Bellatrix is genius

What a musician might need

There are some things I need as a musician. That I think anyone needs in order to practice something when they're alone. It starts with not being alone any more.

1. An Elder. Doesn't have to be older. Has to be someone to inspire and guide and help you: someone who wants to do that and is interested in your development.
2. A community. Loads of functions there. To make it fun. To make it social. Not lonely.
3. A point. In yoga the point is to feel and look good. Later it's to pass a difficult exam and gain a qualification, to further ends. What is it for this art? Joy! Pleasure! Your pleasure, and the pleasure of the community. So, you need opportunities to share what you're doing with the community. Like, Lucy's 'Little Show-Offs' community cabaret.
4. A sense of development path. A sense that there are people further advanced than you – and people less advanced than you perhaps – that you have a collaborative and supportive relationship with people at every stage – and a feeling that you are able to progress.

   
   

   On performance

   I've been quite anti performance for a while. I prefer things where everyone is a participant.

   
   

   I've been gently playing with the idea that there might be an interesting middle ground.

   
   

   I'm thinking of a performers playground, a place to practice. My music – a music of honest, heart led improvisation – has more in common with the Clowns and the Fools than with the jazz singers and open mic kids.

   
   

   So it would be a performers playground for all those working on honest, partly or totally improvised, heart led performance where the relationship with the audience is messed up.

   
   

   In Jonathan Kay's Fooling performance, he had the audience forming a vagina and someone from the back being born onto the stage through us. He had us facing each other and pulling faces and hurling insults. And he had us crying with laughter with some straight forward standup. Perfect.
   Bobby Mcferrin: same. Solo performance and playing with the audience.
   So. How would I do it? What would I do? That's the thing to play with.
   Why perform?
   
   
   I'd like to perform for people who are also doing stuff. I loved performing with the scratch band at Findhorn when everyone else was either dancing or singing. I loved that! I'd like to perform for people life drawing or dancing or something. I'd like to improvise with and for them. I'd like it to be woven into an activity; part of it but not the central focus.
   So why claim a stage all for yourself?
   Partly it's to show off, right? What experience does Bobby Mcferrin give people when he stands up and does Opportunity? We're impressed! We see what a human can be capable of. We're entertained I guess. We enjoy it! Do we? I get a little intimidated too sometimes. But only by musicians. Not by dancers or comedians, because I'm not in their game. I just watch / listen / laugh with delight.
   Is there something about... sharing?
   “You made the whole room feel like being inside honey”
   “Listening to you sing is taking an asthma inhaler. It slows and calms you down and makes you breathe.”
   “We were having an intellectual and aggressive conversation. Then you came in the room and started playing and the atmosphere totally changed, became gentle.”
   That's good, isn't it? Isn't that something worth sharing if you can?
   When we see hearts on stage are we reminded of our own?
   When we're rushing and then we see someone being slow, are we reminded we can slow down too?
   If we are fretful and we see someone at peace, can that help us find our own peace?
   ..
   I watched a Bobby workshop on Youtube and all the people he was working with were coming to the front and basically copying him, with quite boastful performances.
   Bobby spent four years not listening to other music, finding his own sound.
   What is your own music? Your true music?
   What is mine?
   What are the status of our performances? Are they to help launch our professional careers? Are they events in and of themselves – for the joy of the performer and the community present?
   So, after any performance, the question will be: was it joyful for you? Was it joyful for them? Yes? Then it was a success!
   ?

At last

It's the last ten minutes of the last voice class on the last day of the course.

Lee, who's been fantastic all week, steps forward. "Shall we do some free Jazz?"

She prepares us beautifully. Shut your eyes. Only do what you feel. Listen. Feel free. You don't have to make noises. It'll have a life of its own.

Silence. Someone starts making the noise of the wind. Gradually, tenderly, we join in. Over the next five or ten minutes we have crazy rhythms, farmyard noises, laughter, delicacy, and harmonic smokerings that would make a contemporary composer drool.

Silence re descends.

We open our eyes. Two people have tears running down their cheeks.

We burst out into the corridoor. That was like yoga, someone says. It was like the wind, says another. My course friend Nicky turns to me. "I liked the honesty," she said. "I have felt a lot of dishonesty this week."

