When I first started improvising, I was very unfamiliar with the term 'improvisation'. Most of the time, I referred to it as 'playing together'.
Speaking of the first time I picked up a microphone and played together with others, I still remember the stiffness of the thirty seconds before I made my first sound. The microphone, a sound amplifier, had to amplify something valuable to me at that time. But before the sound was emitted, before it was placed in the entire environment and time, how could its value be determined?
So, the first sound that came out of my microphone was the result of 'desperate situation' and 'seeking help', an opportunity created by the environment and technology, and it also involved choosing actions. In the following period of time, there were more choices than decisions, which could be described as a period of speculation, shortsightedness, extravagance, and chaos. Even calling it 'trial and error' is not accurate because I didn't know what was considered an error. But even so, some so-called rules of survival gradually emerged in the chaos.
The feedback from my partners who played together with me was the only information that provided language content and value judgment that I could receive after improvising. At that time, if I wanted to continue playing, I had to respect this feedback.
One memorable piece of feedback was when a friend couldn't bear it anymore and said it to me with great emphasis. You can imagine how noisy I was during improvisation. But who decided whether the space for improvisation should be seen as a football field or a market? This raises the question of how I should view the so-called 'playing together', whether it is a competition or something else.
If it is a competition, there is the concept of 'the best', but where is it, what are the specific criteria, and who judges it, are all questions, but there are also clues to follow.
If it is not, then the problem becomes bigger. It will always be in a state of natural evolution, as Lem said, 'only caring about the fleeting situation'. Universality seems to be the only reference, and characteristics like a rooster's comb are secondary and almost irrelevant.
'Nature doesn't know what it's doing, it just realizes what is possible.' - Lem, Summa Technologiae.
In the book "Leopard Track" by Wu Hong, it mentions the painting of Wei Deng taking off the holy body, where the blood on Christ's right hand and feet shows different states of time, thus introducing the concept of 'small time', which means that the same place in the painting presents multiple time dimensions, each with its own micro-narrative. If a painting can present frozen time in this way, can sound, which is parallel to time, freeze multiple/all possibilities in the same moment? Is this a manifestation of pursuing some kind of universality?
Going back to what I said earlier, during the initial period of improvisation, I didn't know what I was doing, I just realized what was possible. Gradually, I realized that I didn't have a standard to judge whether I was making progress. From collecting all the materials - the sounds I could produce, to doubting myself - why should I make such sounds, I returned to the dilemma of those thirty seconds - value?
When you don't know what to do and don't care, all actions/choices are homogeneous. Genes are the deepest imprisonment of freedom. The desire for autonomy made me eager to find something immediately, to end the situation of not creating anything different.
So I started to delve into the culture and musical context behind improvisation to find answers. Until now, I still don't know if I have found the right place. Improvisation, as a verb, has no style or boundaries. But many musicians operate within a certain framework to do this. Free jazz is the most widely encountered improvisational framework I have come across, and it is also the most 'competitive' in terms of consciousness. In recent years, I have almost abandoned the idea of 'as long as it exists, everything will be fine', and I see improvisation as watching old men playing chess in the park. When I participate, I constantly remind myself to observe, think, analyze, anticipate, not forget the overall situation, and so on, except for reviewing. Compared to before, my performance is very humble, respecting the rules, matching virtues, advocating empiricism, all driven by the interest in finding answers, not inherent nature.
Finally, writing up to this point, looking at it this way, although I am not very diligent and hardworking, I still treat this matter seriously. It also reminds me that the answers I am looking for may not be here at all.