Music as Adventure
 

     by Wally Shoup
 

     Nine Muses Books, 2011
 

As one who has known Mr. Shoup for many decades now, it is clear to me that the writings in this collection of essays resonate both his uncompromising work on alto sax and the holistic exuberance underlying his deep involvement with free improvisation.  In fact both of these lifelong commitments are reflected throughout this most useful and revealing book.  

In offhanded, conversational writing embodied within a tough-as-nails romanticism, Shoup shells down a demanding yet deeply humane view of free improvisation, rightly presented as a developed skill, a concrete yet intuitive practice of beyond-merely-musical import.  

Urgent, thythmically emphatic and commanding a high emotional thrust-to-weight ratio,"Music as Adventure" is infused with a restless authority with which he delivers body-blows
to many misinterpretations by  which free improvising has often been disregarded and disparaged.

Addressing a wide range of key aspects around this phenomenon, Shoup correctly posits this music-making outside the commercial contexts of our culture, yet he resolutely discounts improvisation as some sort of marginalized sub-genre, or what detractors and dilletantes alike present as "...a series of arbitrarily created sounds which, no matter how interesting or cleverly concocted, never seem to resonate beneath the surface or suggest a deeper sense of purpose."

Rather, he shows how improvisation is "a precise art but an imprecise science...about learning to perceive the felt but unknowable scenario of the moment and developing the technique that precisely gives voice to those feelings, however vague and shifting."

Along the way, he testifies against the jazz purists' "mantle of faux-populism," as well as taking to task various rock and pop scenes, which after flirting superficially with "improv," can often show great confidence in having completely misunderstood what this way of music making is all about.  

In a chapter entitled "The Beats, the Blues and Film Noir," he notes something crucial concerning the world of free improvisers:  "Those on the outside, looking not so much to be included but to proclaim their outsider-ness, are the ones who inspire, who point to valuable truths."

This demanding stance vigorously anchors the book's overarching sensibility  as a strangely un-ironic, non-dualistic, even nuts-and-bolts examination of this music's multi-faceted yet singular importance, simultaneously within and beyond our cultural experience.

There are many more aspects than I'm conveying here to this concise and beautifully illustrated edition - it also presents numerous reproductions of his paintings (which to my eye actually look like his playing sounds). 

In short, though, "Music as Adventure" amounts to a veritable manifesto, and constitutes a major contribution to the literature concerning free improvisation.  

                                                                                                                                      -DJW