Borgo Free Jazz in The Classroom

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Free Jazz in the Classroom: An

Ecological Approach to Music Education
David Borgo
Published online: 11 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: David Borgo (2007) Free Jazz in the Classroom: An Ecological Approach to Music
Education, Jazz Perspectives, 1:1, 61-88, DOI: 10.1080/17494060601061030
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Jazz Perspectives
Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 6188
Free Jazz in the Classroom: An

Ecological Approach to Music
Education
David Borgo
Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 10:55 05 March 2015
Abandon Knowledge About Knowledge All Ye Who Enter Here.

Bruno Latour1
Conventional Western educational practice hinges on the notion that knowledgeor

at least knowledge worth havingis primarily conceptual and hence can be
abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. I recently came across a
helpful illustration of this general tendency while watching Monty Python reruns.
The sketch involved a caricature of a British talk show called How to Do It. John
Cleese served as the shows host:
Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynecologist. And this week on
How to Do It were going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an
atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and
make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, heres Jackie to tell you all how
to rid the world of all known diseases.
After Eric Idle solves the global health crisis in a sentence or two, John Cleese explains
how to play the flute: Well here we are. (Picking up a flute.) You blow there and
you move your fingers up and down here. Turning again to the camera, he
concludes the show with a teaser for the next installment:
Well, next week well be showing you how black and white people can live
together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how
to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.2
Certainly no music educatoror cultural studies researcher, for that matter

would subscribe fully to the shows pedagogical orientation. Nevertheless, the
humor works because the viewer realizes that the show presents a gross
exaggeration of the dominant educational philosophy in the West, which
has notoriously underappreciated the physical, psychological, and social
dimensions of the learning experience. But a small revolution is currently
well underway in several different academic circles, involving a conceptual
shift from knowledge as stored artifact to knowledge as constructed
1
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 7.
Monty Pythons Flying Circus, Whickers World (episode 28), recorded on 28 January 1972, first
transmitted on 26 October, 1972 (BBC).
2
ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17494060601061030
62
Free Jazz in the Classroom
capability-in-action.3 From this perspective, what people perceive, how they conceive
of their activity, and what they physically do all develop together. Learning, in other
words, cannot be conceived of simply as transmitting or receiving factual
knowledge, rather it must be viewed as a process that involves becoming a
different person with respect to possibilities for interacting with other people and
the environment. Ultimately, learning is not a matter of what one knows, but who
one becomes. And improvisation, I argue, plays a defining role in this new
paradigm.4
With an intellectual history in what are known as systems or ecological
theories, this emerging pedagogical orientation insists that knowledge can never
be abstracted from the dynamic complexities involved in learning and applying it.5
In other words, knowledge, when viewed from an ecological perspective, is coconstituted by the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs, and
the activity in which the learner is participating. In the technical lingo
increasingly shared by researchers in psychology, education, and cognitive
science, knowledge is embodied, situated, and distributed: embodied in
the sense that mind is not only rendered possible by our bodily sensations
and actions but is in fact coextensive with them; situated in the general sense
that all knowledge is in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it
is developed; and distributed because knowledge as action rather than artifact
exists not simply in the mind of the individual, but rather as something shared
between individuals in a physical and social setting.
Among the various music disciplines, ethnomusicology has been a beacon
for this type of approach for decades, due to its primary focus on ethnographic
studies that emphasize apprenticeship in order to reveal the indivisible
character of learning and practice.6 The jazz community has also traditionally
valued a type of learning that might easily be called embodied, situated,
and distributed. Numerous performers have stressed the full integration of
aural, physical, and intellectual aspects of the music, as well as the notion
that learning and development can only occur within a supportive community.7
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)
founded by Muhal Richard Abrams and others in Chicago, and the Creative
Music Studio (CMS) founded by Karl Berger in Woodstock, New York,
are only two of the better-known examples of this general pedagogical
3
This conceptual shift can be observed in disciplines as diverse as systems theory, ecological psychology,
creativity studies, cognitive science, education, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
4
For a helpful introduction to this pedagogical orientation, see R. Keith Sawyer, Improvised Lessons:
Collaborative Discussion in the Constructivist Classroom, Teaching Education 15, no. 2 (2004): 189
201.
5
For a very readable introduction to systems science, see Ervin Laszlo, The System View of the World: A
Holistic Vision for Our Time (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996).
6
For an ethnomusicological perspective on situated cognition, see Lyle Davidson and Bruce Torff,
Situated Cognition in Music. The World of Music 34, no. 3 (1992): 120139.
7
For a detailed ethnographic account of the process of learning and playing jazz, see Paul Berliner,
Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Jazz Perspectives
63
orientation.8 In the traditional music academy, however, the study of improvisation

has often been shoehorned into conventional pedagogy and curricula or simply not
addressed at all.9
In his book The Wisdom of the Impulse, Tom Nunn laments that [Improvisation]
may be acknowledgedin a way akin to chicken soup as a cure for a cold (it cant
hurt)but it is not taken seriously. It may be presented in some extramusical way,
such as notation, analysis, etc., but as an expression of composition, it goes
unrecognized.10 Even more pessimistically, Jonty Stockdale writes: The ability to
improvise freely is a common skill applied whether in conversation, role-play,
movement, dance, or the playing of games, and yet it is an ability that is seemingly
suppressed through the conventions of music training.11
This lack of innovation within the pedagogy of improvisation partly results from
the fact that our academic approaches to music education have not always adequately
addressed the role that the body and social interactions play in learning and
cognition. Even arguments for music as a different kind of intelligence rarely
propose true alternatives to the educational status quo.12 In an excellent article that
addresses these and other issues, Wayne Bowman worries that:
We find ourselves advocating music study for reasons that fit with prevailing
ideological assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the aims of schooling,
but on which we are ill-equipped to deliver, and that neglect what may be most
distinctive about music: its roots in experience and agency, the bodily and the
social. Our most revered justifications of music education are built upon deeply
flawed notions about mind, cognition, and intelligence.13
In this article, I wish to confront some habits of thought and conventional wisdom in
the pedagogy of jazz and improvised music. Although I will focus considerable
attention on the ways in which freer forms of improvisation can, and should, be
integrated into our music curriculums and pedagogical practices, my broader
8
For more on the A.A.C.M., see George Lewis, Power Stronger than Itself: The Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). For more on the
Creative Music Studios, see Robert Sweet, Music Universe, Music Mind: Revisiting the Creative Music
Studio, Woodstock, New York (Ann Arbor, MI: Arborville Publishing, 1996).
9
Despite this and subsequent generalizations, I am aware that many music educators have developed
innovative pedagogical strategies, but they still tend to be the exception that proves the rule.
10
Tom Nunn, Wisdom of the Impulse: On the Nature of Musical Free Improvisation (San Francisco, CA:
self-published, 1998), 179. In this quote, Nunn is additionally making the broader claim that
improvisation is an expression of composition, and that our strong division between the two is untenable,
a view that I share.
11
Jonty Stockdale, Reading Around Free Improvisation, The Source: Challenging Jazz Criticism 1
(2004): 112.
12
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Although Gardners widely influential theory categorizes multiple types of intelligence, including a
musical one, it still treats the notion of intelligence as the exclusive provenance of an individual. And
though he acknowledges the role that the environment and context can play in the application of
intelligence, he does not highlight the ways in which they can shape its ontological existence.
13
Wayne Bowman, Cognition and the Body: Perspectives from Music Education, in Knowing Bodies,
Moving Minds: Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning, ed. Liora Bresler (Norwell, MA: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2004), 33.
64
arguments, and the theoretical orientation from which they stem, have important
implications for the ways we teach more conventional or straight ahead practices as
well. In addition to my own experiences performing with and coaching improvising
groups, I draw on interviews with celebrated musician/educators Anthony Davis,
Mark Dresser, Lisle Ellis, and Bertram Turetzky, and on emerging and already
established theories in the study of education and cognition. It is my hope that by
scrutinizing our pedagogical orientation and practices, we can produce better
teachers and learners, more useful learning environments, and more responsible and
responsive musical practices.
The Map Is Not the Territory

There
There
There
There
are
are
are
are
no
no
no
no
wrong
wrong
wrong
wrong
intervals if played in succession

chords, only wrong progressions
notes, only wrong connections
tones, only wrong inflections
Eddie Harris14
The score was never meant to imprison the performers imagination.

