On the spot: musical improvisation

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:58:00 -0500

Tony Sarabia:

Jam Band, Zappa, Taqsim, and Bach and of course jazz; these are all part of the extended musical family of improvisation.

You may lean toward the Grateful Dead and extended solos by John Coltrane for your improv pleasure. Or maybe you’re an aficionado of Chicago’s rich new music scene which includes members of the band KLANG.

The quartet, led by Oak Park clarinetist, James Falzone is on Morning Shift Thursday to give us their take on improvised music.

In the beginning there was improvisation. By the Medieval Period, singers were being taught how to improvise a counterpoint to a fixed melody. Jump ahead more than a few hundred years and you have scat singing. When a jazz fan thinks of improvisation, they may look back into the music’s history for stories of the "cutting contests"; late night jams sessions between friendly rivals. Well, consider this; those improvisation cutting contests were also taking place back in the 18^th century between Mozart Muzio Clementi.

Composers such as Mozart, Bach and Chopin were skilled in musical extemporization. And in the Middle East, making it up as you go along is still a big part of the repertoire; the taqsim and maqam are improvisatory techniques integral to music from North Africa to the Levant.

Here’s an interesting aspect of musical improvisation: it’s a skill that not every musician masters. Many musicians have never delved into the spur of the moment type of performing while others have spent their entire careers doing nothing but improvising. Improvisation seems to less about technique than feeling and communication with your fellow musicians. It certainly can be like balancing on the high wire.

KLANG will be providing most of the music this week along with a few picks from Richard Steele featuring improvisation in jazz. My one pick is from a series of improvisations on video from avant rock master Brian Eno. These brief forays into improvisation (each "movement" averages about five minutes) were recorded as a promotion of sorts for his 2010 album Small Craft on a Milk Sea.

Here, Eno’s third movement called "Written, Forgotten Remembered," recalls his work with David Bowie on the latter’s album Low.

Richard Steele:

Lee Konitz is a native Chicagoan with a long career, which often placed him in settings with other musicians who thought “outside of the box.” This 84-year-old alto sax player joined Miles Davis in the legendary Birth of the Cool recording. He was also in the Stan Kenton band for a year. But the person who influenced him most was another Chicagoan, his major mentor, Lennie Tristano, whose musical ideas about improvisation were unlike anyone else on the scene at the time. This song, called “Fishin’ Around,” is representative of those concepts and has a title suited to the musical approach. It’s Konitz on alto sax, Lennie Tristano on piano and Wayne Marsh on tenor sax.

Bobby McFerrin has often been called a vocal virtuoso. His mother and father were both classical singers. He left his home base in New York City to study music at several colleges in Northern California. After moving to San Francisco in the late ‘70s, he met Bill Cosby, who was responsible for getting him on the bill for the 1980 Playboy Jazz Festival. McFerrin later did the theme song for one of TV’s biggest hits, The Cosby Show. He also had a huge commercial hit called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” While all of that was happening, McFerrin continued to develop a unique music style, using his voice and body to simulate a number of instruments. His improvisations are unlike any other vocal technique, and you can hear that on this old standard, “I Hear Music.”

Vijay Ayer’s South Indian immigrant parents exposed him to a wide variety of Indian classical, religious and popular music. Primarily a self-trained pianist, he began to show an interest in jazz while in high school. In the late ‘90s, he became aware of the Asian Improv movement of socially conscious artists who melded their cultural musical roots with the language of jazz. During this period, Ayer was greatly influenced by former Chicagoan and alto sax phenom, Steve Coleman. Ayer learned a lot about improvisation through his association with Coleman. Listen to Ayer talk about how his trio approaches the creation of the music … as he leads off a version of “The Star of a Story.”

Improv pioneer Josephine Forsberg dies at 90

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:30:00 -0500

Very few of the men and women are left now who, sixty years ago, began to create in Chicago the modern techniques of improvisational theater. With the death Monday of Josephine "Jo" Raciti Forsberg, 90, the ranks of the surviving founders have grown even smaller.

The creation of concepts and rules for improvisational comedy, acting and performance--each somewhat distinct from the other--didn't happen all at once. There was no improv big bang, but a series of events, theater troupes, experiments, workshops, cabarets and schools which sometimes flowed out of each other and sometimes not. Jo Forsberg was up to her neck in as many of them as anyone else, from The Second City co-founders Howard Alk (deceased), Paul Sills (deceased) and Bernard Sahlins (happily still among the living and still engaged in making theater), to Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Shelly Berman, to Del Close and David Shepherd and Sheldon Patinkin (also, happily, still fully engaged in Chicago theater).

Although I hadn't seen Jo Forsberg in many years, I remember her vividly and her gifted children, too, Linnea and Eric, who were major forces in the early Off-Loop Theater scene of the 1970's. Now with independent careers of their own in teaching (Linnea) and film (Eric), they were with her when she died Monday at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

I'm grateful to theater critic and Columbia College teacher Albert Williams for reminding me of the details of her long career.

Jo was a member in the 1950's of the pioneering Playwrights Theatre Club, forerunner of the Second City improv theatre, and she was an early member of Second City itself where she assisted Viola Spolin, whose pioneering work in theater games was--and is--the foundation of all contemporary improv work. Spolin, mother of Paul Sills, eventually left Chicago for the West Coast, with Forsberg taking over Spolin's Chicago workshops. Forsberg also produced and directed the long-running Children's Theatre at the Second City from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, continuing to teach at Second City and later at the Players Workshop, forerunner of the Second City Training Center. Among Jo's thousands of students over the years, according to Williams' account, were George Wendt, Shelley Long, Harold Ramis, Bonnie Hunt, Robert Townsend and Bill Murray. Forsberg also was the aunt of the late Martin de Maat, who served for many years as artistic director of the Second City Training Center.

Linking the generation of the founders to those who followed, Forsberg invited Compass Players co-founder David Shepherd back to Chicago in the early 1980s and teamed him up with her student, improv producer Charna Halpern, paving the way for ImprovOlympic (today known as iO Chicago) which Halpern created with great improv guru and theorist Del Close. Also in the 1980s and '90s, she owned and operated an off-Loop venue, the Theatre Shoppe on Lincoln Avenue, which produced dozens of plays and nurtured the careers of many actors, including Steve Carell and Tim Kazurinsky.

We tend to think of improvisational theater as being comedic and satiric, in the mold of The Second City or The Committee (San Francisco) or the Upright Citizens Brigade (New York, but it started here). However, the greatest improv teachers and directors, and Jo Forsberg was among them, understand that improvisation is a key to the imagination which may be applied by any actor to any given role or situation. Once dismissed as having little value, improvisation now is part of the core curriculum of any comprehensive course of acting or directing studies. Master teacher Jo Forsberg is among those who should be thanked and remembered.

WBEZ | improvisation

On the spot: musical improvisation

Improv pioneer Josephine Forsberg dies at 90