Impromptu? The Goldilocks Problem
“Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.”
— Oscar Wilde
“You got to have balls and that’s what it takes for Rock and Roll.”
— George Clinton
Are Improvisations Truly Impromptu?
This is a question people often wonder, pushing back against improv’s claim of being composed in the moment of presentation. Then there are those who object that this or that improv is too improvised, too formless, lacking art. Such objections put me in mind of old Miss Goldilocks’s quest of the just right porridge, chair, and bed.
Isn’t all writing and creativity a spontaneous act to some degree? Isn’t all writing and creativity a premeditated act to some degree? Yet some artists present their work as impromptu, and some as carefully crafted. What if we took them at their word, but rhetorically, not what they say but what they mean?
What do those opposing gestures—spontaneity vs. premeditation—convey? The simple answer: the claim of spontaneous composition disrupts the norms of civilization which calls for our following models of form, of logic, and of rationality. Improv says, if I can do this without thinking—or seem to—why bother with all that falderol? Rule-bound art—some of it works of great mastery—tend to support the status quo. When we leave rules behind, perhaps we’ll discover not just more of the same, but something new. Improv is the art of innovation.
How much premeditation is required to compose the twenty-seven “pleases” in James Brown’s breakout song, “Please, Please, Please”?
Sting woke up in the middle of the night with the line “Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you” in his head. He went to his piano and in 30 minutes wrote the song, an anthem not only to obsession, but to presence.
Paul McCartney awoke one night, went from his bed to a nearby piano, and played one of the most covered songs in music history, “Yesterday.” Paul’s mother came to him in a dream and told him, “Let it Be.”
Keith Richards didn’t compose “Satisfaction” in the moment of its first performance—Goldilocks’s strict working definition—but he did dream its opening hook. In his memoir Life, Richards tells us that, if he had no bed companion, he would sleep with his guitar and a cassette tape recorder. One morning he woke to find the cassette was at its end.
Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need.
Would that pass Goldilocks’s smell test? If not, it’s time to feed her to the Papa Bear. Improvisation is about tapping the embodied emotions Reason cannot access. What better source than dreams. Can Miss Goldilocks not be satisfied?
Mick and Keith couldn’t. “Satisfaction” captures the essence of rock and roll: disruption.
When I’m driving in my car
When a man come on the radio
He’s telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination…
If I may be allowed an embodied analogy, improvisers extoll the climactic moment of creation and down-play the necessary, preparatory stroking. They labor to make their song seem orgasmic, to represent what a climax feels like, but labor even more not to get back to where it once belonged—the meticulous preparations that lie hidden behind spontaneity.
For some, like the writer and musician Elijah Wald (1959-), the Beatles destroyed rock and roll when they left behind the hard driving, rhythm-and-blues-inflected three-chord simplicity of the early singles and albums for the symphonic complexity of “Eleanor Rigby” and Sgt Pepper. Perhaps Peter Jackson’s recent four-part Disney+ documentary Get Back (2021), which gives us front row seats to the mere noodling from which the masterpieces of Let it Be emerged, will let the Mersey Boys off the hook. Let it Be was their parting mea culpa, an effort to return to, to get back to, as Jackson’s title underscores, their Rhythm and Blues roots.
Of course, there was art even in the Beatles early artlessness. In Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, Rob Sheffield’s effort to explain their continuing power, we learn,
They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation. (Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One)
The Divine Godfathers of Soul and of the Beat Novel
Photo: David Corio
In bandleader Paul Shaffer’s words, James Brown is “the most ferocious barbarian of all.” Yet, the “Godfather of Soul” demonstrates how intertwined these two effects—spontaneous and crafted—can be. In a New Yorker profile, Philip Gourevitch describes how his performances were at once literally spontaneous and “orchestrated according to the most rigorous discipline”:
Although no two nights are the same, and much of what you see and hear when he’s onstage is truly spontaneous, the dazzle of these unpredictable moments is grounded in his ensemble’s dazzling tightness. He proceeds without song lists, conducting fiercely drilled sidemen and sidewomen through each split-second transition with an elaborate vocabulary of hand signals. “It’s like a quarterback—I call the songs as we go,” he says.
“Even in his earliest, wildest days,” Gourevitch continues,
his outrageousness was carefully calculated to convey that, while he cannot be contained, he is always in control. In contrast to the effortlessness that so many performers strive for in their quest to exhibit mastery, James Brown makes the display of effort one of the most striking features of his art…. He is the image of abandon, yet his precision remains absolute, his equilibrium is never shaken, there is no abandon.