Larry Soloman15
It dont mean a thing if it aint got that swing.
Duke Ellington16
Although examples of ecological or systems thinking can be found going back

centuries if not millennia, its modern origins are often dated to the first Macy
Conferences held in New York City in 1946, which brought together pioneering
cyberneticists, mathematicians, engineers, and neuroscientists organized by the
dynamic leadership of Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann, and humanities
and social science researchers clustered around Gregory Bateson and Margaret
Mead.17 Many of the central tenets of systems thought explored during these
conferences were adopted from biology, including ideas of feedback and homeostasis, but the then-nascent field of cognitive science eventually organized instead
around a notion of mind that identified cognition with computation, and the brain
as the hardware on which it runs. This view, often called cognitivism, has had a
pronounced impact on how we have conceived of thought and education in the
modern era, but it is gradually being replaced by a view of the mind and
14
Liner notes to Eddie Harris Quartet, There Was a Time (Echo of Harlem), Alfa/Enja R2 79663, 1990,
compact disc.
15
Soloman in Nunn, Wisdom, 180.
16
Duke Ellington and Irving Mills, It Dont Mean a Thing (If It Aint Got That Swing) (New York:
Mills Music, 1932).
17
For an excellent overview of the cybernetics revolution and related issues of embodiment, see
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Jazz Perspectives
65
consciousness that acknowledges the important role that the body, emotions, and
social factors play in how we think.18
Often called embodied or enactive cognition, this view holds that human conceptual,
sensory, and motor processes have coevolved with each other and with their
environment such that they are inextricably linked. Summarizing this position, Fritjof
Capra explains: The human nervous system does not process any information (in the
sense of discrete elements existing ready-made in the outside world, to be picked up by
the cognitive system), but interacts with the environment by continually modulating its
structure.19 Similarly, Francisco Varela and his co-authors in The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience write: Cognition is not the representation of a
pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on
the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs.20 In
short, all knowledge depends on our bodies, our language, and our social history.21
Consequently, researchers with this contemporary orientation insist on biological,
psychological, and cultural dimensions for all human cognition. Referencing the wellknown phrase by semiotician Alfred Korzybski, William Clancey writes: Knowledge is
not a thing or set of descriptions or collection of facts and rules. We model knowledge
by such descriptions. But the map is not the territory.22
Yet improvisation instruction in the music academy has frequently operated under
the notion that conveying the map (to paraphrase Korzybski and Clancey) is all
that music educators are able to offer. In other words, the process of learning what
and how to improvise is conceived of as occurring prior to, and separate from,
actually doing it. Jazz programs also tend to stress individual facility through the
absorption and imitation of pre-existing language and style, such that little time may
be left for, and little emphasis placed on, important matters of self-expression and
collective experimentation.
In his essay on pedagogy for The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, pianist and
musicologist David Ake underscores the ways in which freer approaches to jazz do
not conform to standard conservatory values or the soloist-centered approach of
much jazz education. Far from being a simple matter of collegial disagreement, this
18
In interesting ways, as our day-to-day experience with computers continues to shift away from isolated
desktop machines towards portable and even wearable devices that are continually connected to an
unimaginably large web of information and users, our notions of cognition are also shifting from ideas of
individual-centered information processing towards models that acknowledge the distributed nature of
cognition and the inseparability of our knowledge and actions.
19
Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor
Books, 1996), 68.
20
Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9.
21
For compelling research on the ways in which our thinking and learning is deeply ensconced in
metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980) and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Minds Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
22
William J. Clancey, A Tutorial on Situated Learning, in Proceedings of the International Conference on
Computers and Education (Taiwan), ed. J. Self (Charlottesville, VA: AACE, 1995), 49. See also Alfred
Korzybski, Science and Sanity (Laxeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1948), 58.
66
pedagogical disparity extends well into our institutional policies and structures.
With lessons, assignments, and practice spaces geared towards the development of
individual skills, Ake muses, little if any time or space remains for the
development of the very different musical tools necessary to improvise successful
collective jazz.23 During his argument, Ake asks several tough questions: What
does an aspiring jazz player need to know in order to be considered a good
musician? How does a teacher best go about conveying that information, and how
does one test a students knowledge and understanding of these principles?24 Yet
implicit in these and other similar questions, I suggest, are conceptions of knowledge
and education that must be confronted head on, or we will always remain at the mercy
of the presiding educational philosophy that values abstract intellectual concerns as the
real determinant of educational worth.25 By conceiving of musical knowledge as
individual, abstract, relatively fixed, and unaffected by the activity through which it is
acquired and used, music programs have devalued the experiential, exploratory, and
collective qualities that make for compelling improvisation and, more generally, that
inform the development of musical ears, memory, instincts, sensitivity, and, ultimately,
creativity.
During a recent interview, Bertram Turetzky exclaimed: The academics talk about
scales and this and that strategyand Ive read all the booksbut that is not the way
the masters taught!26 Turetzky, an emeritus professor at the University of California
San Diego (UCSD) who literally wrote the book on the contemporary contrabass,
favors a more embodied approach.27 When working with students, his goal is to
hook up the fingers to the ears. For one exercise, he asks students to sing a passage
from a fixed starting pointat first simply a few notesand then to reproduce the
passage on their instrument. Turetzky finds that even many advanced players cannot
perform this exercise well at first. He remarks: If you cant do it, you are depending
on scales. It is not visceral. It is not integral to your being. It doesnt express anything
except the tricks that you have learned.28
Turetzky is referring to a disjuncture between inscribed and incorporated forms of
knowledge. Many music programs place undue emphasis on the normalized, abstract,
and detached mode of inscription, rather than the more visceral and personal mode
of incorporation. We have all undoubtedly encountered musicians who have
23
David Ake, Learning Jazz, Teaching Jazz, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke
and David Horn (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 268.
24
Ibid., 264.
25
In a relevant study, Jean Lave (Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988) looked at adults of various backgrounds using
arithmetic while grocery shopping. In making purchase decisions, they employed a flexible real-time
arithmetic in order to select better prices per unit weight, continually taking into account the constraints
imposed by the layout of the stores, the capacities of their home refrigerators, and the dietary
requirements of their family members. These skills with situated arithmetic, however, were rarely
reflected in their performance on grade-school math problems.
26
Bertram Turetzky, interview by the author, San Diego, CA, 1 February 2005.
27
Bertram Turetzky, The Contemporary Contrabass (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974).
28
Turetzky, interview by the author.
Jazz Perspectives
67
developed prodigious technique in tandem with their ability to read the most
complex musical figurations yet are loathe to even consider the possibility of playing
music (as expression) without music (as notation) in front of them or previously
memorized.29 Although jazz musicians certainly benefit from the use of musical
inscription as a mnemonic or as an occasional performance aid, to use it as a starting
point and as a continual centerpiece of the learning experience, as many
institutionalized jazz programs do, tends to devalue the embodied and experiential
qualities of improvisation. Far from a simple matter of disposition, if one learns to
play music through the predominant use of inscribed forms of knowledge, making
the necessary connections between ear, mind, and hand to become a fluent and
creative improviser may always remain difficult.
Mark Dresser, the contrabassist with Anthony Braxtons longest performing
quartet and an internationally recognized performer in his own right, was a student
of Turetzky and now that Turetzky has retired, Dresser continues his legacy as a
professor at UCSD. During our interview, Dresser remarked: You find in jazz
schools there are some very skilled people, but the music ends up being variations on
the same theme, because the notation ends up leading the way that everything is
formed.30 Dressers comments underscore the fact that Western notation, when
used to convey aspects of jazz and improvised music, tends to place undue emphasis
on notes, chords, and harmonic progressions since these are most easily represented.
The rhythmic, timbral, expressive, and interactive nuances of the music do not
translate as easily to paper.
Notation has remained central to many programs that teach improvised music not
only for its perceived convenienceit translates well to blackboards and textbooks
and can facilitate complex, hierarchical performances easilybut also because it
allows instructors to believe that they have an objective means with which to
evaluate the progress and understanding of students. Without a doubt, the academic
conventions of individual assessment through written exams and assignments, and
the value placed on inscribed forms of knowledge in general, represent the most
significant hurdles to adopting fully these new educational perspectives and
objectives.31 Altering our approaches to teaching improvisation will also involve
much more than simply rewriting our syllabi, since learningaccording to the new
paradigmis situated in physical and social spaces as well.
Although little known in the West during his lifetime, the work of Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky (18961934) has posthumously provided a common
29
For a detailed treatment of the nineteenth-century disappearance of improvisation from Western

