Meditative Improvisational Mind

Good evening, 

I've been practicing and playing music a lot more often lately. As I've started live streaming jazz standards and improv with my good friend Jason, I've been practicing, playing, and recording much more often. It's good to be inspired. For a few years way back in 2013 I stopped playing guitar. It's good to be back in the saddle again. Here I'd like to jot down more notes on what goes on in the mind of an improvising musician. Check my first post about it here. 

But in today's post I'm going to keep things simple and talk about how to really tap into that meditative improvisational frame of mind. 

So we all know what improvisation is. It's the ability to play something, something well, off the cuff, as if you never played it before. I practice improvising most often in the form of jazz guitar. How do you improvise? It's a tricky question as there are actually many different ways to improvise but the best way for me is to tap into a meditative state while you're playing. This means that all other thoughts in your mind are turned off and you go into the present moment. The only thing that you're attuned to is your very nature; your daesein [your worldhood of the world]. 

Essentially, this means everything pertaining to you: How are you feeling that day? How is your day going? Are you happy, sad, or have no emotional attachment to anything in particular at that current time while you're playing? Is your guitar tone how you want it? Is your band mate giving you the space you need to improvise well? Did you eat a good lunch or a lousy lunch? What's the temperature in the room that you're playing in? Did you wake up early or late? Are you tired? Energetic? What I'm getting at is that to you need to be truly attuned to yourself, your world, your daesein [beingness, beingness in the world]. 

So in order for me to attune myself to an improvisational frame of mind I have all these things in mind while I'm playing. Now here's where things get interesting. Your playing is influenced by all those things listed above but it doesn't have to be. The goal is to have everything in mind but turn it all off, not rely on your old favorite licks and tricks and chords and live in the spirit of the moment. 

The spirit of the moment. This is an interesting concept. While truly improvising in the moment you will never really time to think about the future. You will mostly focus on the present moment in time which is exactly what you want in order to improvise well. Like a true jazz musician. 

The means to getting there is deeply intense and spiritual. The hard way I've learned is through endless jamming on jazz standards, free form improvisation, deep meditation, and calming the mind [with camomile tea]. Eventually, you'll get there and you'll realize that you can truly improvise. You'll play things you've never played before and continue to do so the more you tap into the spirit of the moment and enter that meditative musical state. The hardest part of turning off and tuning in is that you have to let go of your thoughts and even yourself. It's an intense experience. You must let go of attachment and suffering. But it's also soothing. 

It's a lifelong practice. The jazz giants have mostly left us so it's up to us, the younger generation to keep jazz music alive. Hopefully, a newer generation like mine can do the tradition justice. Also, keep in mind that these ideas apply to other disciplines as well, not just jazz guitar. 

Thoughts While Improvising

What goes in the mind of a musician while he or she is improvising? Hard question to tackle, but without further adieu, here's a post entitled Thoughts While Improvising. Keep in mind that these are taken from my point of view. For other musicians it might be a lot different. They could be thinking about cheeseburgers. 

First, I'm always thinking about the melody, the chords, and certain scales or motifs that work within that system. I always look at the song and keep the melody, chords, and scales in my mind's eye, so to speak, so that when I need to take a solo after my band mates, I don't have to focus on any of that stuff as much. Rather, it's ingrained in my head through repetition; of hearing the song a million times, hearing other people play the song, hearing my band play the song before, hearing my band mates play their solo and adjusting to it when I go, and hearing the familiar chord progression and melodies. The easy way of explaining it is that you have to study the song [the chords, the melodies, the rhythms, the comping, the lead work] before you can truly know the song, and then after you've done that, you can throw it away, and go to the next stage. 

Second, there are always those type of musicians who don't have to study songs to improvise well. Perhaps they're just natural good musicians and can improvise on a muddy boot some amazing rhythms. This is the part where if you know all the meat and potatoes of the song [the structure, the chords, the melodies], if you're comfortable enough and have enough practice, you can actually just throw all that stuff out the window, and, gasp[!], just play straight from the heart. This is more of a bluesy [and rock] feel rather than a straight ahead jazz approach [at least imo] but it gets the job done. This style of improvisation, when I play like this, I don't think about anything at all in particular, rather, my playing ebbs and flows through my inner feelings, my inner emotions. I believe that this is true jazz improvisation, but sometimes you have to study the song in order to get here [I prefer to study the songs]. 

