Rock band that could really improvise

Agreed; it's the music equivalent of "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares."

I generally agree, but I think the connotation of jamming is that it is generally done by players of lesser ability and that isn't necessarily the case. I think a better differentiation is a hazy, nebulous definition that involves a prolonged exploration of a relatively simple harmonic structure.

 

True, yet to be honest, I don't think of players have fewer technical skills as necessarily being inferior. In fact, I would say there are definitely musicians with fewer technical skills who make better (to my ears anyway) music than musicians with a lot of technical skill.

 

Of course, my definition completely breaks down if one considers, for example, Coltrane's prolonged, single chord, modal improvisations on tracks such as India and My Favorite Things. I think this is where the pejorative nature of the term "jam" comes into play. Even though I note that jams are not necessarily performed by lesser musicians, I just would never label anything by Coltrane as "jamming." I just can't do it.

 

That is precisely why I have never had any pejorative connotation with jamming. Coltrane's Classic Quartet with Eric Dolphy play some of My Favourite... Jams ever, even though he would later move on to perform all-out improvs with Alice, Pharoah, Rashid and Co. (which I also dig).

 

Perfect example......dream theater or the Beatles?

 

The latter but only with Pete Best.

 

Actually Pink Floyd weren't all that improvisational.

 

This!

 

Not even during '68-'72?

 

I could be wrong, but I always got the sense that even the chaotic acid shows were very well planned. I'd be interested in other opinions on this.

 

They were not all THAT improvisational, but they improvised almost on a nightly basis until the end of the 70s.

Just check out lengthy psychedelic excursions in "Interstellar Overdrive" (60s), expanded or reworked renderings of their structured compositions like "Atom Heart Mother" (e.g. Rotterdam '71) or "Embryo" (e.g. Cincinnati '71), improvised interludes like "Travel Sequence" (1972 tour), and finally regular jams out of the material from "Animals" and "Wish You Were Here" (e.g. 2nd part of "Crazy Diamond" on 1977 tour). Enough variety to enjoy the recordings of their different shows and tours.

 

A band that improvises can mean anything -- it can mean a soloist who improvises over a set pattern, and in these kind of folk forms, which rock really is, even the set patterns aren't always "set" patterns in their entirety, there's individual improvisation with the addition of passing notes or changes of emphasis or what have you that slightly alter the set framework adding expressive elements without fundamentally altering the form. On top of that, any or all of those improvisations could be fully off-the-cuff, or based on a palette of gestures or ideas, the limits of which might be decided on, formally or informally, in advance -- so it's kind of partial improvisation. In rock, it seems to me, these kinds of practices are widespread and common.

Or a band that improvises could mean a group that hits the stage with zero fixed material -- no compositions, no harmonic framework, no preset melodies, rhythms or keys -- or extremely limited fixed material and just starts playing, like in jazz the Sam Rivers or Derek Bailey etc made a practice of with groups. Depending on the ideas the players bring to this that can mean a music where there is distinction between foreground and background, lead voice and supporting voice; or it can result in pretty conventional structures in which the players fall into more or less conventional rhythm/support and lead roles. In rock I think this approach of truly free improvisation is exceedingly rare, even as single novelty performances never mind as a guiding performance principle for a whole project or performance. Even in "new thing" jazz, or jazz generally, that kind of free, group improv approach is pretty rare -- even in the music of, I dunno, Albert Ayler or late period John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, the music is still pretty much head-solos-head, lead voice with rhythm and support, and, often a fixed tempo, tone center, and even harmony or melody or mode or some other sort of set shared materials, in some ways it's closer to baroque music where the continuo rhythm and harmony support is improvised within a narrow functional purpose on a semi-notated basis, and then a lead line with space for an improvised cadenza than it is like completely free collective improvisation.

Jamming, it seems to me, is a colloquial catch-all that can mean a lot of things -- it can mean informally getting together to play songs; it can mean playing really well or really hot ("those guys were jamming"); it can mean extending a performance by vamping using some improvisation in a fix structure (it's just a 16-bar blues jam in A). When we talk today about "jam bands" as a kind of style or school -- talking about Phish or whomever -- whatever stylistic or individual differences exist between the nature of the performance style of those bands and of the Grateful Dead or even of the Allman Brothers (who were really more like a group that jammed -- in terms of extending vamps that were largely fixed, vs. freer form group improv the way the Dead might have done with performances of "Dark Star"), the method and use of improvisation as an performance element is largely similar.

