On jazz, bicycles, and the art of mischievous friction

There is a particular quality of thinking that happens on a long bicycle ride through a forest. The rhythm of the pedalling, the canopy overhead, the absence of interruption — it creates a space where ideas can unspool at their own pace. Last week, riding through the forest of Rochechouart, I found myself turning over a question I have been turning over for years without ever quite stopping to examine it directly.
What actually is improvisation? And could it be considered spontaneous composition?

The Case for Spontaneous Composition

The framing holds up reasonably well on first inspection. When you improvise, you are making all the same fundamental decisions a composer makes — melodic shape, rhythm, harmonic choice, tension and release, silence. The difference is the timescale. A composer can revise; an improviser commits in real time. But the act of musical decision-making is structurally identical.
There is also the question of what improvisation actually draws on. Nobody improvises from nothing. You draw on internalised vocabulary, patterns, emotional states, the harmonic landscape under you, what the other musicians just played. In a sense, the composition happened over years of practice. The spontaneous moment is more like retrieval and recombination than pure creation from nothing — though that is arguably true of written composition too.
But the framing gets complicated quickly. Composition usually implies some intention toward a fixed, repeatable object — a piece that exists independently of any one performance. Improvisation is inherently ephemeral and relational. It is shaped by the room, the rhythm section, a moment of hesitation from the bassist. That responsiveness is its most distinctive quality, and the word composition does not quite capture it.

Pre-loading the Stance

Thinking about this on the bike, I arrived at a description of my own practice that felt more honest than either composition or conversation.
Sometimes I set out on a tune with an intention. Not a musical intention in the technical sense — not a plan for which scales to use or which substitutions to make. Something more like a dramatic premise. I might think: I am going to clash the hell out of this one. I am going to argue my way through it. That is how I feel today. And then I just play.
What I am doing in that moment is pre-loading a stance. I am not pre-composing notes, I am pre-loading an attitude, an energy, a posture. The music then finds its own way through that filter. Two distinct layers operate simultaneously: the intentional layer, which is the mood or the argument I have chosen to bring; and the spontaneous layer, the actual notes and phrases that emerge in real time but have been given a direction to flow in.
It is a bit like the difference between deciding how you are going to walk into a room versus the actual steps you take. The character is chosen; the choreography just happens.
What strikes me about this is how physical and emotional it is before it is musical. You are not thinking about flattened ninths and rhythmic displacement — you are thinking: I am restless, I want friction. And then years of vocabulary serves that feeling without you having to consciously direct it. At a certain level of musicianship, technique becomes almost transparent. A clear medium through which something pre-verbal gets expressed.

Mischievous Friction

I would say — I do not always want to win the argument. Sometimes I just want to create some mischievous friction. That is actually a more interesting goal than winning, because winning implies a conclusion, a resolution. Friction that is genuinely mischievous stays alive. It does not resolve; it keeps the listener slightly off-balance, slightly unsure whether what just happened was intentional or whether you are about to fall over. That ambiguity is the point.
For this to work, though, you need the right response from around you. If you are there trying to start a musical argument and the band is all peace and love, you are done.
That is where the card up the sleeve comes in — the back-pocket contingency. Not just one pre-loaded attitude but a small repertoire of them. If the argument is not landing, you shift. Instead of clashing head-on, you go quiet and sardonic. You let the peace-and-love wash over you and then drop something slightly unsettling underneath it.
Some tunes hand you more cards than others. Donna Lee, for example — lots of cards, but it is a tight fit shirt. The changes move so fast and so purposefully that there is not much room to lounge around in. And yet that constraint might actually serve the mischief rather than prevent it. When everything around you is that disciplined, even a small deviation stands out sharply. The tightness of the shirt makes every wrinkle visible. The tune becomes your straight man.

The Cyclist in the First Five Minutes

The best co-conspirators for this kind of playing share certain qualities. They have to be at ease and comfortable — because if someone is anxious about their own playing, all their attention is turned inward. They are managing themselves, not listening outward. There is no spare bandwidth for catching a wink across the room.
They have to be confident — and this is separate from ability, which is an important distinction. A highly able player who is insecure can be the most rigid of all. They have the most to protect. Whereas someone with less technical firepower but a settled sense of who they are musically can afford to take risks, to go somewhere unexpected, because they are not worried about being exposed.
And they have to be listeners. Because mischief in music is essentially a signal sent to another person. If they are not listening with that particular alert, open quality, the signal just goes into the air and disappears.
The remarkable thing is that you can often spot all of this before a note is played. Just in how they set up, how they handle their instrument when nobody is officially listening yet. Whether they noodle with genuine curiosity or just run scales to fill the silence. Whether their eyes are open or closed to what is around them.
It is exactly like going for a bicycle ride with someone new. You can tell within the first few minutes whether they know how to ride or not. Not from how fast they go or how fit they look — something in how they sit on the bike, how they handle the first corner, whether they are fighting the machine or simply in it.
What you are reading in both cases is the same thing: confident familiarity. A relationship with something they have absorbed deeply over years. At a certain point it stops being a skill you perform and becomes a way you inhabit something. And the people who have it share one defining quality — they have no need to prove it. The moment you are proving something, you have introduced an audience into your head. You are no longer just doing the thing; you are watching yourself do it and managing how it looks. That internal observer is deadly to real presence.

