a critical view of improvisation [The following comes out of an exchange with an old friend and former musical partner, M., now a doctor and psychologist and no longer playing music. He heard me play recently and criticized the playing of a partner of mine from several years ago for his obsessive drone-like performance, reminding him of an autistic child. In the most recent email he was pleased that I wasn’t offended at the criticism. I reply:]

Without critical back and forth there isn't much to think about. Of course even with close friends we often don't know if they are interested in what we “really” think. For some, any differences at all are hurtful and personal, and we try not to step on their toes—which assumes we can catch their hints as to what are their sore points! I myself often take things personally, but I can usually distance myself from that as a bad habit. Of course, I don't want to assume others can do that, so I am usually cautious, apologetic. So I appreciate your boldness, based on friendship and trust. As for your criticism of the music (even though not much directed at me), I am more interested in comments of rejection, and audiences that question my music, than praise. And it’s good that I appreciate the negative, since I have gotten very little praise for my music; mostly no comment at all. If there’s one thing sorely lacking among musicians it is self-criticism and the willingness to get help from others in seeing their music critically.

M: I imagine I overstated the criticism of improvisation: I wrestle with the approaches to improvisation because I think it has the potential to be the most important music on the planet. I get frustrated because it is so potentially magical and gets as close as I would ever admit to believing in anything transpersonal. I am far more critical of popular music and masturbatory guitar solos. I'm sure [the player he criticized] was more present than he seemed, and I am making assumptions about players all the time. I am a viciously critical live music listener, and probably err in assumptions so much because I miss performing so much.

You make me aware of how much of our listening and playing assumes a cultural background, a story. In the case of improvisation this is quite inaccessible, since its history is only known as the story of its icons and not the people like ourselves. This background is largely unconsciously procured over time and shapes our taste, our patterns of acceptance and rejection. My partners have in varying degrees absorbed this history into their playing, as have I, which means that we wouldn’t now play what we would have played in the past. We “move on”, often unintentionally, which is transparent to those hearing us for the first time, or after a long interim.

A prime question for the player or artist is to what extent this evolution is individual and what is collective, as in the typical avant-garde movement. Evolution that is collective requires interpretation, an explicit meaning or message that can be communicated and shared apart from and yet shaping the experience of the art. In the sixties message art triumphed over abstract expressionism, which people complained didn’t have any single explicit (literal) meaning, or could mean a variety of things at the same time. Pop art and its sequels corrected that problem. An example of message art is Concept Art, a seventies art movement of which there are traces today (art with an aesthetic or political message). Each piece, installation, or action of Concept Art was one of a kind, individualizing the artist as well as the statement. One could not then and cannot today repeat a Concept Art piece without someone saying, "but that was done yesterday (or forty years ago)". This falls in line with the approach to art at least since the Renaissance, which declares all art as historical and each contemporary artist as standing on the shoulders of the predecessors. For the spectator, some art, such as classical music and all museum art, is still fully valid after centuries, but no composer would dare write a Bach chorale today. For art of any age to be considered “contemporary” it matters very much that the past is past—at best a storehouse from which to pick, choose, mock, re-interpret and revise for the present. Not just for the artist but for the spectator of contemporary art, if you don't have some awareness of what the contemporary artist has presumably absorbed, discarded, explored, it is often hard to appreciate what is going on. Without that cultural background you might just miss the point, for instance you might have thought that Pop Artists were just commercial artists working for an ad company and not the pretentious first wave of postmodernism.

The notion of collective progress found in art movements is shared by technological and scientific advance, whose cultural prestige they envy and would like to borrow. Progress is based on scientific experiment, whose point is to do something infinitely repeatable with the same or analogous result. Once it is done and the awards handed out there’s no point repeating it, only elaborating it and making it more widely known. It is the result that counts, results that stack up over the time of a scientific or artistic career. You don’t have to dwell on the individual’s motivation, the focus is on the advance that has been made. It turns what was previously done and considered valid into a naive past, known at least to some collectivity, which can identify itself as advanced, progressive. And to be progressive is to link oneself with all that is true, just, good, and all that blah.

