Sunday Online Session with Dr. Sam Murray Performer/Composer/Musician

 

 

 

 

  Last Sunday we had really amusing night sparkled with the jazz, talk and sharing different ideas and approaches. Sam shared with us different art forms and described how he does things, how he connect with them, why is improvisation so important in Jazz music, how composition works?, how to think in philosophical tone how audience receive your music? How sound can interweave each other?how technology can penetrate into the audience?How we can catch that moment musically?..really, very delightful night and questions around the work of Sam Murray. 

I was actually moved by three things, first music by itself, than talk about improvisation and the moment when we communicate with the audience throughout the art, music, performance...

In my fourth AOL I wrote about communication through performance and I would share some sentences from that area cause I somehow found relation between performing music either dance, movement, theatre...

Through communication with the spectators, participating through performance and sharing the “mystery of embodiment” (Fraleigh, 1987, 25) I have learned that this way of commitment requires trust. I found that beyond thinking is knowing and while I was dancing i did that movement and my “bodily existence is given in I am” (Ibid, 25). Through performance I always try to intensify my somatic awareness, clear the perception, achieve participation and make sense helping the audience to understand important aspects of functioning performed body. Im creating “private conversation with self” (Tarrant, 2013, 172). “Making sense needs to be taken as an active and creative process; where we can recognise knowledge generated through reflective conversations“ (Ibid, 169).
    “The dancer transcends the limit of self in shedding her everyday persona. She achieves this by consciously embodying the characteristic aesthetic qualities of  each dance she performs” (Fraleigh, 1987, 30).
In this matching up of ourselves with the others and with the world the audience wants to see, feel, participate emotionally, resonate performer’s aesthetic correct doing, right form, seek for qualitative action, according to Freleigh similar to the “state of nowness” (Freileigh, 2015, 173) and me as performer constantly searching for that right doing and correct responsiveness to the manipulative insight of the observer. That communication is constant, interrelated, complex, changeable and seducing. That performance is known only by me and only I can “become dynamically interrelated in a communicative process through the object which mediates what can be known” (Fraleigh, 1987, 36). This object is dance and known is substance of dance. 

Another thing chime with my work is talk about improvisation. My research is about embodied flow in motion, which is related also with improvisational work in dance and movement and first thing what I do in improvisation is finding a good place to start. First, finding a good grounding, than moved by rhythmical impulses given from the body (emotions, breath) and environment. I love to work with that connection. The power of Improvisation is in these many given possibilities and spontaneous invention where is nothing wrong. Accompanied by inner rhythm, experience, freedom of movement the artist can push harder things, and always trying things out (if we listen famous sculptor Alberto Giacommetti). Improvisation is always asking, where things can go creatively? Where creativity can lead us? What we can do the best with our bodies, instruments, or choices how we can take academic risks. We can not enforce music to do, neither the dance or any other performance to influence in that certain way and understand, interpret an audience mood but we can work on understanding why is created something in certain way? was there an attention? we can always develop, engage ourselves every time differently and being on that journey. 

I wanted to ask Sam why is in his work Improvisation very important form?

would be great to hear from musician's perspective that answer:)

anyway, thank you for that jazz experience...in the end, isn't it all about JAZZ?:)