So did I.

I have never tried starting from complete silence. That's next! :)

Amazing Human Beatbox

My Way

OK so if I'm a pioneer of a “new” approach to singing, (it can't be new, what are it's roots? Anywhere in space and time?) it's about:


honesty


playfulness


The pleasure of the people present in that moment


It's not about recording. Is it about performance? Hummm, performance is a sticky one I have yet to untangle, and I've got a love-hate relationship with it. What is the cross-cultural history of performance? In campfire jams, prima donnas and domineers are not tolerated.


The course director is on stage right now singing his interpretation of a Maya Angelou poem. “Nobody can make it on their own,” he sings. 


Yes! Who are my playmates?


More... On singing courses, we'll learn 'theory' with our ears and bodies and tummies. We'll do yoga and dance and drum. We'll sleep well and eat well, sing for the trees and slugs, amplify the soul with clowning and quieten the ego. We'll sing with our bodies in dance, sing with our hands on the drums, dance our voices, dance our hands, drum our voices, drum our bodies.

Anth is sitting next to me in the theatre while I'm scribbling away. “I've always found jazz like this kind of self important noodling,” she says in a low voice. “Is that OK?”

“Yes!” We cackle. “Sorry, I just have to quote you.” I pick up my notebook. 

She leans over again. “Is it a coincidence they're all men?”

Head. Science. Rationality. Control. Individualism. Showing off. No! :)

notes get wilder

• start a choir. Audition.
• Try things at the Fun Fed.
• Create a performance troupe: a) musical – vocal performance: b) variety
• JAM SESSIONS RULE. What can I offer?
• Structures for improvised pieces. Segments. Rules, eg, note boundaries, tempo, rhythm, accompaniment
• Not a pro! Just a student. And a player :)
• NO ONE TEACHER. MANY INFLUENCES.
• :)
• What are the limits to whale song? In terms of group size?
• Audience – set them up as a backing track, and impro over them: a) write it, b) impro it
• Invite audience members who want a bigger role to come forwards; if you want an easier life, go to the back. Concentric circles: inner circles, harder, middle circle, easier, outer circle, listeners (really? Is that allowed on participatory things? They could click, clap... ). Free: can everyone get here?
• Sing for artists and dancers at play. Sing with friends – singers, musicians, neither, but still somehow participants. Sing alone
• Weekly jam sessions – a different key signature each week, instrumentalists get to know them. Post them before so people could familiarise themselves in practice if they want.

We're already here

“I could live for 100 years. I could live for 200 years!” said Brian, “and I would never learn one tenth of all the music in this world.”

I realised in that moment that there is no endpoint in this journey to hurry towards. No acceptable standard that we do not yet meet and that we must strive for.

We are as we are and our music is within us.

The human voice, honest and well cared for, is one of the most beautiful things I know.

You're on yer own, darlin'

I'm in the tea line. “Are you singing tonight?” asks an old Jazz man in a long anorak. “What you did last night was beautiful. Beautiful. It was like a piece of old lace. Delicate, and full of holes. Some of them were big holes! But beautiful. Beautiful! What next? It was a tiny piece of lace. The lace needs form... edges. That genre...”


“Ah! Is it a genre?”


“Well, you've just invented it, haven't you?”


“Really? Don't other people do that?”


Jazz man furrows his brow. “Well, there were a few in the seventies, but... No. You're on your own, darlin'. It's a new field. A big, wide open space. With a sign on it: Here be wilde things.”


Humm. I wander thoughtfully to the milk and de-tea-bagging stand. Duncan the guitar tutor comes up. 


“You the trombonist?” 


“No, singer.” 


“How's the week been?”


 “Humm.” 


“?” 


“Well, I think... I think that what I want to do isn't normal.” 


“What do you want to do?” 


“I think it might be called free vocal jazz.” 


“Ah! Free Jazz! Well you can't teach that,” he grins cheerfully. “You just have to start and see what happens.”


“That sounds like fun!”


