The ultimate goal for me, and I know for many other musicians is to get as close as they can to the sounds they hear in their head when playing. The tone colour, inflections, speed, pitch etc. Now by practising our instruments and exploring all of the possibilities we can build up a memory bank of experiences to draw on when a certain sound is sought (I mean in a real time playing situation). By playing certain lines or notes because someone said you should, not because you actually like them, is a pretty dead give-away and won’t communicate with the listener well.

This all becomes really interesting in an ensemble context. Take for example a musician of any instrument playing a ‘solo’ with say a trio. Actually lets make this more specific. Lets take the pianist in a piano trio (piano, bass, drums). He/she is playing a solo and the rhythm section is accompanying. The pianist will be expressing certain things when they play, but if you took away the bass and drums and left the pianist playing on their own, you can guarantee that what they play is completely different. The reasons I see for this are context and interaction.

Context:

What I mean here is that the pianist will choose something to play that they hear in their head, while also hearing a bass and drums. The bass and drums give the pianist a landscape to accentuate, destroy, compliment, navigate, ignore, imitate and so on. An element of what the soloist hears in their head is a reaction to what is already happening, even if all that reaction becomes is awareness. The same happens in reverse, the pianist gives the rhythm section context and within the section, the bass player and drummer give each other context.

Interaction:

So keeping in mind that the musicians have supplied each other with a landscape (remembering that they may choose silence, this is also a valid landscape), We have to be aware that the bass player and drummer are also both human (presumably, I hear pterodactyls frequent the bass register) and not a ‘play-along’ record of some kind of band in the box arrangement.

They are both going to be listening to the soloist to allow the soloist the freedom to dictate the path. They have the ability to ‘jump on’ the pianists ideas, that is, start playing along, imitating rhythms, harmony and dynamics or lay back and let the pianist explore the contrast between what it is they are creating, and the canvas being supplied.

We mustn’t forget the interaction between the bass player and drummer. They have their own thing going on there too in terms of rhythmic and dynamic possibilities.

So take into account that the Pianist is reacting to the rhythm section, and rhythm section is reacting to the pianist. The bass player with the drummer, the drummer with the bass player, the pianist with the drummer, The drummer with the pianist, the pianist with the bass player and the bass player with the pianist.

Any one thing that any one of these musicians does will change the chain of events occurring in the performance. Thinking about it like this conjures images of time travel. Going back a few million years, squashing a bug by accident, only to return to the present to find the human race walking around on eight legs.

Nuff said.

Photo of Bill Evans courtesy of Exquisitur