About two months or so ago I came across, quite by chance, the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and since then I have spent a great deal of time listening to his extensive discography. I have enjoyed his work immensely and reading his Profile on the website of his recording label ECM I noticed the following: ‘As an improvising musician, Jan Garbarek has said that he seeks to make his playing “fit the tone, texture and temperament of the music. It’s about finding a common language”’. Garbarek’s words resonated with me. I have been talking of late about ‘tone-matching’ (George, 2024) in my work but what if I were to start thinking about ‘texture and temperament’, where would that take me and what sense could ‘texture and temperament’ have for me. And of course I was left wondering about the last phrase ‘it’s about finding a common language’. Is this what I do? What connection might the way that I think about my work ‘co-constructing a new way of describing’ have with the concept of ‘common language’?
As these thoughts were ticking over at the back of my mind, and with the word ‘improvising’ moving itself forward, I picked up Bradford Keeney’s (thin) book Improvisational Therapy: A Practical Guide for Creative Clinical Strategies (Keeney, 1991). I have not even glanced at it for many, many years and yet the opening page of chapter 1 fits so well with how I have been thinking about the conversational process is Solution Focused Practice for the last 20 years or so. Keeney writes:
‘imagine psychotherapy being contextualised in an academy of performing arts as a discipline comfortably related to theatre, music, dance, and the rhetorical arts. In this setting, therapists would speak of their craft as professional conversation, strategic rhetoric, or even as a genre of interactional theatre. The training of a therapist would focus on developing communicational artistry. Opportunities would be offered that provide practice in encountering the client’s rhetorical challenges and surprises. The therapist, like an improvisational actor, would strive to be ready to respond resourcefully to any possible situation.
Therapy as art underscores the therapist's performance. Given the unpredictable nature of a client's communication, the therapist's participation in the theatrics of a session becomes an invitation to improvise. In other words, since the therapist never knows exactly what the client will say at any given moment, he or she cannot rely exclusively upon previously designed lines, patter, or scripts. Although some orientations to therapy attempt to shape both the client and therapist into a predetermined form of conversation and story, every particular utterance in a session offers a unique opportunity for improvisation, invention, innovation, or more simply, change.
The most dramatic shift imaginable in the field of psychotherapy is to free it from the tight embrace of medicalism and scientism and connect it to the creative wellsprings of the arts.’ (p 1)
So many of Keeney’s words and phrases fit perfectly with the way that I have been thinking about and writing about our work for a long time, thinking about Solution Focused Practice as a ‘performing art form’, talking about it as a ‘craft’ (George, 2020) and talking in trainings about how we can learn to ‘respond resourcefully to any situation’ from within our model. Perhaps reading Keeney has had more of an influence that I have realised. And of course whilst we may bring to our first meeting with a client a potential default structure, after all who wants to be re-imagining how to do therapy every time we meet a new client yet, as Keeney writes, ‘every particular utterance in a session offers a unique opportunity for improvisation’. Indeed we could go further and suggest that ‘every utterance’ requires us to improvise in our response. People observing Solution Focused Practice will sometimes ‘construct’ the idea of a worker asking the ‘same questions over and over’. And yet we never do this since every client’s answer is different, and the unit that deserves, indeed requires observation is not the question, but the question/answer unit, and of course the next question/answer will be shaped by the client’s last answer to the worker’s last question, and so on, building forward, incorporating the client’s own words, and less obviously their ‘tone’ and maybe ‘texture and temperament’. This is the major challenge for Solution Focused trainers, we are inviting people to learn how to improvise within a framework, and since the ‘therapist never knows exactly what the client will say at any given moment’ we can never know what our next question will be until we have heard the client’s answer to our last question.
Whilst coming across Jan Garbarek might have been the starting point for these reflections equally so might Joel Simon and Lance Taylor’s book Opportunities in Solution-Focused Interviewing (2024) and indeed a question asked me by a current trainee (1), reflecting on the difficulty, when learning the Solution Focused approach, of ‘knowing what to say in the moment . . .what kinds of questions to ask’ and concluding ‘I’m truly trying, and I practice often, but the more I try, the more I realize how subtle and complex this can be’. The more that I think about this trainee’s comments the more optimistic I feel about her Solution Focused future. It is the people who never realise ‘how subtle and complex’ the approach is, who in the end, are more likely to find the approach unproductive.
Finally there is no way of referring to the idea of improvisation without crediting the work of Paul Z. Jackson who has been making this connection over a long period of time.
(1) With thanks to Sunhwa Lee
George, Evan (2020) From ‘Art’ to ‘Craft’ or ‘Art and Craft’ www.brief.org.uk/blog/from-‘art’-to-‘craft’-or-‘art-and-craft’.html 28th June 2020
George, Evan (2024) Tone Matching www.brief.org.uk/blog/‘tone-matching.’.html 25th September 2024
Keeney, Bradford. (1991) Improvisational Therapy: A Practical Guide for Creative Clinical Strategies. New York: Guildford.
Simon Joel and Taylor Lance (2024) Opportunities in Solution-Focused Interviewing: Clients’ Key Words and Therapists’ Responses. London: Routledge
Evan George
London
30 March 2025