Photo: Robert Frank
When Robert Giroux insisted that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, written as a 130-foot scroll without punctuation or paragraphs, needed revisions, Kerouac pushed back: “This manuscript has been dictated by the Holy Ghost.” Kerouac doesn’t mention which member of the Trinity helped him edit for six years to get it to press. And yet, however much he edited, with its sustained aura of spontaneity On the Road helped inspire the disruptions of the 1960s. A few years later, James Brown helped to inspire the Black Pride movement, claiming that his improvised performances were sacrosanct: “when it comes from me, it’s the real thing. It’s God.”
If “the highest art is to hide one’s art” worked for Horace, why not for Rock and Roll?
Even so great a practitioner as Bob Dylan gets befuddled by the Goldilocks question. In a New York Times Magazine interview, asked “what role does improvisation play in your music?” he answers,
None at all. There’s no way you can change the nature of a song once you’ve invented it. You can set different guitar or piano patterns upon the structural lines and go from there, but that’s not improvisation. Improvisation leaves you open to good or bad performances and the idea is to stay consistent. You basically play the same thing time after time in the most perfect way you can.
This perfectionism doesn’t harmonize well with his serial bands’ common report that touring with Dylan was always a challenge because he never used the same tempo in playing his classics. Howard Fishman writes in The New Yorker:
Dylan confounded his band with spontaneous new arrangements and musical flights of fancy. Any song might begin with lurching imbalance, like a plane taking off in high wind. Turbulence was common; Dylan would strike a guitar chord that had no place in the song being performed. I would see terror flash in the band’s eyes, their mouths slightly agape as they tried to guess where the music was headed next. Often, it seemed as though Dylan himself didn’t know, and he seemed to draw energy from this. He was playing without a net, and they were expected to follow. (Howard Fishman, “Never Ending Bob Dylan,” The New Yorker, Nov 3, 2017).
When the interviewer Doug Brinkley next asks about the autobiographical nature of his new album’s opening song, Dylan answers, “‘I Contain Multitudes’ is more like trance writing. Well, it’s not more like trance writing, it is trance writing.”
Trance writing? Playing without a net? Improvisation? Clearly some definition is in order.
Allen Ginsburg anticipate Fishman’s metaphor of Dylan taking off in a high wind. In Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, Allen Ginsberg sums Dylan up: “in the 1960s a wind was blowing through Bob Dylan.” What improvisation, trance, and Ginsberg’s “wind” have in common is an inspiration—a breathing in of the divine afflatus—that frees the artist from matters of craft and decorum. Having done their 10,000 hours of homework, craft comes to the improviser as a matter not of intellection but of instinct. Now beyond the reach of art, the improviser is free to invent and to innovate. But the claim that it is not art is just rhetorical. The claim says, this is just for fun. But the claim is persuasive at bottom, a way to authenticate the artist’s voice while throwing artifice under the bus.
When in 1965 British folk purists booed Dylan for plugging in, it was because for them he had forsaken folk’s immediacy—its freedom from artifice—that his rough voice always promised. When his new rock audiences applauded his new sound, it was because the screaming guitars promised a different immediacy. It’s always a matter of too much or too little, or what rules of decorum the artist follows or pointedly doesn’t follow.
Photo: Ebru Yildiz
But, preoccupied with matters of definition or splitting those hairs—too much? too little? Just right?—we are blinded to what’s going on inside us, our embodied emotional and intellectual response to someone seeming to improvise without a net. Will they fall? This is the embodied response that the pianist and critical student of improvisation Vijay Iyer calls attention to. The intensity of our anxiety, or of our pleasure or laughter, depends on the stakes on the table. Just by virtue of improvising, the performer raises the stakes. Our heart rate increases. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, floods our bloodstream, increasing sugars (glucose), enhancing the brain’s use of glucose and the availability of substances that repair tissues. Cortisol curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation.
Throwing Goldilocks Under the Bus
What is at stake in the Goldilocks’s challenge to improvisation is no less than the nature of truth. Science—and the art of mastery—posits that Truth is out there, an objective fact, just waiting for the proper experiment or apparatus—or rules—to uncover it. Improvisation seeks to find truths (plural, no cap) by means of subjective engagement. The claim of spontaneity throws you into an indeterminate world where some form of subjectivity—intuition, emotion, instinct, cortisol levels—will have a role in the quest for meaning. Uninterested in meaning, the Goldilocks Challenge is willing to settle for mere facticity, mere facts, Steven Colbert’s “truthiness,” when what we deeply long for is meaning.
Goldilocks seeks determinacy regarding a trope—this is improvised—whose point is indeterminacy. It wants to know facts when what improv is offering is process, truths that emerge through embodied engagement.
Which shall we pay attention to, splitting hairs or watching the emergence of a new paradigm that offers new meaning for life?
