On Sunday night in the Slosberg Music Center, the Brandeis Improvisation Collective’s fall concert made people tap their feet, nod their heads and laugh to the music.

Brandeis Improv Collective is an undergraduate group that plays completely improvised music. In short, they make it up as they go along. 

The group that performed on Sunday night included fifteen musicians — guitarists, bassists, drummers, pianists, a flutist, a saxophonist and more. The collective is actually a class taught by Professor Thomas Hall (MUS), who introduced the concert and its different acts.

Hall began the event by saying that, “as humans, we are improvisers.” 

He went on to talk about how there’s a process of improvisation that we go through in every aspect of our lives, and this process, though used for different situations, is the same every time. He said that in the collective, they are “using music to explore that process of improvisation.” 

The night started with solos, and the group of musicians on stage grew consecutively bigger every two acts, such that after two solo acts, there were two duets, and so on until there were septets. After the septets, the night ended with all fifteen musicians on stage playing music together. The pieces got steadily more disjointed as the group of musicians grew. The first few pieces, the solos and the duets, hardly sounded improvised but rather sounded like fully formed pieces. The first piece, played on the piano, was beautiful, and the performers of the first duet, two pianists, were so in sync that they made me wonder if the two pianists were reading each other’s minds. 

However, this did not mean that the pieces played by bigger groups were any less enjoyable. In these pieces, it often happened that the musicians looked to one person to start before joining in. Some of the groupings seemed planned, but others seemed to be arbitrarily chosen by Hall. 

One of my favorite groups was the drummer quartet, composed of every drummer in the collective. The drummers quickly started a really good beat and soon had the audience clapping along. In one of the sextets, Hall called up former members of the collective onto the stage to perform as part of the sextet. 

Despite not having their own instruments, they each found something to play, and one student did not play any instrument but rather stomped her boots on the ground and tapped on any surface she could find to add to the beat. This was one of the more lively performances, the old mixing with the new, and everyone really just having fun up there on stage. Hall said after this particular performance that he allows anything to be played within the group, even if it’s not even an instrument. He gave an anecdote of one student who would come and play objects found on the street. 

While some pieces remained disjointed and aimless, others came together and really got into a groove.

 Even the fifteen-person group at the end seemed to really begin to jive as they played. Hall said that normally he doesn’t let the collective perform in groups as big as septets, as they did that night. However, he found that this particular group of students seemed, more than other past groups, to enjoying playing constantly and all together. He said, “If I let them,  they would all just play together for the entire three-hour class period.” 

The concert was fun, full of surprises, laughter and music that ensured nobody on stage or in the audience went home bored.