SOME SECRETS piano improvs by Richard Isen

Description

I’ve got a new recording that I made over the last month or so and wanted to share with you. The zip archive contains high quality mp3 files and the CD insert in PDF form.

These are all improvs- just me and the piano and not knowing what’s going to happen when I sit down at my piano. I would try to find a tiny musical idea and then a certain kind of mood or feeling and then just play – trying to follow the flow state.

I did some editing afterwards and changed the order but these are fairly unadulterated. I do tend to approach improv more like a jazz musician even though I don’t think of myself as a jazz musician. But it’s my training to get interested in inventive chord progressions and improvise a melodic line over the progression.

I called it “Some Secrets” because I was thinking about typology (Myers Briggs and CJ Jung) expert I know who told me as an INFP (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving), I mostly lived in a world of secret and complex feeling that the introverted part would have me believe that these moods or feeling would seem impossible to explain. On the other hand, I would also use it as a basis to make some kind of art that would express it even though I might not want to share whatever I made. The Achilles heel would be that criticism would be very difficult for me and would cause me to retreat.

While I think there’s some truth in all that, I managed to get over the criticism part because it’s necessary. We all have to learn to toughen up in order to put anything out in the world. There are 11 secrets (trax) in all.