Playing Apart Together

Improvising freely in lockdown days

Free musical improvisation has many guises. It is also one of the areas in the performing arts where the sanitary measures that were and are being imposed to prevent the ongoing spread of coronavirus mutations severely hindered the working artists’ practices, often just short of bringing them to a grinding halt.

Work of musicians in one of these guises, one that is close to my heart and personal practice — the non-academic, speculative (that is how I prefer to call what usually is referred to as ‘experimental’) and ‘underground’ realms of free electro-acoustic improvisation — often depends on a largely informal and ‘unofficial’, yet vast, global network of performance hubs and residency locations. It is a network that facilitates and enables a peripatetic musical practice, a continuous moving from country to country and from city to city, while making just enough money to cover costs and buy a book here or there — along a chain of small, dedicated, venues, as well as participating in specialised festivals and events. Along the way these speculative peripateticists are lodged by locals, friends and artists, that will join them in performance, composition and recording. Being part of this action is very much like being a bee in a busy-busy, joyfully humming and hyper-creative hive. It makes one far from rich in the…