concert music practice see Angeles Sancho-Velasquez, The Legacy of Genius: Improvisation, Romantic
Imagination, and the Western Musical Canon, Ph.D. diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.
30
Mark Dresser, interview by the author, San Diego, CA, 26 January 2005.
31
I have grown fond of the notion of post-literate orality, first forwarded by Walter Ong (Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge, 2002), to describe the current
educational and musical moment in which learners have a base of literacy, but their primary means of
learning have shifted back to oralilty-focused formats and media.
68
theme that runs through much of the new educational paradigm.32 Vygotsky
proposed that activities of the mind, including creativity, cannot be separated from
overt behavior, from the external materials being used, or from the social context in
which the activities occur. For example, many young children are unable to name
what they are drawing until the activity is completed. Their minds produce stimuli
while they interact with the physical materials (e.g., crayon and paper), and they react
to the resulting visual stimuli and to the responses of others, creating a cycle of action
and reaction. Over time, these experiences can form the basis for more abstract
planning and cognitive reasoning about art, but the art in the mind cannot exist
without mediating tools and a foundation of lived, social experience.
In contrast to the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896
1980), whose theories of childhood development tacitly reflected the ideology of
individualism, Vygotsky emphasized a sociocultural approach in which the
intellectual development of children is seen as a function of communities. His
writings take for granted that the personal and the social are not self-contained but
have a shared existence. For instance, children develop language alongside the need to
communicate with others. Vygotsky also proposed that all of the higher mental
processes, including problem solving and consciousness, are of social origin; they
originate as relationships between individuals and are constructed through a subjects
continuing interactions with a social and physical world. Our inner speech and selfawareness that define thought and consciousness emerge after communication; they
are the end product of socialization, not its beginning. According to Vygotsky, the
interpersonal comes before the intrapersonal, and the latter cannot be fully
illuminated without acknowledging the former.
Exploring free jazz in a classroom setting, I argue, provides an opportunity for
instructors to highlight to students, and to explore for themselves, the interpersonal
dimension of improvisation. Yet these more open improvisational practices, and the
more dynamic pedagogical approaches that they require, are still thought by many to
be ill-suited to the music academy. In a panel discussion on free jazz held at the 2000
International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) Conventionone of the few of its
kind in the history of that organizationthree jazz pedagogy experts held a frank
discussion of their experiences exploring freer forms of improvisation in the
academy.33 The panelists included Ed Sarath, a flugelhorn player and head of Jazz and
Contemporary Improvisation Studies at the University of Michigan, Graham Collier,
the former artistic director of the Jazz Course at the Royal Academy of Music in
London, and Allan Chase, a saxophonist and Chair of the Jazz Studies and
Improvisation Department at the New England Conservatory of Music. Chase argued
that educators tend to avoid engaging with freer forms of improvisation in a handson way because: (1) they are unfamiliar with most of it (many had an initial negative
32
See Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Allan Chase, Graham Collier, and Ed Sarath, The Shape of Jazz to Come? (panel discussion at the
International Association of Jazz Educators Convention, 2000), http://www.jazzcontinuum.com/
jc_rtcl1.html (accessed August 20, 2006).
33
Jazz Perspectives
69
experience with the avant-garde and have stayed away ever since); and (2) they are
concerned with how to assess progress, and how to measure results. The first concern
is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy if freer forms of jazz and improvisation are not
allowed a place in the academic classroom. Regarding the second concern, Chase
pointed out that it is equally difficult to assess the progress of composition students,
or to grade an abstract painting, or even to measure the quality of a bebop solo
beyond the point where someone masters playing changes in the basic sense. In all of
these situations, he asserted that there are things you can teach, ways you can
critique a piece of work. There are suggestions you can make and there is a dialog you
can have with the students.34
During the same panel, Ed Sarath described his evolving approach to directing the
Creative Arts Orchestra at the University of Michigan. He recalled that at first he
tried to balance composed parts or sections featuring more traditional soloing with
free interludes in order to frame the riskier parts of performance. But the
students wanted to do more collective free improvising. After some soul searching,
Sarath decided to program entire concerts of completely improvised performance as
well:
Where I used to sit in the audience and be just terrified as to what was going to
happen, and making a list of who I hoped hadnt come to the concert, in recent
years Ive become a little bit more comfortable with this completely improvised
format. And at the December concert, it was just amazing what happened. Its
almost like some external force overtakes the ensemble and guides the
orchestration, creative decisions, formal sections, etc. But theres no middle
ground to this kind of thing. We can extend the boundaries of bad beyond belief!
In the other direction I have to say that when it works it becomes one of the most
profound things I have been involved in. Something takes over the group. Weve all
experienced this in smaller group situations but there are 25 people up there. No
conductor. No format at all and you have to tune in to whatever that force is that is
going to orchestrate the thing, deal with formal proportions, deal with transitions.
Its an amazing thing and its terrifying. It still is.35
Rather than insisting on a prescribed plan and a tightly controlled environment for
learning, instructors adopting this contemporary orientation must focus on creative
ways to facilitate learning in a dynamic context that is shaped and negotiated by all of
the participants. Instead of creating a situation in which there is a predetermined
outcome, instructors must be comfortable presenting unpredictable situations and
exploring open-ended possibilities. Rather than simply imparting problem-solving
skills in the abstract, they must encourage students to develop problem-finding
approaches and create a context in which everyone feels comfortable exploring new
ideas and experimenting together. The notion of teachers as experts and gate
keepers must ultimately give way to the more engaged and interactive role of
mentors or facilitators.
34
35
Ibid.
Ibid.
70
Lisle Ellis, an improvising contrabassist who has performed with avant-garde

legends from Paul Bley to John Zorn, emphasized to me that:
A good teacher is always teaching a lesson that the teacher needs to learn. I work
with students on things that I am interested in and [that] I am trying to discover
myself how to do. It keeps me from going into a rote thing. And also they can see
me make mistakes. I think that is a really good thing to impart to young people: let
them see you fail and let them see you deal with it. And no matter how many times
you fail, you still get up and go back at it.36
Ellis studied at the Creative Music Studios in Woodstock with both Karl Berger and
Cecil Taylor. Although he found each of their pedagogical approaches useful, the
contrast he drew between them offers a possible response to arguments that
reductionism and rigor are one and the same. Berger, a German vibraphonist and
world music pioneer, worked to demystify the music in his classes. He focused
on the basic building blocks of musicrhythm and pitch perceptionthat can help
budding artists to engage with a whole world of music.37 Taylor, on the other hand,
offered little in the way of specific technical advice to his students, preferring instead
to musicify the mystery. By playing with Taylor, Ellis discovered a way of exploring
music through the music itself, without verbal discussion and without stopping to
rehearse in any conventional manner.38 Taylor is well known for his insistence on
teaching his music to fellow musicians by ear, for always bringing something new to
sessions for his musicians to learn, and for his penchant to disregard any of the music
that was prepared ahead of time once the moment of performance arrives, a practice
that has unsettled more than a few of his bandmates. As Ellis puts it: You want to be
an improviser? Lets improvise! Paraphrasing Duke Ellington, Ellis explained: The
music never stops, you just get on board. This is an old idea. Everyone says this is
new music, but this is some kind of ancient thing going on.39
Describing his educational philosophy to me, pianist, composer, and UCSD
professor Anthony Davis stressed that playing with [students] is very important. I
try to drop bombs on them. See what they do with it; stuff that engages them and
challenges them in an immediate way when you play. Thats the best way to do it.40
Daviss pedagogical perspective is an outgrowth of what he learned from his own
mentors, who included such distinguished artists as Jimmy Heath, Wadada Leo
Smith, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Ed Blackwell. Davis finds that in a group
setting people naturally assume different roles, so he consciously tries to make the
students reverse or change these roles: Have someone play up front, and someone
who is more aggressive, have them play a supporting role. For Davis, teaching
36
Lisle Ellis, interview by the author, San Diego, CA, 25 February 2005.
For instance, Bergers system called gamala taki helps musicians to break down complicated
rhythms into patterns of threes (ga-ma-la) and twos (ta-ki).
38
Ellis, interview by the author.The idea of rehearsing is of course derived from the notion of rehearing something, and is anathema to the practice of many improvisers.
39
Ibid.
40
Anthony Davis, interview by the author, San Diego, CA, 2 March 2005.
37
Jazz Perspectives
71
improvisation is an improvisation. I try to respond to the group dynamic, the

