I've drunk a little too bit to write something convincing. Tomorrow. Anyway, feel free to write to me!
Performance
I will work to address, remediate and ultimately minimize the collateral damage of my mistakes, which will be many.
— Shanley Kane, “Values Towards Ethical and Radical Management”
Was wonderful to have time to contemplate. Now should emphasize more effective action: performance.
But I think that people have a tremendous lack of understanding of what goes behind improvisation. For instance, a lot of people think Coltrane is just this genius who is spontaneously emoting. They think that improvisation in music is just making stuff up off the top of your head. It's just amazing. It's like hacking, right? Just, I am so awesome. I'm so bright. I am just going to, like, make this up.
But it's quite interesting to see, as we've gone back through the archives and had these new releases of old recordings where they put the alternate takes in there because you'll see Coltrane. He had the solo. It sounds incredibly spontaneous. But then you listen to the other six versions, and you realize that everything that went into the solo that you thought was this amazing one-off, he had worked out. And he was trying them in different orders, different juxtapositions, different cadences and levels, and maybe the order of it was spontaneous, but there was a tremendous amount of preparation associated with that.
So there's a sense in which improvisation is dynamic composition of prepared materials, of planned material, and that to be a great improviser means to make those smaller plans or have those kinds of prepared abilities or approaches or sensibilities that you can apply when the time comes in a live situation.
And you have to have a lot of knowledge to do this and a lot of vocabulary to do it. It's just not something that you make up. And Coltrane was a genius at this preparing. He practiced more than anyone in order to seem as if he was making it up most fluently.
— Rich Hickey, “Design, Composition and Performance”




Oops! I kept scheduling forward this blogpost, because I was lazy to turn it back one of my many drafts... Didn't intend to post it! :P
Next time, I should at least delay it years in the future... so if I die in that time, this phantom post will mysteriously pop up...