A Minor Adventure
From Improvisation to Gear Setup to Southwest Journey
Adventure and improvisation seem to travel together. Adventure can be defined by the presence of the unexpected, and improvisation offers the creative potential to respond effectively to it. Or maybe it’s the other way around: improvisation creates the unexpected, a lived experience where chance increases relative to normal. In any case, they share one quality in common: they both require comfort in not knowing what comes next.
This A minor jam represents the first public stream where I integrated equipment to facilitate long form improvisation like this. Chance happened, both favorable and not. At 2:21 in the video you can see where the creative moment transcended me and self-organized into a beautiful call and response. At least that’s where I noticed it while I was playing.
Adventure, by definition, puts you in situations your preparations aren’t totally equipped to handle. Drums off the 1 beat? Interesting syncopation. Signal clipping? Edit out the midstream fixes later. A larger pattern and order emerged organically, as can only happen when working with, rather than trying to control, chaos.
The key of this jam is A minor—the relative of C major, all the white keys on the piano, but starting at the 6th tone. It’s a mysterious key, not as heavy as D minor or bright as E minor. I picture it dusty and hot. A couple of prominent travel songs I know—”Me and My Uncle,” “Jack-a-Roe”—feel right in this key. In fact, you can hear the first chords of “Me and My Uncle” at the end of this.
All of which feels relevant considering I’m embarking on a Southwest adventure today. Driving to Austin, then New Mexico and Colorado to escape the big city and immerse myself in the grand scale characteristic of the American West. I’m finishing a sixth edit of a poetry collection written in the Southwest, brainstorming how to get it out into the world—spoken word over soundscape? Journal submissions? Email messages? I’ll be carrying my music equipment on the journey, creating on the road as I used to, but for the internet now, and adding to my nature recordings I hope will feature soon.
Improvisation is a type of adventure, and looping is improvisation. The adventure started two weeks ago with setting up this gear. I chose tools to facilitate longform improvisational composition: the Sheeran Looper + and a drum machine. The Looper + was an unlikely choice, but I went with it because it allows spontaneous layering of musical loops of different lengths—unusual for loopers and lovely in its capacity for complexity.
The road to integrating drum machine with looper (and eventually tape delay) required one of those side quests so typical of adventures. I’ll spare you the sordid details, but in the end I was lucky enough to find a cardboard box on the floor at a local guitar shop—exposed after swinging a rack of guitars aside—full of dusty items I needed. One of the two of those didn’t work, so the creative engagement that is so typical of creative work, even the technical side, continued from there.
Even with all that preparation, during the stream the loop started on something other than the first beat of the drum pattern, and there were inexplicably two audio signals creating an echo on the vocal track. These unexpected conditions meant the music became managed chaos rather than beautifully controlled composition.
So here I am, stepping out again, working with chaos and the unexpected—anything can happen on the road. Similar to the adventure of setting up gear or engaging with live improvisation—ready or not. I know the colors will be mostly sage green and ochre, and hopefully it’ll be an A minor type trip, mysterious and adventurous, a mix that reveals emergent patterns neither too light nor too heavy. The nature of these opportunities of life is to enjoy—or live with—whatever place we co-create in the call and response of adventure and improvisation.
Listen or download A Minor Adventure at bandcamp.
