First of all, here’s the original version from Snow White.

Once you’ve got the tune in your head, listen to the Miles Davis recording.

The long intro uses a pedal point, which just means that bassist Paul Chambers plays the same note over and over, creating a feeling of floating suspense. Drummer Jimmy Cobb plays gentle waltz time with his brushes: one-and-two-and-three-and, one-and-two-and-three-and. (Most jazz tunes are in four-four time, so each bar would have four beats.) Pianist Wynton Kelly plays some improvised figures based mostly on arpeggios.

At 0:40, Miles Davis enters, playing the melody on muted trumpet. Even though he interprets the tune’s timing very loosely and adds some ornaments of his own, you should have no trouble singing the words along with him. This section is called the head, and as is the case with a lot of jazz tunes, it’s thirty-two bars long. In case you’re a music reader, here’s the chart.

At 1:17, Miles begins his solo. Over the same thirty-two bar form of the original song, Miles improvises a new melody. He chooses his notes spontaneously, but not randomly — the solo has to make sense against the song’s chords as they go by. You can keep track of the form by continuing to sing the words, and hear how Miles’ playing interacts with them. Miles was famous for his dark and moody style, with unhurried pacing. He plays fewer notes than his virtuosic sidemen, using frequent silences. You can hear him going back and forth between a tuneful style that refers back to the original melody and a more abstract approach, choosing notes that form patterns for their own sake, sometimes rubbing tensely against the chords.

Each pass through the form of the song is called a chorus. Miles plays three choruses — you can sing the words three times over his solo. At 2:26, Miles ends his second chorus with a funky repetitive riff on one note. At 3:05, the end of the third chorus, he reiterates the one-note riff and extends it, allowing it to spill over past the end of the form with a nonchalance that’s typical Miles.

At 3:11, there’s a more energetic feeling in the drums as Jimmy Cobb switches from the soft-sounding brushes to the louder and more percussive sticks, and Hank Mobley begins his tenor saxophone solo. Hank doesn’t come off on this recording spectacularly well — he was new to Miles’ band, and didn’t yet have his feet under him. Also, his softer and more lyrical improvisational style sounds a little schmaltzy compared to Miles’ acidic tone. (In fairness, to hear Hank at his best, check out his classic album Soul Station.) After two choruses, Hank runs out of ideas at around 4:18, and he comes to kind of a lame conclusion. The risk of failure (or incomplete success) is exactly what makes jazz improvisation the exciting art form that it is.

Next comes Wynton Kelly’s piano solo, at 4:26. As in his intro, he plays a lot of arpeggios, short fragments that call and respond to each other. Wynton sounds a lot more relaxed and on his game than Hank Mobley, no surprise since he was a veteran Miles Davis sideman. Wynton gets a chorus and a half, and at 5:24, Miles takes over, restating the second half of the melody. Then there’s a short interlude on the same pedal point as the intro before the final solo. This is a pretty unusual structural move — Miles clearly wants to set the stage for the dramatic climax, the entrance of John Coltrane.

A little back story is helpful here. Coltrane had played tenor sax in Miles’ regular group on and off through the second half of the fifties. Together, the two of them had created some of the best and most famous recordings in jazz history, including Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind Of Blue. (Go buy them! You won’t regret it.) At the time of the “Prince” recording session, Coltrane had recently left Miles to lead his own staggeringly great band, but he happened to be visiting the studio that day, so Miles invited him to sit in.

What you’re hearing at 5:52 is Coltrane playing with zero preparation, just sight-reading the chord chart. That may sound impressive, but it’s actually pretty common for jazz recording sessions. What you should be impressed by is the effortless intensity and power of Coltrane’s improvisation. His solo gradually builds in complexity until by the start of the second chorus, he’s playing full doubletime, cramming twice as many notes into each measure as the pulse of the tune would suggest. His lines twist and spiral with a complexity unmatched by anyone else in jazz at that time. It isn’t just his technical ability that makes Coltrane great. Even at speed, his note choices all make emotional sense, and his lines have a rock-solid melodic structure to them. If you slow Coltrane’s solos down, they become quite tuneful, even catchy. It’s one thing to be able to throw a lot of notes around; it’s a lot more rare to have all those notes tell a compelling story.

