Vignette
Odd André asks Anne (nine years old, on double bass) if she can remember Water-melon Man.1 He starts to play the intro with a riff. Anne joins in the riff and plays the root while Odd André plays the melody. He asks: ‘Do you remember the blues scale in B♭?’ Anne starts playing the descending B♭ blues scale. ‘Shall we try to improvise a little?’ He counts in, and Anne improvises. Her phrases centre around the root and third in each chord, often in stepwise melodic movements. Rhythmically her phrases are lagging behind the beat, almost not reaching the next chord in time, most likely because of the physical exertion of her small fingers on the refractory bass strings. This fact is not causing Odd André to slow the tempo down; on the contrary, he is pushing it. I also notice the rich chords Odd André lays down on piano. After a chorus, he stops and says: ‘And then we started to play walking [remember]?’ Anne: ‘Is it like this?’ and she plays 1-2-3-1 on each chord.2 Odd André nods, counts in, and then they play one chorus where Anne repeats this bass pattern on quarter notes through the form. Afterwards, Odd André says in a questioning tone ‘You’d Be So Nice? Can you play a little of the chord sequence from the start?’3 Anne responds by playing scales, one scale per chord. She doubles the speed for chords that last only two beats instead of a whole bar, although the tempo is not steady. For chords that last for two bars, she plays the scale first ascending and then descending again. He counts in again, which is a cue to Anne to start improvising, while Odd André is comping her. After a chorus, he says: ‘Very good. You’re doing it right regarding improvising with drive and flow. Last time we talked about how you can play. You often start on the root, and that’s good, but we can try to experiment by starting on other notes. Pick some places where you do that’. Anne nods, concentrated. Odd André counts in, and they play a chorus. He says: ‘Now, that was very exciting and nice, but simultaneously you have to …’ Anne: ‘… know where I am’. They play another chorus. Odd André: ‘Very good, get used to listening to me to orient yourself’. Anne: ‘But now I knew where I was. I think’. Odd André: ‘Cool. Now you played something in between. One more time. Let’s try having you sometimes take chances and sometimes play [phrases] from the root. I will be playing what I’m going to play [on concerts]. Then you must be responsible yourself for knowing where you are’.
They play several choruses. Suddenly she plays a phrase with a rhythm that is different from the way she usually plays, and he immediately imitates the rhythm on piano. I wonder if she has noticed it. He ends the lesson: ‘For next week, practise playing walking on Like Someone In Love’.4 You can make up and rehearse a fixed bass line. Remember the different ways you can create a bass line, you can go both downwards and upwards, within the B♭ major scale’. While Anne has her lesson, Thomas, her brother, is reading a book. Their mother, who has brought them to their lessons, is knitting. When Thomas’s lesson starts and he unpacks his alto saxophone, it’s Anne’s turn to pick up her book.
The vignette above is based on field notes from the very first time I observed lessons at Improbasen, a private learning centre in Oslo, Norway.5 It was established around 2005 and is run by jazz saxophonist and main teacher Odd André Elveland. Improbasen is formally organised as a foundation with an informal board consisting of pupils’ parents. The funding has shifted over the years, and Improbasen has mainly been financed from public sources and from pupils’ fees. The centre offers instrumental jazz improvisation tuition to beginning instrumentalists between the ages of 7 and 15, on instruments such as saxophone, piano, drums, bass, guitar, trumpet, and occasionally vibraphone. The pupils receive weekly individual 60-minute teaching sessions. Improbasen holds regular concerts in Oslo and participates on collaborative projects with children from other countries.
From January 2015 to February 2017 I conducted fieldwork at Improbasen, following the activities within and around the centre closely, through observations of lessons and performances. I have interviewed participants and travelled with them abroad. The high number of social interactions with Odd André have ranged from three-hour conversations in his kitchen to riding the subway together after a long afternoon of teaching to late-night restaurant dining after children’s concerts at jazz clubs or on tours. I helped stretching PA speaker cables on concerts, followed kids to the toilet when the adults around were busy with organising tasks, transported musical equipment in my car, listened to what sometimes felt like endless sound checks, and heard an almost infinite number of blues variations in B♭ and D major scales played from the second and fifth scale degrees, in various degrees of technical fluency. As I took part in these activities, I was constantly considering this study’s main questions and asking myself how I possibly could manage to answer them: how is jazz improvisation taught to children who have never played an instrument before? How do the children make meaning out of what they’re taught? How do they learn? As my acquaintance with Improbasen and its participants increased, a seemingly more significant question emerged: why do they do it? ‘What makes them make the effort?’ (Engeström 2001, 133).
On the Tuesday in January described in the above vignette, I watched two of the pupils, the nine-year-old twins Anne on double bass and Thomas on alto saxophone. The twins had started learning their instruments one and a half years before this lesson took place. As I sat and watched, I found myself thinking that I was witnessing something extraordinary. The way they all behaved, how they placed themselves in the studio and the ways they talked to each other revealed a routine situation for the four persons involved. Their talk was limited to very basic information and practicalities such as how much the twins had been practising since last week, how the mouthpiece in the sax felt that day, and so forth. Odd André’s way of communicating with the children seemed ordinary. They were not over-blown with cheering or enthusiastic encouragement when they improvised. On the contrary, his messages were brief and neutral. After the lessons, I commented on what to me seemed to be a sparse communication, without much praise. ‘Oh, I wasn’t aware of that’, he replied,
[B]ut you know, I want them to get on stage and perform together as soon as possible after they have started here. I guess I want this improvising thing to be an everyday activity, not make a lot of fuss about it. I think that’s the best way to avoid developing fear of failure. Because children, they do play a lot of strange notes when they improvise. But I want them to learn not to think or care about it, to move on. To play on.
The aura of ordinariness that permeated their interactions stood in stark contrast to my experience as first-time observer. In fact, there is nothing ordinary about 9-year-olds improvising on jazz tunes. You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To is a jazz standard that only a few of my conservatoire jazz students know. But Anne and Thomas knew it. They could verbally account for all the chord changes and their roman numerals in modulations on the second 16-bar section when asked, and they could play the correct inversions of the harmonic minor scale on a II minor 7th chord and the following dominant chord, respectively. As I sat there and watched I was more and more puzzled by an interaction that seemed to me to be anything but ordinary. It wasn’t that the children displayed extraordinary achievements or artistic original improvisations – they didn’t. Nor was there anything exceptional about the pedagogy I observed. But what is perhaps extraordinary about Improbasen, and the source of my puzzlement, is the way children are introduced to and allowed to participate in a knowledge culture (Cetina 1999) that we normally do not associate with children.
The emphasis on learning to improvise with ‘correct notes’ is a central feature of Odd André’s teaching approach and is often criticised, especially when used with children or other beginners. It is often claimed that this approach teaches children to be concerned with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which may hinder their creative development and encourage a fear of making mistakes.
Yet, as is clear from Odd André’s statement quoted above, one of the ambitions of Improbasen is precisely to create a learning environment where the children are encouraged to express themselves, make musical real-time choices, and take chances within the tonal framework that the chord scales provide. If they make single mistakes, the flow of the groove (provided by Odd André through his piano comping) will persist; it will not stop and wait for corrections. The children are implicitly taught not to put any weight on mistakes, because new opportunities for playing on that chord sequence, playing that song, playing on concerts, will be provided continuously. In a time when education is increasingly reliant on measurable achievements (Guro G. Johansen 2018) and ‘assessmentism’ (Elliott 2010), and where learning activities with potentially uncertain outcomes are not always encouraged, this feature of Improbasen is extraordinary.
