10 Steps to "Pure Inspiration"

 

 This is a method I discovered years ago which was developed by Lee Konitz, who was the alto sax man on Miles Davis' "Birth of the Cool" sessions.  It involves 10 different levels of alteration, or embellishment, of a melody.  

    First and foremost, Konitz stresses the importance of melody.  He says that in order to play on a tune, you need to have a solid understanding of the basic elements that make up the tune: the melody and the harmony.  Before you can go on creating a new melody in your improvisation, you need to understand the meaning of embellishment.

    Konitz suggests the use of techniques such as a trill, a passing tone, an appoggiatura, and other compositional elements to embellish the melody.  Basically, you still want to be playing the melody at this point, but doing something a little different to it.  Konitz points out that practicing tunes is more important than practicing scales, because you will learn more about the actual music this way, as opposed to warming up with scales for an hour then working on tunes for 30 minutes.

    Here is the 10 step method to improvisation developed by Konitz.  He uses the first 8 bars of "All The Things You Are" for his examples.  The first and most important level is the melody of the song itself.  The melody is then transformed, little by little, through progressively more "involved" iterations.  It becomes more and more obscured, without losing the melody entirely, until arriving at the final stage, which results in an entirely new melodic structure.  Konitz calls this last level "an act of pure inspiration."