Afterbirth of the Cool

There hasn't been a single night in the past week where I haven't spent at least an hour listening to jazz on the radio. I guess I go through jazz phases from time to time, actually. It makes me feel sophisticated, and maybe a little less white. Also, I think it just reminds me that folk and rock aren't the only things out there, even if they're the only genres I do anything with. Nothing beats listening to some good Thelonious or Miles to get an idea of how different people handle improvisation.

This all fed into what was probably a twenty minute harp solo last night. Having made a fair amount of cash already, or enough to make me feel like I didn't need to attract an audience by playing anything recognizable, I decided to just mess around with a chord progression and noodle on the harp.

Now, I definitely have set harp rhythms in my brain. I resort to these usually at the beginning of a solo, and then slowly but surely manipulate them until it becomes something more legitimately improvised. Last night, I challenged myself to use none of these. To make use of rhythms that I normally don't even think of when I'm in the heat of a song.

I definitely fell back to a few habitual patterns, but on the whole it was a really enlightening exercise, and I definitely broadened my performance vocabulary. Not that it was earth-shattering or anything. That's only going to happen when I hook up a kazoo to my harmonica yolk.