Journal · Performance & Musicianship
On the fear of the empty solo — and five things that turn improvisation from a high-wire act into a story you actually want to tell.
Improvisation feels like one chance to impress — and that is exactly the thought that ruins it. It is not a test. It is a language, and like any language it begins with a single word.
Improvisation is one of the most exciting — and most frightening — experiences a musician can have. The spotlight is on you. You have one chance, you think, to create something beautiful: no room for mistakes, one chance to impress the audience, to show how hard you have worked, how fast you have become. The adrenaline climbs. The hands lock. You begin to lose control of them and they slip onto auto-pilot — and you crash, and walk off frustrated and disappointed. This mechanism is very, very common; every musician knows it intimately. The question I want to answer here is how to make that state of mind calmer, deeper, and — in the end — more musical. Here are five things that help.
Before you play a single note, you hold infinite possibilities. Infinite patterns, infinite directions. That sounds like freedom; in the moment it is paralysis. In fact, most ruined solos are ruined by the same impulse — the attempt to play everything I know in one breath. So the first and most important thing you can do is choose one simple idea you can repeat and work with. One motif. It turns the infinite into a practical first step.
Practise exactly that: pick a single short phrase, repeat it, live inside it — then pick another, and another, until the act of choosing a sentence quickly becomes comfortable. And where do the sentences come from? From the language of the drum — which you learn the way you learn any language: from a teacher, and from listening, deeply, to the players who move you.
We carry a fear that if we repeat ourselves the audience will be bored — that we must constantly bring something new to the table. It is not true. Inside the solo itself, repetition is power. When you repeat a phrase, you let the listener follow you — and once they are following, your variation lands, because it arrives against something familiar. That is what draws an audience in.
Repetition also gives you air: room to see, feel, and picture the next phrase instead of scrambling for it. And it does one more thing — it turns a general percussion solo into a story about something specific. A solo about one idea is always more compelling than a solo about everything.
Tension and release is the backbone of every performing art. Anything that unfolds in the present has to account for breath — the player's breath, the audience's breath, the breath of the story being told. Try to find a monotone thing in nature; you will not. The only true monotony is silence — and silence is not emptiness. It is the canvas, the pure potential everything is drawn upon.
Once you begin to tell a story, it has to have life: drama, expectation, emotion that grows and resolves. I learned much of this not from a drummer but from the theatre master Nissan Nativ — using the anti-climax as a door, an opening through which a new idea can enter; then developing that idea toward a climax, and opening another door, and another. There is no single map for the movement. One solo starts in a whisper and climbs slowly; another does the reverse. Up or down does not matter, as long as you are the one steering it. I tell students to begin by exploring the full range of their dynamics — playing as quietly as they possibly can, then as loud — simply to feel what each one does to them.
If a roll does not transcend athletics into something human, I am simply not interested.
There is nothing more depressing than a monologue on the drum whose real subtext is look at my triplet roll — look how fast my split-hand is. If a roll does not transcend athletics into something human, something that resonates, I am simply not interested. Imagine an actor playing Hamlet who believes the point is his diction and his facial expressions, rather than whether we feel him genuinely asking whether to be or not to be. We would never believe him; it would be an embarrassment.
Music makes this confusion easy to fall into, because technique is visible and feeling is not. So train yourself to think through the filter of music — of phrasing — never the filter of technique. This is the whole of what I mean by poetry over speed, and it is the same thing as truly embracing the music instead of performing at it.
Finally: know yourself. Know where you feel confident and where you do not. Do not reach, in the middle of a solo, for a finger technique that is not baked yet, or improvise over a time signature you do not yet trust. Practise those, experiment with them, throw yourself in the water — always. But that is technique practice, and it is a different thing.
Improvising is its own practice: it is practising your presence, your motif-development, your storytelling. It should never become a chase after the one of a cycle you do not really know. Stay within your means and, strangely, the music gets freer — not smaller.
Improvisation was never one chance to impress. It is a language you get to speak — one word, and then the next.
Explore the Classes →Live online lessons across four instruments — or read Poetry Over Speed next in the Journal.