The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #17950 Message #1858947
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
14-Oct-06 - 05:59 PM
Thread Name: What is improvisation ?
Subject: RE: What is improvisation ?
If you take it as referring to the thread headline (which it wasn't), rather than to the previous post (which it was) and you might read it that way. But I agree - if I had meant to say that mouth music was the only kind of improvisation, that would have been very silly. .........................
Of course there's an important fourth kind of improvisation, involving the words - ranging from the one singers do, when they forget a word or a line and adjust to cover, to traditions in which whole songs can be improvised - blues for example, or dub and rap and so forth, or work songs of various sorts.
......................... I like it when an old thread comes back to life, at least when it's one that hadn't beaten a topic to death.
I noted a suggestion back there where Callie expressed doubt as to whether group improvisation has a role in folk music. Unless folk music is defined in a very limited way, I can't see that as being right.
Mind a lot of time when people talk about group improvisation, in jazz typically, what they actually mean is one person at a time doing a relatively improvised solo, against a prearranged background. True collective improvisation is a much rarer bird since jazz got all clevered up.