Organic Versus Conventional Improvisation

 

As you can see it's a very sunny morning. It's totally white behind me.

I answered a Quora question this morning: "In regards to songwriting, Neil Young said that if he practices a song too much it loses the organic feel.” There are different kinds of organic: Organic in pop music means that you can jam around on a few chords and simple rhythms. It's an easy space to play in. Jazz is different: it's still an easy place to play in but there's a lot more preparation at the front end. But they're essentially both improvisations. Even pop songs can start to get kind of jazzy–because if you go in that direction, and you have jazz players, they're going to add that flavor to it. That's one of the things I like about adding improvisation later after the framework has been established. With a pop song, it's easy to build structure. With Neil Young songs, lyric ideas are usually driving the music. Since there are typically no lyrics in jazz there's no linguistic aspect that's having an influence. That can be added later as well. But in terms of improvisation, there are two different kinds: one allows for more free-form playing and one might happen only within a bridge section for example. #riff

(10/21/2021)