Today, we were interviewed ‘live’ at Mediacorp’s Symphony 92 Classical Music Radio Station. One of the aims of this is to spread the joy and love of music improvisation to mainly classical music listeners.

The objective is to encourage our ears to try something different from an established written score. Once in a while, it’s good to see what possibilties lie ahead of us in music making. This will help us to boost our self-discovery of what we can do, what new sounds we can make and in turn, develop our own compositions, musical voice and direction.

I wrote a quick reharmonisation of Bach’s ‘Minuet in G’ and basing only on certain chord progressions and my band and I proceeded to improvise this (we had no prior rehearsals of this song, we just went for it on the fly, haha!).

What I did was to give them a general direction (medium Jazz Waltz), a count-off and exaggerated head movements to ‘lead’ and conduct them as we move along the song (Think I might need to see the chiro after this).

You can view our impromptu performance here :

Believe me, music improvisation can be learnt. By the way, did you know that Bach also did improvisation using figured bass? So did Mozart and Beethoven. It was just that they couldn’t record these down in audio form (they had no recording devices then! Everything had to be written down in score!). In fact, some of their compositions were a result of variations in improvisation, not just always a direct result of deliberate thought.

It was also a chance for me to publicise our MIC (Music Improvisation Collective) community initiative of getting people to come and jam with us ‘live’, in a safe and nurturing environment.

So if you want to listen to spontaneous, live music that is creative, or you want to play and jam, come and join me and my band, monthly at Blujaz Cafe (3rd level) or visit www.mic.sg for more info.

By the way, MIC is Northwood’s sister initiative.

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