Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz

Towards a Theory of Collaboration
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-3-540-92194-3
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 141 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 407 g

Reihe: Computational Music Science

Let’s try to play the music and not the background. Ornette Coleman, liner notes of the LP “Free Jazz” [20] WhenIbegantocreateacourseonfreejazz,theriskofsuchanenterprise was immediately apparent: I knew that Cecil Taylor had failed to teach such a matter, and that for other, more academic instructors, the topic was still a sort of outlandish adventure. To be clear, we are not talking about tea- ing improvisation here—a di?erent, and also problematic, matter—rather, we wish to create a scholarly discourse about free jazz as a cultural achievement, and follow its genealogy from the American jazz tradition through its various outbranchings,suchastheEuropeanandJapanesejazzconceptionsandint- pretations. We also wish to discuss some of the underlying mechanisms that are extant in free improvisation, things that could be called technical aspects. Such a discourse bears the ?avor of a contradicto in adjecto:Teachingthe unteachable, the very negation of rules, above all those posited by white jazz theorists, and talking about the making of sounds without aiming at so-called factual results and all those intellectual sedimentations: is this not a suicidal topic? My own endeavors as a free jazz pianist have informed and advanced my conviction that this art has never been theorized in a satisfactory way, not even by Ekkehard Jost in his unequaled, phenomenologically precise p- neering book “Free Jazz” [57].

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mazzola, Guerino

Cherlin, Paul B.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Jazz
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musiktheorie, Musikästhetik, Kompositionslehre

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Getting off Ground.- What Is Free Jazz?.- Jazz in Transition.- The Landscape of Free Jazz.- Out of this World.- The Art of Collaboration.- Collaborative Spaces in Free Jazz.- Which Collaboratories?.- The Innards of Time.- Gestural Creativity.- Gestures: From Philosophy to Thought Experiments.- Geometry of Gestures.- The Escher Theorem and Gestural Creativity in Free Jazz.- What Group Flow Generates.- What Is Flow?.- The Symbolic Axis of Distributed Identity.- Epilogue.- From Pre-to Postproduction: The Infinite Listening.- Global Strategies for Free Jazz.- The Future of Free Jazz.