extemporization

Over two recording sessions for Columbia Records in early 1959, Davis would hand out the sketchiest of outlines for the music and leave the rest to extemporization.

This was part of the Beatniks’ famed approach to extemporization—the way Kerouac and his contemporaries transmuted the mundane.

The selections tended toward works with variations above repeating bass figures, which come as catnip to these players, inviting, as they do, the extemporization of new variations.

Each monologue is recorded and then looped back on top of the next in increasing layers so that the final extemporization is delivered over the interweaving strands of thought of the nine previous ones.

Its audacious hybrids are driven principally by a fascination with reviving the Baroque art of ornamental extemporization and a curiosity about how contemporary improvisatory styles might be enlisted in that quest.