To Copy and Improv

This morning my daughter asked me to play with her, which of course I love. What she wanted to do though seemed completely boring and uncreative to me, but due to my traveling and in general being too busy, I was willing to do whatever she wanted. She wanted to use translucent tracing paper to trace and then color images from books at my in-laws house. I found a book of Van Gogh paintings and sketched one and then colored it with colored pencils while still having the sketching paper on the image. The process of doing this surprised me completely.  Instead of being rote art forgery, it gave me a certain insight into Van Gogh’s choices which I didn’t have before. I had never realized how similar the colors on the single painting were for example.  Greens, nearly identical, were used for sky, farmhouses and grass. At the same time he interweaved yellows, reds and browns in such a subtle way that it was hard to reproduce. It was the brushstrokes and the shading, and of course that famous bold outline of the features that distinguished things even further. I could have figured this out by studying the painting, but I wouldn’t have understood it in the same visceral way.

Around 2008 I stopped trying to play classical music or even standards from the score as I had done since the age of 5 and throughout music conservatory and beyond.  I did this because it seemed completely uncreative to me. Also both Ornette Coleman and Daniel Carter encouraged me to throw away the music, in their own way. Daniel did say something though which now comes back to me, which was that all of my conservatory training was the fuel for my ideas. We also had an editing session that lasted all night on a recording we did for 577 Records called “The Gowanus Recordings”. Daniel was so precise about what he wanted that he seemed less the improviser and more the perfectionist. He also said something to the effect that he wished someone would transcribe the music, because there was more going on in it than any of us realized.  This was a powerful statement from one of the greats of free jazz, but one that made me not completely discount those people who had Art Tatum transcriptions that they tried to play in exact detail. Perhaps this study told them something useful about what was behind the sound, just as the Van Gogh sketches did for me.

I am an impatient guy, but I am wondering how much of this applies beyond the arts. There is a book called Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future which is the equivalent of the tracing project or the Art Tatum transcriptions. It lets you in on some important algorithms including Google’s search algorithm and some other artificial Intelligence, which is something that is very useful to me. I found that reading it did everything but sap my creativity. It fueled it, the way Daniel said my conservatory training did for my playing.

All of this may be obvious, as our education is about learning what was done before, but it needs to be balanced very carefully. Foolish playing, painting or inventing in the dark can produce masterpieces. Perhaps like so much in life it is the mélange of technique and chance.