After a short interlude, Miles plays the head out, the final statement of the melody. Usually the head out is identical to the head, but in this case, Miles just plays the first half of it. Then there’s an outtro, much the same as the intro, a piano groove over the pedal point in the bass. Wynton Kelly plays more freely than he did on the intro, using darker and crunchier harmonies, probably inspired by Coltrane’s solo. Finally, the tune winds to a spontaneous close, by a hand signal or eye contact among the players. You can hear that Jimmy Cobb doesn’t quite land in the same spot as everyone else, he carries over a few extra beats. Then someone in the room makes a mysterious “pop” sound with their mouth, and the tune is over.

Most mainstream jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-solos-head form. The band plays the melody, then different musicians play solos on the melody’s form and chord progression, and then the band plays the melody again. There are infinite variations on this basic structure. You can get a taste for them just by listening to different versions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” which has been recorded many times by jazz musicians over the years. Miles himself was inspired by Dave Brubeck’s 1957 recording, which is faster and doesn’t have the pedal-point interludes.

I chose this example specifically because it’s a well-known song to most of you reading this. Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through adaptations of standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to tunes that were popular seventy years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply a ton of historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome. Happy listening.

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Composition
Duke Ellington – “Concerto For Cootie”

Blues feeling
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”

Romance
Count Basie – “Lil Darlin’”

Effortless virtuosity
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – “Joy Spring”

Reinterpreting pop music
Miles Davis – “Someday My Prince Will Come”

Funk
Herbie Hancock – “Fat Albert Rotunda”

Soul-searching and inner flight
John Coltrane – “Venus”

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Miles Davis was at his wildest and most experimental in his forties. That decade of his life starts with the Miles Smiles band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) and extends into his electric funk period. The music that he was playing at age 49 on Agharta and Pangaea is the most intense he ever made, though it’s not to everyone’s taste.

I saw Max Roach perform a couple of times when he was in his seventies, and he was tremendous. At one of the shows, he did an encore solo piece on just a hi-hat, and you wouldn’t believe how much music he got out of it.

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The Facebook page lists about eleven billion examples of The Lick. Here are some of my favorites.

Miles Davis, “Two Bass Hit” — John Coltrane plays it at 1:15 and 1:39.

John Coltrane, “Impressions” — listen at 3:11.

Coltrane again, “On Green Dolphin Street,” at 1:32.

Freddie Hubbard playing “A Love Supreme” at a Coltrane tribute concert — 0:16.

Sonny Rollins on Miles Davis’ “It’s Only A Paper Moon” at 2:25.

Sonny Rollins, “John S” at 1:51.

Grant Green, “Nomad” — Bobby Hutcherson plays The Lick at 4:12, 4:46 and 4:53.

Charles Mingus, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” — Joe Gardner at 1:34.

The Lick doesn’t just belong to jazz. Stravinsky uses it in “The Fire Bird” — listen at 14:43.

The Lick is a pop and rock staple too. Player uses a variant of it in “Baby Come Back” — listen at 0:13.

Santana plays yet another variant in “Oye Como Va” — listen at 0:17.

Akon sings The Lick right at the beginning of “Just A Man.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of four versions of The Lick, all transposed to A minor for clarity.

These few variations on The Lick only hint at the richness of explosive diversity you can find on the Facebook page. The Lick is one of those musical memes, like the Amen break or the “Egyptian” melody, that can adapt itself to a seemingly limitless variety of circumstances. There’s a lot of debate on FB about whether a given phrase counts as The Lick or not, since many of the examples stretch the time or alter the pitches, or both. These debates are a lot like the ones biologists get into around taxonomic issues, whether a given fossil is a dinosaur or a bird. The Lick mutates and evolves exactly like a gene in a population of organisms. You can think of The Lick as being like a single gene that codes for a single protein, functioning as part of a larger musical genome, a tune or a solo.

We come down hard on artists who use cliches too much, and praise others for originality. But if iconoclastic musicians on the level of Coltrane use The Lick so heavily, how bad can cliches be? Too much originality is an obstacle to creating emotionally resonant music. Coltrane’s last albums were by far his most original — you’re not going to hear too many cliches on Ascension or Sun Ship. But I find those albums challenging at best, and most people find them unbearable. Coltrane’s best art is based on familiar materials — showtunes, folk music, the blues. The best art doesn’t avoid cliches; it owns them, personalizes them and transforms them. I say, long live The Lick.

First, the Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, featuring some of Eric Dolphy’s finest work.

