I can improvise. I can be directing my attention toward motifs; paraphrasing the melody; hitting the chord tones to signal the chord changes; going up and down scales; having one phrase answer another... There are, indeed, wrong notes. They are notes that are not what you heard in your head, or that clash with the harmony. I can improvise using only a certain note value, like only quarter note triplets.
A lot of the improvisation will be dissonant. There are several categories: a note that is fairly dissonant, but actually forms part of the chord, say, a seventh in a major seventh chord. That will sound dissonant to someone not familiar with jazz. Then, an upper extension or altered note, like a sharp 9th. Again, this will be dissonant, but forms part of the jazz language. These are not wrong notes. Wrong notes are outside the harmony of the piece, but outside in an unintentional way (as opposed to being chromatic ornaments).
I find myself playing things that are too harmonically ambiguous, so, for example, any notes sound acceptable if they are part of the diatonic scale of the piece, but I need to emphasize the chord tones more to make the melody sound less random.
The main flaw in my playing is that it doesn't sound jazzy enough. I can improvise, but that does not mean I can improvise well, or in a way that's idiomatically jazzy enough. Even playing the cliches would be better, from that perspective.
Probably the most interesting thing to do is develop motifs. Invent a motif, then play it using different notes (but with the same melodic shape and rhythm). Then vary or expand it.
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"I always had some doubt, for a long time, that this wasn’t the real thing I had come upon but once I discovered in this free thing that I could actually play wrong notes, I knew I had something." (Ornette Coleman, as remembered by Bobby Bradford, who is quoted in Charles Michael Sharp, “Improvisation, Identity and Tradition”)
I love Ornette but I don't play "free." I don't think I've earned it. At most I play slightly outside the changes, but I need to always return to home base, the 3rds and sevenths.
I don’t play “free” either, but I think the point about “wrong notes” even applies to both of us in our small ways: when you hear the “wrong notes”, it means you have a system.
I like this longer version of the quotation from Ornette, because it has the searching quality of his music.
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