At the time I thought they conjured up too many past idioms, and lacked the transparency I wanted in group playing. Part of the initial drive towards doing solo concerts was to see if the 'new' material I'd come up with could work on its own. After a few performances I'd learnt a lot about making connections, but had also noticed recognisable pieces beginning to develop, and worried about what this meant for long-term solo work.
Composers can wrap up a piece, send it out into the world, and move on to the next.
Individual improvisers must repeatedly re-create their music at each performance. But, whilst the quality of newness may be hard to pin down, improvisation can only make sense when it is somehow connected to the hope of finding, spontaneously, some music you don't really know about beforehand. Playing 'pieces' is too close to playing 'routines' and a concert is an opportunity for much more - a chance to engage with what Derek Bailey described in his book as a 'search for whatever is endlessly variable'. For a while I came under the spell of John Cage and, whilst there's undoubtedly something refreshing about 'allowing sounds to be themselves', it soon became clear that for improvisation to make sense, sounds must be put to work. It's through solo playing that I've found myself reconsidering some of music's more traditional concerns, like line, pacing and flow - and it seems to be that when you're alone, you really learn the weight of your ingredients.