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]

Taking turns at solos set Bill Monroe's band apart from earlier string bands, which aimed for a blended ensemble sound.^[4:1] Bluegrass improvisation has always sat alongside a strong habit of imitation: musicians learn by ear, often copying admired recorded solos, yet no two performances are quite the same.^[5:1] Solos are typically built from shared, harmonically based phrases known as "licks" and "runs", which need not follow the original melody.^[1:1] From the late 1950s, players stretched this framework with longer, freer and jazz-influenced solos.^[4:2][6:1] This page covers how improvisation works within bluegrass. For improvisation across musical traditions in general, see musical improvisation.

Origins

In older string bands, the instruments usually played together as an ensemble, with the fiddle leading. In the early 1940s, Bill Monroe instead let his instrumentalists trade leads, and even tried improvised solos.^[4:1] In Monroe's band of 1945–1948, with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater, the instrumentalists took solos at various times while the rest of the band provided rhythmic and melodic backing. The folklorist Neil Rosenberg identifies this soloist-and-band framework as one of the features that made the band's "sound" distinctive.^[7:1] The music scholar Benjamin Krakauer describes Monroe's step as an audacious application of a jazz-derived model of improvised soloing to the instruments of a rural Appalachian dance band.^[6:2]

Breaks and the ensemble

In a 1965 study in the Journal of American Folklore, L. Mayne Smith described the bluegrass ensemble in terms of three roles: a lead part carrying the melody, one or more instruments that back the lead without overshadowing it, and a steady rhythmic and harmonic base. Every instrument takes all three roles at times, but the fiddle, banjo and dobro are primarily lead instruments.^[5:2] Voices and lead instruments take turns at the melody "or some variation upon it", usually about eight times through a piece. Some instrumental pieces also include a strain of no fixed length, which the fiddle plays as an improvised solo over a single chord (see fiddle improvisation).^[5:3] Writing in the Journal of Music Theory, Joti Rockwell describes songs as usually placing instrumental solos between the vocal sections, while instrumental tunes feature solos alternating "in the manner of a jazz combo". When not soloing, banjo and fiddle often play short offbeat chords, which Rockwell compares to the hi-hat cymbal in jazz.^[8:1]

The same pattern governs jam sessions today. Each musician in turn "takes a break", playing an improvised lead for part of the tune, and whoever is leading the song, who may be a guitarist or mandolinist who also sings lead, usually indicates whose turn is next.^[2:1] 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] Jam leaders often arrange the order so that the same instrument does not take two breaks in a row.^[3:2]

What a break contains can depend on the kind of piece. A saying among jam musicians holds that "when you take a break in a fiddle tune, you play the tune, but when you take a break in a song, you don't play the tune". In other words, solos in songs are more often played over the chords than over the melody. Newton notes that this is not a universal rule, and many jams prefer to keep the melody in both cases.^[3:3]

When they are not soloing, players fill in behind the lead. Nathaniel Mitchell's study of 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.^[9:1]

Imitation and variation

Bluegrass musicians very seldom use written music. They learn by ear from records, radio and each other. Smith observed that although records let bands imitate earlier performances closely, both conscious and unconscious improvisation produce considerable variation, even between supposedly identical renditions of a piece.^[5:1] Monroe usually encouraged his musicians to imitate the styles, and even the most successful recorded solos, of the players they replaced. Don Reno, who joined as banjoist after Scruggs left, at first played much as Scruggs had.^[5:4]

Banjo styles and formulae

Thomas Adler (1974) and Neil Newton (2022) both describe bluegrass banjo as having three main styles, distinguished largely by how closely they follow the melody, but they do not agree on which three. Both name Scruggs style first. Its three-finger patterns, called rolls, surround the melody with chord tones.^[3:4] Scruggs's own instruction book teaches a small set of these, including the forward, backward and reverse rolls.^[8:2] Adler estimated that only every third or fourth note of a Scruggs-style passage is actually a melody note.^[10:1] Both also name melodic or "Keith" style, after Bill Keith, which aims to play the full melody of a fiddle tune as a fiddler would.^[10:1][3:4] For the third, Adler proposed a "blues-chromatic" style, heavy in blue notes, that slights the melody.^[10:1] Newton names instead the single-string or "Reno" style associated with Don Reno.^[3:4] Adler himself noted that in 1974 most banjoists had not yet settled on a name for the third style.^[10:1] Newton describes playing in one of these named styles as asking how that player and his banjo would have handled a passage, even one the original player never played.^[3:5]

