There’s Still Time To “Get” Experimental Music

The High Zero Foundation is already holding fundraising events for its namesake festival, a Baltimore-based showcase for experimental, free-improvisational music. It takes place in September, at the end of festival season, so it gives fans some time to build familiarity with this extremely outré form of music.

I picked up a new copy of a book: A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation by the journalist John Corbett. I tried to apply its maxims. He tells readers what to listen for in free improvisation, and starts by defining his terms. “When you mention freely improvised music, people often have something specific in mind,” Corbett writes. “I’ve had folks say: ‘Sure, but they improvise on something, right, like chord changes or a melody or something?’ Nope. No scores. No memorized tunes. Making it up as you go along, often in groups, sometimes alone.” Given his frequent use the word “no,” Corbett risks sounding rigid. Is he really free after forbidding himself from relying on memorized tunes?

Luckily, Corbett expands the book’s focus. To avoid debates about what to categorize as free improvisation, Corbett introduces the term “poly-free,” a term coined by jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy. Corbett uses this word to describe music with some combination of spontaneity and premeditation. “With poly-free, Lacy wanted to allow the music to be free not to be free,” Corbett writes. “If you can learn what to listen for in purely improvised music, you’ll have no trouble finding applications of those listening skills in the realm of the poly-free.”

That’s what I tried. Late last month, I saw the band Orcutt Shelley Miller, a supergroup named for the guitarist Bill Orcutt. Orcutt built his solo career by freely improvising on his guitar. However, this new band improvises on pre-written songs, like a jam band. Last year, they released their debut album, recorded live during their first show. The 30-minute album contains six tracks, all instrumentals. The album covers noise rock, psychedelic rock, and poly-free. As a live act, the trio played each track as if retelling a story, and they made me remember Corbett’s advice.

Corbett gives readers a few tactics for active listening. He encouraged readers to make a line graph illustrating the loud-quiet dynamics, a tool for deciding where to look and when. He convinced me to draw a timeline showing each musician’s record of starting and stopping. Looking at all these charts, I saw an account of musicians settling into their nerves. That night, I took seven pages of notes. Still, I failed in some respects. In an attempt to heed Corbett’s advice, I tried taking notes on each musician’s performance gestures, the little idiosyncrasies.

“It’s helpful to build up a repository of information about specific players, what they do, their performance vitae, the bands they have worked with, any details that come to hand,” Corbett writes. “The seasoned listener recognizes them and, moreover, can hear when they have been deployed in an especially wonderful or novel way.”

I’m not a seasoned listener, because I mistook the opening band for the main act, when the members don’t even look alike. What’s more, I didn’t apply every single one of Corbett’s tactics. Corbett recommended falling asleep during a performance, and I refused. “You may think I’m joking, but I’m being dead serious. Some of the most memorable moments for me have come just as consciousness was reclaiming my limp brain, my body jerking awake after having nodded off,” Corbett says, citing personal experience rather than lab research. “Part of this has to do with what goes on at the edge of wakefulness, via beta waves and hypnagogic hallucinations.”

I was standing during Orcutt’s performance, given the limited seating in this packed venue. Still, I remain open to taking a nap during a future performance. High Zero is held in a seated venue late at night. I hope by September, I’ll be able to pick Bill Orcutt out of a crowd.