Feel, Imagine, Create (with David Reed, Improvise For Real)

Christopher: When you improvise music, does it come from your head, your hands, your hearing, your heart?

If you know us at Musical U, you know, we have this 4 H model with Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart. And when we’re teaching improvisation or creativity, that’s where we’re coming from, factoring in all of those things. But of course, that’s not the only way to think about improvising.

One of my favourite music educators, David Reed over at Improvise For Real, has his own methodology, his own perspective on it. And in today’s clip from our conversation that we started last week, I want to share with you a couple of quotes we discussed that touch on this topic.

Where does the improvisation come from? Where can it come from? Where should it come from? Because a lot of musicians find themselves trying to learn improv and getting stuck or frustrated or really not feeling the flow of it.

In the last episode, David had this lovely metaphor of riding a wave when you’re making music. And in the couple of quotes we discussed today, we pick apart some of these topics around, like, is it all about scales? Is it all about intellectual knowledge? Is it all about choosing rationally which notes to pick, or is it more of a free-flowing instinct? And how do you get to that place where you really feel like the music is flowing out from inside you?

So I hope you enjoy this next part of the conversation with David Reed. Let’s go!

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Christopher: So let’s move on to the next one then, David. What’s next on the list?

David: Okay, so the next one here is… some of these are kind of controversial!

So this is a sentence we pulled out of a very late chapter in the book, and so without, out of context, it might be surprising. But the statement is:

Playing scales is not improvising, no matter how well you do it.

And with your permission, with something like this, I’d kind of like to throw it to you first and ask you what you can make of that. Does that make any sense at all? Can you imagine how it could make sense? Does it ring true? What is your first reaction to that rather bold claim?

Christopher: Yeah, well, my first reaction was “them’s fighting words”!

You know, looking to pick a fight with someone. I love it. No, I absolutely love it.

I was reminded also of that saying that, you know, “no-one goes to a concert to hear scales”. And it’s the trap we fall into, you know, in learning an instrument, there can be an overfocus on technique, but it goes so much more so in the context of improvisation.

And at Musical U, when we talk about improvising,
we distinguish our approach from two traditional methods or philosophies, which I would describe as kind of pattern or rule-based improv, and vocabulary based improv. So the latter is kind of the jazz approach of memorise all of these licks and riffs and runs, and know which ones you can use over a 2, 5, 1 and so on.

And then you kind of regurgitate that vocabulary. And because it’s the great jazz vocabulary, it’s gonna sound good. The other approach around patterns and rules is what comes into the picture here, talking about scales for me, which, you know, the epitome of this for me was trying to learn to improvise on guitar as a teenager.

And I asked my teacher having been learning guitar for a year or two, “can we do some improvising?” And he was like “sure, this is the minor pentatonic fretboard pattern. Let’s practice that”. And… that was it! Like that was kind of it. We did it week after week and he would give me kind of a blues backing track and then he’d be like “now the minor pentatonic!” And I would be like “okay”.

And I would kind of run up and down it and I would pick some notes at random from it. And as far as I could understand, that was what improvising was. And it, and you know it sounded okay because it matched the harmonic context, but it didn’t feel like I was improvising. It felt like I was guessing and hoping. And I’m guessing that’s what you’re talking about at this point in the book where, you know…

David: Yeah it could be. That’s why I wanted to ask you, because we could actually take it in several directions, and it’s a little different from the direction I had imagined, but let’s stay with your direction.

So you just said something really interesting, because superficially from outside, if I’ve seen you doing that, I wouldn’t necessarily know that you’re not having a deep and beautiful experience with improvisation. It’s a totally private experience. You said that it didn’t feel like improvising. It felt like guessing and hoping. And so that’s another example that calls up this metaphor of a surfer catching a wave. In those experiences, you know, I see Christopher on the water, I see a surfboard turned over in the water. There’s some waves crashing by, but you weren’t able to get up on the surfboard and really be riding the waves. Right?

