Free Improvisation, Memory, and Recording.

I'm just back from Brooklyn, where I spent the weekend recording my free improvisation quartet, Carlos' Red Shoes. I suppose I'm pretty happy with the results - I'll post tracks here as soon as they become available - but recording improvisation is always a massive head trip to me, and I generally find my own thoughts more interesting than the recorded results when I record unplanned music.

About ten years ago, I did a recording session of some improvisation, and one the players (I wish I could remember who, sorry) told me, "look, improvisation is always more fun to do than to listen to, so there's no point in worrying about how it sounds." As jaded as that perspective is, it really does take the pressure off the musician to come up with something engaging off the top of his or her head, and I find it helpful to remember it when I'm sitting in the corner with furrowed brow, trying to figure out what to play (which is more often than I'd like, but sometimes the best thing to add to a sound is nothing else, too). Call me an idealist, but I have a different take on what I'm doing when I improvise freely - my goal is still to have fun doing it, but I also think total improvisation can be the best way to address a moment as it happens - right now, I don't really want to hear a Serge Gainsbourg tune, I think I'd rather hear a tuba played with a saxophone mouthpiece, and if I'm improvising, I have the extreme luxury of playing my tuba with a saxophone mouthpiece right now, and I get to hear it. Because of this approach, I tend to forget pretty much everything I played right after I've played it. Partly because the moment is passed, and what I played doesn't serve a purpose for me anymore, and partly because I was so darn busy playing the stuff that I couldn't really make a note of what I was playing. The other guys in CRS tell me that I had a pretty nice extended tuba solo going on at one point, and I do remember that at one point everyone stopped playing except for me, and they all came in again at the same time and I had a good feeling. But I have no idea what I played, for how long, and whether it felt good because it sounded good. It didn't matter at the time and I can't really go back and play it again anyway. But the strange thing to me is that in a week or so when I get the rough mixes from Sunday, I'll know exactly what that sounded like, and if it's good enough to make the cut and we release it, anyone who wants to know what my playing is like will have that moment to listen to and come up with an impression of my musical approach.

I wouldn't say that it was pointless to make that moment permanent. On one hand, I enjoy some recordings that I understand to be completely and freely improvised and I'm glad that those particular moments have been made permanent. On the other hand, well, CRS has had trouble with clubs and gigs, and maybe yesterday we played something that will catch the right ears, and they'll hire us to play, and we'll make back a little bit of the money that we spend to keep the band going. I think I will say, though, that a recorded improvisation is a completely different entity than the actual improvisation that got recorded. It's pure chance that the recording sounds like it does, that the moments we were playing were the same moments that microphones were present and that zeros and ones were arranged on a hard drive in a specific order to make a machine reproduce the sounds of that moment. But there's no going back to change that data now. What had been a flexible, reactive, fluid moment is played back the same way, every time, with no change, for eternity. It almost feels like I have no part in the recording part of recorded improvisation, and the stuff on that hard drive is not what I played in the same way a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence is not the actual birth of a nation from a rebellious British colony.

And at the same time, what we played yesterday was in response to a strange moment. It wasn't just what we felt like playing at the time. It was what we felt like playing at the time, with microphones pointed at us, and a guy in the other room making sure that what we felt like playing was being made into a permanent thing, a list of numbers that will not change once we're done with the technical fiddling. Now, that's as valid a moment as any moment we might spend on stage, or in a rehearsal space, or wherever, but it's no more typical a situation in which I might make up some music than if I were to be riding on the back of a zebra down Canal street with a tuba in my lap.

I will know, in a few weeks, once I've forgotten the weather, and the conversation I had had the night before, and the endorphin rush when Dave and Dan kicked in together at the end of my tuba solo, whether what we recorded is worth listening to. But as a performer, there's really no way I can listen to my music and tell you whether it's any good or not. Not while I'm playing it, because I don't have time and I'm focused on playing the stuff. And not while I listen back, because I hear what I thought were mistakes at the time and I hear the band giving up on what we were trying to do and just floundering for a few minutes - all while you just hear music, the completed result of what we ended up playing at that moment. On some level, that's always true. I know things about the structure and method and style of my playing that you don't and likely can't hear, and in exchange, I can't hear the music I make in the way it's listened to by anyone besides me.

And in the meantime, I never have these thoughts when I listen to a Derek Bailey album. They don't matter. I can't hear them and I don't care. And while I still generally say that there's no good in recording improvised music, that what we play with no preparation is not intended to be heard past the moment in which we decided to play it, I can't say I've ever turned down the opportunity to listen to a few favorite albums multiple times just because I knew that the music was only to be played live once and then never revisited.