Immerse Blog
Going Deeper With Sarah Arthur’s: “The Art of Improvisation”
by Jake Bouma on September 12th, 2011 -- filed under Story
If you’ve been in youth ministry for longer than a week, you’ve almost certainly been in a situation where something you planned didn’t go quite right. Suddenly, you find yourself with an extra half hour of time to fill, and you improvise an activity or lesson on the spot. I have been in these situations numerous times, and sometimes they have totally flopped, and other times they’ve been tremendously successful. This type of “oh no” improvisation is decidedly what Sarah Arthur is not talking about. For her, improvisation is a theological concept, and it takes practice to become proficient. “We need to school ourselves in the art of improvisation,” she says.
About two paragraphs into the article, I stopped midsentence, put in my headphones and scrolled through iTunes until I landed on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s 2006 album The Carnegie Hall Concert. Jarrett is a living jazz legend who is widely known for playing sold-out concerts consisting entirely of improvised piano compositions. On The Carnegie Hall Concert, for example, the first 10 tracks are titled “Part I,” “Part II,” and so on, because the music itself didn’t exist until Jarrett’s fingers coaxed it out of the piano right then and there, on the fly. I thought it would be particularly fitting to finish out Arthur’s article while Jarrett’s virtuosic display of improvisation graced my ears.
In addition to the music itself, which is almost hypnotic, there is another aspect to the The Carnegie Hall Concert that makes it compelling: the…
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