Bruce Wands Comments Class 1

Bruce Wands Comments Class 1

I found our first class to be interesting and engaging. Lewis’s review of the history of improvisation opened some doors I had not thought of before. One of them was that I had assumed that the improvisation in Indian music was thousands of years old, rather than starting in the 1700s. I was also one of those that held the belief that the early 1900s New Orleans jazz was the golden age of improvisation. Lewis’s contention that the improvisation was controlled during that period changed my attitude. His emphasis on improvisation as a “continuum” makes much better sense to me. While “third stream” was mentioned in my Jazz Literature course this spring, I gained a deeper understating of the relationship between classical music and jazz. I was trained as a classical trombone player and moved to electric bass, rock, blues and jazz. My own music has two sides, a blues/jazz New Orleans approach and an electronic music/classical approach. The discussion regarding “third stream” helped me to see my music in a new way. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of graphic notation. While I was aware of it and had seen it before, it had slipped away from my awareness. One of my current areas of research is writing music based on imagery and video. This insight adds an additional dimension to that area of my art and music.