direction, what makes them comfortable, what makes them uncomfortable.
Daviss awareness of how social roles play out in the classroom is a tacit
acknowledgment of the situated nature of knowledge and learning. To be clear, the
notion of situated cognition is not simply a recommendation that teaching be
relevant, nor does it refer to the obvious claim that learning always happens in a
location, or the common oversimplification that people learn best by trying
something out. Rather, learning is situated because a persons actions and
understandings are indelibly shaped not only by the physical and social specifics of
a given learning environment, but also by his or her perceived place in a social
process. From this perspective, all musical encountersboth those deemed public
and privateare inherently social, since other listeners are always either present or
imagined.
When practicing alone, for example, other listeners are always within earshot (or
imagined to be so) as sounds leak through walls and rooms, ultimately affecting what
and how one plays. More importantly, our conceptualizations of music are
continually shaped in complex ways by social factors. For instance, as we learn to
play a musical instrument we develop a relationship between our physical actions and
our perception of resulting sounds over time, but those same perceptions and actions
are also shaped within a social matrix in which sounds may be deemed desirable or
not, and actions may be encouraged or not, depending on specific cultural and
individual factors. This may help to explain, although certainly not to excuse, the fact
that in the not-so-distant past many musicians were strongly discouraged, and even
prohibited, from playing jazz while they were pursuing institutional music studies.
The jazz community, too, is not beyond reproach in this regard. Anthony Braxton,
for one, finds it ironic that many of the politically and spiritually aware musicians of
the 1960s could also function as chauvinist[s] and oppressor[s].41 The notion that
all musical practices are profoundly situated in social spaces should ideally serve to
increase our awareness of the racial and cultural dimensions of our music classrooms
and help us to remain ever attentive to sexist attitudes and gender-based power
inequities as well.42
Although some may still dutifully accept the idea that musical structures can be
captured fully in the pages of a score, many, if not most, of the essential elements of
any musical performance are in fact spread across the minds of the individual
41
Braxton in Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics,
and Activists (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 265.
42
For more on these issues, see George Lewis, Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic
Memoir, in Arcana: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 78109, and
Getting to Know Yall: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, Critical
Studies in Improvisation 1, no. 1 (2004): n. p., and Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in
Jazz Studies, Current Musicology 7173 (20012): 375408, and Bordering on Community:
Improvising Women Improvising Women-in-Jazz, in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation,
and Communities in Dialog, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2004), 24467.
72
participants, not simply their music stands. The theory of distributed cognition offers
considerable support for this position and for the intrinsically social nature of
cognition and consciousness. In place of the Cartesian view that envisioned mind
as separate from and dominant over body (I think, therefore I am), the theory of
distributed cognition upholds the embodied view that mind is in the body and the
body is in the mind, and further maintains that mind extends beyond the physical
body. An example may help to clarify this position. Gregory Bateson, a leading figure
at the Macy conferences and an early proponent of systems thinking, frequently made
this point with a Zen-like simplicity: Is a blind mans cane part of him? The
question aimed to spark a mind-shift. Although it may be convenient to conceive of
human boundaries as defined by their epidermal surfaces, in Batesons example the
cane provides essential information to the man about his environment in a way that
makes them, from a systems perspective, inseparable. In order to grasp Batesons
point we must envision a blind man actively engaging with his environment through
his cane as surrogate eyes. A stoic subject who did not move an inch would not
provoke our epiphany that his cane is, in fact, part of his sensorimotor apparatus and
therefore his cognitive being. According to this emerging perspective in cognitive
science, learning and problem solving are best approached as occurring in a
distributed fashion across both physical and social settings.43
With its emphasis on interacting physically with instruments and sound and
interacting socially with other performers and listeners, music may provide one of the
best sites for investigating distributed cognition. During performances, musicians
communicate and coordinate their sounds and intentions in very subtle ways. For
instance, qualities like ensemble timing, phrasing, blend, intonation, and groove, are
all examples of musical interactions and negotiationsin short, cognition
occurring in a distributed fashion.
In mainstream jazz, for instance, group members often balance their riskier
improvised explorations with an awareness that they must also help to secure the
cohesion of the entire ensemble (e.g., by emphasizing specific harmonic or rhythmic
figures or by articulating certain sections of the song form to help lock in the group
when needed). At times, groups may even need to recover collectively from moments
in which the timing or phrasing of a performance got temporarily derailed, all
without making it apparent to an audience.44 Far from simply offering a form of
negative feedback, however, distributed cognition also inspires individuals to play
things that they might not have been able to play alone, a product of positive
feedback. It enables ensembles to impart a specific musical and emotional character
43
For a seminal text on distributed cognition, see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995). Hutchins details the ways in which the cognitive demands of successful
navigation are distributed among the various crewmembers and the tools and physical layout of a ships
bridge.
44
See the detailed analysis of Jaki Byards trio performing Bass-Ment Blues in Ingrid Monson, Sayin
Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15271. For
a related discussion of interactional synchrony in orchestral performance, see R. Keith Sawyer, Group
Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 1768.
Jazz Perspectives
73
to a given performance, a product of the musicians sensitivities and the inherent

complexities of their interactions.
Although distributed cognition undoubtedly plays a role in all group musicking,
freer forms of improvisation simply extend the process most fully into the realm of
musical content; the distributed sense of sonic and social unfolding becomes the
essence of the musical experience, its raison detre.45 Exploring this very notion, Jared
Burrows writes:
A group improvisation is a complex social phenomenon. During a performance,
there is a subtle, web-like interplay of individual psychological needs and
intentions, technical tasks and difficulties associated with playing musical
instruments, awareness of the audience (if the performance is public) and, most
centrally, conscious and unconscious reactions to sound stimuli. Cognitive
distributions in this context occur between musician and instrument, between or
among two or more musicians, and between dialectical relationships among
mediational artifacts, stimulus, response, and action. As each new element is
added, it becomes subsumed in the overall tapestry of aural stimuli, and these
stimuli form the basis for further thought and action. Because all members of the
group both react and contribute to the same set of stimuli, their cognition is linked
in a profound fashion. Once certain sound-actions have been brought into play, the
players construct a kind of group meaning from those actions.46
Many psychological approaches to studying improvised musical creativity have

wrongly separated the mind from the body and individuals from their social and
physical environment.47 Ignoring the embodied, situated, and distibuted nature of
cognition, these studies take what might be called an information-processing
approach to perception. Such studies generally detail how improvisers must extract
and represent features of their sonic surroundings and then diligently work in a
problem-solving manner to create more abstract and complex representations that
ultimately are restructured and reproduced through musical action. It may come as
no surprise that these studies frequently highlight the inherent shortcomings that
insufficient time and unreliable memory can create in improvising situations. Most of
this work ultimately concludes that jazz offers something of an imperfect art, to
borrow Ted Gioias unfortunate phrase.48
45
For more on musicking, see Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
46
Jared Burrows, Musical Archetypes and Collective Consciousness: Cognitive Distribution and Free
Improvisation, Critical Studies in Improvisation 1, no. 1 (2004): n. p.
47
For psychological perspectives on improvisation, see Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Freedom and
Constraint in Creativity, in The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, ed. Robert
J. Sternberg (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 202219, John Sloboda, The
Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985), and
Jeff Pressing, Psychological Contraints on Improvisational Expertise and Communication, in In the
Course of Performance, ed. Bruno Nettl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4769.
48
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections of Jazz and Modern Culture (Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press, 1988). Although sympathetic and sensitive to the aesthetics of improvised music,
Gioias treatment is still beholden to many conventional notions of knowledge and beauty.
74
In his recent book, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of

Musical Meaning, Eric Clarke emphasizes several significant problems with this
information-processing model of perception. His argument is worth quoting at
length:
First, it relies very heavily on the idea of mental representations, both as a final state
that the system achieves, and as intermediary stages along the way. Rather than
making use of the structure that is already out there in the environment, the
outside world is needlessly and endlessly internalized and duplicated (literally represented). Second, the standard information-processing account tends to be
disembodied and abstract. Perception is treated as a kind of disinterested
contemplation, with no connection to actionwhich bears little relationship to the
essentially exploratory and orienting function of perception in the life of an
organism. And finally, perception is characterized as working primarily from the
bottom up (despite the incorporation of top-down processes), with more
complex levels constructed from the outputs of lower-level, more primitive
processes. Direct experience suggests that this is wrong: if you hear a burst of music
from someones radio, for instance, it is more likely that you will be able to say
what style of music it is (opera, hip-hop, Country and Western) than to identify
specific pitch intervals, or its key, meter, and instrumentation. In other words,
people [including musicians] seem to be aware of supposedly high-level features
[meaning broader features, not better ones] much more directly and
immediately than the lower-level features that a standard information-processing
account suggests they need to process first.49
In contrast to the information-processing account, an ecological approach