But really, in practice, whether it's jazz or rock, there are so many degrees along the spectrum between fully notated in every particular and performed exactly as written on the page through slight expressive variation to jazzing the melodies with one or more narrowly improvising lead line players to improvised solos with expressively altered rhythm to completely improvised performances with no fixed material and no prior discussion even about tempos, tone centers, harmony or anything, that while it may be of musicological interest to parse and define the levels and degrees, I dunno how useful it is, especially when it come to trying to define some kind of line between improvising and jamming.

 

When I saw this question, I was thinking no way could someone say Led Zeppelin.

To me, they were okay at it (not bad but certainly not often all that great at it either). Their insistence on spending so much time at it makes chunks of their live recordings one of the more perplexing aspects of their career.

My answer would be King Crimson during the Wetton/Bruford era.

 

The thing that really sticks out from the massive Floyd box, Early Years, is much of the improvisational heavy lifting was Rick Wright's, once they became an FM friendly song oriented band(Dark Side onward), his role really diminished. The band's improvisational style was not based on chops, but more chance taking ala the avant garde of the time (AMM, Fluxus, etc.,)

 

I think there's a line between what was working in the arena and what sounds good on tape.

For instance, on tape I enjoy the spacier/more introspective parts of Grateful Dead concerts vs. the 'rock jam' they often closed shows with (Not Fade Away, Sugar Magnolia, Around and Around etc.)

But reading reviews and accounts of people who attended, the majority of the audience really got up for the extended rock numbers and were bored during the space jams.

I know in the latter period Drums/Space segments were considered prime opportunities for some to hit the bathrooms (not me though,) even though that's when they did some of their most daring improv.

 

I dunno. I think it's just what you prefer. I think the highlight of most great Dead performances on tape are usually the extended improvisational performances on stuff like "Dark Star" or "Playing in the Band" or "St. Stephen/The Eleven"..... but the "jams" -- to use the language we've been kicking around on this thread -- on some of the R&B stuff: the Turn on Your Lovelights and the Dancing in the Streets and such, to me, are pretty much always the low lights of any Dead show, in person -- though I only saw the band once) or on tape (especially when Pigpen was in the band -- a truly atrocious singer to my ears. The Pigpen songs are the time to cue upon the bathroom line as far as I'm concerned, but there are others who truly believe Pigpen was the heart and soul of the band. But some of the rock "jams" -- the Sugar Magnolias/Sunshine Daydreams, for example, always work for me. Still, while I love the Dead when they stretched out, "Drums/Space" always to me seemed pretty musically empty, more of a theatrical element of the show, than something worth listening to. FWIW, I also though Mickey Hart's drum albums weren't very interesting either and always thought the Dead was a much better, and certainly more musically nimble, band when it was just Kreutzmann on drums.

With the Dead so much of each individual's perception of what's best about 'em seems mostly to do with the preferences each of us bring to 'em. You know people came out and danced to the Dead, so sure, they liked the uptempo numbers; but people also came out and dropped acid and listened to the dead, and people also liked "Dark Star." I just don't know too many people who ever thought Drums was great music.

 

I think it is an issue with the perceived "dirtiness" of the word jamming, which a few posters have brought up above.

For many rockmen and jazzmen with artistic ambitions (and/or proper music education) the improvisation was a means of opposing the (oppressive) hegemony of the composition (and the Composer) established in (and emanating from) the academic world. There is a common thread that links Frank Zappa's "hateful practices" (quoted earlier here), Chris Cutler's "non-academic way of music creation" (here) and Irmin Schmidt's "New Music's dogmatic thinking" (here). They tried to align themselves with the composers "who, in one way or another, broke with the practises of their time" (Varèse, Cage, etc).

However, you probably cannot challenge such an institutionalized hegemony with... jamming. You have to improvise, to become an Improviser to counterbalance the cultural symbolic weight of the Composer. Perhaps that was why a renown jazz pianist like Keith Jarrett (no introduction required) or a renown rock pianist like Sergey Kuryokhin (of the Russian cult rock band Aquarium's fame) referred to the lost tradition of improvisation in baroque and romantic music (and not to any "low-brow" jamming they built their careers on), when giving their recitals transposing (jamming over? ) the historical material sourced from the high-art sphere.

What do you think?

 

Certainly "jamming" sometimes carries the connotation of something amateur or at least informal, and "improvising" carries, maybe, some more high-falutin' cache. Maybe some people are or have used the different phrases that way. Or sniffingly dismissed some kind of playing as just jamming, or some performances as just jams.

