John Coltrane
Impressions
(hear it)

This was the first album I listened to which featured "improvisation". When I was 15 or so, I think my dad realized that he wasn't going to go this far into Coltrane's zany period, so he gave me this CD. I didn't really know what jazz was, but I understood that it is improvised - they make it up as they go along. To me, this meant that it was entirely improvised, and I spent a long time listening to this album under that illusion. Of course, Impressions does actually feature wide swaths of fairly pure improv (but note, never with multiple high register harmonic instruments like piano and sax, or sax and bass clarinet), but I believed that the composed sections were also improvised. The beautiful thing is that I had a faith that such a music could be improvised, that a group of people could just, click, start and make complete music with no prior arrangements. The even more beautiful thing is that this can actually happen. It requires faith, the kind of faith people have in Jesus, or that they will recover from the cancer, or that mom will come back, even though she left me on a bench in the bus stop and I've been returning here every day for two weeks with no sign of her.

What is required is a unity of intention, and absolute awareness, shared by all the members. This is fairly easy to achieve with only two people. What I am not responsible for, the other is, and in fact duos can fluidly improvise music with only mildly less chance of success than a soloist.

That a soloist can improvise a piece of music (ie not an "improv" but music), is a fact which I bear witness to. Just listening to a jazz solo, in which the individual is freely creating a piece of music, with only mild conditions placed on him by the others, should be enough evidence that this is so.

I've had a hell of the time, in the distant and recent past, convincing people that improvisation of this sort is possible. Either people refuse to go further than jazz, or they disbelieve that music, and not just improv, is a possible outcome.

By the way, the mix is really messed up on this album - I guess the soloist mic or mics picks up the rest of the band, and when the solo is over they have to change the balance on the rest of the band tracks to keep the volume from dropping or something. Very phasey and weird sounding for a while there. I suppose in 1963 they were only working with like 3 tracks at most though, so it's not like they had a lot of options...

bb, 25 Feb 08