Point to Line at the National Flute Association Convention

Point to Line, my flute duo with flutist and composer LisaBost-Sandberg will give a short performance-lecture of our own compositions at the National Flute Association  convention in New Orleans. My performance at the convention is funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. I received a Professional Development Grant for travel and lodging expenses.

At 10am on Sunday, August 11th, I will perform Transition for Solo Flute (featured on my album, A Moment in Mythica), and Lisa will perform her solo flute work, Fluxion. Between our performances, we will discuss our compositions, their relationships to improvisation, and other compositional techniques. We will end the performance-lecture by improvising together. We will be featured on a larger program called, “Solo Concert: Beatboxing, Extended Techniques, and More.” 

This concert is unique as works by living flutist-composer-performers are in the minority of convention programming. Point to Line’s spot is further atypical at an NFA convention because it will feature improvisation! Lisa and I formed Point to Line in the fall of 2010 because of our mutual interest in contemporary music for flute.

Improvised Music: Is it Jazz?

In both Demolition Duo presentations at Clackamas Community College (CCC) on May 10th, and at Portland State University (PSU)  on May 22nd, groups of students performed free improvisations together. We held the the sessions in the students' regular rehearsal rooms, which aided in creating a relaxed and informal atmosphere at both performance-workshops.These sessions were also scheduled during regular rehearsal times, so many students had their instruments and were ready to play.

Four CCC students (two tenors, drums, and trumpet) performed three different improvisations.The first one, which I sat in on, featured a recurring pitch center that everyone orbited around, each musician occasionally touching the pitch, but never settling completely on it. This approach created a cyclical sense of phrasing was neither static nor too predictable. The second improvisation was longer with clearly delineated sections. Some of these sections were arguably too long, which was a good talking point. Knowing when to stop playing is one of the hardest things to do in free improvisation! This particular improvisation led the students to discover the possibilities of impromptu duos, trios, and soloists. Ken and I both suggested that this improvisation had many good ideas and that an improvisation like this one, if recorded or notated in some way, could be used to construct a more “formal” composition. In the last improvisation, I suggested that the students play for no more than 10-30 seconds, and to play loud! In relating to this, Ken commented that not every improvisation needs to start softly or sparsely, but that a variety of basic initial concepts (loud, soft, fast, slow) can be used to begin an improvisation.

PSU’s students performed two separate improvisations with tenor sax, drums, flute, electric guitar and piano. Afterward, we suggested that each individual performer can initiate more dramatic musical textures and gestures if the music becomes “stale” or gets in a rut. In other words, not everything needs to change amorphously. Clearly articulated changes in musical texture can make an improvisation exciting. Jazz pianist and PSU professor George Colligan helped facilitate the workshop, and at one point he asked, “is this jazz?” A valid question, and our answer went something like this: we have jazz backgrounds, therefore there is often something in the way we play the rhythm in our improvisations that comes from a jazz place. Other people also come to free improvisation from rock (Ken mentioned Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame), various classical music backgrounds or other musics, and those players bring sounds and ways of playing music to free improvisation that somehow relate to their “home” musical languages. In this way, everyone can come to the table of free improvisation, bring their respective sounds, and the music remains vital as players of different backgrounds feed off of each other. For me and Ken, our free improvisations may rely heavily on the syncopated and propulsive aspects of jazz, but there are also influences from other sources such as Webern, Cage, minimalism, modern chamber music,  and electronic music. For example, Ken's A Swarm of Yellow demonstrates various rhythmic influences from jazz, but its pitch arrangements are heavily influenced by the compositional aesthetics of Webern or Messiaen.

It has been my experience that people who identify themselves as free improvisers don’t necessarily feel the need to identify and categorize the music specifically as jazz. In fact, many distance themselves from the label entirely. My question is, what does it do to categorize this music as jazz? Perhaps it changes people’s opinions about it (positively and negatively), or maybe to label it “not jazz” serves to shore up the boundaries of what jazz is by some people’s measures. I think both are true, but believe that by categorizing free improvisation as jazz it runs the risk of being misunderstood. For example, free improvisation cannot necessarily be evaluated by many of the same criteria that might be appropriate  for bebop or swing styles, e.g., swing feel, playing the changes, and motivic development to name a few. Instead, assessment for free improvisation may rely more on factors such as how well performers inter-relate, how do performers move from section to section, and how effectively do performers of free improvisation create textures. Development of a player’s technical language, that is, his or her personal vocabulary of contemporary sounds, is also a possible area for evaluation. Also, if free improvisation is labeled as jazz the label itself may become a subtle barrier for musicians who might improvise but who do not play jazz or have jazz backgrounds. Why should free improvisation be so exclusive? This, I feel,  is one of the basic problems of teaching improvised music  in most colleges and universities (and certainly in students in high school  and even younger): the tacet assumption that improvisation equals jazz, and if you don’t play a “jazz” instrument, i.e., a standard big band instrument, you are excluded from participating not only in jazz traditions, but improvisation entirely! I've seen this happen with many of my high school aged flute students. 