“Yep, it is. I used to know some guys who did it. They'd have a set list with titles on, like 'Red Sunset...  Thick Brown Water...' and they'd start and they'd all stand and imagine what a red sunset might feel like, then one of them would start playing and the others would think of what might sound good with that, and join in.”


“Ah I see. Thanks!”


I walk towards the studio theatre and bump into the course director. We talk about free singing and different cultural approaches to vocal music.


“Your singing last night was very beautiful,” he says. “In some ways it was extremely simple, musically, but it was absolutely full of emotion. You probably couldn't get that if you were playing second violin on a Bach Fugue.”


Humm. I go into the concert and sit at the back listening and scribbling notes.


Is there a spectrum with complexity and one end and emotional content at the other? I think of the Peulh and Richard Quantum Lightbreak Bock and the power of singing a single note.


It can't be that simple. Atul's music is quite complex – it gets very fast, at least – and it's packed full of emotion. Bobby Mcferrin on the other hand can get really complex and lose emotional charge, gaining impressiveness – but that's a different experience.


And how do you learn complexity, or things that make your improvisation sophisticated, without smothering out the emotionality? It's as if once we know what we're doing, we leap confidently in and reel it off, but when we're not sure we explore like raw curious things. I like raw curious things. We explore like raw curious Clowns.


How do you keep the clown, and make it a clever clown? How do we feed our little voices? Maybe we feed it in the language it knows, the language of the heart and ears and rhythmic guts. We feed it aurally and through experience, like in Indian and Zimbabwen music, rather than through mathematics and diagrams. ?


“You've got to have form and structure,” said Jazz man. Yup. This is my question: what kind of rules and sections can you have in an improvisation to give it form, like Indian improvised music? Maybe just using the rules from Indian classical music would be a good start. They're good rules. Then you could just make them up. For the first five minutes, no drum, and you don't sing higher than a middle G. Second five minutes, you only use the pentatonic scale, and you can have a drum but it's quite steady and spacious beat. And so on. It could be a whole different approach to writing music: to establish the sectional and overall principles and set it free.


Gosh. That's exactly how a chaordic organisation works: establish the principles and set it free.


I'd like to turn the fun fed into a chaordic organisation.


Humm.


“You're on your own darlin'. It's yours to explore.”


“You can't teach that.”


“Genre? You've just invented it!”


“Your piece last night was the highlight of my week.”


“Breath of fresh air.”


“You are the most free person I've ever met.”


“Can I hug you?”


“There's a sign... Here be wilde things.”

feed the little voice

Everything a singer could want to play with and practice might come under four headings. ?

North: rhythm

South: melody and vocal dexterity

East: Playing nicely with the kids (this would include harmony)

West: your instrument (this would include body, heart, mind, and soul. Tone. Honesty. Health. Exercises to get into the right place to sing from. How? Clowning? Singing and clowning? 

There might be something else... Something about form and structure, the overall shape of the improvisation. Is that something to practice?? Or is it more of a set of creative decisions to take about a piece in advance? Or during? ?????

Free Birds

I lie in the park at the end of the penultimate day of Jazz Summer School, almost in tears. All day, almost all week, my noise-making has been tightly controlled by a central person – a composer, a conductor, a tutor.

Where is the space in our world to sing like a free bird?

Who puts the birds in a circle and dictates what they must sing?

Who rounds up the Whales?

Simply left to make noise together, humans create such beauty and magic. I've felt it time and time again. With central control, quality, pleasure and presence get diminished.

Walking slowly away from the Guildhall building I feel such a terrible weight. I feel it in my body and I've seen it grow on everyone's faces as the day progresses.

I feel angry with the rigidity of the structures that try to control us so tightly and kill our pleasure.

For our beautiful innate music is not allowed to find itself.

Last night in the studio theatre I did my first ever entirely improvised performance. Actually it wasn't entirely improvised. I knew the five or six chords on the piano I'd be using, but I didn't know in which order. I knew the rhythm and tempo of the piano playing that I'd use as a base. And I knew the first note I'd sing.

It went down really well. “You make being in the room feel like being inside honey.” said one. “I felt as if I was walking by a river, calm and free,” said another. Many questions about my training.

