Tradition v. Improv

Tradition v. Improv By Reverend R Clark

“There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.”
- Chinese Proverb
Is it is or is it ain't? I reckon I musta got a double dose of relent a few stops back and stepped off the relentless "Traditional Train" at "Jubilation Station" The country is lovely here at the foot of the Improv Mountain chain, and I'm having fun to beat the band. I wish you were here. ;^)

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous.”
- Carl Sagan
I am reminded of a Guinean dancer, Moustapha Bangoura's tears of sadness upon hearing the Guinean mask dance rhythm, Kakilambé played by Americans as taught by Senegalese who got it patently wrong.

“Blass for me, blass for you, blass for everybody in the room.”
- Eddie Izzard

Alternatively, in a class with Tra-Bi Lizie from the Ivory Coast, he wryly rebuked a rather full of himself student by saying, “How sad he doesn't know the rhythm, he has to make it up as he goes along.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
“Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them. And you don't have to keep them either. They keep you.”
- Frank Crane
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams
How unintentionally inspiring for me Tra-Bi's statement above is, to know the rhythm And improvise. "Improvisation" as I understand it is far from being created on the spur of the moment, is rather an accumulation of deviations (mistreaks) from a known rhythm that have the same feel chosen on the fly.
Also, my only Samba (originally an Angolan dance rhythm) teacher, Brazilian Welson Tremura used to get so frustrated with our American "bateria" because we persisted in playing the music "straight" or metronomic. He used a word from the Angolan Portuguese - "gingas" to describe the feel he was listening for. Which roughly translated is a sexy, swaying kind of walk.

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
- Rene Descartes (1596-1650) French philosopher
“Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four.”
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)

I don't feel that I've heard the last word on any of the traditional music I've studied, and already needed to unlearn past lessons to satisfy current teachers. So it goes, academics is a game, often an elitist one that I don't play. At least these studies inform and flesh out my chops for improvisation.

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
- Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter, sculptor

Related:
Drumming 'n Drugs
Drumming As A Form of Prayer by Jim PathFinder Ewing (Nvnehi Awatisgi)
Drumming Peace One Oh One
Drum Reiki
Drums: How they beat stress by By Ann Trieger Kurland
Finding Healing Music in the Heart by Corey Kilgannon
Healing, Drumming & Praying by Jim PathFinder Ewing (Nvnehi Awatisgi)
Melodic Instruments at Drum Circles
Sound
Prayer
Shamanism: Drumming and/or Drugs
Voices at Drumcircles: Testimony and Theories

“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust,
we all dance to a mysterious tune,
intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American Physicist, Person of the 20th Century)

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