Back Where We Started

I rode back into the village having gone around the question without quite answering it — which feels about right. The best loops do that. You arrive back at the start and it looks the same, but you are not quite the same for having gone round it.
Improvisation is not spontaneous composition, not exactly. It is something more relational, more alive than that — shaped by the room, the other players, the particular quality of attention in the moment. But at its best, when the stance is pre-loaded and the right co-conspirators are in the room and the tune is handing out cards, it achieves something that written composition works very hard to simulate.
It sounds like someone who has no need to prove anything at all.

Time for a cuppa and a slice of cake!

My jazz tutor Matt Warnock recently flipped a familiar saying on its head. It’s not necessity, he suggested, but boredom that is the mother of invention. His challenge was simple: play over the same thing for long enough that you run out of ideas. And then keep going. That’s where the interesting stuff lives.

I took that idea and sat with a minor blues backing track for just over ten minutes. I started where most of us start — inside the familiar pentatonic boxes, playing what I know, reaching for the phrases that have always been there. Safe ground. Comfortable ground.

But I kept going.

Somewhere around the halfway mark the vocabulary started to dry up. The boxes felt smaller. And rather than stopping — which is what I usually do — I pushed through. By the final few minutes I was playing purely by ear, reaching for outside notes, deliberate dissonance, chromaticism. Stuff I’d call “tangy.” Some of it surprised me. Not all of it was pretty. But it was mine in a way that the earlier, safer playing wasn’t.

The minor blues was just the launchpad.

What strikes me about Matt’s idea is that boredom is usually the signal to stop. We run out of steam, we put the guitar down, we make a cup of tea. But boredom might actually be the threshold — the point where the rehearsed vocabulary is exhausted and something more personal can emerge. The magic isn’t despite the boredom. It’s because of it.

You don’t need to be a jazz guitarist for this to apply. Pick anything — a chord progression, a groove, a single scale — and stay with it longer than feels comfortable. Past the point where you think you have nothing left to say. See what’s on the other side.

I’d love to know how far out you’re willing to go before you pull back.

A Stratocaster for Jazz? I was reading a discussion recently about “beefing up” Stratocaster tone. You see this a lot. Suggestions about hotter pickups, thicker sounds, ways to make a Strat behave a little less like a Strat and a little more like something else.

It makes me smile.Because the more I play mine, the more convinced I am that nothing needs beefing up at all.It’s supposed to sound like that. It’s a Strat.

I play a lot of jazz on a Stratocaster. A pink Paisley one, no less. Which probably breaks expectations before a note is even played.

For many people, jazz guitar still carries a very specific image: big hollow body, dark tone, neck pickup, highs rolled off, one carefully controlled sound maintained all evening. And there’s nothing wrong with that sound. It’s beautiful. It’s part of the history. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we sometimes confuse tradition with necessity. Because when you think about what jazz actually is, the Strat starts to make enormous sense.

Jazz, at its heart, is conversation.
It’s listening.
Reacting.
Leaving space.
Changing direction in response to what someone else just played.

When that’s happening, sound can’t stay fixed. It has to move. One of the reasons I disappear for hours when playing my Strat is that it constantly asks for engagement. I’m always on the volume and tone controls, shifting colour, softening attack, swelling chords, brightening or thinning the sound depending on what I hear around me.

From a warm whisper to something close to a scream — all without changing guitars, pedals, or settings. Just touch and attention.

The clarity of a Strat does something important for jazz harmony too.
Chords don’t blur.
Extensions remain audible.
Inner voices speak.

Instead of becoming a block of sound, harmony keeps breathing. It feels closer to a piano than to the traditional idea of jazz guitar thickness. And rhythmically, the immediacy of the attack makes time feel alive. Small differences in touch suddenly matter. Placement matters. Intent becomes audible. The guitar responds instantly — which means you have to listen instantly.

Historically, the darker jazz guitar sound made perfect sense. Early amplification demanded control and blend. Guitars needed to sit safely inside acoustic ensembles. But those practical limitations are gone. What remains is expectation. And expectation can be stubborn.

The longer I play, the less interested I am in making instruments imitate one another.
A Stratocaster doesn’t need to become an archtop. Its strength is responsiveness, transparency, and movement. Tone becomes part of improvisation itself rather than a fixed identity established before the first tune. From an expressive point of view, that might make it one of the most complete jazz instruments available.

So yes — I play jazz on a pink Paisley Strat. Once the music starts, nobody seems to care what the guitar is supposed to look or sound like. They just listen.

Which, when you think about it, is the whole point.