emphasizes the structure already inherent in the environment and views perception
as a type of resonating or tuning to environmental information.50 In other
words, perception need not involve representing and computing objective knowledge
about the world out of a chaotic inflow of sensations since the environment is already
highly structured and humans, their organs of perception, and the way in which the
brain orients them have all evolved such that the whole system of input and output
already resonates to this external information.
The process of resonating to ones environment, according to Clarke, is the result
of long-term adaptation, via a tangled web of biological and cultural evolution, and
the more immediate personal/social process of perceptual learning. For instance, the
human auditory system has evolved in specific ways (e.g., the logarithmic frequency
distribution demonstrated over much of the basilar membrane) that favor speech and
other forms of auditory communication.51 Human beings have also, in Clarkes
words, exploited natural opportunities for music making, including the acoustical
characteristics of existing materials and the action-possibilities of the human body,
and they have adapted themselves to those opportunities through tool making of one
49
Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1516.
50
A seminal work in the field of ecological psychology and a primary source for Clarkes argument is J. J.
Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979).
51
Clarke, Ways of Listening, 21.
Jazz Perspectives
75
sort or anotherfrom drilled bones, through catgut and wooden boxes to notation
systems, voltage-controlled oscillators and iPods.52 More immediately, individuals
continually engage in perceptual learning, which, according to Clarkes ecological
perspective, involves a process of progressive differentiation in which perceivers
become increasingly sensitive to distinctions within the stimulus information that
were always there but previously undetected.53 Clarke repeatedly stresses that this
process of resonating with ones environment should not be thought of as
passive, since our perception-action coordination is essentially exploratory. We
continually seek out sources of stimulation in order to learn more about the
environment.
Recent work in cognitive science supports this ecological perspective by
demonstrating empirically that many cognitive tasks are greatly simplified by our
propensities to: (1) anticipate experiences and perceptions (only the differences from
expectation need to be processed); (2) use information already in the world (so that
mental representations are often not required); and (3) distribute the demands of
real-world cognition among several individuals.54
To make this ecological perspective more tangible, imagine that you are craving a
glass of milk. You go to the refrigerator hoping that there is enough left in the carton
to quench your thirst. How do you gauge the remaining quantity of milk? Many
people will grab the carton and gently shake it up and down to determine how full it
is. Ultimately, this is not a measurement of its mass (a property of the object itself),
nor of its weight (a property of the relation between the object and gravity), but
rather of its heft (the perceived resistance of an object in motion), a measurement
that can only be made relative to an organisms perception-action coordination. To
slightly caricature this situation, an information-processing approach imagines that
we calculate the amount of remaining milk based on extracting abstract information
about the weight of the carton and the velocity of our shaking motions and
combining these with our previously stored mental representations about the mass of
milk. An ecological approach focuses instead on the perceptual learning that occurs
through our embodied history of interactions with lifting objects in general, and
liquid-filled containers in particular.
For an example in the sonic domain, imagine that you just heard the sound of
leaves rustling and sticks breaking behind you. An information processing perspective
imagines that you picked up the sounds from your environment in an objective
fashion and that you are now cognitively processing them by calculating the shape,
mass, density, and texture of the sounding objects, as well as of the object or objects
52
Ibid., 2122.
Ibid., 22.
54
See Varela, et al., The Embodied Mind, and Hutchins, Cognition. Neuroscientific research also supports
this ecological perspective by demonstrating the ways in which perception is intimately connected with
action. For more on this topic, see Vijay Iyer, Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive
Microtiming in African-American Music, Music Perception 19, no. 3 (2002): 385. The brains ability to
dramatically adapt to changes in its structure or the environmentreferred to as its plasticityis also
increasingly being recognized as a fundamental and defining feature of its function.
53
76
that provoked the disturbance, since all of these factors and more (e.g., the
atmospheric conditions of the surrounding air or any obstructions between you and
the sounding objects, etc.) have an effect on the resulting sounds and their
perception. An ecological perspective on this event, however, acknowledges that the
sounds emitted are directly related to the physical properties of the objects and spaces
involved, but humans (and many other organisms) do not have to do complex
processing to decode this information. In fact, as a result of resonating to our
environment our initial (and often most profound) response to any acoustic
disturbance, including music, tends to be of a more emotional or physical nature. For
example, your primary response to the situation described above would most likely
be to feel fear or to be startled. And for evidence of the ecological aspects of musical
meaning, witness the inseparability of music and dance in many cultures around the
world, as well as in many corners of our own culture.
Conventional jazz education, in my opinion, appears stuck in an informationprocessing mode. It frequently proceeds with the assumption that students must
first master the ability to abstract lower-level features such as intervals, chords,
and basic rhythmic structures before they can contend with global features such
as melodic contours, harmonic tendencies, complex rhythms, or expressive
gestures. According to this logic, only after the pyramid of processing has
been completed, should students expect to achieve the less talked about (and
rather more nebulous) goal of improvising, to have conscious or unconscious
experiences of a truly musical kind. This conventional approach does offer a clearly
structured route from simple to complex properties (about which I will say more
later). However, if as Clarke suggests, people are aware of so-called high-level
features of music more directly and immediately than the low-level features
stressed by information-processing approaches to perception, then we may wish to
encourage our young musicians and budding improvisers to engage with their
musical environment in ways that resonate more immediately with these high-level
features as well.
In Derek Baileys important book, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music,
English drummer John Stevens described how he would try to create a situation with
students in which they did not rely on him to set the improvisation up. Everyone had
to respect the playing space and upon arrival be prepared to immediately start
playing with purpose and interacting with whomever was already present. Describing
Stevenss instructional philosophy, Bailey writes: The aim of teaching is usually to
show people how to do something. What Stevens aims at, it seems to me, is to instill
in the people he works with enough confidence to try and attempt what they want to
do before they know how to do it.55
Freer approaches to improvisation tend to deemphasize the musical dimensions
that are most easily represented by notationquantized pitches and metered
rhythmsin favor of subtle temporal, timbral, and expressive concerns. In this more
55
Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1992),
121.
Jazz Perspectives
77
open environment, students can explore the high-level aspects of musical gesture,
interaction, and form in ways that may help them to avoid always reducing music to
its component parts, and ultimately may benefit their ongoing development as artists.
Even in more traditional musical settings, the information-processing approach
tends to ignore the ways in which musical qualities are always heard in context. In
tonal music, for instance, intervals and chords are not simply heard in the abstract;
rather, they are subject to tendencies established through historical conventions and
they are always heard based on what has already occurred and what we anticipate
might happen next. The notion that each chord of a standard jazz song maps in some
near isomorphic fashion to a specific scale, a pedagogical approach perhaps most
associated with the publications of Jamey Aebersold, also ignores this ecological
approach to musical experience.56 For example, a blues in the key of F is
better thought of in that key throughout, with changing emphasis, than as
changing key and scale each time a new chord arrives. Similarly, if students are asked
to conform to the ii7-V7-I progressions within a Tin Pan Alley tune but are unaware
of their relationship to one another and to the tunes underlying key center(s), they
will most likely produce rigid and disjointed improvisations as they focus their
attention exclusively on moment-to-moment note choices rather than on melodic
contour, rhythmic development, or large-scale harmonic, gestural, and formal
considerations. It is worth noting as well, that for many of our most esteemed jazz
improvisers who specialize(d) in playing Tin Pan Alley song forms, ii7-V7-I
progressions were nearly ubiquitous in the popular music that infused their
childhood and young adult years, a type of immersion that, according to an
ecological perspective, plays an immeasurable role in how one hears and interacts
with ones musical surroundings.
Perceptual learning, according to the ecological perspective sketched out by Clarke,
proceeds in passive and directed ways (although passive is a bit misleading
since activity is always involved).57 A considerable amount of musical learning, from
our earliest years onward, occurs through unsupervised investigation. For instance, a
child discovers the loudness and pitch contours of a xylophone through more-orless unregulated experiments. During this seemingly undirected activity a
profound process of self-tuning is occurring; the child is picking up environmental
information through a cycle of action and perception. This exploratory orientation
towards ones environment, and the way in which learning occurs through a
feedback cycle of action and perception, differs little from how mature musicians
hone their skills. Directed perceptual learning, in Clarkes formulation, describes a
situation in which others model a behavior, either through demonstration or
by offering verbal instruction or emotional support in ways that encourage the
learner to try out certain actions or to pay attention to specific aspects of the resulting
sounds.
56
Jamey Aebersold Jazz, Inc., P.O. Box 1244, New Albany, IN 47151-1244, U.S.A. (www.jazzbooks.
com).
57
Clarke, Ways of Listening, 2224.
78
Many of our conventional approaches to music education already exploit these

