Learning to improvise (Fly in the Porter)

Sheet music for Fly in the Porter by Paddy O'Brien as played in Baltimore. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio podcast on Apple Music or on Spotify!

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Fly in the Porter by Paddy O'Brien from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about getting started with improvising. I love to improvise. I improvise a lot. But I never did any improvising growing up. I'm thinking back and trying to remember if I made up my own music, or just played music that my teacher or my dad gave me that I heard No, I never did. I didn't do any improvising. 

I think this is a real shame. The way kids are educated in music is so different from how they're educated in other creative arts like art, or writing, where it's a balance between looking at what other people have made and created. And then creating your own stuff. I mean, even in language, we don't just say all the things other people say we're constantly making up our own things to say, in art, people make up their own art and in writing, people write their own writing. 

And then somehow in music, it's different. And in the classical world, and in the traditional music world has a lot of imitation. I don't know, maybe that sounds kind of harsh. Well, I started thinking about this a lot when I went to work for Alice Kanack. Alice connect was a Suzuki teacher, and she trained me. She had been teaching in New York. And she was a creative person. I think she had a degree in composition.

But she was she was teaching violin lessons spent some of her time working on improvising. Basically, I think at first it was just a way to make it fun for kids. Teach them musical concepts. You know, there's a lot that improvising can work on that's not specifically creative, like it can help your tuning, it can help your tone. 

But she does tell a story about working with a student who was having a very hard time learning and memorizing classical repertoire. But when she would improvise with him, he was just amazing off the charts, improviser creative creator of music, she began to see that, you know, not everybody was strong, and both that, that there were a lot of kids that weren't being served, because they were just expected to learn and imitate, and not being coached in creating their own music. But because of the way their brains were wired, or, you know, just as a personal thing, they would get a lot more out of the violin, or music, if they were encouraged to and taught how to make their own. 

So we would do a lot of improvising with the kids. And I, I love it. A little group of fiddlers at my kids school, and we started improv games in the fall. And they could not do them at all. There was fear and total lack of rhythm and creative ideas. And oh my gosh, I hope they don't listen to this. But there's been a ton of progress, just playing games with them, getting them into improvising. It's a completely different story. 

Now when we, when we improvise together, they're really on top of it and they make things up, they fit it together rhythmically. They play backup to each other. They play in the right key just instinctively. It's so cool. So that's what improvising can do. Some of the best musicians that I have met. 

You know, I think it's common with jazz musicians that you'll learn that part of their musical upbringing. exploration was a lot of time by themselves kind of making things up that they thought sounded good. But I've met a lot of really incredible classical musicians who also describe that. I mean, Alice Kanack was one of them. 

But my Professor Lynn Blakeslee, she wants just told me off the cuff. Oh, yeah, I used to just, she improvised this thing for me. And I was like, what was that? And she said, I was just making that up. That's how I used to work. up, I would just spend hours making up things that I thought sounded beautiful on the violin. I don't think that was a coincidence that she got so good at violin that she was a professor at Eastman. 

Here's one of the things I got from learning to improvise. I just learned a lot more about how to create the kind of music that I really enjoy. And love is learning that certain chord progressions, certain kinds of melodies, were the ones that I really responded to, you know that there was a recipe for it. 

It's like knowing your favorite movie director, you don't have to just watch random movies, and hope that one of them really speaks to you, you know that if you watch this particular person's movie, that it's probably going to be made in a way that you really like. So when you dabble in music, and you're creating with it, and you're experimenting with it, you get to know what you like. I think it's really good. Not even really talking about playing over chord changes. That's a different thing. It's great to do that. 

I'm just talking about being creative with music. If you get out your fiddle, and you feel a little silly, and you're like, where do I start? How do I try to make something up? A lot of kids will start with making up riffs making up just a little pattern that repeats that they liked the sound of my oldest child used to do that all the time, just pick up the violin, pick up a little riff a little repeating melody, played a few times. Play around with that. 

I play a game called questions and answers. And you can even play this with yourself or with somebody else. One person plays a few notes. Bom bom, bom, bom, bom. And the other person makes up a little answer bom bom, bom, bom, bom. And you can go back and forth. And I'll play that a call it questions and answers with adults and with kids, just musically going back and forth. And eventually, as we get to longer phrases, and we do more styles, like do it in a jig style in a six, eight rhythm, then I'll have them start making up their own tunes. I mean, an a part is just a question and an answer. And the second half is like the same question with a different answer. It's kind of a way into that. Questions and Answers. 

So try some improvising. It's just exploring. You can close the door. Nobody has to hear. Try it out. 

Our tune for today is a setting of Fly in the Porter. This is a jig from an Irish session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland. It's a jig by Paddy O'Brien. I did another Paddy O'Brien tune. O'Brian was a BC accordion player. Oh, yeah, Paddy had written the tune, Dinny O'Brien's for his father. 

We play a lot of Paddy O'Brien tunes at this session, because there's an accordion player, Billy McComiskey who comes to the session. He lives in Baltimore. He's pretty famous Irish accordion player, and a really nice friendly guy. And pretty often he will come by the session and play and when he does, we play a lot of Yeah, accordion centric Irish tunes. 

So I'm trying to learn them. So I can, I can keep up with that. Billy McComiskey was taught by Sean McGlinn, who played in the East Galway style, and won all Ireland competitions all through the 70s and 80s. 

His sons will come to and they play accordion. And it's funny to see Billy and his sons and they all have kind of similar accordions with a similar strap, and they hold it like at the same angle. So if they're all sitting next to each other, it's like all these strap an angled accordion, and then they play you know the body language of their playing and the rhythm is so similar because they played together for so many years. 

I could just sort of sit there and watch Billy play accordion with his sons all day. Billy is pretty funny if he if he sees me. I'm trying to learn these tunes so I can play with him. If he sees me just sitting and I don't know a tune in. I'm spacing out. I'm not trying to learn it here like pick up his phone and wave it at me because he wants me to record it and go home and learn it. Of course Charley always records the session. 

So this might just be in my head. But I think it can be good manners to take your phone out if it's an unfamiliar tune. And you know, you open voice memo, you put it on the table and you record it. 

It's nice if you're playing a tune. When you're like, Oh, this is a good tune. I'm sounding good on this, but not many people know it, but if they're recording it, you're like, oh, but they really like, they like the way I'm playing it and they want to go home and learn it. So it's kind of a compliment. 

So maybe I'm offending Billy, when I'm doing that. He's like, You need to work on these tunes. So here I am with a podcast working on these tunes, Paddy O'Brien tune, I think there's another Paddy O'Brien tune I'm going to do in March. Also, because they're all pulled from the same accordion Irish session. 

Anyway, if you go look at Fly in the Porter on the Session, there's some discussion about permission, I guess somebody recorded it and called it traditional. This stuff is a little tricky in the folk music world a lot of times, I guess it's because none of us really make a lot of money in folk music. We don't necessarily pay royalties, you know, just informal permission is usually all you need to record somebody's tune. 

Unless it's a real moneymaker. I think. Certainly, Ashokan Farewell was a whole different kettle of fish for Jay Ungar, who I think wanted it to be more like most of folk music where it's just freely distributed for education purposes, or it's nice if somebody asks permission to record it. But you don't necessarily sell that right but he was kind of tied up with a company trying to control the rights to Ashokan Farewell because it was so famous. 

There's so there's a little bit of a back and forth I think the person who recorded it and didn't attribute it, like wrote an apology and posted it on the session. All this stuff. I was reading through it, but we're gonna play Fly in the Porter Yeah, this jig in D.