I am extremely untrained, formally. I am simply incredibly honest, and I listen for what the small singer in my tummy is singing, and I copy. And when it is silent, I let myself be silent too. And I trust it. Most of the time...

I have never got on well with formal music education because it seems to ignore that small singer inside me. It tries to paste over it with its knowledge and rules and theories and scientification of music which it assumes to be superior. For many years I simply thought that I wasn't a proper musician, I was inferior. But now I think actually, I am a real musician, and I just disagree. 

I disagree.

And here, even where the course director is a singer, singing is somehow inferior. The instrumentalists in their small bands pass the improvised solos round like sweeties, while in choir we sing exactly what the choir master tells us. Finally solos time comes! With the exception of me, everyone gets their solo at the same time – unlike the instrumentalists - with no guidance at all about how to approach simultaneous improvisation, and the result is uncomfortably chaotic.

I find myself feeling offended that the voice is not considered an instrument in the same way other instruments are. Maybe the whole issue is just the course but these people run the jazz master's course at the London Guildhall and as far as I know that's pretty high up in The Establishment. This perspective feels systemic.

I feel sad and a little angry.

Where is the space to sing like a free bird?

Birds, come along. We can create it! :)

Centerpiece

Free Jazz 2

Free Jazz

Free = liberated from social, historical, psychological and musical constraints

Jazz = improvised music for heart, body & mind

I think I'm a free jazz musician

Free Jazz

Few music forms know the expressive possibilities of free jazz : authenticity and adventurous creativity combined with collective interplay. ...

Free Jazz according to Wikipedia

Free jazz has primarily been an instrumental genre. However, Jeanne Lee was a notable free jazz vocalist; others such as Sheila Jordan, Linda Sharrock, and Patty Waters also made notable contributions to the genre.

Bobby Sings Vivaldi

I love this. Sometimes improv gets scary and messy. Something like this is safer. And fantastic discipline.

How do you gain the skills to improvise well in a fun way?

I've pretty much hated all of my formal musical education, apart from learning from Atul and Chartwell.

Something to practice 1

Rhythm

Over a 4/4 beat, do patterns in 3 equal beats, then 5, 6, and 7, squeezing or stretching each set into 4 beats. Initially stick to the same note, then create simple melodic improvisations within the rhythmic structure.

Once that's good, you can break each note into two, then into a swung two, and then into three. Then you can do different beat sets over a ¾ beat, and so on.

Intervals

Create wierd melodies, jamming around with a set interval. Start with very easy - 1s, then 2nds, then 3rds and so on, until you're only using, eg, minor 7ths, up or down.

Start using just one chord / drone, then could be tried with a moving chord structure.

Writing this I suddenly have an explosive sense - what if I actually knew about music? How cool would that be?

OK but how do I learn in a really good way?

i drum my fingers on the... keyboard. harrumph hurrah. I shall gather people together and find or create a way...

Free Jazz part 1

That evening, we have the first tutor concert. The quartet are technically excellent players. The composition is something that might come into your mind on a rainy November afternoon in the front room of a Victorian terrace in Cambridge in 1998. It's formulaic. Each player takes their 64 bars or 120 or whatever it is to improvise from their brains – and they're clearly very clever – and then it's onto the next. This Shona notion of playing from your tummy when the feeling takes you is absent here. 

Everyone is well behaved and we clap politely.

Oh to have a bunch of musicians, a campfire, and no rules.

After a second piece in 7/8, the melodic instruments take a rest leaving drum, double bass and piano. These guys are starting to play. They go further and further until they take off together leaving the written pages behind on the ground and they're flying. It's alive! They're not looking at their music stands now, they're looking at each other. The drummer is a Dude! I'm excited! My heart is beating faster. They're going crazy! It's fantastic! Slam dunk bang crack bgl gg ggbgbgb BAAAANNNNNGGGGGgggggggggg..... phew. Woops and applause.

Jazz at it's best is incredibly skillful play.

I look up the drummer later. He's Brian Abrahams.

How to learn music?

After lunch is harmony and improv class. I've been really excited about this. I'm pretty good at harmony and improv so I pick the level 3 class. But the teacher's diagrams and language make no sense to me at all. After 10 minutes I pick up my bags and go find the level 2 class.

