Some of my friends probably heard me saying that I believe all life is an improvisation, and we are all some little great jazz masters. Recently I found myself more and more coming back to a set of ideas and situations which all revolve around improvisation. I will pour some of them out of my head, so I make space for more. Don’t feel like you have to read everything, I will never see when you leave the page ;) Ah and when you leave, you can click on the b/w picture to the right - you will be directed to youtube to a movie of Art Tatum playing Humoresque by Dvorak. From his point of view.
Take for example music. Nowadays, classical musc performers play music by the sheet. Somebody (preferably not alive anymore) wrote a beautiful (or interesting or strange) piece of music and the interpret learned to play it. And he plays it. And he is very good at it and the audience enjoys. He also enjoys it. However, after a while he gets bored of the piece and does not want to hear it again. This is probably the result of the industrial age. People started specializing more and more up to the point where we have people who are so good at various aspects of music that they can live well by doing just that. But the price of overspecialization is boredom. My musician friends will excuse me that i use them as examples - I use them because they are more interesting, more pitoresque - but I am sure that overspecialization has a similar effect on everybody.
Music was not always like this. Beethoven was an astounding improviser. Leonardo da Vinci with his friends improvised operas where both the music and the acting were created on the spot. There are still types of music where improvisation plays an important role and jazz is one of them. In jazz the artist expresses himself while he creates the music instead of interpretting the music. And I think that when the artist creates, when he improvises he is enjoying at a different magnitude than when he is reproducing. Back in Lugano I used to do some two-guitar improvisation jams with Jeff (hi dude!) and I can say that when improvisation goes well, it can be much better than interpretation.
Life has its own scores. You want to be an accountant, you go to university, study economics, and then you find an accountant job. Then you do accounting for the rest of your life. You want to be a researcher, than you work hard, hang out with the research crowd, and eventually you do it for the rest of your life. You want to be an actor. You practice for 12 hours a day, network well, and eventually you get the roles. This is what I would call interpreting the scores that the society has prepared for you. I think there is an alternative and in life like in music it is improvisation. Instead of playing by the scores, try to introduce a bit of your own creativity in life. Change a note here and there. Don’t break the tempo, respect the chord progression… As you gain courage you will see that you can play with the rhythm too.
This is why I started to attend an improvisation class with Tom Ridgley at the Peoples Improvisation Theatre, here in NY :)