How "Free Exploration" Can Inspire New Compositional Creations

The concept of free exploration as a means of playing the guitar is something that I discovered when I was quite young, but for many years I didn’t understand how it could fit into my musical life as a guitarist. There are so many specific things to address: what to practice, songs to learn, things you need to be able to deliver when you are hired to play, the things the teacher wants you to do, composing new music, and then… free playing. Is free playing just a means of getting something off your chest, or is it really an important part of your musical personality, or your musical pursuits?

In recent years, I’ve started playing with musicians who shined a light on this concept, like Nels Cline, John Zorn, Marc Ribot — all people who have found their own distinct style when they improvise. I grew up thinking that improvising in a “free” fashion, à la Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor, meant that you abandoned everything, and did not realize that, like all playing, you actually can develop a vocabulary that grows from a “free” concept. You can hone in on your toolbox and develop gestures and sounds that represent what is unique about you.

FIGURE 1 illustrates a “free” musical segment that my fingers discovered by moving around the fretboard. I then will think about what I played, evaluate it in some way and think about what I’d like to do next as a follow up. Improvisation is sometimes described as composition that happens in real time, so the next thing I’d play would be something that grows from that final E chord in FIGURE 1, as I do in FIGURE 2. What becomes clear to me is that I have arrived in the key of E, so that acknowledgement of a tonal center will help to direct the music that will come next.

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