Musical Improv 2: Genres, Spectacle and Game

Get ready to take your improvised song-making to the next level by incorporating genres and styles, adding a degree of spectacle, and uncovering the Game of Song.

In Musical Improv 2, we build off the skills we learned in level 1, each week applying them to different genres or styles like rock, blues, country, folk, love ballads and freestyle rap. We’ll study the different tropes, musical qualities and lyrical choices of each genre/style and get practice improvising complete songs using those elements. We’ll also discover some genre-focused short-form musical improv games, including an EDM-themed madrigal; a Beastie Boys-inspired rap battle and a boy band/girl band musical line game.

Throughout Musical Improv 2, we’ll start integrating elements of spectacle into our work-–elevating our songs beyond the lyrics and melody and incorporating things like harmonies, back-up singing and dancing, more complex rhymes, dance breaks and stage pictures.

And we’ll start exploring the concept of Game of Song—discovering patterns that both give us lyrical focus and make our songs funnier and richer.

Students will leave this class with several new skills including:

How to improvise songs in various popular music genres and styles;
How to improvise a song with a 12-bar blues progression;
How to spontaneously create 1-3-5 harmonies;
How to create seamless improvised dance moves with dance triangles;
How to use character and confidence to get into a freestyle rap flow;
How to identify the Game of Song and play it with purpose.

This class culminates with a show–an improvised music festival in which students will get the chance to show off the skills they’ve learned by staging spontaneous songs in various genres and styles based on audience suggestions.

Requirements:

All students enrolling in this class should have completed Musical Improv 1 at All Out Comedy, as we will be working with specific skills and concepts from that course that are not commonly taught at other theaters in the Bay Area.

If you haven’t completed Musical Improv 1 at All Out Comedy and are interested in this course, you’ll need to send us an email to be considered—Do not register for this class unless you’ve received approval.

The Instructor: Jed Levine

Jed is an All Out Comedy instructor and mainstage cast member with over a decade of experience as a musical improviser, coach and teacher. You can find him performing improvised musicals twice a month with the team he co-created and coaches, Knockoff Broadway. He also coaches several independent musical improv teams and the All Out Comedy musical improv house team RiOt: An Improvised Rock Opera.

Jed is a graduate of the Second City Musical Improv Conservatory in Chicago and is an alumni of the critically-acclaimed musical improv company Baby Wants Candy. In the Bay Area, Jed has been a guest player for improvised musicals at BATS Improv and teaches musical improv at Leela in San Francisco where he coaches the musical improv P.I.E. team there. Jed is the founder of Bay Area Musical Improv, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to creating opportunities for local musical improvisers, and a co-founder of the Bay Area Musical Improv Festival.

The Musical Director: Jared Hauser

Jared has spent the past 10 years in Seattle, fronting several local rock bands as singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Blending his love of late-60s psychedelia with mid-70s jangle-rock, Jared has graced stages around the Northwest and beyond. Recently, Jared relocated to California, setting up his home base in the east bay. Jared’s instruments include: guitar, piano, mandolin, lap steel, sitar, melodica, autoharp, and many more. As a rule of thumb, if it has strings and frets Jared can probably jam on it.

Dates: Thursdays, 7:00pm-9:30pm, March 6-April 24

Requirements: Musical Improv 1 at All Out Comedy Theater

Location: All Out Comedy Theater, 2550 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland CA 94612

Registration: $364