extemporization

But the broadcast clock was ticking, and instead of interacting with the myriad stars in front of them — who wouldn’t want Andrew Lloyd Webber to describe his day for the sake of comedy? — these performers blandly reenacted the moments we’d just sat through, and with little 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 generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool — capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn’t harm paper — were, he wrote, “the first where practice was aimed at perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation ‘off book.’”

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.