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On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote: > I've read that Miles envisioned percussion loops freeing up the whole > ensemble in much the same way > that playing modally freed the melodic soloists from the tyranny of >static > chord progressions I find this post highly interesting because it hints at an important "change of rules" that has been brought in thanks to live looping technology. Back in the days chord progression were looked at as "tyrannic" restrictions in improvised music. With the modern looping gear this has not to be, since loops can be instantly changed to evolve and also "pitched" on-the-fly into any chord progression. In essence the "background" chord structure can be instantly improvised as well as melody lines. In my praxis I prefer to call this Multi Lateral Improvisation. And I predict a revival for chord analysis based improvisation! Another way of working around that traditional obstacle was causing Ornette Coleman to speak about "playing the music rather than the background". That view is also obsolete now in the days of modern live looping gear that makes it possible for musicians to improvise a background to a written lead line, letting everything float dialectically or even to play solely backgrounds in an improvised manner (thus making the listener "create" the lead lines in his/her imagination, a "psychedelic" technique I like using very much). BTW - that expression "modal improvisation", isn't it actually describing a musical restriction? I've never fully bought into it because fact is you can as well vary your modal expression even while moving through a harmonic landscape! So there's no need anymore to "dumb down" the music by taking away chords just in order to make room for more modal expression. A bit of both takes makes music more interesting IMHO. -- Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) www.stockholm-athens.com