Free improvised music, variously called 'total improvisation, 'open improvisation', 'free music', or perhaps most often simply, 'improvised music', suffers from -- and enjoys -- the confused identity which its resistance to labelling indicates. It is a logical situation: freely improvised music is an activity which encompasses too many different kinds of players, too many different attitudes to music, too many different concepts of what improvisation is, even, for it all to be subsumed under one name. Two regular confusions which blurs its identification are to associate it with experimental music or with avant-garde music. It is true that they are very often lumped together but this is probably done for the benefit of promoters who need to know that the one thing they do have in common is a shared inability to hold the attention of large groups of casual listeners. But although they might share the same corner of the market place they are fundamentally quite different to each other. Improvisors might conduct occasional experiments but very few, I think, consider their work to be experimental. Similarly, the attitudes and precepts associated with the avant-garde have little in common with those held by most improvisors. There are innovations made, as one would expect, through improvisation, but the desire to stay ahead of the field is not common among improvisors. And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making.

The lack of precision over its naming is, if anything, increased when we come to the thing itself. Diversity is it's most consistent characteristic. It has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.

Historically, it pre-dates any other music -- mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation -- and I think that it is a reasonable speculation that at most times since then there will have been some music-making most aptly described as free improvisation. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors. Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone -- beginners, children and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. It can be an activity of enormous complexity and sophistication, or the simplest and most direct expression: a lifetime's study and work or a casual dilettante activity. it can appeal to and serve the musical purposes of all kinds of people and perhaps the type of person offended by the thought that 'anyone can do it' will find some reassurance in learning that Albert Einstein looked upon improvisation as an emotional and intellectual necessity.

The emergence of free improvisation as a cohesive movement in the early sixties and its subsequent continuous practice has excited a profusion of sociological, philosophical, religious and political explanations, but I shall have to leave those to authors with the appropriate appetite and ability. Perhaps I can confine myslef to the obvious assumption that much of the impetus toward free improvisation came from the questioning of musical language. Or more correctly, the questioning of the 'rules' governing musical language. Firstly from the effect this had in jazz, which was the most widely practised improvised music at the time of the rise of free improvisation, and secondly from the results of the much earlier developments in musical language in European straight music, whose conventions had, until this time, exerted a quite remarkable influence over many types of music, including most forms of improvisation to be found in the West.

Two important pieces of reading concerning free improvisation are Leo Smith's book "NOTES: 8 Pieces" and Cornelius Cardew's "Toward an Ethic of Improvisation", which is from his Treatise Handbook (published by Peters Edition). Each of these documents is written by a musician with a great deal of experience of free improvisation and they write of it with insight and pertinence. They are however totally different from each other. Smith speaks of free improvisation almost exclusively as an extension of Jazz and Cardew considers it mainly in terms of European philosphy and indeterminate composition. And both accounts are valid, each reflecting perfectly one of the twin approaches to free improvisation which took place in the sixties. It is necessary to point out that for Leo Smith the predicament of the black man in America, particularly as this applies to the black musician, is of far greater significance than the purely musical matters dealt with here. In a rather similar way Cardew's objections to his situation were later to take a purely political form. But these documents also indicate that for musicians of integrity, in either field, wishing for a direct, unadulterated involvement in music, the way to free improvisation was the obvious escape from the rigidity and formalism of their respective musical backgrounds.

-- COPYRIGHT Derek Bailey excerpted from "Improvisation: its nature and practice in music" (146 pages) available from INCUS Records 14 Downs Road London E5 8DS England.

(Footnote: Alexander Moszkowski reported that in 1919 Einstein told him '...improvisation on the piano was a necessity of life. Every journey that takes him away from the instrument for some time excites a home-sickness for his piano, and when he returns he longingly caresses the keys to ease himself of the burden of the tone experiences that have mounted up in him, giving them utterance in improvisation'. Conversations with Einstein, published 1921)