To Play Music

(This was orignally published at The Green Room (http://sidestageimprov.com/thegreenroom/tubas-and-trumpets) with much better design.)

We spend a lot of time talking about improv teams as “ensembles”, often without really appreciating what that actually means. To most theater owners and/or directors, it conjures an image of cohesive uniformity. We like to think of it as a homogeneity – a team that is unified to common purpose, internally reliant, and trusts each other complicity. All of this is true, but how do we get to that point? The classical approach is to take your team, stick them together for long enough, and have them spend time until they develop bonds. This works, and is how a great many number of friendships form, so it should hold true for improv teams as well. This doesn't explain, however, why some teams seem to just “work” and others don't, and also takes a “fingers crossed” approach to team dynamic.

We know that successful teams are built on commitment, but there appears to be a magic spark that makes some teams fun to watch and others, less so. We also know that successful organizations have diversity, or rather the “right” kind of diversity. Large enough groups (let's say, the Navy or the US) need maximum diversity to account for their large size, but small groups (say a three-man improv team) have no way of representing every possible demograph in it's population. How do we put humans together in a way that they can function together, and more than function, succeed? Bands, as it turns out have been doing this for centuries. You have orchestras with every possible instrument present, all the way down to duets of every possible variation. Billy Merritt refers to the “Pirate, Robot, Ninja” classification, but this doesn't really indicate “how” people play. Everyone has a tone – a voice – about how they improvise. This is really about (using this band analogy) what kind of instrument each person is. Here's a brief overview of the common instruments, and combining the right ones is what makes groups “sing”, where right really only means “complementary voices”.

Flute – highest voice in the band (excluding the sub-flute piccolo); flute is technically a woodwind despite the fact that it is made of metal (usually brass or an alloy of copper and/or silver). Flute parts are typically fun, bouncy, bright, cheerful, and delicate. In solo parts, they can be buried by the band unless they are given opportunity to soar. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be1jJCH32OU) Most flautists are female, and this type of player also tends to be female. This player's voice carries the melody, so is a voice that carries the game and the engine of the scene, but doesn't carry power or oomph with it.

Clarinet – mellow, high range woodwind and reedy. Often carries the melody, but is excellent at providing fill and mood. When soloed, it very commonly does so in jazz music – again it's high range combined with a delicately reedy sound can make this an instrument easily overshadowed if not given room. There are usually a lot of clarinets in a band, and when put together, they can do some very amazing music. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LpSqykddUo) As an improviser, this person can be very easily overlooked because they rarely shine. Tasked with supporting the central voice, yes-anding ideas, and filling in information they may not always get laughs, but what they do provide is essential.

Oboe and Bassoon – I've combined both here because many times bands may not have these instruments. Few arrangements require either instrument and they don't have an essential role in most non-professional organizations. Also, most groups don't have more than one of each, to give you an idea of how rare they are. Both instruments have the potential to have gorgeous musical lines, but other more prolific instruments can drown them out. The oboe is a high, haunting and bucolic sound. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL7CDcVQjbM) The bassoon, known as the “belching bedpost” is low, bass reed sound. Warm, friendly, and supportive of other similar parts in most arrangements. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnF9_bouEdY) A hall mark of both instruments (and players), is the finicky-ness of their sound and the intelligence both require. These players will very commonly find themselves waiting for opportune moments to add perfect additions to melodies and harmonies.

Alto Sax – there are a number of different saxophones, but this is the one that you're thinking of when you're thinking of a saxophone. Also a woodwind despite its brass construction and reed used to generate sound. This instrument can be very loud very easy and sounds jazzy, funky, and bright. When given solos, it is very common in jazz or Broadway type songs, or does well in harmony and counter melodies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKRtUL-klhc) This player is loud and big – imagine heavy characters or premise heavy initiations. This is an improviser who may be light on finesse, but will be heavy on energy and play.

French Horn – a high brass sound that is regal, haughty, and soaring. Quartets of these instruments can be gorgeous and solos are marked by being soaring and big affairs. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC3tMN-ofqM (pertinent section begins at ~3:45)) These improvisers are probably seen as being arrogant or cocky. We might interpret this as a negative, but even these roles have their purpose in shows and scenes.