But for the most part I think with these kinds of music -- jazz, rock and most popular music -- we're talking about something that's more like folk music and folk forms that have to an electronic age and age of recorded music (vs an oral or performed tradition); and almost no practitioners are things at all about something like "the oppressive hegemony of the composition." And if they were coming out of rock or jazz or these other kinds of American folk forms, they weren't coming from a presumptive environment of the primacy of the composition or composer in an academic environment. I think such stuff never entered the mind of 98% or more of rock improvisers or even jazz improvisers. For the handful of others who thought about those issues, the answers about what they were thinking is probably peculiar to each individual. There were always some folks who thought of improvisation as spontaneous composition, or for that matter, composers who started a work with some kind of ad lib, an certainly there are plenty of examples in the jazz and rock and R&B realms of more compositional ideas growing from jams and improvisations.

I honestly thing all these different practices and uses of improvisation and jamming in Western music, never mind non-Western music (where obviously you have other kinds of traditions, like raga, build explicitly around improvisation and rules for improvisation) -- even going back to the baroque where maybe you had an organist improvising a fugue, or a rhythm section filling out a basso continuo part (improvising with tight rules), or folk musicians at the coffee house or bar or party playing for dancers and extending a know rhythm or melodic shard as long as the dancers needs, basically, jamming -- pre-date all this language and though about the roles of the composer and the freedom of improvisation or whatever. The practices have just always been a part of music making for as far as we can look back into history, different people and generations just come along and find different ways to talk about them or frame them or use them in the specific context they find themselves operating in. But really, it's still just musicians doing what they've always done in terms of using a mix of improvised and fixed material.

 

The Velvet Underground
Tangerine Dream

 

Here's a monkey wrench to throw into the discussion:

"noodling"

 

One other thing about The Dead is the acceptance of solo material of the members. I cannot think of another band that had members do solo projects only to come back into the band and use some of that material as live. One of many examples is Mickey Hart/Playing In The Band.

 

I think Phil Lesh changes any comparison between The Allman Brothers and The Grateful Dead. Everything they played is never played the same way. Jerry, Phil and even Bobby & Keith were seemingly constitutionally incapable of playing anything or any song the same twice.

Great posts above.

Certainly theme-solo-theme was still a part of even the most "out" music being made by Ayler or most or even all of the others in the late 60's. However Ayler made a great recording of collective improvisation - New York Eye & Ear Control in 1964. Any thematic material is buried to my ears. Steve Lacy made a recording called "The Forest and the Zoo" that was recorded in 1966. Again the two side long tracks are credited as composed by Lacy but it is really a true free jazz record.

Peter Brotzmann's "For Adolphe Sax" was released in 1967 and is to my ears, a fully improvised power sax-bass-drums power trio.

During this period with the aforementioned Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Evan Parker & others at the Little Theatre Club were using minute thematic materials which within a couple of years were dropped in almost all cases and they worked in groups and sub-groups with themselves and musicians from the continent in developing what is often referred to as "non-idiomatic improvisation". Keith Rowe, Cornelius Cardew & Eddie Prevost also formed AMM in this time-frame and this music is more abstract and seemingly even less connected (seemingly impossible!!) to any melodic or harmonic theory based music than even Derek Bailey's small groups or John Stevens seminal late 60's/early 70's Spontaneous Music Ensemble (Bailey was a key factor in early versions of this collective). This band spawned the descriptor of "insect music" as it is based on small gestures and minute detail and focus.

Then you have Topography of the Lungs with Parker, Bailey & Han Bennink. Power meets abstraction/skronk.

The genesis of my favorite improvised music all comes from these places. Why until today, the best Grateful Dead improvised music is when they get to places without those thematic jams (Mind Body, Tighten Up (aka Soulful Strut) or Feeling Groovy), as great as those jams were/are.

Also why I love that this is being discussed here. Gonna play some Barry Guy small formations improv later this week. I urge all to pick up Mad Dogs, Mad Dogs on the Loose and Tensegrity.

3 box sets from the past 6-7 years which are probably the best examples of what this sort of music has to offer in the present day.

 

Phil has always been a true original.

Grateful Dead Sources: Spring 1971: Phil Lesh Interview

 

Their jamming angers me too along with the deadheads spinning in a perpetual circle watching their hands move to the music.

 

Think it was more of a free form jazz exploration.