And so that’s, goes back to the musicality. There’s a whole connection there, where you don’t have this beautiful, and perfect connection between what you’re hearing, and what you’re feeling and, what you’re imagining, and what you’re playing.

Now, in your case, I think in that situation, you just needed some other experiences or some help to get all of that together and to catch that wave. What I was actually talking about in the book is another phenomenon that happens more kind of in the jazz world. Which is, okay, so we give you the scale.

And then the next 20 years of your life are about playing that scale faster, and playing it in more clever, sort of, parsing it out mathematically, you know, like all these different, sort of abstract patterns and, you know, and that is one way to make music and it’s one way to live your life. And it’s a beautiful way to live your life and I don’t have any judgment for anybody who wants to do that.

I think it’s cool. I think it’s fascinating. I’m glad people are doing it. But it’s not the only definition of improvisation, and it’s not our definition of improvisation. To me, improvisation is simply the spontaneous creation of music. And what’s beautiful about it is that when it’s spontaneous, it can be collective.

So you and I can sit down together and compose something together, and our ideas are interacting in real time in the sounds. And so if you think of improvisation as composition, well then ask yourself, you know, is a Mozart composition gonna be better because somebody’s just playing the scale up and down faster and faster?

That’s not what compositions do. That’s not what music does. Music tells a story. Music expresses human emotion. And so I was saying all that in the context of, thinking of improvisation, or the kind of ideal of improvisation, the goal of improvising, is not to be able to play the scales faster.

It’s to be able to imagine a sound and know exactly where it is and how to express it on your instrument. That’s channeling your inner composer and making music. And if I could just address the one point about the fighting words, you know that it’s true they are fighting words, but we’re not fighting with anybody else.

The first thing to understand is like, what they tell you about dreams. When you have a dream, every character in the dream is actually you. And when I’m saying these things in my book, every character in the book, whether it’s the, you know, the mean-spirited music teacher who’s too strict when we’re children, or the kind of myopic, jazz instructors that just tell you the rules and formulas, or the perfectly-illuminated soul who’s just all transparency and love and joy. All those characters are me man. You know, I’m not fighting with anybody. I’m fighting with myself. And when you read the book, all the characters are you, so those fighting words, those are for you to say to yourself and to remind yourself.

And the beautiful thing is that you also get to decide what they mean to you, and how important they are to you. And that’s really the intention of everything in the book.

Christopher: Terrific. And I think there’s a lot more we could cover here in terms of the trade-offs and the advantages and where there is a place for scales and rules and having some structure around improvising.

But what you just said, I think leads on nicely to the next one. So let’s move on to that one.

David: Did you mean the one, the very minimalist one that just says “Feel, imagine, create”.

Christopher: I did.

David: Okay. Wow, I would love to get your take on this before I say anything too, but just in fairness…

So that was an illustration that appeared very late in my book as we start talking about, what some people call free improvisation, and how to think about that.

And how all the things that we’ve learned about harmony from our deep study of very simple, and very clear and precise beautiful things. How we take all of that with us, but we open it up and we use it in a more abstract way to even make music in a context where there are no written chord changes and we’re just freely improvising.

And those are words that kind of outline the thought process. So if you and I are improvising freely, meaning that we haven’t agreed on a song structure, you put a note into the air, I put a note into the air, you maybe play a chord. I play a chord. Now you’re playing a note. How is it that you are able to play another note that makes musical sense, that takes this music in a coherent direction that people can understand and feel and follow.

And what allows you to do that is this thought process of “feel, imagine, create”. Meaning first, you’re listening deeply to the last note you played, and through the skills that we develop and learn through Musical U and Improvise For Real, you’re able to situate that sound within whatever key of the music you are feeling in that moment.

So it doesn’t matter if we’re changing the key every half second. At any given moment, any note you play is gonna sound like one of the notes of the 12-tone octave, you know, relative to a tonal center. So let’s say to you, the last note you played just sounds like note six. Okay. Next step, imagine. Now what is the next sound you hear in your mind that would be beautiful? That would make sense.