Adler's study gave a detailed account of how a bluegrass break is improvised. Borrowing from Albert Lord's theory of oral-formulaic composition in epic poetry, he proposed that banjo licks are built from smaller stock units, or "formulae". A banjoist may know hundreds of licks and thousands of formulae, and can improvise a break by combining them. Even breaks that seem memorized turn out to be built from the same units.^[10:2] For any metrical and harmonic "slot" in a tune there is no single correct figure. Each player develops personal variants, and even highly individual players fill the slots with their own licks.^[10:3] The difficulty lies in joining one formula smoothly to the next, and in combining them with taste. Players follow unspoken rules: Courtney Johnson of the Newgrass Revival would play whole breaks in the blues-chromatic style, while Jack Hicks used it only as punctuation. Adler describes Hicks at Bean Blossom, Indiana, in 1973, briefly losing his place while improvising a difficult variation on "Dusty Miller", to laughter from the audience.^[10:4] Adler argued that this formulaic system explains how quickly the banjo styles spread, mostly through one-to-one oral teaching. Because the underlying structure of bluegrass stayed the same, a player could take up a new style by learning its formulae.^[10:5]

Not all virtuosic banjo playing is improvised, however. Analysing Scruggs's instrumental pieces such as "Earl's Breakdown", Rockwell found that later performances, by Scruggs himself and by other banjoists, stick very closely to the notes and picking patterns of the original recordings. At those pitches and tempos, there are few practical alternatives for the picking hand. In Rockwell's words, the music "is thus less improvised than it may appear".^[8:3]

Licks and runs

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]

The best-known shared run is the "G run", associated with Lester Flatt, which guitarists use to punctuate the end of a passage.^[4:3] Mitchell describes how a guitarist in Monroe's later band would play a version of it at each return to the G-major chord.^[9] Rockwell notes that in contemporary bluegrass the G run works as an improvisational constraint: guitar soloists are free to explore a wide range of tonal and rhythmic territory, provided they end their solos with a G run.^[8:4]

Learning and coordination without rehearsal

Bluegrass draws on a repertoire known in common 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.^[9:2] 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.^[9:3]

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.^[9:4]

Expanding the solo

From the late 1950s, some players moved beyond copying the founding styles. Banjoist Sonny Osborne of the Osborne Brothers recalled realizing in 1957 that he could no longer simply copy Scruggs. He began to improvise solos, and modelled some on horn or piano solos.^[4:2]

The guitar was a late arrival as a solo instrument. In Monroe's band it had been used for rhythm or for brief runs, and bluegrass had not developed a solo role for it comparable to the mandolin, banjo or fiddle.^[4:3] Writing in 1965, Smith noted that some bands had only recently begun to use the guitar for lead.^[5:5] 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.^[11:1]

From the early 1970s, newgrass bands such as the Newgrass Revival, based in Louisville, Kentucky, let players take extended instrumental solos, as in jazz or rock.^[4:4] Like some progressive bluegrass, newgrass often featured extended jam sections over a simple chord progression or vamp.^[6:3] In New York City in the same period, musicians including Tony Trischka, Andy Statman and Matt Glaser, notably in the band Breakfast Special (1973–1975), took an approach to improvisation heavily influenced by jazz, psychedelic, klezmer and avant-garde music. Krakauer argues that this "improvisatory recklessness" was at odds with the technical precision and smoothness that came to dominate mainstream bluegrass from the 1980s.^[6:1] More recently, some younger musicians, reacting against the precision of players such as Chris Thile, have taken up free improvisation in which technique "is not really the focus".^[6:4]

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] He also argues that instruments influence one another within the ensemble. Crosspicking, a guitar and mandolin technique that picks across three strings in a pattern awkward for a plectrum, mirrors the syncopated three-note groupings of the three-finger banjo.^[3:6] 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.^[9:1]