Improvisation in bluegrass music

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Improvisation in bluegrass music is the practice of making up instrumental parts, above all solos, during performance in bluegrass, a string-band style that originated in the United States and was codified as a genre in the 1940s.^[1] Its most familiar form is the "break": in a jam session, players take turns playing an improvised lead over a few bars of the tune, usually when the song's leader signals them.^[2:1] In instrumental tunes, each time through the tune is usually taken by a different instrument.^[3:1]

Bluegrass improvisation tends to be built from shared, harmonically based phrases known as "licks" and "runs", which need not follow the original melody.^[1:1] The music is learned largely by ear and is often played by musicians who have not rehearsed together.^[1:2] For that reason, improvising in bluegrass depends as much on shared knowledge of the style, and on reading cues from other players, as on inventing new material.^[4:1] This page covers how improvisation works within bluegrass. For improvisation across musical traditions in general, see musical improvisation.

Breaks and the ensemble

In a bluegrass jam, the musicians "take breaks": each in turn plays an improvised lead for part of the tune. Whoever is leading the song, who may be a guitarist or mandolinist who also sings lead, usually indicates whose turn is next.^[2:1] In fiddle tunes, the melody is typically passed from instrument to instrument with each repetition. Neil Newton argues that the instrument shapes what is improvised on it, even down to which pitches are used, beyond simply favouring phrases that suit it. The contrast between, for example, a banjo break and a fiddle break can then help mark out the form of a performance, and recurring instrument-shaped figures act as a marker of the genre.^[3:1]

When they are not soloing, players fill in behind the lead. Nathaniel Mitchell's study of Bill Monroe's band describes the band as treating a song as a scripted sequence of chord changes. Each player fills these with suitable vamps (repeated rhythmic accompaniment figures) or licks, chosen from a personal stock of gestures that is limited by the player's instrument, the harmony and the meter.^[4:1]

Licks, runs and the melody

Kathleen Coker, comparing bluegrass with Irish traditional music, describes the usual bluegrass approach to varying a melody as using harmonically rooted licks or runs, with no obligation to resemble the original tune. These figures are larger than the named ornaments of Irish music. They do not decorate a particular melody note but carry the music from one chord to the next. Coker notes that it would be unusual for a bluegrass player to rely mainly on Irish-style ornaments such as triplets, and equally unusual for an Irish traditional player to drop the melody in favour of runs.^[1:1]

A well-known example of a shared run is the "G run", a stock guitar phrase used to close a phrase on the tonic chord. Mitchell describes how a guitarist in Monroe's band would play a version of it at each return to G major.^[4]

Learning and coordination without rehearsal

Bluegrass draws on a repertoire known in common, is traditionally passed on by ear, and is often played in informal groups that have not rehearsed the material.^[1:2] Monroe's own band, the Blue Grass Boys, worked in a similar way. According to Mitchell, Monroe very rarely rehearsed his musicians, and at least 149 musicians passed through the band during his 57-year career. Del McCoury recalled that before his first show with Monroe, the band only tuned up and walked on stage.^[4:2] Musicians therefore had to learn songs on their own. Guitarist Peter Rowan recalled that the parts "wasn't written down. It's what you brought to Bill". As a result, different members could hold slightly different versions of the same song in their heads.^[4:3]

Monroe also framed performance as a contest. He said that "bluegrass is competition with each man trying to do the best he can, be on his toes". Former band members report that he sometimes worked against his own musicians on stage, for example by changing the familiar mandolin introduction to "Muleskinner Blues" without warning. Mitchell interprets the song's irregular meter and Monroe's unpredictable cues as a kind of initiation for new band members.^[4:4]

The guitar as a solo instrument

According to the music critic Geoffrey Himes, Clarence White showed that the acoustic guitar could solo over bluegrass chord changes. Tony Rice took guitar solos with J. D. Crowe and the New South that held their own with the banjo, mandolin and dobro. With the David Grisman Quintet, Rice brought jazz harmonies and rhythms into acoustic string-band playing.^[5:1]

Scholarly perspectives

Coker applies the composer and scholar George E. Lewis's distinction between "Afrological" and "Eurological" approaches to improvisation. She places bluegrass in the Afrological mode, describing its improvisation as transformative and referential, and guided by the harmony more than by the shape of the melody. She links this to bluegrass's roots in Black musical creativity, a debt she argues has been historically underemphasised.^[1:3] Her research also documents "Irish Bluegrass", a term used by musicians in Ireland who play both bluegrass and Irish traditional music. These players habitually mix Irish-style ornamentation and bluegrass-style runs in their improvised variations.^[1:4]

Newton draws on post-humanist philosophy, which questions the sharp divide between human agents and objects, to argue that instruments themselves have a kind of agency in bluegrass improvisation.^[3:1] Mitchell borrows from the cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins's theory of distributed cognition. He treats the band as a single thinking unit whose members build and sometimes fail to share a common understanding of the music as it unfolds.^[4:1]