This track was originally issued on Impressions, but it comes from the Vanguard recordings and is one of my favorite things in the universe:

The other Coltrane live album I nominate is his 1957 Carnegie Hall recording with Thelonious Monk. The sound quality is as crisp as any of their studio work and the performances are extraordinary.

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You can build up your vocabulary by studying other people’s improvisation, especially by transcribing from recordings. Working out melodies by ear is another good way to build vocabulary — as you stumble around and try to determine which note comes next, you’re doing a lot of experiential learning.

Music theory is the improviser’s best friend. Knowing the relationship between scales and chords frees your imagination, opening up new musical areas for you to explore. When you’re up on stage playing a solo, it’s not like you’re explicitly thinking “okay, a D7 chord is coming up, so I need to play mixolydian.” But having that knowledge thoroughly mastered means that when you get on stage you’ll have a bunch of notes under your fingers that you know will sound good. It’s up to you whether you want to stay in safe territory or venture out into crazier sounds, but it helps to know where the safe territory is.

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My preferred method the past few years is to record some improvisation over a beat, and then edit the high points together in the computer. I also like to take samples, slice them and see how far I can get rearranging and pitch-shifting them. With vocals, I like to sing wordlessly or scat nonsense syllables, and then fit lyrics to them later. I learned a lot of these methods from working with hip-hop and electronic dance-pop artists and they’ve done a lot to freshen up my writing, make me take chances, and not be too precious about my ideas. When I’m doing work for hire, of course, I have to follow to the client’s process, and that can be a drag, but I try to adapt to whatever the method is.

If you’re immersed deeply in music, ideas will just pop out of your head continually. He’s wise to carry a recording device with him at all times. Paul McCartney famously kept a tape recorder, notebook and guitar or piano in every room of the house. “Yesterday” came to him more or less fully formed in a dream, and when he woke up, he just rolled over and recorded it before it vanished. These sorts of bolts of inspiration don’t just come out of nowhere. You need to feed your brain a lot of raw material. Listening isn’t enough. You need to memorize and perform other people’s material, and play around with it. Try extending or dropping sections, try combining parts of different songs together, try altering a chord here or there. Your brain will take in all these chunks of music, digest them and recombine them while you go about your day (and apparently also while you sleep.) When something hits, you need to be ready for it.

What is the creative process like when writing a song?

The lead sheet writes out the head’s melody and chord progression. The specifics of accompaniment, interpretation and tempo are up to the performers.

Sometimes lead sheets specify intros and endings, but very often they don’t, and it’s up to the performers to come up with them. A few third-party intros and endings are so memorable that they become de facto parts of the original composition. For example, Dizzy Gillespie wrote such a brilliant intro and ending for Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” that Monk himself used them in all of his own subsequent performances of the tune.

Big band jazz will add quite a bit of additional composition to the head-solos-head structure. There will be written parts accompanying the solos, countermelodies to the head, more elaborate intros and endings, and composed sections between solos called shout choruses. Improvisation can form the basis for a lot of these passages — horn players will improvise a background part onstage, and then if it works it’ll get written down and added to the “official” score. Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman frequently worked improvised ideas by their sidemen into their compositions (some would say they stole those ideas, since the sideman rarely got co-composer credit.)

Like Mark Catoe says, there are some through-composed jazz works. My favorite is Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.”

But even within such a highly structured piece, Monk varied the delivery quite a bit from one performance to the next, especially rhythmically.

There’s been a pretty smooth continuum between through-composed, classical-sounding music and completely off-the-cuff improvisation through the history of jazz, sometimes within a single performer’s work. John Coltrane started his career playing conventional head-solos-head tunes with written intros and endings, and ended it playing completely unstructured free jazz. There was a fascinating middle period where he was playing head-solos-head music but not writing anything down, just giving verbal instructions to the band. That’s actually my favorite music of his — the long, one-chord modal tunes from the early to mid sixties. Miles Davis also ran the gamut from tightly structured big-band jazz to chaotic freeform funk, and everything in between.

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I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful whole. The best way to get an idea of what I’m talking about is just to see the man in action.

Reggie on Conan:

“Wax and Wane,” a video by Jake Lodwick:

See a video deconstructing the process behind songs like this. The delay/looping unit is a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler.

