On Improvisation

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental!            

The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsim because jazz improvisation is based on 7-note chord scales, whereas Taqsim is based on tetrachords or other scale sub-units. There is improvisation in classical music as well, but is defined as a Cadenza, that similarly constrains performance with a scored melody.            

I don’t think there could ever be a universal definition of improvisation, although historically, the older forms of improvisation in other cultures have been integrated into Western music as a way to make it universal.            

Spiritual Aspects of Improvisation            

I like to think that the basis for playing music is always “spiritual”, meaning your performances are always the output of the “buffer zone”—the gap that controls what you’ll play. You can blame bad playing both on the lack of free will to hone chops, but also on lapses of attention to what’s happening in real-time in the music.            

Jazz and other genres (including actor improv) that allow for free playing tap into these phenomena. This is what comprises “spirit” or “soul”. Scored music doesn’t for the most part; the player is the marionette controlled by the conductor (engineer) using the composer’s (architect’s) plans. Composition also doesn’t play in the gap, unless decisions on key centers and tempo really matter on the page. Bb minor won’t make the players better, especially if they can’t play in the key. Perhaps that’s the point—to make bad players out of everyone to level the field. Everyone is lost at the same time. 

Long jazz improvisations tend to bore audiences but they are really “musical imaging studies” of a group of humans (and their “souls”) being pushed around at the mercy of their neurons. Check out any free jazz performance and you’ll hear the MRI (Music Response Imaging), full of mistakes and random firing, but also revealing of what we perceive as “soul”.            

Cells that fire together wire together.

 9/18/2017        

[9/18/2024: A few days ago I was riffing on the idea of AI jazz improvisation. If a soloist has a “tool box” of techniques to use in a solo: arpeggios, pentatonics, and so on, how is that unlike AI randomly using “tools” (random phrases)? In classical composition, motifs or cells of 3-5 notes can be used to build a whole composition. What I want to do with AI is to load those melodic or rhythmic motifs into a musical LLM and have it generate improvisations based on the “seeds”. This is how AI has been used in the past, which I think is more interesting and creative than generating music where we don’t know how the random permutations are created. It also gives us authorship if we designed the seeds].

[9/19/2026: I was thinking about this yesterday when I was considering releasing an album of AI-generated jazz that was generated from my preexisting works. I tried a few, and they were interesting in the sense that you can hear improvisation, but the improvisations are done on other music, and they seem to work as improvisations on my music. The sound quality is not very good, but it's something I'm not really concerned with. I see it as a grainy recording from the 1950s; I'm not looking to have it sound like it was produced yesterday. I'm okay with it sounding ancient. Similarly, with 60s soul music, I don't want it to really sound like it's 2026; I actually wanted to sound like it's 1966, so as to accurately represent what music sounded like back then with the existing technologies. 

Musing On Music Mostly LLM: Discuss improvisation