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“Everybody gets it in the end. It’s a question of just being authentic.”
“If we’re obsessed by someone else not listening, then we’re not listening ourselves – if you want listening (in group improvisation), then listen, if you want more space, put more space in. Half the time, people get so frustrated with somebody else that they play in a frustrated way, and get even more frustrated. I’ve found that the more you accept whatever arises, the more it DOES self-regulate. I think improvising finds its natural level.”
“The Gathering is just ‘dealing with whatever arises’, and it’s the most PHENOMENAL training!”
“For me as a musician, but also as a human being, improvisation strengthens my ability to respond skilfully in the moment... People often improvise like that out of sheer necessity.”
“When you just want to please, to be approved of, it’s contrived: an aesthetically pleasing general consensus, rather than a real consensus. As you know, when you’re not following others but just following your own impulses, when there is consensus in THOSE circumstances, then whoa! That’s powerful. There’s a synchronicity that’s very different from the grovelling of ‘I’d better fit in’. It’s a process. I just love the process of improvising, whoever or however.”
“Improvising is important because we’re not obeying orders. We’re learning how to share power, how to navigate, negotiate and create.”
“The freer you are as an individual, the more responsive you are to the group... but then the more responsive you are to the group, the more free you become as an individual. Both the individual and the collective are enhanced through the process of improvisation.”
“Awareness is more important than whether you’re listening or not listening.”
the great Maggie Nicols
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Improvisation belongs everywhere; that’s another big strength to it.
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"Large-group improvisation is a very valuable thing to do, but I also find it the hardest [thing]." John Butcher
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"For me, part of improvising is to explore what jazz is – what is the myth of jazz violin, and what are the different identities associated with the violin?'
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To improvise freely means you're free to use material that you know very well indeed and you're also free to invent and take risks, to do stuff you're not quite in control of, just to see where it leads.
Evan Parker
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We are not ‘free’ at all... improvisation is an ART (all the great musicians of history were improvisers); it is natural, it’s a life-art (un art de vivre)...
improvisation is about life and death – that’s why it’s such a strong jubilation, it’s a drug... because each time we improvise we are in between life and death. Joëlle Léandre
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Spontaneity and improvisation isn't just randomness. Whenever power does something, we know that there's a set response that they're expecting – but then you can go, 'OK, what WOULDN'T they expect?'
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'Why do I improvise? Improvisation is just a much more satisfactory way of making music for me. We have to ask questions, because in the west we have this idea that improvisation is separate from western culture, but that’s only since the 17th century – up until then improvisation was always part and parcel of western music making. The reason we’re asking questions like this is that something happened to western music then, and that is why we now have to ask why improvisation matters. If you think about Bach or other great classical composers, they all improvised.' Pat Thomas
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'When I interpret the son-icons on the viola… with the incongruency of visual art with music, this is like a very inspiring discussion. If they're not congruent, that's propelling the discourse – it's driven by this' Charlotte Hug
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"As an incarnation of social and religious marginality in the Muslim world, particularly in the Turko-Persian regions, the figure of the dervish is unclassifiable. Popular etymology expresses this well, by linking the first syllable of the word darwîsh to dar (the door), while diverse explanations have been proposed for the syllable wîsh, such as pîsh (before, in front; thus dar-pîsh, before the door), wîz (from the verb âwîkhtan, to hang, to suspend; thus dar-wîz, suspended from the door) and yûza (beggar; thus dar-yûza, the one who begs at the door). The same idea returns again and again: ‘dervish’ designates the individuals or the groups that remain in front of the door as beggars, who are at the edges of society, simultaneously included and excluded, who, standing on the mystical threshold, are knocking on the door of the absolute or of God. In the absence of a linguistic argument, folk etymology provides a vernacular and endogenous translation of a materially, socially, and symbolically inscribed socio-religious reality. For the historian, the difficult task remains that of unearthing parts of this reality, one that Sufi writings (including treatises, manuals and biographies) tend to pass over in silence. One must turn away from the well-known names and texts, avoid the light and, to perceive the spirituality of society’s dregs, look rather into the shadows for the small Masters and the anonymous authors." A. Papas, Thus Spake the Dervish.
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"Maybe if you approach these noises with love, that's what transforms them into what we would call music"
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'I like to construct something new at the moment every time, and of course... I probably fail! Inevitably one fails, because one is oneself, with one's fingerprints and so on.
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Chaos is a form of machine as well, because it can in some other way also be quantified and computed. The important thing is that if you are not owning the systems of quantification, then you are being quantified.
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You Can't Afford This
03:15
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Punk was my personal Perestroika – a few moments of freedom and possibility preceding a takeover by the most rapacious, the cannibals, getting fat on us. Mines, shipbuilding, steel, gas, electricity, water, telecoms, airlines, railways, housing, prisons, schools, universities, care homes, roads, parks, rubbish collection, forests, land, buildings, tubes, buses, pensions, post offices... sold off, privatised or destroyed.
Those with no ballast of scruple, love, or conscience floated effortlessly to the top, stealing from past and future generations. Once the tangible assets were gone for good, they used the technology of creators who dreamed of freedom to turn our ties of friendship, family, interests; our communication, curiosity, creativity and individual constellations of relationships, into PRODUCTS to be sold to the highest bidder (States, Parties, advertisers, corporations). YOU have now been privatised online.
When the ideologically committed state facilitators of overweening greed, whose sickness dictates their beliefs:
Fuck everyone else but me
Buy cheap and sell dear
There's no power but buying power
Enclose the commons
Poison the well
Everything has a price and if you have to ask what it it, you can't afford it…
when they come up against a novel sickness that can't be bought or sold, what happens?
An orgy of denial, buck-passing and empty bravado. The murder by omission of thousands who could still have been alive. The handing over without tender of vast contracts to inexperienced and incompetent private companies run by cronies. Because if they can't buy a cure, they can at least keep finding ways to turn a profit from all the sickness and death. Lie after lie after lie, over PPE, Dominic Cummings; Test&Trace; the tracking app; "immediate end to NHS surcharges for workers from abroad and their families"; "World-beating response". The exhortations to get back out there: herd immunity by the back door, cynically jettisoning the old, the poor, the very workers who are just holding the scraps of our society together. In the UK, the USA and Brazil, the most dangerous co-morbidity with Covid 19 is deadly extremist neo-liberal capitalism.
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Caroline Kraabel London, UK
Caroline Kraabel is an improviser in music, art, politics and life.
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