I spoke above of individual evolution as the common alternative to this. As an example of this, watching a dvd of 21st. century visual artists recently I am struck that they are all expected to elaborate stories that individualize the artist in question as a “person” in the contemporary sense. They talk not of how their art challenges conventions, educates us, and advances Art, but of their family and cultural background, how their present work reflects their story of themselves. To be presentable as artists of course nothing currently disreputable can be hinted at, such as machismo or right-wing fantasies. As those advancing collective evolution might consider themselves radicals, these personalistic artists would be liberals (it would seem that anyone to the right of center is simply incapable of artistic expression). Such interviews of artists would have been unheard of in the days of the classical avant-garde (imagine Picasso asked how he expressed his love life in his paintings of women). Rather they reflect our current liberal culture in which everyone is potentially an artist, and one’s work is valid as unique self-expression of a personality. All art needs is a few more pats on the back and “good job” all around.

In relation to assessing a performance, improvisation has an evolving history, which means that some of it is “past”, and valued for that, and some of it is “contemporary”. Of course it is important to register our immediate feelings about any art we encounter, but when we are faced with the contemporary we are being asked to suspend judgment, to not have our taste determined by our feelings. That means to doubt our feelings, to distrust them temporarily in order to search out alternative possibilities behind what we experience. To put this in the language of psychology, what offends us might be the clue to some part of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge. By no means am I saying that resistance is either foolish or futile, but that it might be a key to something more, indeed to a path we are headed down without knowing it. My favorite personal example is hearing Ornette play in 1967, when I practically had to leave the room it was such a horrid experience. Then five years later, after much change in my personal life, I found myself enraptured by it. At that point I bought some Schoenberg records expressly because I didn’t like Schoenberg, and played them often, just to break down my resistance and open myself to something beyond my experience.

As a player myself, I have one foot in what is now considered “the past” and one in “the contemporary”. That is, I can no longer play what I did twenty years ago; even though I can listen to it with pleasure and curiosity, it is not what I would spontaneously play now. Beginning about twelve years ago I was open to those who were finding a way around conventions I myself had become bored and frustrated with. Particularly in Berlin players had been challenging the predominant “full-tilt” improvisation (roughly called free jazz today). They, and a few players in Boston and London, created a collective aesthetic called unfortunately “reductionism”, closer than improvisers had ever come to an avant-garde movement. (While reductionism has been declared dead, the pretensions of representing the avant-garde over all free improvisation is firmly in place.) At the time I borrowed the players of this reductionist movement to get me away from my personal musical cul de sac, while smiling at its pretensions, which I thought harmless and adolescent. Playing with minimal sound and much space drove many of my regular listeners away, but to shift towards playing this way was something absolutely necessary for me.

The music I tend to play for others now gradually recovered much the same energy that I used to have, but a quite different quality of time and space, utilizing sustained pitches, texture, and often no recognizable saxophone sound. To my ear, my music today has more concentration and tension in it than my “full-tilt” playing of the past. The critics and record producers apparently don’t like it, I suspect, because it is a mixture and not the kind of easy story they want to hear. I don’t fit the picture of the loyal free jazz player, yet I have too much physicality and emotion in my music to be part of the avant-garde scene. Also, though I most often play with plugged in players or percussionists, the two categories most prized by the avant music world, I myself play only the traditional, unmodified saxophone and make sounds only my breath makes in the tube and my fingers make on the keys. In other words, it might look like I have reneged on the avant-garde project, or was not capable of doing it, whatever. Such criticism comes from the point of view of what I am calling collective evolution, and is associated with “radical”, uncompromising, risk-taking—all the p.r. of the cultural left. But this is where my personal evolution has taken me, a spiraling movement rather than the straight linear, monolithic progress that sees itself always ahead in the race against the past. That’s what I mean by being both on the side of the contemporary, the progression of art shared by most of my partners, and at the same time not dismissing my personal or the collective past of free improvisation but vindicating it through the work of transformation. My particular version of this music is one of many possible, and does not easily fit the hierarchy based on an aesthetic model.  ¶ 11:27 AM