Now, this is not a number, this is not a letter. This is not theory. This is a sound that you just imagined. So now you’ve got the sound in your mind. And so then the next step is the same way you recognize that the note you were playing sounded like note six, I think I said, now you’re recognizing that the next note you’re hearing in your mind sounds like flat three. That’s what we create. We play the flat three.

So the skills, the musical skills involved, are about orienting ourself relative to whatever key we’re feeling and recognising the next sound we’re imagining in our mind. But we don’t need any of those skills or knowledge in order to know what to play next.

That idea comes to us in the form of a sound. And that’s how free improvisation is possible, and it can be every bit as melodic and harmonious as a song that people have written out and agreed to play together.

Christopher: Yeah, and I think the reason I felt this led on directly is that it’s kind of the other end of the spectrum from what we just talked about in terms of strict scale-based improvising, where, to me anyway, that it falls into the trap of being purely intellectual and rational, and I’m gonna think about what the next note should be.

And what you just described clearly is driven by the feeling and the instinct and the inner hearing of “what is it I want to create?”.

And, you know, I think, for me it reminded me a lot of, one of the components of our improv method, which our Head Educator, Andrew, calls the Play-Listen/Listen-Play loop.

Where so much of what is taught in improv, or what people stumble around trying to learn to improvise, is just play. So they have a rule or something and they play it. And like I described for myself on guitar, I have my minor pentatonic. I’m gonna pick notes at random, I’m gonna play them. And what’s missing is that listen, and what we would describe as that feedback loop, where you play something, you hear how it sounds, it feeds back into your awareness.

You hear in your head what you want to play next. And you know, that can be describing the moment to moment experience of improvising, but it’s also this bigger picture description of how you’re learning to improvise. You know, you are trying things, you are internalising that instinct and that feeling for where the notes are, what their character is in the scale, and all of that stuff.

And to me that really encapsulates the sweet spot or the middle ground between having some intellectual understanding of what’s normal or what’s possible in music. And like you just described there, it can be helpful to know that the note you are hearing is the “six” in some sense, right? And you have an idea of what the options might be, but then you’re also bringing in this listening and this instinct and this feeling for what the music sounds like and what you want it to sound like.

David: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the problems with improvisation is that it’s actually two things and we don’t really see that clearly. It’s a way of certainly expressing music, it’s a way of creating music. But it’s also the way we study music.

I mean, in any other activity in life, the only, and a huge part of your learning would be to get your hands on the thing and get to examine and explore it for yourself and, you know, look at it from all different angles and check it out and play with it and see what it does. In music that’s called improvising, right?

So when I tell you, all right, we have this particular scale and these are what the notes are. That’s not the end of your learning. That’s the very beginning of your learning. That’s day one of the classroom. The rest of the of the semester is you all by yourself, exploring and discovering the melodic possibilities of those sounds, and that’s improvising, which starts out as an attitude of exploration and learning and discovery. “Let me just check these sounds out”.

But through that process, you’re also becoming an amazing improviser, right? Because you’ve discovered all of this beauty and all of this ability to tell musical stories with those sounds. And so that ability to improvise has kind of, it’s almost like it sneaks up on us. It’s a natural result of the way that this is just how we study music in the first place.

Christopher: Yeah, and this is something we’ll come back to, I think in due course with one of the other quotes, definitely that role of improvising in the learning journey.

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Christopher: Awesome.

I hope you enjoyed that part two of the conversation with David Reed from Improvise For Real. If you’re not familiar with their stuff, hurry over to improviseforreal.com, we’ll have a link in the show notes, of course, and you can find the full set of quotes we’re using for the basis of this conversation over on their Instagram. We’ll have a link to that, too. If you missed part one, I’ll put a link in the shownotes, it’s one of last week’s episodes. And we will be continuing with part three of this conversation very soon.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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