Trumpet – the biggest carrier of melodies, especially so in marches (e.g. John Phillip Sousa); the trumpet is brassy, bright, and bold. It can do subtle, but it isn't it's strength. When used traditionally the trumpet plays to it's power, energy, and liveliness. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLMVB0B1_Ts) This improviser does melody and power – strong initiations, big characters, bold moves, and speed.

Trombone – also known as “the one with the slide”, trombones are known for power. A common joke in bands are as to how loud the default playing volume of a trombone is. The biggest difference is the slide; notes are reached not by clicking down keys or valves, but by sliding the tube longer and shorter. As a result notes may ooze into each other – this is done for purposeful effect in jazz numbers using glissandos, or if players get sloppy, entirely by accident. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaPmysTfVFI) Because this plays in the tenor voice range, it carries well, and will be commonly found initiating but may play more outright comedic characters. An improviser playing like a trombone may have a little “sloppiness” in their play – a kind of fun funkiness.

Baritone – this one is a low, angelic “small tuba”. Baritones often play bass lines in arrangements, but will sometimes have lovely solos or countermelodies. The instrument can also be known for silly, goofy, playful parts – voices that mimic clowns or baffoons. Played well, it fills a needed middle tone in the ensemble. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjvuYlNLLtY) Improvisers playing as baritiones are often fun, silly, have an emphasis on play and funny but may not always “shine” in scenes. Baritones are a comfortable, consistent, reliable presence in scenes, often doing the hard work in small scenes to keep them grounded and stable.

Tuba – the lowest voice in the band; strong, bold, but often a slow, plodding voice. Tubas rarely get solos, mostly because the precision and speed required is hard to pull off in the instrument, instead it can be found doing low pedal tones or oscillating bass tones in marches and the like.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Rul-qYAGQ) Tubas as improvisers are doing the hard work; towing the line in scenes to keep them grounded or give them gravitas. They maintain the reality of scenes and keep them with a pulse and heart.

Percussion – the metronome, the beat, the thrumming backbone of the band. This includes snares, bass drums, cymbals, chimes, bells, marimbas, and all the fun “toys” that add so much little touches to music. Precussion instruments are interesting in that a single one cannot provide all of what is typically needed in a large ensemble (excluding drum kits), but instead have to highly work together to produce rhythm and beat. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDXVgqmaYJk) As improvisers, expect these people to maintain tempo in games and dynamics, to provide edits, and off-stage color. Usually more unassuming players are precussion, but they deliver powerful one-liners and buttons for scenes in addition to small color in large group scenes.

Strings – strings are very common in orchestras, but for our purposes, we are assuming all our instrumentation is only for a modern sit-down concert band. In that concept, strings are uncommon except for very specific arrangements, and then only for a very specific purpose, like the bass guitar in Horner's “Coming Home from the Sea” or the harp in a number of Christmas arrangements. Strings are delicate, full bodied instruments that provide rich melodies, harmonies, and bass lines to orchestras, and we are assuming that violins, violas, cellos, and basses are all a part of this category. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCmqArxZ2GQ) Why lump all of these together? Quite simply, if we use this system as a method to categorize people, we will undoubtedly run into people that don't easily fall into one of the instrument categories, and this is our “everyone else” group. If you have a person on a team that doesn't quite jive with what other people are doing, that seems to be playing by their own music, they're probably a string instrument living in a wind band world. They don't sound “right” because the accompaniment is “wrong”. They're not bad players, they just need other string instruments to complement them appropriately.