In light of all of these things, I think it would be helpful for all of us, performers, educators, and listeners alike, to broaden our listening and involvement in improvised music. To help in this, there are organizations that promote improvised music such as ISIM and the Creative Music Guild. I am most familiar with them, but I'm certain there are many others across the globe. It's important to remember that there exists a vast network of performers from all backgrounds who participate in improvised music making. These artists may not be well-known celebrities, but many of them have been slogging it out for years, perfecting their craft, and bringing amazing sounds to the world. Seek them out, they are well worth listening to!

Risk, Courage, Trust, and Forgiveness in Improvised Music

April was a busy month (including a CD release on Teal Creek Music !), so I'm now just getting to posting for Demolition Duo's April 5th performance-workshop at Lewis and Clark College. There was a lot to digest from our visit at LC, but here are a few highlights.

We presented two different sessions at LC, one for Professor Jeff Leonard’s jazz appreciation students, and another for Beth ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Szczepanski’s jazz theory class. We opened up each session with a

long free improvisation. You can check out one of the improvisations on my SavageFlute youtube channel (in parts 1 and 2). The students at Lewis and Clark were interested in our decision-making processes. Some questions included, how do you decide what instrument to play (including individual parts of the drum kit?) How do you know when to begin (or when not to begin) a new musical idea? How do you decide when to use different instrumental techniques? And what are those techniques?

There was also a recurring theme of how to bridge free improvisation concepts and styles into more traditional styles. Ken and I feel that we presented this well, making it clear that many of the musical considerations required an effective free improvisation are part of effective playing in straight-ahead jazz, classical styles, and other musical genres.

One student (who played bass) asked, “are there ways to practice this type of improvisation?” Ken answered with some specific practice techniques, such as taking the first ten minutes to play an improvised solo with or without restrictions (e.g. play just with the  bow, or just with your pinky), or try improvising using “centricity,” where everything one plays leads back or relates in some way to one specific pitch, but not necessarily in a ii, V, I sort of relationship (traditional, functional harmonic relationships).

Another student asked, “What are you thinking about through the  course of any song?” I replied, "I listen to what my duet partner or the rest of the group doing, and then I may make the decision to play in a supportive roll or a contrary roll. I 'get out on a limb,' play something that I'm not sure if I can execute technically as a performer--there's an audience component in this as I want to do it well for the audience." Ken responded to this thread by saying that, “the music will take you to someplace technically where you’ve never been before."

In summing up many of the ideas presented in the workshop, Ken and I both discussed the need  for courage, trust, and forgiveness, both for yourself and for the others with whom you are playing.  We also stressed the need for taking musical risks, and that any free improvisation is full of risk taking from the very beginning.

Demolition Duo "Academic" Tour Begins

Demolition Duo Rehearsal

Administering my RACC project grant for the Demolition Duo is a lot like booking a tour: there's a lot of coordinating times and dates with multiple professors at the various schools. What I've generally found is that it is often difficult to fit us into a school’s regular curriculum, especially as we try to combine different classes together in one place and time! However, since this undertaking is funded by a RACC project grant, there’s no need to negotiate fees or wait for the cover-charge tally at the end of the night!  Actually, this arrangement works well for everyone, the schools, their faculty and students, and we creative-class-types. Without some of the monetary struggles often associated with playing free improvised music, Ken and I can focus more on the artistic aspects of our duo. Here are two audio clips of our last rehearsal on February 23rd (demo duo reh 2-23a and demo duo reh 2-23b):

https://soundcloud.com/demolition-duo 

Though not included in the grant (RACC only funds for Portland's tri-county area) Ken and I are starting our 2013 college tour with a performance at Western Oregon University on Thursday, February 28th, at 7:30pm. Our future engagements include Reed College on March 29th, Lewis and Clark College on April 5th, Clackamas Community College sometime in May, and our final workshop-performance will be at Portland State University's summer jazz clinic in July.

I look forward to seeing how each visit develops through the collaboration of  jazz, ethnomusicology, composition, and classical performance programs. Improvisation is an element of all of these disciplines in one way or another, so it makes sense that the Demolition Duo’s visit could break down artificial barriers between academic studies (jazz students here, classical performers here, musicologists over here). So in some sense, I feel that my main objective in this project is to get students and faculty from these different areas together in one room to experience how improvisation can enrich their musicianship and scholarship. I hope our visit inspires a classically trained pianist to jam with a straight ahead jazz trombonist, new musical ground is discovered between a virtuosic bebop saxophonist and a “noise” guitarist, or that a musicologist may consider the potential role of improvisation in composition in his or her next paper. 

As March begins tomorrow, it seems timely to mention that Ken and I will be performing for Portland's March Music Moderne festival http://www.marchmusicmoderne.org/wp/

We'll actually be performing separately on a concert of solos also including Danielle Ross (dance) and Madelyn Villano (violin). Here's the info:

The Creative Music Guild presents: A Series of Solos (March Music Moderne)
March 12th
The Gallery at Port City

2156 N Williams, Portland, Oregon 97227

8pm, $7-$20, sliding scale