aspects of perceptual learning. Ear training courses, for instance, are explicitly
designed to assist students in improving their skills at differentiating aspects of the
sound environment that were always present but previously undetected. Instructors
encourage students in directed ways to seek out the quality of the sound being
scrutinized, and the students gain greater awareness of music theory through a cycle
of perception/action, in which they explore how their actions (e.g., sing the middle
note) and perceptions (through repeated and concentrated listening) combine to
help them consolidate new perceptual awareness/ability. Private instruction, handson workshop settings, and the coaching of ensembles all provide additional
opportunities in a standard music curriculum for instructors to mentor students in
directed ways.58
In my opinion, we only err when we place the cart of music theory before the horse
of musical experienceor, more accurately, when we conceptualize them as entirely
distinct from one another. According to an ecological view, ones ability to hear and
therefore use any theoretical construct (e.g., specific scales, chords, rhythms,
intervals, etc.) will always depend on that individuals perceptual capacities and
experiences. From a pedagogical vantage point, we cannot presume that simply
knowing about aspects of music theory will in any way assist students in becoming
better musicians. We should also avoid presuming that by dictating which music
theories are important, we are helping them to engage most fully with their own
musical horizons. Our theoretical abstractions of music are in some ways analogous
to the mass and weight of our milk cartoni.e., information that is not terribly
useful when one has a pressing thirst.59
I am suggesting here a middle way in which the conventional categories of
music theory (e.g., intervals, scales, chords, etc.) are viewed neither as out
there (i.e., independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities) nor in
here (i.e., independent of our surrounding biological and cultural world).
According to an ecological theory of music, perception involves neither recovery
nor projection of external musical constructs; rather, it involves the constant
orienting of an organism to its environment through a cycle of perception/
action. From this perspective, encouraging improvisation, broadly speaking, would
seem to be a critical component of not only a musical education, but of any
education.
58
This approach might also be described using current educational terminology as scaffolding.
Vygotskys notion of a zone of proximal development (Mind in Society) and Jean Lave and Etienne
Wengers idea of legitimate peripheral participation (Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991) are other ways in which educators talk of the
importance of apprenticeship in learning.
59
I do not want to deny here the important ways in which theoretical abstractions allow for abstract
manipulations of their own. For a cogent critique of too strong a reading of situated cognition, see Carl
Bereiter, Situated Cognition and How to Overcome It, in Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic, and
Psychological Perspectives, ed. D. Kirshner and J. A. Whitson (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Publishers, 1997),
281300.
Jazz Perspectives
79
According to this emerging pedagogical paradigm, it is impossible to separate the

learner, the material to be learned, and the context in which learning occurs. These
new theories also seek to displace the conventional notion that direct causal
influences from either genes, environment, or culture make individuals intelligent
with the more systemic view in which individuals, environments, and socio-cultural
relationships can all be transformed through intelligent transactions. As the
psychologists Sasha Barab and Jonathan Plucker have recently suggested, a learners
ultimate understanding of any object, issue, concept, process, or practice, as well as
her ability to act competently with respect to using these, can be attributed to, and is
distributed across, the physical, temporal, and spatial occurrences through which her
competencies have emerged.60 Barab and Plucker also propose replacing our
standard notion of talent with the idea of talented transactions. According to
this insightful conceptual shift, such talented transactions involve a set of
functional relations distributed across person and context, and through which the
person-in-situation appears knowledgeably skillful.61 This move has a special
resonance for music education, because it downplays a notion of talent as a
specialized endowment of a chosen few, and replaces this entrenched view with
talented transactions that are within the reach of all learners.62
To embrace this new pedagogical perspective does not involve throwing out all of
the methods and techniques that educators have found useful in the past. The
theories of embodied, situated, and distributed cognition acknowledge the value of
descriptive models of knowledge, but insist that these models alone are incapable of
capturing the full flexibility of how perception, action, and memory are related.
Human conceptualization has properties relating to physical and social coordination
that cannot be captured by decontextualized models. As William Clancey explains,
knowledge is a capacity to behave adaptively within an environment; it cannot be
reduced to (or replaced by) representations of behavior or the environment.63
Although we commonly talk about information and knowledge as things, they are
in fact relationships. Both depend for their existence on being perceived by living
creatures in ways that ensure their dynamic and polysemic nature. In her book, How
We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles questions the emerging postmodern
ideology in which the bodys materiality has been subsumed, and at times replaced,
by the logical or semiotic structures that it encodes. To put this more simply, Hayles
is concerned with how information lost its body. She suggests that work in both
60
Sasha Barab and Jonathan Plucker, Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, and Talent
Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning, Educational Psychologist 37,
no. 3 (2002): 170. A related concept here is J. J. Gibsons notion of environmental affordances (The
Theory of Affordances, in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. R. E.
Shaw and J. Bransford, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977), 6782.
61
Ibid., 174.
62
For an example of an ethnomusicological study that highlights the social dimensions of competence
and talent, see Benjamin Brinner, Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of
Musical Competence and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
63
William Clancey, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.
80
the humanities and the physical sciences has reduced the body to either its play of
discourse systems (e.g., Foucault), or to that which can be encoded into a computer
(Hans Moravec, et al.). Hayles reminds us though that even if one is successful in
reducing some area of embodied knowledge to analytical categories and explicit
procedures, one has in the process changed the kind of knowledge it is, for the fluid,
contextual interconnections that define the open horizons of embodied interactions
would have solidified into discrete entities and sequential instructions.64 The map, it
seems, is not the territory.
Harnessing Complexity
How, then, can these practices be nurtured, particularly within the rather serious and
sedate halls of the music academy? According to Allan Chase, the success of
introducing freer forms of collective improvisation in the classroom depends on the
attitude projected by the instructor and on how (s)he frames the creative moment.
During the IAJE panel discussion mentioned earlier, Chase advised instructors not to
be apologetic, not to say Hang in there with me, because its going to be weird.
Instead, Chase suggested that
Its very important to center yourself and say, Were going to create a beautiful
work of art and present it that way to the students. Or: Were going to go
somewhere weve never gone before. Lets do it. Lets listen to each other and be
sensitive and play like an ensemble and heres a new idea of how to do that. Give a
structure, a way to guide it, a way to end it, so it doesnt go on for the rest of the
day. Then talk about it a little bit and do it again. Just like rehearsing any other
music.65
Several writers have made a compelling distinction between a problem-solving and

a problem-finding approach to art. Artists adopting problem-solving techniques begin
with a relatively detailed plan and work to accomplish it successfully. Those
employing a problem-finding approach, by contrast, search for interesting problems
as the work unfolds in an improvisatory manner. Problem-finding approaches are
especially important when improvising with a group in more open settings, since it is
often impossible to determine the meaning of an action until other performers have
responded to it and each performer may have a rather different interpretation of what
is going on and where the performance might be going at any given time. According
to creativity researcher Keith Sawyer, the key question about intersubjectivity in
group creativity is not how performers come to share identical representations, but
rather, how a coherent interaction can proceed even when they do not.66 According
to Sawyer, this interactive creativity is possible because individuals shape a
64
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 202.

Chase, et al., The Shape of Jazz to Come? Chases comment does raise certain thorny issues about
the difficulty, or even desirability, of arriving at a consensus regarding what constitutes a beautiful work
of art. And, as noted earlier, the idea of rehearsing, literally to re-hear something, is anathema to the
practice of many improvisers.
66
Sawyer, Group Creativity, 9.
65
Jazz Perspectives
81
performance on both denotative and metapragmatic levels; they simultaneously enact

the details of a performance and they negotiate their interactions together. Even if a
singular meaning to a given performance will always remain elusive, participants can
still shape the ways in which their various interactions unfold.
In the opinion of Anthony Davis, many beginning jazz improvisers are stuck in a
problem-solving mode: They have been taught right and wrongthese are the
notes, these are the chords, these are the arpeggios that work on a given chord. This
chord happens on the fifth bar [in a blues].67 Through extensive listening,
practicing, and, most importantly, playing with musicians who are more experienced,
Davis finds that young jazz players can move from a dependence on articulating the
form to using the form, realizing that [the tune structure] is the beginning of
something and you have to create something else. They have to do more than just
keep time, Davis continues, they have to articulate time. Even as students become
more proficient, Davis reminds them that, you have to get beyond your mannerisms
to really come up with a musical idea as opposed to a catalog of what you do.68
In more open improvising settings, Davis stresses that students must learn the
difference between listening and following: In order to listen, you dont necessarily
follow, you respond. You try to construct something that coexists or works well with
something elsenot necessarily this tail-wagging-the-dog thing where you just follow
someone. For Davis, Listening is knowing what someone is doing and using it in a
constructive way, as opposed to mimicry [following], just trying to demonstrate that
you are quote-unquote listening. The very notion that everything could be heard,
processed, and immediately responded to during complex moments of improvised
music is, by itself, far too facile. Trombonist/composer/scholar George Lewis
describes a type of multi-dominance in improvised music by which individuals
articulate their own perspectives yet remain aware of the group dynamic, ensuring
that others are able to do so as well.69
Although the notion of music as a conceptual abstraction may be a mainstay of
modernist discourseone that has been challenged recently by many scholars
improvisers seem to understand the inseparability of art and experience on an
intuitive level.70 Mark Dresser described his working process to me as a cycle of
moving between recording his improvising (either alone or in a group setting), and
then analyzing those moments that strike him as interesting or filled with potential
for future improvisations. This allows him to capture what he intuitively does and
affords him a process of rigorously looking at ones instrumental sounds, ones
vocabulary, in a way that you could make a lexicon out of it, try to measure it, much
67
Davis, interview by the author.

