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.”