I enter and sit. “The best way to make a chord,” the teacher explains, “is to play one note at the same time as another one.” He turns to the white board, and draws a round 'E' note above the 'C' note already on there. I promptly pick up my bags and skidaddle, along with about 80% of the class.

What are these people doing?

What can you teach me about harmony and improvisation with theory, mathematics and diagrams?

You're putting me into the wrong place to make music from! Music comes from the heart and belly, the heart and soul. You're putting me into my head! What's that about?

I'm confused.

And the singing teacher earlier was putting us into our noses. Why on earth would you want to sing from your nose? Do you love from your nose? Do you feel from your nose? What do you want to receive when a person sings to you – soul or snot?

When the tutor sung from her nose in a performance, I have to say I didn't like it at all.

The heart, the belly, the groin, the loins – this is where we must sing from.

I'm wandering the corridoor and I pass a room full of rhythm. I peer in. Ah! A group is learning about rhythm by tapping their feet, clapping their hands, hitting their knees, scatting with their mouths.

This is the way to learn music! I go and join in. It's great.

Later I bump into the teacher outside. “The old head of music here made an official complaint about me for not showing him due deference,” he tells me. “He had them all learning by the book! I said to him, how do you teach a child to speak, through writing and grammar? That comes later. The body comes first. Shame was, he was in charge of all the learning here.

“You go up to a Brazilian master percussionist and say, teach me that rhythm, he won't go and get out a notepad and write some phenomenally complicate lines and dots for you. He'll slow it down and sing it to you. He'll play it on your hand. He'll dance it for you.”

When Atul taught me Indian vocal improvisation, he did so in temrs of rising suns, bouncing balls and a road trip around Europe.

“When the Sun enters the sky, how does it come - with a loud burst? No! It begins to arrive with a delicate, gentle lighting of the whole sky. Your sonic arrival must be like this.

“When you go to Europe, and you go to France, do you then go straight to Germany? No! You play around in France. You get comfortable in France. Then when you go to Germany it's a Big Deal to get there.”

France is Pa. Germany is Da. Italy is Ni.

He plays me a recording of a woman beginning her Alap, the first slow part of the improv. “Listen to her. She's been singing for twenty minutes and she's still in Germany! She hasn't even touched Italy yet!”

Here it comes... Then BAMN she's in Italy and it is a Big Deal. I feel it all through my body.

Discipline in creativity. You need discipline in creativity. What is my discipline? He's given us some rhythmic exercises and I bunk my next class (Hello, please tell me your name and what you want out of this song performance masterclass – my name is Briony and I don't want to be in this class, I'm only here because you said I had to be – Oh! Fine! Go then! - OK! Thanks!) Excited, I skip off with my Mbira, sit down by the Barbican's fountains, get playing my little song and practising his rhythm exercises over the top, gradually working melodic improvisation into them. I've been practising my little song All Week at Findhorn and I haven't been able to improvise over it. Now, using this technique, I begin to be able to.

Ah! This is creativity, and discipline, and fun. It's challenging and it sucks me in for hours like a computer game you want to get better and better at.

Good.

Good.

The teachers on this music course have been talking at us a lot in words. I seem to switch off.

A couple of years ago I was hired by a government-funded R&D lab to conduct an independent evaluation of a new technology for learning and teaching physics. I did focus groups with all the kids in the study. What do you like least? “When the teacher talks for hours,” they unanimously replied. What's good? “Class discussions. We learn a lot from each other.” What's best? “When we get stuck in and play with things! That's how we find out the most.”

A teacher's dialogue and language must accompany the play to make sure the kids are learning what they can from their exploration. But why do teachers so universally think that they should spend so much time talking?

Ave Maria's Bach prelude

Here's the music

I've adapted it (just in pencil on my printed copy) to fit my range which is from C below middle C to top C, by moving the basenote on the 1st and 3rd beats of the bar up an octave, starting on the first bar of the second page.

Choir?

