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FACT FILES
GENRES
HISTORY
THEORY
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Fact File:
Improvisation
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Improvisation is the act of making something up as you go
along. This term is usually used in the context of music,
theater or dance.
It is difficult to define precisely what jazz is; but,
clearly, a key element of the form is improvisation. Improvisation
has been since early times an essential element in African and
African-American music and is closely related to the pervasiveness of
call and response
in West African and African-American
cultural expression. The exact form of improvisation has changed over
time. Early folk blues music often was based around a call and
response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the lyrics,
the melody, or both. Part of the Dixieland style involves musicians
taking turns playing the melody while the others make up counter
lines to go with it. By the Swing era, big bands played carefully
arranged sheet music, but the music often would call for one member
of the band to stand up and play a short, improvised solo. Finally,
in Bebop, improvisation takes center stage, as almost the entire
focus of the music is on clever, improvised solos, with little attention
given to the melody, or "head", of each piece.
When jazz musicians improvise, they usually use a chord progression -
the series of chords that define the harmonic structure of a piece of
music. For example, the
Charlie Parker
composition 'Now's the Time' is 12 bars long and follows what
jazz musicians call a 'twelve-bar blues' progression. After the
melody, the rhythm section keeps playing the same 12 bars of music,
while each soloist in turn improvises new melodies within the harmonic
structure of the chords. It is possible to get a better idea of what
is happening musically by humming the melody while listening to the solo.
In this manner, it becomes clearer that the improvised melody is
closely related to the chord progression of the piece. Fitting
an improvised melody to the harmony is known as 'playing the (chord) changes'.
As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz,
abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the
individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of
a given scale or mode. When a pianist or guitarist improvises chords
while a soloist is playing, it is called comping.
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