I was a member of KREation, a loose and ever-shifting collective of musicians gathered and inspired by bandleader/composer/saxophonist Kevin Robinson, a native of Baltimore who has now moved to California. I played keyboard with him live dozens of  times in Baltimore, DC, and New York, and hope to get a chance to join him out West for a few hits, one of these years.

Kevin is a brilliant thinker on musical and creative topics, and just a really beautiful, intuitive composer and improviser. He inspires everyone he works with. Back in 2009, Kevin and I joined guitarist/percussionist Chris Taylor (also Baltimore native) in the recording studio of Maryland Institute College of Art. Composer/musical innovator Erik Spangler (Boom Bap Society) was our recording and mixing engineer.

Some small portion of our session was based on written-down melodic and harmonic material from Kevin, which we rehearsed briefly before recording. The vast majority of our sounds, however, were improvised spontaneously and collectively.

Kevin lives his life and pursues his music with an attitude of "Holy YES" to everything. When preparing us for gigs, he has said things like, "Okay, I have written this melody and it starts in G, but you can play it in whatever key you feel like, or with different rhythms, or just play whatever you want." Sometimes we'll be up on the bandstand at An die Musik in front of fifty listeners, and Kevin will surprise me with an announcement: "And now our pianist, Sandy, will introduce our next piece, which I'm calling Conversation With The Trees." Up until that very moment, I would not have expected to be playing an introduction--nor would I have ever heard that tune title before, because Kevin just made it up five minutes earlier.

The results of such wild experiments are free-form but also surprisingly "organized" on a deep level. That's what happens when you have sensitive musicians--the kind who listen harder than they play--all doing their best to work together.

What you do in such situations is use the vibe of the room, the suggestiveness of the song title, and your own momentary inspirations to create a new spontaneous composition on the keyboard--while trying not to worry about the fifty people listening to you. Truth be told, worry is not the primary emotion that wells up for me in these situations--instead, it's a kind of unexpected bravado. The very fact that there are listeners focused on what you're doing enables you to think more clearly and carefully as you build up brand-new melodies and harmonies, move by move, across the piano keys.

There is a profoundly social aspect to this kind of playing, too. Often times, I've met and shaken hands with a musician for the very first time right on the bandstand before we start, and within half an hour of close listening and responding, it feels as if we've been playing together for years. Once, at a KREation gig in a Harlem club called The Shrine, I found myself sitting at an out-of-tune, beat-up Fender Rhodes "suitcase" piano, with the drummer Shareef Taher positioned behind my back. We'd barely had time to say hello before hustling up to the stage. Even without making eye contact, we quickly established a simpatico rhythmic concept between the piano and the drums, one that made the whole evening a profound and forever memorable pleasure. It's these moments of deep connection and group creativity for which we improvising musicians live.