Ancient Music to Modern Improvisation

 We talked in earlier posts about the simplicity of early Western music, so simple at one ancient point, with just single notes chanted in church, that no chord-playing instruments like the piano were even needed. Even after harmony-based music appeared, and the elements of melody-plus-chord music grew, early music was still restricted to very stringent rules and used only the most conservative chord patterns. Many of the chord and melody choices commonly used in Chopin’s works would have been considered musical heresy in Telemann or Handel’s day, Similarly, the free-form, impressionistic musings composed by Debussy and Ravel, with their purposeful disregard for strict meter and cadence, might have shocked Chopin.

After hundreds of years of this ever-widening musical evolution, a true American art form was born in Jazz, in the early 20th Century. Jazz gave rise to many subset musical forms throughout the 1900s – New Orleans jazz, jazz standards, swing, be-bop, straight-ahead and avant-garde – each one ever more free-form in its definition of what music could be. We’ll look at some of the great eras and types of jazz, and their gifted exponents, in a later post.

But one of the main freedoms and styles jazz gave ultimate permission for, was improvisation. Improvisation simply means you use the written melody and chords as a starting point, but then play other notes and chords not in the original written composition. On piano, you may keep the same chords in your left hand, and simply add extra notes, runs and flourishes to the melody in the right hand. Or, in more experimental jazz forms, you may take license with the whole structure – melody, chords, even meter and tempo, ending up with something that most listeners would be hard-pressed to say still resembles the original.
 

In a lot of swing and straight-ahead jazz, it’s common for the band to play once through the main structure of the song’s chords & melody, as it was originally written, then take off for anywhere from a couple verses to 20 minutes worth of improvisation on that structure. Most of the improvisation is built on the basic blues structures – the 1, 4, 5, 6 chords with lots of added 7ths – that jazz grew out of. But it doesn’t sound anything like the simple blues of Muddy Waters or B. B. King. That’s because it’s only based on those blues structures. Then the improvisers go wild, adding a lot of diminished, augmented and modal sounding chords, with lots of extra 9ths, 11ths and 13ths (both major and minor.) The resulting chords and melody, often with both the natural and sharped-or-flatted form of a note in the same chord, can have a very angular sound, and for some, it’s an acquired taste.

But even straight-ahead blues players like B.B. King and Eric Clapton do a lot of melodic improvising, as do so many accomplished piano players like Errol Garner or Oscar Peterson. The accompanying chords stay close to the original chords, but numerous solos are taken on top of that basic structure, with slow or rapid, leaping or crying strings of notes and flourishes, until these solos become the more interesting and dominant aspects of their versions, over just the plain melody.

Coming off of the recent post about learning to play by ear, improvisation is the obvious next step. Once you can play any modern song, fully knowing its original chord and melodic structure, you are invited to take off on flights of fancy and enter an entirely new musical world. Try keeping the left hand chords the same, but experimenting with "riffs" above the normal melody. Try an upward or downward run of chromatic and other scales, or playing some cool "licks," quick or long combinations of bluesy notes that sound good as a nice flourish.

How do you know which riffs and improvisational choices are good or bad? Well, there are many books available that cover entire libraries of commonly used riffs, licks and solos. And there’s my favorite source, listening to other well-known piano players, either live or on CD, over & over, savoring and learning their improvisational choices, and adding my favorites to my own memory bank.

But in the end, it’s about just experimenting yourself, to your heart’s delight! That’s why it’s called improvisation! Because you are experimenting, technically, you can’t make a "mistake." So don’t be shy, just try tons of different things – different chords, different runs of notes – and see what sounds best to your ear. You might even discover a whole new music form. Either way, you’ll definitely have fun! Set aside some time in every piano practice session for some improvisation. Your playing will grow by leaps & bounds!

For more check out these related posts

• Improvisation 2