insert from the Live! at Eyedrum improv compilations:

Improvisation: the word itself is even a little off-putting for some people. That damn im- on the front moving one immediately to think of all those not-words: improper, immature, not-provable, and so on. And in a delicious way real improvisation (and we’re not talking ‘jam session’ here) or improvisation that is freely played, that is, no tonal, harmonic, or rhythmic constraints excepting what is called for by the exigencies of the moment, IS a not-ness. That is to say, it doesn’t fit easily into the various commercial genres but instead derives its strength from the idiosyncratic leanings and abilities of its various practioners. The very fact of very singular expression IS the strength of free improv.

Every playing occasion is a chance for a new musical socius to form, a new society of individual perceptions and abilities, and the possiblity for the emergence of a new collective identity. True, it only exists for the duration of the sessions, a musical mayfly, but then that also is one of free improv’s distinct charms. (Of course, recording technology fits into this in an ambiguous way. It has no doubt facilitated the spread of the very idea of free improv, perhaps a necessity given the lack of scores per se, but it also perhaps acts to set it as a form, another genre even. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

But just as much as what it is NOT, free improv is just as much a primal parallel stream of development, tapping archaic modes of unfolding, emerging from the molten core of ‘creativity’ itself and just plain playfulness. As the last part of the word ‘improvisation’ would point toward, in being caught in the throes of immediacy and exchange of playing one can feel enmeshed in the grip of an impersonal Visitation, forces pouring into and out of the players with the intensity of daemonic convections or the sweetness of seraphic conversations. approaching the ecstatic fervor of a secular speaking in tongues, the microrhythms of all the world-cracks becoming visible, a glorious immersion of confusions and connections. The satisfactions to be had here are not the closures of the song form but the beauties and terrors of a muscular voyage across the uncharted terrain of a fathomless sonic sea.