Third, I think about the main theme of the song. What's the main melody? Remember to always keep that in mind even if you're going far over the moon in a modern straight ahead jazz guitar solo [think Mike Moreno, Lage Lund, Mary Halvorson]. If you keep playing the melody, add permutations to it, and add that as part of your solo, it gives your solo a lot of structure and weight. Sometimes I think about the melody, and come back to it, either at the end of the song repeating the head, or just ending the song in an interesting way, using the melody to form an unusual [b9, #11, 13th note chords] but great sounding chord[s] to end on. 

Lastly, improvisational music is a spiritual endeavor. One of the magical things about playing a form of music that is based on improvisation [jazz] is that when you improvise, there's no telling where you're going in your head. You're sitting on a chair but metaphysically speaking, you could be flying across the heavens. For me, it feels as if time itself has ceased to exist, and all my thoughts have ceased to exist, and I'm in some sort of black hole, blacked out from the rest of the world and others, even when people see me play on a stage [although I feel them and their feelings too], I feel this inward prescience, the cosmic energies that arise out of me and into the world, the world-hood of the world, a sort of being and time, daesein, if you will.

Improvisation brings me to a spiritual plane where nothing can hurt you, you're invincible, you can fuck up and make mistakes but it won't hinder you or hurt you in the long run, it forces you to adapt to any and new situations, teaches you how to play in an ensemble with others, how to comp [accompany, strum chords for the band] for other musicians, how to take solos, how to play melodies with confidence and ease. When you see that this is all part of the vast history of American jazz you can see how your playing has been influenced by history, and you can take solace in the fact that you are keeping the tradition alive through your music, however you choose to do it. There's really nothing quite like it. Even though I love rock and roll, there's something about jazz, about improvisational music, that can't be forgotten, that can't be broken, it's still untouched, perfected by time, and the great performers that played it. 

There's no right or wrong way to think while improvising. Most of the time I feel like I'm not thinking at all, rather that I'm feeling the music in a much more visceral way. Sometimes you get so used to just playing from the gut, that eventually everything you play comes from that same place, where you're playing more off your own feelings rather than the song or the song's structure. Whatever works is fine. Finding your muse is what takes a long time when it comes to improvisation. Find what works for you. One thing I didn't mention is that sometimes when you're doing improv, you have to think about what you're going to play ahead of the time. Things like that. Who knows, for some people, thinking about cheeseburgers might encourage them to play a lot better. For others, much less so.   

Feelin' Alright

Ahoy shipmates, and welcome aboard. Lately, I've been writing vlog-style [lifestyle] posts so let's keep up in that fashion. The last two weeks I've been ranting a lot, a lot about hard work at the retail gig, Marxist theory, the stompin' upon the proletariat...blah blah blah. The truth is that within the last couple of weeks I've been feeling that work was becoming overwhelming. That the proletariat is being used and abused. Or something like that. 

I almost became a Marxist. That's one of my best jokes I've come up with recently. I was so fed up with working that I wanted to become a Marxist. Going so far as to consider spending my time reading more Marx and Engels, and Adorno, my music mentor's hero. I would say that I have a lot of Leftist influences and that my general political ideology is more aligned with that, rather than say, a pure form of straight capitalism, which we have seen now in 2019, no longer works. But that's an op-ed column for another day, wouldn't you say? 

So today rolls on by. I chilled with some friends and we did the same usual stuff. We played Smash Ultimate in three-player free for all, ate lunch, talked, and listened to some music on YouTube. I didn't take a Lyft from my friends' to work. Rather, I took the bus. The bus took about forty minutes because it was a slow bus on a Sunday, the laziest of all bus days. 

During the wait, I stood the entire time. I was mostly surveying the image of the valley canyons. I saw a customer who happened to be taking the bus and I told him how great the weather was, and how beautiful the valleys looked, and that we were lucky to live here. "Yeah, man, we're blessed." Being able to just stand around, enjoy the weather, and take in the scenery really calmed me down. It brought it all to me right there: dasein, time and being, the worldhood of the world. The important stuff I learned from Heidegger's Being and Time. Which one might say has to be experienced first before you even try to explain.

