Re: [Harp-L] Extended Solos

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Michalek writes:

Hey Everybody,

What are your thoughts on taking extended solos.  I don't mean 3 or
four choruses I talking about 20 choruses or more you know going on
for 20 minutes...

===================Winslow

Depends on how much of a story you have to tell and whether you can
make it interesting. 

The accounts of walking around dramatics by Rod, Kim, and Sugar make
the extended solo part of an extra-musical bit of theatrical business
that might or might not work if the soloist just stood still and
played.

Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves did it with a 27-chorus solo in front of the
Duke Ellington Orchestra that drove the crowd wild at the Newport jazz
festival during the buttoned-down 1950s, but found he couldn't repeat
the feat later on - it was a one-time inspiration.

Think of someone like Chris Rock or George Carlin or Eddie Izzard alone
on stage with no props and no gimmicks riffing for the better part of
an hour on a unified theme - sex, buzzwords and social clichés, le
président de Burundi, whatever. Of course these are carefully worked
out routines and not improvisations. But the point is that these can
hold the attention - the fascination - of an audience for an extended
period. But an improvising musician has to be able to do this without
the unifying pattern of meaning created by words and without a
carefully worked out long arc of structure. So it's down to the unifyng
meaning that can be created with musical patterns and the dynamics
created in the moment that hopefully will add up to a sustainable
dynamic over the whole period of the solo.

A short sturctural unit like a chorus of 12 or 32 bars doesn't help
unless you can see beyond this and use a large number of these as a
unit on which to base a larger structure. Someone like Ravi Shankar has
the advantage of using much larger forms as containers for extended
improvisation.

So yeah, I think it's possible and it may even be posible to cultivate
and do consistently - has anyone thought to mention Sonny Rollins? But
it takes thinking beyond the small unit of the chorus and, if you're
serious about it, also beyond non-musical theatrics, effective though
these are with an audience.

Winslow


		
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