Day One: Workshop Let’s Improvise, Jim ten Boske
This year I subscribed for an extra package called Let’s Improvise, I thought it would be fun to do some more with improvisation. So after the workshop Stage Presentation, I walked to Jim ten Boske’s classroom. The organisation had assigned the participants to groups of two or three people, in this way I became a member of Group Green. When I entered the room, it appeared that the schedule had slightly shifted, Mats, a member of Group Yellow was still there.
Never mind, just a matter of drawing up chairs. The first thing Jim asked us was what we liked to do. Well, that’s the correct start of an improvisation, just knowing what you want to do: choosing a key, a chord progression and a rhythm.
The result was an improvisation based on one chord by three guitarists. It was great fun to find that this simple concept remained interesting for more than ten minutes, which happened to be the moment that Andre -the other member of Group Green- entered the room.
Andre had been participating with a Flamenco workshop, which I consequently had missed by now. Small mistake... but never mind, we went on right away with a nice basic instruction in finger picking.