I'm on a jazz summer school at the London Guildhall. I'm in choir. The mood is low. The leader is great but I think it's the form that doesn't work. The youngest, a girl of about eleven, is getting increasingly miserable. She's punching her thighs now in a cute little rhythm. She's the daughter of the saxophone tutor, a big soulful black papa, and her mother is evidently a long lean leggy beautiful white woman. It's as if this child is unselfconsciously embodying the discontent of the group, who, being adults, sing along obediently with joyless faces.

Is it the central leadership, the central control of our musicality? The little pre-designed part-boxes we're being put into?

In Indian music there's no such thing as choir. In Shona singing there are songs everyone teaches each other, which are repeated endlessly and become the basis for a whole lot of making it up.

What happens elsewhere? Am I saying I reject choir?

At my friends Rachel and Alex's wedding, a choir of friends, conducted by a friend, sang “Thank you God for this amazing day” in the service. It was totally magical.

I once walked, late of course, in from a cold December evening inot the Royal Albert Hall where my siseter was performing Christmas carols with the Bach Choir. Almost immediately, tears welled up in my eyes at the beauty and the warm feeling of homecoming.

I don't want to reject the choir form, the form of coreographed, taught and centrally controlled music.

But do I want to take part in it personally?

Does it have anything to do with the fun fed?

How did the young Vin Marti, big papa of Ecstatic Dance, feel going to dance lessons where his movements and interactions with other dancers were controlled by the choreography and direction of another? Where beauty was prized above honesty, technique above expression? His response was to ditch the audience and professionalism, say “Dance Ugly and Drool”, and spread a form of dance that everyone can participate in, love every minute of and get mighty high on.

Ecstatic singing? I've experienced ecstasy through singing twice, and something approaching it a lot.

I google the term, and retrieve lots of stuff about Kirtan, the Indian call and response form of singing, and devotional song, the repetition of mantras. Repetition is one of the routes to ecstatic singing, but I'm not sure about Kirtan and mantra.

How do we do it, then?

I don't want to come back to boring 'sing-as-you're-told' choir. But I form 50% of the tennors section. “You two”, says the choir leader pointing at me and my fellow tennor, “as long as you come back all week we'll be fine!”

Argh! The dilemma! It's lunchtime but I've been drinking my whizzed up breakfast all morning and I'm not hungry. I sidle off to another practice room, get out my Bach prelude and, under the instruction of my unmet Hero, Bobby Mcferrin, sit down at the piano and learn to sing it.

I sing for my pleasure, and for the pleasure of the community, I think. This week, this is the community. I'd be letting them down to bunk choir and sharpen my teeth on Bach instead. I decide to stick with choir and keep Bach for lunchtime.

Sesame Street

We've been talking about touring festivals next year. I'm interested in the kind of vocal jams we get going in workshops, and about the new creative challenge of how you get that kind of thing going in a looser jam rather than a workshop.

I like this.

So I've experienced two kinds of jams. Actually they're not jams, it's a jam and a session.

Sessions are performance led. People jump in with a piece to perform. Everyone else either listens or joins in. When they join in they either join in because they know the piece, or they make it up.

With a jam, someone starts a chord sequence or a rhythm and then other people build stuff on top of that. Diva moments ripple around chaordically.

I'm over-clarifying. Jams often become session-like and sessions often become jam-like, but technically there are two different things going on.

So McFerrin's approach to creating a vocal jam in an informal session might be to do a performance that he's the leader of, which involves getting everybody singing playfully, to begin with by call and response.

So how do you get people into whale song without words? In an informal jam?

Ooo now there's a challenge.

Todd did it at Dance camp. We were doing biodanzer and we'd all ended in a very very big close knot of people standing so close we didn't have to hold ourselves up. He started a loud hum and everyone joined in with different notes that then harmonized chaordically in that wonderful way for about five minutes and it was golden. Golden!

So the dance camp crowd are well trained. There's a difference between long ooommms, and higher risk contributions like melodies, rhythms and silly noises.

Maybe you have part of the crowd primed. If I kicked something off when Loose was there, she'd start playing all over it and other people would follow her lead.

Humm. Something to play with.

Looks like there are two ways to do what Bobby did: 1) write it; 2) make it up on the spot.

rain

Bobby rocks again

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.