Ibid.
69
George Lewis, Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager, Leonardo Music
Journal 10 (2000): 3339.
70
For a compelling argument against the autonomy of music and the resultant work concept, see
Lydia Goehr, Werktreue: Confirmation and Challenge in Contemporary Movements, in The Imaginary
Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,
1992), 243286.
68
82
in the way you would look at parameters of electronic music.71 Dresser stresses,
however, that it is the process of personal involvement, using ones analytical
abilities to analyze ones intuition or ones hearing, that is most important.72
In his course titled Sound and Time, Dresser asks his students to undergo a selfreflexive process: to create a personal lexicon of extended techniques, sounds, and
approaches. As one assignment, he asks them to make a short transcription of a
recording of ambient sounds, perhaps thirty seconds captured in the field. He then
instructs them to create a time line and to locate and describe the sounds they are
hearing. The point of the exercise, Dresser explains, is to investigate how you listen
and how you organize how you hear. The students are then asked to use their
transcriptions as the foundation for a new composition, one tailored to the specific
instruments and, more importantly, for the specific musicians in the class. The
compositions are to be designed as vehicles for structured group improvisation and
are meant to make use of the personal vocabularies of each of the other class
members. In this way, the assignment affords a feedback cycle between the acoustic
environment, each individuals perception of that environment, and the combined
groups technical abilities and creativity. Drummer Gerry Hemingway, who took over
Dressers class at the New School in New York City, has adopted this same strategy
but also asks the students first to improvise in the style of their environmental
recordingsboth as individuals and in groupsbefore committing them to paper.
Dresser now recommends this practice to his students as well. For him, the bottom
line is musicianship. The ability to perceive pitch and time can never be too fine. The
more we teach our musicians to develop ears and skills, the better equipped they will
be to work in an ever-changing situation.
There is an inherent danger, however, if we maintain a pedagogic focus on the
individual as the primary locus for knowledge and learning, as has been the
educational norm in the past. Only if ensemble music is conceived of as the simple
addition of parts can skills be taught to individuals in isolation and summed together
for performance. If music is in fact a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,
then the skills necessary to perform/improvise cannot be developed in isolation;
rather, these skills must be honed in a distributed fashion with other musicians and
listeners. Dresser commented to me on the importance of performing in front of an
audience: I believe in the magic of performance to bring out peoples best thing, best
qualities. Ive seen that happen time and time again. All of a sudden at the
performance people transcend the rehearsal process because there is that dynamic
with an audience.73
Certain exercises employed by improvising actors may be useful for improvising
musicians as well.74 For instance, dramatist Keith Johnstone believes that humans
are too skilled in suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to
71
Dresser, interview by the author.

Ibid.
73
Ibid.
74
For more on the ideas discussed in this paragraph, see Sawyer, Group Creativity.
72
Jazz Perspectives
83
reverse this skill and he creates very gifted improvisers. Bad improvisers block action,
often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.75 Instead of
denying or rejecting what has been previously introduced into the dramatic frame,
improvising actors are taught that they should accept the actions/words of others as
dramatic offers and, in turn, add something to the dramatic frame (i.e., present a
complimentary offer, or revoice an existing offer). The inherent challenge is to
avoid circumscribing or over-directing the group flow. This does not, however,
preclude the possibility of swiftly changing dramatic or musical directions, as the case
may be. In most instances, care should be taken to do this in a way that keeps
previous developments available for future moments of reference or expansion.
Improvising actors call this practice shelving. Of course, it can be a tricky
proposition to evaluate exactly when revoicing or shelving the offers of others
has been successful. The inherent complexity, polyphony, and polysemy of music can
make this even more challenging. At heart, however, these exercises in improvised
theaterand similar ones adopted by musiciansare designed to improve ones
ability to listen and remember, so that the ongoing group development will be
stimulated rather than curtailed.
Bertram Turetzky described to me several strategies he employs when improvising
with others:
One way when I play free music, I try not to think of anything. I respond or I
initiate. And whatever my intuitions tell me, I go with them. Other times in free
music, I play with people perhaps I dont know. And I say, well, the last one started
soft and slow and got faster and then went back. So all of a sudden I start
banging things and doing all kinds of stuff. For some people, I think you have to
be very rational. And you perhaps have to have an idea of where you think it could
go, and be the quarterback.
Turetzky acknowledged, however, that establishing a proper group rapport is often

difficult: It can be a problem if someone has a big ego and wants to make everything
compositional. When he perceives that the group flow is in jeopardy, he often
adopts a third strategy: If there are three of four people, maybe Ill stop a little bit
and let them see what they want to do. If there is a mess, let them sort it out. Let them
start something and maybe I can support them.
Compositional schemes can help to organize improvised music, either prior to, or
in the moment of, performance, but deciding how or how much to structure
performances can be tricky, and at times contentious. John Zorns Cobra is one of the
best-known compositions for free improvisation, although his own description of
it as a game piece is perhaps more fitting. In making a distinction between his work
and conventional notions of composition, Zorn remarked:
In my case, when you talk about my work, my scores exist for improvisers. There
are no sounds written out. It doesnt exist on a time line where you move from one
75
Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theater (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 95. For a
related treatment regarding jazz improvisation, see Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery: Liberating the
Master Musician Within (New Albany, IN: Jamey Aebersold Jazz, 1996).
84
point to the next. My pieces are written as a series of roles, structures, relationships
among players, different roles that the players can take to get different events in the
music to happen. And my concern as a composer is only dealing in the abstract
with these roles like the roles of a sports game like football or basketball. You have
the roles, then you pick the players to play the game and they do it. And the game is
different according to who is playing, [and] how well they are able to play.76
Other strategies for structuring group improvisations in performance include the

Soundpainting system, devised by Walter Thompson, and Conduction, an approach
pioneered and championed by Butch Morris.77 Both involve their own language of
conducted signs and gestures that can organize and inspire groups of musicians, as
well as facilitate multi- or inter-media projects.
With their attentions already engaged in complex ways during performance, others
worry that highly involved schemes for structuring improvisation can hinder rather
than assist the natural development of the music. For instance, performer/scholar
Tom Nunn writes:
When improvisation plans are complicatedno matter how clear or well explained
they might bethe attention of the improviser is constantly divided between the
plan and the musical moment, having to remember, or look at a score, a graphic, or
even a conductor. What often happens is that both the plan and the music suffer
from this divided attention.78
During our discussion, Mark Dresser acknowledged that: Composition is often

about control. You have to build [improvisation] in. Ive built pieces that have been
little prisons, too. Youre looking at something really specific. But he added that
Its a trip to find the balance. You try to find combinations where you have real
focus and condensation, and points of real expansion. For me, it is all about being a
complete musician. All of those things are interesting. At different points in the
evening I try to have all of those things. Its funny, though, when you get in the
composers head its really hard to let go of trying to control it or to create this kind
of balance.79
Even compositional strategies that have the sole intent of facilitating group
improvisation during performance can backfire. In referring to Butch Morriss
extensive system of conducted gestures designed to help organize improvised
performances, Dresser commented: Ive seen the Conduction thing be a disaster
with people who just dont like to be controlled. Without pre-conceived strategies,
however, there is an ever-present danger that improvised music will fail on its own.
This danger may also increase with the size of the group. Philip Alperson has
observed that as the number of designing intelligences increases, the greater is the
76
Zorn in John Corbett, Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation, in Jazz Among
the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 233.
77
For more on Soundpainting, see http://soundpainting.com/. For more on Conduction, see http://
www.conduction.us/butchmorris.html.
78
Nunn, Wisdom, 162.
79
Jazz Perspectives
85
difficulty in coordinating all the parts; the twin dangers of cacophony and opacity
lurk around the corner.80
This makes those moments when group improvisation is deemed successful all the
more powerful. Lisle Ellis confided to me that he felt that a lot of improvised music
was not very good music. But man, when it hits, its extraordinary! Thats what Ive
spent my life doingwaiting for those moments when it really lines upto find a
way to have some consistency in it. Some days I think I really know how to do that
and other days I think I dont have a clue. In a telling aside that highlights the
almost paradoxical qualities of harnessing creativity, Ellis playfully remarked, Ive
got to write more stuff down! Ive got to write less stuff down!81
It can be particularly challenging when discussing creativity to avoid thinking in
terms of simple dichotomies while at the same time remaining leery of equally facile
truisms. For instance, viewing improvisation and composition as somehow
antithetical ignores the ways in which they both involve creativity at the shortest and
longest timescales. Improvisers draw on a lifetime of practice and experience while
they perform in the moment, and composers must heed their moments of
inspiration even as they record a document intended to be realized at a much later
date. Yet simply equating the two ignores the very different set of skills, experiences,
and expectations on which they rely. Referencing his time spent as a young man in
classes with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM school, George Lewis writes:
Improvisation and composition were discussed as two necessary and interacting
parts of the total music-making experience, rather than essentialized as utterly
different, diametrically opposed creative processes, or hierarchized with one
discipline framed as being more important than the other.82 Toward the end of
our talk together, Mark Dresser recounted a telling moment during his first tour with
Anthony Braxtons quartet that also resonates with this issue:
The only time that Braxton criticized the quartet, he said, Well, you guys are
playing the music correctly, but youre just playing it correctly. The criticism was
[that] you are being too dutiful; youre not taking a chance. That was the day that
the format of the music actually changed, from being a solo-based music to an
ensemble music. All of a sudden, the nature of the music became different. That
moment articulated when the group came into its own.83
In contemporary science literature, a distinction is often made between complicated

