It is 3am, and I am wide awake. My mind, that is. Funny how just one Dota session can screw up your sleeping habits big time. I ended up missing Arranging and Ear Training yesterday (but then again, Freddie hardly teaches inspiring stuff nowadays), and I cannot afford to miss Traditional Harmony today. My whole body feels tired, my head is aching, but as soon as I turn off the lights and lie down on my bed, my brain seemingly goes into overdrive mode on purpose. Suddenly I hear great arrangements for my projects or maybe think of new strategy for FIFA 08 to beat my friend on his awesome PS3. Just 5 minutes ago I had the most brilliant lines forming over the chord progression of A Foggy Day. Other times it's brilliant patterns over a B minor funk vamp. And when I wake up, like most good dreams, they're almost gone. By the time I grab a pencil, all I can hear is this:






*whirr of fan*





*washing machine*




*bugs chirping*





******silence******





Maybe you can't hear silence, but I can. It is what used to be the killer line you just thought of a moment ago. And people think jazz and improvisation is nothing compared to classical music, pop etc etc. Try coming up with your concertos, cadenzas and horn arrangements on the spot with no eraser, no pencil. And play them with the same intensity, passion, feeling, expression, all the while making it sound musically pleasing to the ear (but then again, "musically pleasing to the ear" is very subjective). Mozart and Beethoven were both brilliant improvisers; if I've said this before I'll say it again: If they were alive today they'd probably be great jazz pianists.

So while people like Paquito D'Rivera, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, insert-famous-jazzer-here (no not Kenny G), spontaneously improvise some of the best solos the world has ever heard day in day out, mere mortals like me struggle to even remember a single line over a II-V-I progression.

(Those videos, if you actually bothered to watch them, is a good example of what improvisation is - playing what you hear in your head, not some bunch of chord/scale BS your lecturer told you to play. And yes it's IMPROVISED, as opposed to memorised - memorising something requires written sheet music first; improvising means they're coming up with those seemingly-impossible lines on the spot)

But that's the beauty of improvisation; during some gigs when everything seems to fall into place - the drums and bass are tight, the pianist (and guitarist) are listening and everyone is grooving along together (ie when you're lucky), the lines really start to flow. I miss those jam sessions at Top Room where everyone was all on the same wavelength (even though it was the first time playing together) and I could put together some good bebop lines over Anthropology and Billie's Bounce. Fine, they're just rhythm changes and blues progressions, but everyone has to start somewhere...

By the time I'm typing this I've almost forgotten what I wrote in the beginning and why I'm blogging in the first place. This is probably the most disorganised rant I've ever written. Go ahead and flame me if you disagree with anything I've said, I'm too tired (or lazy) to read through it again, and I'm forgetting sentences as fast as I'm thinking of them.



Come to think of it, half the time my improvisations are about as well-organised as this post.







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