How to improvise over a "free" blues?

That IMO is not a blues... It's 3 dominant chords played indescriminately. A learning experience, but
there are other harmonic progressions more worthy of investigating that will impart more knowledge... That experiment IMO would be better if there were more content. Bird blues, tritone subs, Coltrane matrix, addition of II-V's, jazz oriented blues... etc.
Playing over a structure that doesn't inhibit your ideas due to the abundance of ideas it alludes to is true freedom IMO...
Either way, what are you trying to gain doing this? Is there a point to your experimentation?

Cheers,

D.

 

First listen to a ton of Ornette and Albert Ayler. Ornette has some great blues tunes on his early albums and was really a blues player in the end. Ayler to me just oozes the blues in everything he does, while still being in a whole other dimension most of us will never reach while we’re alive. I’d personally also recommend checking out the work of Bobby Bradford and John Carter too. They were contemporaries and early collaborators of Ornette, but never got as muck recognition since they were west coast based.

Next I would seriously recommend listening to a ton of old blues music that does not use a 12 bar form. The 12 bar blues came later in the development of the blues and was probably codified to a degree by W.C. Handy, so listening to how blues musicians have created blues without a form will be very informative for this.

There’s more I could add, but my cat woke me up and I should get back to sleep. When I’m more consciously awake I’ll see if I can add any more. There are a lot more early free players I could add, but who I mentioned should be a great starting point. Teaching improvisation is hard, especially open/free improvisation. Most of how I’ve learned to play in these environments was done on the bandstand and listening to a ton of music.

 

Blues can be a LOT more than just I IV V. Two minutes in the Real Book shows that.

 

IMO, you can't just throw in random chords. There has to be some kind of melodic/harmonic structure. The point to my post is that there are plenty of ways to expand upon the blues form.

 

There are a lot of ways to do it. "They" say early blues was free, with the same changes and turn around. So, starting there is a good way to get everyone to hear free chord changes.
The lore is that an early blues singer would go to the IV chord when they needed a change and hit the turn around when they wanted to start over.
As @Sean Riddle points out above, there is a lot of early free jazz with blues material. I'd add pre-impulse Shepp as well.
The material can be freed from the form.
Here is a very abstract solo using blues material to show how far it can go:

Brötzmann often talked about having his own version of the blues, and you can hear it best on this version of Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman:


Another version is freely change keys but keep the changes, you can do this with a free form (that maintains I-IV-V changes) or a 12 bar or other fixed form.

Lastly, Mingus has a whole catalog of compositions that are abstractions on the blues in various ways, this album is a good place to start hearing those ideas, and once you can hear them you can use them in your music:

 

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit to you I wonder how long you’ve been playing and how much harmonic knowledge you have? Three chords of the same type? What do you see when you look at a dominant chord? Are you looking at it from the angle of Melodic, Harmonic, Diminished, double dim. Etc? Chords are just directions to navigate through imo... If you really, really investigate this then I believe you would find infinite freedom within a form. If your ear gets really developed, the notes wouldn’t matter as much... That’s why people hum their lines basically... If you can hear it, you could play it... imo...

 

People want freedom without doing the work to achieve it. That means gigging, listening, practicing, and reading... a lot...

Musicians put in more time than doctors and lawyers imo...

If you’re going to be a casual hobbyist, then it doesn’t apply. The rigorous discipline... If you want to be called a musician, then you need to have a religious fanaticism toward improvement... imho...

 

Freedom comes at a price.

 

As far as a positive version, I like this one, Ronnie Boykins holds this D minor riff down:


The South African bassist Johnny Dyani had lots of great bass lines that people played free over:

 

Those are who I was forgetting earlier this morning. Blues and Roots is such a great album that has a lot to offer for what you're looking for. That Kowald solo is heavy. I'm gonna have to spend some time with that album. Thanks Damon!

 

If you can hear it, it is probably a pretty uninteresting (if correct or even beautiful!) idea in general. We learn to build layers on what we are hearing. It feels good to play what you hear, it sounds good, those are often the least interesting parts. It is sort of improvised music 101.

For me, playing what I hear is way to deal with an interesting harmonic situation that is already in play - not a way to create one.
I played with the pedal steel player Susan Alcorn the other night, she plays all kinds of advanced harmonic ideas so I went with what I was hearing way more than usual. I did the same with Cecil Taylor because I wanted to be as inside of that music as I could be.
There is no one answer for this stuff, as soon as you are comfortable with one approach, start looking for others!

 

Isn't this like trying to be "a little bit pregnant"?

See prior comment.
Thanks.

 

It's best to approach this as you're either 1: expanding upon and abstracting a blues form ala Mingus. 2: opening up or completely abandoning a blues form so it becomes a blues only in melody. 3: stretch the harmony within a typical 12 bar blues. I jammed with Bill Frisell once in a workshop while in college and we decided to play Turnaround. The form was pretty much kept but we abstracted the harmony extremely as the solos developed. That was such a fun little experience and I wish more people would be adventurous with that tune, or at least play the turn around Ornette wrote if the form is adhered to.

 

Also Eric Dolphy’s solo on this Mingus blues tune is a great example of abstracting a blues while still keeping a form. And it’s one of my favorite Dolphy alto sax solos.