Group vocal improv exercises

Over the last few months we at the London Vocal Improv Collective have found, collated, created and collected these ways of approaching vocal improvisation in a group of about 6 - 12 people.

1. Talking nonsense
Start by having conversations in nonsense. Before long, patterns start to arise from the nonsense - hear a phrase you like and start to repeat it. Little loops arrive, and from them music grows...

A good warm up for this is the Bobby M exercise where you go through the alphabet doing a bit of nonsense with each letter of it as the starting letter in turn.

2. Twisted karaoke
One person thinks of a song and keeps it secret. The rest of the group starts a groove (using, if needed, exercise 4). Then the soloist has to put their song over the group's groove, keeping as faithfully as possible to the song yet putting it within the tempo, time and key signature of the groove. Especially good with traditional songs in your mother tongue :)

3. You sing we follow
One person starts singing. It can be a song or an improvisation. The rest of the group brings in sound to support.

4. Motor, interlocker, counterpoint

Small version
Create a base with three roles.

The motor is a 1 - 4 bar repetitive riff. It has to have some space in it. Often you improvise your way into it, start singing whatever and wait for the loop to arise. The motor is also the conductor, and can lead key changes, endings, pauses, dynamic changes and so on.

The interlocker is like the motor's partner. It lives in the spaces created by the motor and works with the motor to create a strong basket to hold the piece in.

The counterpoint is another loop, but now an entirely new kind of sound, to create a fresh contrast to the motor-interlocker partnership. So, if they are very staccato, the counterpoint might be very flowing. If they are cute, it might be harsh. If they descend slowly, the counterpoint might ascend quickly. You get the idea.

Bigger version
Several other parts can layer upon the three part basis. Each of the primary three parts can have harmonies from other singers. In addition, there is base, rhythm (can be two or more people) and a soloist.


5. Whale song
Apparently, communities of whales know who's in their community because they all share the same song. They swim around the sea singing it. Often little variations come in. When a whale hears a community member singing a variation they like, they pick it up. In that way, by the end of a season often a whole community will be singing an entirely different song to the song they started with, but they will all still be singing the same song as one another.

Here's how whale song works.

One person is the conductor. They divide singers into parts and make up a part for each part group.

Once you've been given your part, you can stick to it, you can copy someone else, or you can sing something entirely different. The only idea really is to keep what you're doing in fitting with the whole sound. (It can be fitting to take it somewhere new).

In that way, once you've all got into the car, so to speak, you can take the car anywhere together. The piece finishes itself. When it's over, it's over.

6. Conductor soloist 
This is a bit like whale song but more power remains with the initial conductor. The conductor can keep tweaking the piece once it's live, changing parts, influencing dynamics and generally doing whatever they want.

The conductor can pick a soloist, or different soloists in turn. If you're picked you come into the middle and solo over the group. It doesn't matter how scared you are. You'll relax before long. It's important that the group supports the soloist with their volume, being quiet enough to hear the soloist and matching the soloists energy when they get loud and strong.

The conductor can be the soloist, and can play with the parts, for example cutting a part for half of it and singing in the space created like a call and response. You can silence parts entirely, move part volumes up and down, get everyone singing the same part, create more and more sub parts, and solo in a way that supports and serves the sound - anything that sounds and feels good!

6. Bubble up from silence
Here you just start from silence, with closed eyes, and let sound bubble up, live and die. What I find really delightful here is the mix between more and less musical noise. It can start from breath, rhythm can emerge, strange noises, animal or machinery noises, then some notes might flower like petals, stretch and harmonise, fly a little together, then sink back into atonal sounds.

7. Scene setting
This is a bit like bubbling up from silence, but you start by deciding on a scene. It can be, 'sunrise in Mumbai', or, 'a swamp', or, '2am soho' etc. Again you start from silence, the scene rises, lives out a kind of story, and then dies back into silence.

Do you have any more?

Circle Song

We did a lot of circle song with David. He gets us all singing a repetitive rhythmic kind of backing track and we take it in turns to improvise over it. It's taken from Bobby Mcferrin. Who took it from ancestral African traditions. In many ways it's like what we do all night in The Tent on Mbira camp.