Long story short. Sometimes all it takes is a moment of self-reflection to realize how great life is, and how your impact on your world, community, etc, makes the world a better place if you will it, allow it, and make it so. "When you smile, the whole world smiles with you." It's actually true. The more upbeat and happy I am at work, the more people want to talk to me, and find out more about me. Likewise, the more gloomy I am, the fewer people want to talk to me. This goes back to a post I wrote some six months ago about how I had an epiphany about happiness, changing the way you think to attain this more often, regularly, etc. I'm no guru or anything. Rather, I am just a young grasshopper trying to attain enlightenment. 

One of the most liberating feelings in the world is being happy amongst others: family, friends, coworkers, customers, and managers. The other is being happy with yourself. Find the balance between the two and the universe seems to open up, engulfing you in a sea of happiness [or something like that lol].  "They call me mellow yellow...quite right."

It can be something simple like standing around, contemplating the canyons. Or it could be something more complicated like meditation. Whatever way you find it, when you find it, try not to lose it. However, if you do, remember you can always pick up where you last left off.  Even life has a pause button.

"When you smile, the whole world smiles with you."

Gestalt

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about art, music, history, ideas, philosophy, zen, and the like. Almost a year ago I came upon the sudden realization that my focus was attenuated by my own distractions, resulting in poor work service and social skills among my friends and peers. Thankfully, I've been working on all that and things have been going swimmingly. You could even say people love me, even people who aren't my family or apart of my immediate friendship circle. I'm ready for the Orlando Fanclub LOL. 

In all seriousness, what I am truly talking about here is thinking processes on a metaphysical level. Gestalt actually. This is a German word for shape or form, and its the idea that systems and their properties should be viewed as a whole, not as loose collections of parts.

What really got me going with this was reading Heidegger's Being and Time, a book so immensely prolix that I'm not quite sure anybody who's read it quite understands it, or definitely doesn't understand all of it, but perhaps portions, or segments of it. Being and Time got me thinking about life metaphysically. What is life, what is being, what is time, what does it mean to be apart of the worldhood of the world? Etc. 

I've thought about these things as part of Heidegger's thought processes but that is too complicated to go into here [blog in the future incoming on that book], so rather I'll focus on what I think about these ideas. 

Life is the optimal persona [don't ask, its a California thing] of the soul, of a person, place, or thing. Being is the consciousness, so to speak, the thing that makes it a life plus everything else. This includes personality, physical, and mental traits of the person, and the way they make their thoughts process. Time is the standard measurement of life. To be apart of the worldhood of the world means to be a willing participant in the game of life, to want to be apart of social conventions. This includes work, friendship, family obligations, girlfriend, wife, kids, etc. Plato has different variations on these ideas, as does Heidegger.

My own thoughts on these ideas are simple, they're still valid still fair game. My thoughts on Being, or as Heidegger calls it, Dasein, has brought me to a new idea, a new way of thinking, thought processes. Basically, you don't have to think about your thoughts as being apart from each other. Rather, you can look at it as one entity. All your ideas could be thought of as one spontaneous act. Cycles of reality if you will. Your whole entire day could be thought of as one smooth motion rather than many different acts within 24 hours. That sort of thing. Frank Zappa had a word for this that I've since forgotten. But basically, he thought of all his recorded body of work, music, as one entity, rather than as individual albums or single inspirational moments. I'm thinking about daily ideas, activity, and thought processes in a similar way. 

This could also correlate to activities. You could do many things throughout the day with many different people, see a lot of places, do many things, and at the end of the day, you can look at it all as one activity, one single act of motion. 

I think about all this as cycles of reality, an idea I got ironically from a jazz song, from a modern jazz muso from New York, a drummer whose name I've forgotten. For me its a way of thinking in a more meta way, thoughts are more cohesive rather than random and disorganized. This isn't to say that all your ideas are related, rather when you think in this vast linear fashion, the worldhood of the world changes a bit, not it in itself, but rather the way you fit inside of it. It can come in handy sometimes when boredom is so ready at hand in the humdrum of everyday life. It connects everything together, you're more alert, so you don't look up and go, either in your mind or speaking to another person, "what?" 

What can I say? These Germans have me thinking metaphysically.