almost no overlap. (But I wonder if the audience could catch any of that…)

toilette bourgeoise

You can almost hear the guitarist’s thought processes on this one. Goes something like this:

Given that it’s pointless to compete with violins on timbre, sustain, or (micro-)intervalic stakes, what’s the poor guitarist to do? Since there’s no way that the poor guitarist can keep up with a fiddle player who decides to go the extreme scratchy, droney, slidey route, the poor guitarist should stick with the percussive and the polyphonic.

So the guitar goes tappity – tap – tap – t’thump
and the fiddles go krrr’shhhhhhh – scrrrrreeeeechhhh – scrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
(starts at around 0’20″).

Or guitar: t’tap – tap – p’pop – pop’p’p’p
and fiddles: weeeeeeeee – eeeeeeeeeeeeeee – eeeeeeeeeeeee
(at around 1’23″).

I tried for the Oxley-esque meters gear-shifts, but the body-mind-instrument complex was not cooperating (I think I had a better shot at this last month).

…or I may have consumed one drink too many (there’s a cautionary tale here somewhere).

Then the question: now what?

I tried a half-hearted juxtaposition of gesture-types, but that really didn’t go anywhere (interesting). Having said all that, listening to the recording right now, I don’t think that particular failure made any difference to the overall performance.

I think we owe the faux-bluegrass moments that starts and sputters across this ditty (beginning somewhere around the 4’20″ mark, and coming to the foreground at about 6’50″) largely to Eoin Callery’s and Barry Twomey’s playing / instrumentation earlier in the evening.

In retrospect, the most interesting thing about these ditties was how easily / clumsily, fluidly / abruptly, imperceptibly / overtly the trio configures and re-configures itself. One moment it’s two fiddles + guitar, another it’s one solo fiddle supported by the guitar-violin duo. One moment the guitar-percussion it met by violin scratches and subtones; a single violin in scratch’n’subtone mode is met by guitar-percussion plus violin-percussion; or the guitar-percussion morphs into pseudo-country-finger-pickin’ which recontextualizes the scratches and subtones.

some random observations

Susan Geaney may have done some of her best (most interesting and oblique) playing at this Lab. Rumor has it that she was hung-over. Whatever the case, her usual reserve seems to have gone out the window. (Hope this state is achievable without constant recourse to alcohol.)

The potential volume discrepancy between Eoin’s and Tony’s instruments (unplugged dulcimer vs. amplified bass guitar) offers some challenges. As it happens, Tony spent the bulk of the evening at very low volume levels, and Eoin was whacking the dulcimer senseless, but given how sensitive a player Tony was being, I wonder if Eoin was ever tempted to play quieter?—bringing the whole ensemble down with him—or was Susan’s new-found boldness going to prevent that from happening?

Although it’s by no stretch of the imagination ‘good music’ (whatever that means), the quartet of Murray, Marian, Tony and Veronica Tadman (filed under ‘kentucky fried music’) may be my favorite for its shear technicolor, psychotic strangeness. No, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.