Designing for Improvisation (2010)

Jazz musician and programmer here.

I wish people held off postulating about improvisation until they understood the first thing about it.

First off, modal jazz wasn't invented by Miles on the Kind of Blue sessions. He'd even used it himself in earlier recordings. Also, modal jazz isn't inherently more simple than what had gone before. Is it _really_ more simple than the blues scale? Nah.

And then this

> Instead of the control coming from the composer (read: the designer), modal jazz promotes a sense of discovery.

is just nonsense. Every other solo section on every other recording was constrained by the composer, by specifying the chord sequence. Whether that's a one-chord vamp or the later Giant Steps-style gymnastics. And what happened on this recording is the composer specified the chord sequence and then on top of that, told the soloists what notes to choose from when soloing. If anything, that's even _more_ control from the composer than what came before. And it being modal doesn't promote any more of a sense of discovery than any other framework for choosing notes from the time.

I could go on, but I'd just get more cross. Worse, it reminded me of an old talk by Kent Beck on Jazz. IIRC about a tool he'd built on top of Eclipse? Either way, he horrendously massacared the concept of jazz and improvisation, too.

I am very frustrated by this article and I don't know why. I mean, they're right, improvisation, that's a good model for how you should design your social networking service. But just given how "realtime systems" (read: social media) evolved from 2010-2022, somehow I feel like this is not what Miles Davis stood for.

I was really confused, and thought I'd missed out on a big chunk of music theory, when I read this. Glad to see it wasn't my understanding, but the author's.