My daughter Kaye Elizabeth Phillips improvising at piano . . . she’s at home just letting her fingers move . . . fellow hypnotists may note that her improvisation is very much based upon a musical ideomotor movement of her fingers which take on a life of their own as she plays . . . almost as musical automatisms but within a beautiful flow of the moment.
The first bit of this is a variation of a composition she’s been working on based upon a lyric I wrote for her . . . of course, she took what I gave her and made it so much more beautiful. The other bits are improvs of throwing things into the mix and seeing what sticks. She does this quite a bit.
When she was younger, I told her to give this sort of creation a go and she was petrified at the thought as she’d never considered just making things up on the spur so loosely as part of a valid creative process – of course, up until that point she’d been primarily schooled in classical music with little exposure to contemporary pop or other genres. Lorraine and I took her to see a performance by Girl + the Machine (among others) and G+tM didn’t have their full ensemble so they did some improvisational work with Moving Sound to flesh out their performance . . . and right then at that moment with Jackie and Fred and guests improv-ing and sounding wonderful I could see a little switch click into place and as soon as Kaye got home she began experimenting with improvisation . . . now, it’s one of her main methods of creative outlet wherein her compositions just seem to flow naturally through her . . . yes, she enters flow or the zone so very naturally.
Yes, I usually post her videos to my youtube but this one is on Kaye’s own new channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/wolfiebluewhite so don’t be surprised to see more of her experimental work as she gets more and more comfortable sharing her music with the planet. I absolutely love the self-portrait image she has chosen as her current youtube background as well. She took that herself and then processed it a bit in photoshop.
- Brian
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