A knowledge of the instruments and their accompanying player personas allows for easy ensemble building – some instruments do not naturally go together (though there are some nice tuba/flute duets, these are niche, rare, and gimmicky). Also, some instrumentation doesn't fit the music well; I've had a dream for some years of having a large jazz combo, but having the instrumentation re-written to concert instruments. Saxes become clarinets and bass clarinets, tenors and baritone saxes bassoons, trumpets as french horns, trombones as baritones. Though this would be interesting to hear, it's more akin to the strange “IPA with Sriracha cream” gimmick beers that pop up in San Diego from time to time. They'd be interesting to try, but you wouldn't buy a keg of it. My long time duo, Mike and Chris, works because Mike is a trumpet, and I'm a trombone. Our two brassy tones complement each other. Small groups (duos, trios) need very well balanced instruments – brass go with brass, woodwinds with woodwinds, basses with basses, etc. Larger groups need and can handle more diverse parts.

At the end of the day, our objective is “ensemble” and playing together. Well made music requires more than a single note, we need chords. Multiple notes built to go together, where the pieces work in concert towards a common goal. All groups end up with stylistic choices that define their show, it's what makes two different teams that do the “same show” (e.g. harold teams) have performances that feel different. This isn't a side effect or accidental – this is part of the built in, secret sauce that makes live performance unique. More importantly, this is what makes our team work important. How the parts fit together and what everyone contributes makes team. As the clothes make the man, the instruments make the band.

Books and Shirts

The Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre (UCB) published an improv book recently, though more likely than not, if you're reading this blog, you already know that. This book was obviously groundbreaking in a number of ways: one, the first book to completely encapsulate a theater's approach to improv (as opposed to a person), and from a theater that is very much having a moment right now in the improv zeitgeist. It also was a book that was years in the making, and was the first one to propose to be a toolkit that could completely guide an improviser all the way from neophyte to functional. But I think the biggest thing about the book was more than the content of the book itself – it was that nearly every improviser I knew pre-ordered it and started reading it right away (and also posted a picture of themselves reading it with a cup of coffee). This happened again very recently with the TJ & Dave book, although apparently to a lesser degree.

I'm a bit of an improv bibliophile; I have improv books occupying over an entire shelf, and going back to the 60's. Improv books actually come out pretty often, but this was the first “big” one to come out while improv is on such a huge swing. The interesting thing about improv books is that they are a static, tangible totem in a craft that is absent such adjectives normally. We don't create things that can be shown or kept in perpetuity. Even our improv shows, when recorded, never quite recreate the experience of watching it live. This is kind of one of the magic sauces of improv, that live is what people truly come to see.

The downside is that we have very few totems that we can hang on to as a community; outside of a cluster of improv books (and even fewer really great ones), the TJ & Dave movie, a few team, theater, and festival t-shirts, we don't really have anything that we can hold in our hands. Even most of the great philosophy and writing is mostly in the land of the easily shared, but also easily forgotten digital (like this blog!). Improv is dangerously ephemeral.

I had a student ask me a great question recently: “what is improv?”. Some context as to why this is a great question is that she was explaining to her sister what the classes were about and was looking for a response to give her that described what we were doing. What we do may seem obvious to us as improvisers, but it's always worth remembering to think about what we look like to our audience, and the uninitiated. How would you describe improv to an alien that had absolutely no frame of reference? Hell, how do you describe the majority of what we do even to people who've seen “Whose Line”? (Which, on a related note, can we all bow our heads for a moment and thank God that a show like “Whose Line” exists and was relatively well played on ABC Family, because seriously how would we describe what we do to our families otherwise?)

The answer I gave my student is that it is “theater that is unscripted and unrehearsed”, which is a definition I rather like in that it is accurate, fairly all-encompassing, and concise. But it's not really a precise answer. It does say what we do, but doesn't really give you an idea of what that looks like. I always liked the poetry of the iO description of the Harold – saying that it was like a jazz band, which again, nails the artisanal, flexible, and complicated nature of it, but still doesn't really tell you much. You could of course recall its scene/game/scene structure, but that tells you even less about it. My student's follow up question is: “is it always funny?”, which we as improvisers I think have matured enough to be able to say the truth, which is: most of the time, but not always. But more importantly, that it doesn't have to be.

What is improv? It's something we can't write out easily. It can't be described in a sentence that fully captures what it looks like, what it means, and what it is composed of in a single sentence. This is its inherent beauty. We get to participate in something that we can only share by being present, in the moment with each other. Our entire art is a summer memory, fondly recalled.