A ballad, Big Ass Purse:

A longer performance at Google:

Reggie’s most produced video blends his usual disjointed lunacy with a loving parody of hip-hop. It’s called F*ck Sh*t Stack, and obviously, the language is very explicit. And hilarious.

Reggie works well in purely audio form too: Thus Far (Alternate) by reggiewatts

Reggie on Radiolab:

Hear many more tracks on this Spotify playlist. I’m particularly awestruck by the fifteen-minute “My History Thus Far.” It’s a wonderful autobiography unto itself, but if you want more background, check out this New York Magazine profile.

Improvised words and electronic music belong together

Barbara Singer and I had a somewhat similar idea to do completely improvised electronic music, and to combine it with improvisational comedy. Reggie’s method is better. First of all, instead of using canned beats like we did, he beatboxes everything himself. Secondly, he sticks to a pretty strict hip-hop/R&B song form: eight and sixteen bar sections, intros, verses, choruses, breakdown, outtro. The structure gives his improvisation a solid skeleton, keeping the music tightly enjoyable while the words go off in whatever random directions.

I went through my free jazz phase, but Reggie’s approach is way cooler than free jazz. Reggie is accessible and pleasurable in a way that free jazz only very rarely is. Relatedly, I like improv comedy as much as the next guy, but combining it with singing and rapping pushes it onto a completely different level. Reggie feels less like an entertainer and more like a transmitter for the collective unconscious of the culture. In a prehistoric culture he probably would have been a shaman or a prophet. It helps that he looks the part.

Studies of musicians who improvise while having their brains scanned show a connection between melodic improvisation and speech.

[Improvising] led to a surge in activity in a variety of brain areas, including parts of the premotor cortex and, most intriguingly, the inferior frontal gyrus. The premotor activity is simply an echo of execution — the novel musical patterns, after all, must still be translated by the fingers. The inferior frontal gyrus, however, has primarily been investigated for its role in language — it includes Broca’s area, which is essential for the production of speech. Why, then, is it so active when people create music on the piano? The scientists argue that expert musicians create new melodies by relying on the same mental muscles used to create a sentence; every note is another word.

Given these results, it’s not surprising to me that the richest improvisation combines music and language. The best jazz solos have a speech-like aspect. Freestyle hip-hop makes the speech-music connection literal, but suppresses melody. By combining hip-hop with melodic singing and discursive lectures, Reggie is hitting every brain region at once. When we laugh at his routines, it’s not because his stuff is “funny” in the traditional sense (though it can be.) I think we’re laughing at the delightful surprise of having so many new connections between our own brain regions being lit up at once.

So, the show we saw

Apparently it was taped for a Comedy Central special, that’s something to look forward to. As you can see in the videos, there’s a whole dance component to Reggie’s act, which includes waving his fro around hypnotically. It had been pouring buckets before the set started and it was still humid, so Reggie’s hair steamed visibly under the lights.

The beauty of the live looping is how unpredictable and context-sensitive it is. Sometimes crowd noise got recorded along with whatever Reggie was singing or beatboxing, adding to the texture. On one of the songs involving piano, he overdubbed two layers that were slightly out of sync with each other. Instead of erasing one and trying again, he just let it run, giving the piece a nice organic lopsidedness.

While most of the content came straight from Reggie’s subconscious, there was some pop culture too. He did a flawless parody of Radiohead. He shouted out nerd culture several times too, making references to rolling for initiative and Seven Of Nine. He aimed a surprisingly earnest lecture to computer hackers, entreating them to find something constructive to do.

Reggie’s best material went from the ridiculous to the sublime. He started one of his hip-hop tunes by shouting out all the boroughs – “Is Brooklyn in the house? Is Queens in the house?” That led to a rapped discourse on New York City, its neighborhoods, the way the streets down in the financial district and the Village are all oddly laid out because it was before the grid system, then the Dutch, the native Americans, the wooly mammoths, the formation of the earth, and all the way back to the big bang, which he described as “a black hole emitting radiation.” Which: wow.

In general, Reggie’s act feels like he’s explaining to aliens how humans work. I sometimes feel like that’s my job with this blog. It’s a thing with people who grow up between different cultures. In my case, it’s the conflict between my Jewish and Protestant ancestors. Reggie’s case is more complex, because he has a French mother and an African-American father. His Obama-like chameleon quality is the result of an Obama-like upbringing. He probably feels like an alien himself most of the time — too black for white people, too white for black people, too European for America, too American for Europe, too musical for straight pop, too pop for the academy. He and I share a fondness for Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” which is all about the alien perspective on humans. I bet he likes Björk’s “Human Behaviour” too.