So I'm listening to Bobby McFerrin circle songs on Youtube and I'm starting to think about the possibilities for gathering a group of performance quality singers, maybe a pan-European flexible come and go group, with different constellations of singers gathering for performances in different places

I'm thinking about developing some kind of show that's a mixture of the individual singers' work maybe and some circle songs, and doing some fun playful participatory stuff with the audience, I like that part a lot

I'm thinking about progressive circle songs - I really like the way this one of Bobby's builds so gradually and continually as a whole piece. I'd kind of like it to have some kind of key change perhaps at some point - that's getting quite western, you don't have key changes in, for example, Hindustani (Indian) classical and Shona (Zimbabwean) improvisation-based music. You just have really gradual organic progression within a single key or chord sequence.

Then I'm thinking about the form of Indian classical music, and how you could bring that into circle songs.

You start with the alap - low and slow and arhythmic. The sounds enter like the rising sun; first the gradual, soft lighting of the sky. At some point some way in, the actual sun appears on the horizon. Because of the gradual play preceding it, it's a breathtaking moment, electric like a first touch within chemistry. It's when the improviser reaches the 8th note, (in other words the base note, the tonic, one octave up).

The arrival of each new note is an Event, and one that is lingered upon. Atul described it to me like a road trip. "First you are in England. England is Sa (the 1st). Well you go about England preparing your journey. Then you move - and it is a journey - over to France. France is Re (the 2nd). Now you're in France, do you go straight to Germany? Germany is Ga (the 3rd). No! You stay in France. You play for a while, visit some friends. You play around the edges. Then when you arrive in Germany, it is quite an event!"

And so on. And all the while, softening, softening into the music, softening into the experience of letting the music sing through you rather than you pushing and forcing it out of you.

So that's Alap.

Then a beat comes in. It's low and slow. You improvise but every 12 bars or something a little repetitive phrase comes in that marks the kind of corners that are emerging within your form. Your improvisation stays mellow but moves from the arhythmic quality of the alap to a rhythmic quality in resonance with the beat.

Next the beat quickens. Your improvisation does too. The drummer gets more playful. So you do you. You rise together; the pace, the speed of your sonic movements, the tones, rise rise rise until you reach your first climax.

Next, the intensity goes back down half way. Now enters a melodic composition. It will be a little thing, maybe 8 bars, maybe 16 or 32. You'll sing it a few times over. Then you'll start to play with it. You might sing bars 1 - 4 of the composition, then improvise for 4 bars, then come back for bars 5 onwards. Next round, you might improvise for four bars between bars 4 and 5, and four bars between bars 12 and 13. Then you create bigger gaps in the composition for your improvisations, and more of them, then more and more, until the composition is literally in shreds, tiny strips that give a thematic kind of fiber to the improvisation, and you can whip and weave them around each other. By this point both the melodic soloist and the drummer are going crazy, improvising with wild abandon, beyond all control, yet still within the form and feel of the music, until the final peak is reached, and gradually like the slowing and softening after orgasm, the music moves towards the still intimacy of silence.

I wonder if it's possible to weave some elements of that musical form into circle song. With the right group of people. I wonder who those people would be.

David Eskenazy Rocks

I've just come back from the most rockingest week long vocal improv workshop in the south of France with David Eskenazy. All I want to do now is sing.

He's got a teaching style that is both artistic and practical, free and rigorous, which pushes you to your edge then lets you fly. And as a musician, vocally and instrumentally, he rocks out.

I'm going to study with him for a year.  I've cleared ten hours a week in my diary. I want to clear more.

Be warned though, his advanced workshops are not a space to get comfortable with vocal improv, they're a place for those already comfortable with it to really stretch themselves. If you're interested and just getting comfortable with public improv, go for the intermediate and beginners levels.

I'm going to help him organise some workshops in London. Watch this space...

Bobby and Aziza Mustafa Zadeh

Scat exercise

Fundamentals of improvisation

luminous object

his thumbs are dancing

his thumbs are playing

his thumbs are making love

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! :)

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

O Lift Me Up

my old housemates, lucy and declan, in my old house. last friday. filmed by gav. priceless.

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