Music Improvisation Calisthenics: Nine Sessions Completed for Winter 2026. Now with more John Cleese.

Up Next: a new short 4-week series, Thursday Nights from March 12th to April 2nd.

In January and February, I hosted nine Thursday night MIC (Music Improvisation Calisthenics) sessions all over the Pacific Northwest. Each week, musicians of all levels came together to share in a guided session designed to increase our abilities in Being Musical together. And, in mid-Feb I also flew to LA for a Sunday version.

The final Winter session was last Thursday at Seattle’s iconic London Bridge Studio where many definitive and sacred recordings and performances have occurred over the last few decades.

This final session in our 9-week season was the most musical of the series. I regret not recording it (we could have done this easily with room mics and/or my phone. Sometimes, I make precisely the wrong decision.

And the musicality of this team was, perhaps, a direct reflection of our diverse and iconic footwear:

Towards the completion of the session, I mentioned a best practice that I’ve taken on since I saw a (long) lecture by John Cleese where he described his process of putting in an intentional, extra effort after everyone else in the Python writing crew had gone home for the day.

At the beginning of TOM in 2016, I invented a shorthand for this best practice called “Cleese Release” which is defined as the moment where you might end or stop or give up or move on to whatever is coming next, and then: you pause and decide to intentionally to go further, deeper, longer than you might have otherwise. This practice involves a commitment to notice when you might make a Tiny, but deeper, investment in excellence by keeping going a bit longer than may be comfortable or convenient.

Here is more from John Cleese with a Short that also captures a second principle I bring to each MIC session. This is a principle I also describe as: it is impossible to make a mistake in a MIC session. See more about why this is necessary and true here:

So, based upon the momentum and energy of the Winter series, we’ll continue live MIC sessions for four weeks beginning Thurs March 12, 19, 26 and April 2nd. I’ll continue to use Meetup.com for event tracking, but this time, I’ll also create Facebook events for each session. We’ll also continue to rotate through Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue and Mercer Island locations. Based on the musical success of this most recent series, I hope to see a new and growing flow of musicians who aspire to engage in group Music work where we share tools, techniques, principles and practices designed to energize our potential as collaborators and musicians.

Call to Action: I’d love to see comments or feedback from any of the ~45 musicians who came through the most recent Winter series. Or, if you’re curious about what we do, come please participate. 🙏

Finally, as an example of what can happen when musicians improvise together, here is a song that was improvised by Electric Gauchos in 2014, and this video was released in 2015 capturing that full improvisation:

NOTE: The poetic incantation at the beginning of this improv is our dearest Canadian saint Jane Siberry (used by permission).

* * *