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.