The crowd was heavy on the hipsters, but more varied in race and class and age than you’d think. The people around me were uniformly enraptured, laughing at the random nonsequiturs, bopping to the songs. The only exception was a woman standing front and center at the foot of the stage, who abruptly stormed out two thirds of the way through the set, angrily exclaiming, “This is not funny!”

Miles and Eno seem radical, but in a way, they’re just boiling the usual compositional process down to its raw essentials. Really, all composition and songwriting consist of improvising within constraints and then sequencing the best ideas into shape. Usually this improvisation happens in short spurts, inside the composer’s head or alone at an instrument. Using a recording device instead of a sheet of paper can make the process more bodily and immediate, and can help get at playful ideas that might not squeak past the mind’s internal judges and editors during the relatively slow process of writing stuff on paper. Michael Jackson wrote his best stuff by improvising into a tape recorder. There’s something about improvising a performance while being recorded that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Since 2004 I’ve been writing and recording with Barbara Singer in different configurations. The first version was her idea, a band called Blopop. She had some techno versions of pop songs programmed into her MC-909 groovebox, and the idea was that she’d sing and DJ, and I’d improvise guitar on top.

Both Barbara and I come from jazz training, and both of us felt boxed in playing standards. Free jazz wasn’t that interesting to us either; it felt too chaotic and self-indulgent, too disconnected from the musical world we live in. Babsy had the bright idea to use electronic beats and loops as the basis for improvising. Her original concept was to use pop songs as the basis for improv. We did a little performing that way, but then quickly moved into completely open-ended blowing over beats.

Brian Eno has all kinds of different systems for imposing order on his in-studio improvising. For us the system was to use the presets in Barbara’s groovebox. The generic techno grooves programmed into the box establish  a key and a vibe, so you just set the tempo and you’re off to the races. In a perfect world we would have programmed everything ourselves from scratch, but there was something wonderfully effortless and expedient about just dialing through the presets at random.

Babsy is an improv comedian, a veteran of various improv groups and a student of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We talked a lot about the improv comedy bible Truth In Comedy and how applicable it is to music too. If you’re confident, responsive to the other performers, and genuinely focused on the present moment, you really can’t do anything wrong.

Constrained improvisation is a perfect meditation exercise. I learned firsthand what the Buddhists always say, that it takes a lot of practice and discipline to be maximally effortless and intuitive. I’ve enjoyed few activities more than freeform musical improv over techno beats. Completely free improv can be a pleasure too, but it can also be a pain, since it usually devolves into formless noodling. The beats give enough structure to make the process fun. Here are some of our attempts to put the Truth In Comedy principle into action.

See

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Improvisation recorded during the first time Barbara and I were ever in a room together, in the summer of 2004. Babsy is in the excellent habit of recording pretty much every note she plays or sings. I was a little taken aback when she wanted to record our first session, but went along. This isn’t edited, or even mixed. I pick a starting note at random, which turns out to be the flat seventh of the synth loop’s key. That establishes the main riff I have to work off of. This element of harmonic randomness ended up being a big part of the band’s pleasure for me, having to puzzle out a good-sounding relationship between the note I picked to start on with whatever came out of the groove box.

Warmup

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Another unedited improv, recorded a month later than the one above. As the title suggests, this was just to get limbered up at the beginning of a session. It fades out once I lose the thread.

Everything We Do Is Right

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Maybe our best attempt at a longer-form improv.

Window remix

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Edited from over half an hour down to eight or so minutes. The original contains all these ideas, but they’re separated by some stretches of aimless wandering, and with looser repetition. I like it better this way.

Listening now, this stuff doesn’t nearly as tight or focused as our more pop and remix-oriented material we eventually moved into. But I admire the spirit of adventure behind it. My guitar playing certainly improved enormously under the pressure of all that recorded improvising. We never remotely found an audience for this music. It was too weird and avant-garde for the dance music people, not weird enough for the avant-garde, too unfocused and unpredictable for pop fans, too electronic for jazz fans. Still, I think it was a cool idea, one that I don’t think we came close to exploring completely. I’m still interested in pursuing this format further. Anybody out there game for some Eno-flavored freeform techno? Drop me a line.