systems and complex ones. Complicated systems tend to involve a top-down model of
organization that requires a strict hierarchy and the unerring execution of many
sequential operations (e.g., an assembly line). Modern concert music in the West has
arguably become an impressive showcase for complicated systems, at least in part
because the division of labor in the modern orchestra, along with the organizational
80
Philip Alperson, On Musical Improvisation, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 1 (1984):
22.
81
Ellis, interview by the author.
82
Lewis, Teaching, 86.
83
86
tool of music notation, allows a single individual (the composer) to dictate many
aspects (though certainly not all) of a musical performance.84 Complex systems, by
contrast, tend to involve bottom-up or self-organizing dynamics that rely on
extensive communication throughout a network of highly interconnected parts (e.g.,
the Internet and the World Wide Web).85
The dynamics of complex systems are extremely hard to predict, but not entirely
random. They can exhibit regularities, but these regularities are difficult to describe
briefly and impossible to describe over time with absolute precision. In short,
complex systems can produce emergent behaviors; they offer the possibility for
surprise.86 It seems particularly apt that jazz music, and its improvisational progeny,
has famously been described as the sound of surprise.87 Similar to what we are now
learning about the dynamics of complex systems, jazz musicians must strike an
uneasy and ever-changing balance between the exploration of new ideas and the
exploitation of strategies, devices, and practices that have already been integrated into
the system. They seek persistent disequilibrium, by avoiding constancy, but also
restless change. By conflating the role of performer and composer, downplaying the
adherence to well-established instrumental roles in the ensemble, and frequently
dispensing with most if not all notions of hierarchy in performance, free jazz may
offer an especially appropriate and fruitful avenue for exploring the dynamics of
complex systems.
Two of the hottest current topics for organizational design are jazz music and the
science of complexity. Both domains emphasize adaptation, perpetual novelty, the
value of variety and experimentation, and the potential of decentralized and
overlapping authority in ways that are increasingly being viewed as beneficial for
economic and political discourse. Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen see in the
move from the industrial revolution to the information revolution a powerful shift
from emphasizing discipline in organizations to emphasizing their flexible, adaptive,
and dispersed nature.88 And Karl Weick, in a special issue of the journal Organization
Science devoted to exploring the jazz metaphor, finds that the musics emphasis on
84
This description is most applicable to the compositional approach frequently described as
modernism. Many post-modern composers have explored alternate methods of notating or
organizing music that add both complexity and uncertainty to performances.
85
For more on complexity, see M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of
Chaos and Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). For more on the science of networks, see
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks (New York: Perseus, 2002), and Duncan
Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
86
For a compelling futurist account of the ongoing switch from an engineering to a co-evolutionary
perspective across several disciplines, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social
Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Perseus Books, 1995).
87
Whitney Balliett, The Sound of Surprise (New York: Dutton, 1959). In an intriguing meeting of
metaphors, John L. Casti described the new paradigm of complexity research as the science of surprise
(Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise, New York: Harper
Collins, 1994). For an intriguing application of the psychology of expectation to music studies, see David
Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
88
Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, Harnesing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific
Frontier (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Jazz Perspectives
87
pitting acquired skills and pre-composed materials against unanticipated ideas or

unprogrammed opportunities, options, or hazards can offset conventional organizational tendencies towards control, formalization, and routine.89 In a response to the
heavy reliance by journal contributors on the idiomatic models of swing and bebop as
the source of their jazz metaphors, Michael Zack outlined ways in which free jazz
might propel discourse even further into the realm of emergent, spontaneous, and
mutually constructed organizational structures.90
By fostering more open forms of improvisation in our jazz classrooms, and by
acknowledging the embodied, situated, and distributed aspects of learning in our
institutions, we may be able to provide effective and efficient ways to handle complex
organizational problems, to improve communication outside of traditional
structures, and to inject local knowledge into the systemall qualities that are
increasingly be viewed as desirable in the modern academy. Perhaps in a way similar
to democracy, which along with jazz music has been a powerful symbol of liberation
and resistance to oppression on a global scale, improvising music teaches us to value
not only cooperation, but also compromise and change. In politics, as in music, a
notion of the common good is bound to mean different things to different
individuals and groups, such that the democratic experience is one of not getting
everything you want. In a similar way, the value of improvising music does not lie in
the outcome of a single performance. Instead, this value emerges over time through
continued musical and social interactions. The act of improvising music together
does not necessarily produce optimal outcomes, but the commitment to improvise
music together does.
Improvisation in general, and its more open forms in particular, has suffered in the
academy for at least two broad reasons. Many instructors still hold the view that
improvisation is purely intuitive, therefore it either does not require instruction, or it
simply cannot be taught. According to this argument, improvisers are best left to
develop on their own, since they wont benefit from, and might even be harmed by,
a formal music education. A different, though no less damaging view, imagines
that all student improvisers are blank slates onto which must be poured the
amassed total of jazz theory and tradition, an approach that the reader should, by
now, recognize as both impossible and fundamentally misguided (especially if our
goal is to produce creative artists rather than musicians skilled at regurgitation).
In this article, I have suggested that a pedagogical approach that views musical
creativity from an ecological perspective can help to overcome the tendency to
separate musical materials (the tools and theory of music) from musical
behaviors (the application of those materials in context). Broadly speaking, these
new theories represent a pedagogical commitment to develop more useful learning
environments, as well as a theoretical commitment to avoid the philosophical stance
89
Karl Weick, Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis, Organization Science 9, no. 5
(1998): 543555.
90
Michael Zack, Jazz Improvisation and Organizing: Once More from the Top, Organizational Science
11, no.2 (2000): 227234.
88
of dualism: to conceptualize knowing and doing, knower and known, mind and
body, intelligence and skill, learned and acquired, content and context, and subjective
and objective, as interrelated and inherently inseparable aspects of a complex whole.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors, the two anonymous readers, Andy Fry, David Ake,
and Suzi Borgo for their invaluable assistance. Although the term free jazz is not
accepted by all, or even most, of the musics practitioners, I have retained it here
simply for its familiarity to many jazz educators and historians. The notion that this
music is deserving of more attention in the academy can be illustrated by the simple
fact that, despite its nearly fifty years of development in both the United States and
abroad, it is often still described in terms of what it doesnt havewhat it has been
freed from, rather than in terms of what it offersvery different, yet no less
valuable, musical approaches and aestethics.
Abstract
A pronounced shift is occurring in fields concerned with contemporary education,
psychology, and cognition, such that learning cannot simply be conceived of as
transmitting and receiving factual information. When viewed from an ecological
perspective, all knowledge is co-instituted in which the learner is participating: it is
embodied, situated, and distributed. Yet conventional jazz pedagogy frequently treats
musical knowledge as individual, abstract, relatively fixed, and unaffected by the
activity through which it is acquired and used to the detriment of more experiential,
exploratory, and collective approaches to improvisation. Drawing on interviews with
celebrated improvisers and pedagogues, this article confronts the conventional
wisdom of jazz pedagogy and argues for more responsible and responsive educational
practices.

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Free Jazz in the Classroom: An

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Free Jazz in the Classroom: An

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Abandon Knowledge About Knowledge All Ye Who Enter Here.

Conventional Western educational practice hinges on the notion that knowledgeor

Certainly no music educatoror cultural studies researcher, for that matter

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

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orientation.8 In the traditional music academy, however, the study of improvisation

Free Jazz in the Classroom

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The Map Is Not the Territory

intervals if played in succession

The score was never meant to imprison the performers imagination.

Although examples of ecological or systems thinking can be found going back

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

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For a detailed treatment of the nineteenth-century disappearance of improvisation from Western

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

Lisle Ellis, an improvising contrabassist who has performed with avant-garde

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improvisation is an improvisation. I try to respond to the group dynamic, the

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

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to a given performance, a product of the musicians sensitivities and the inherent

Many psychological approaches to studying improvised musical creativity have

Free Jazz in the Classroom

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In his recent book, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of

In contrast to the information-processing account, an ecological approach

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

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Free Jazz in the Classroom

Many of our conventional approaches to music education already exploit these

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According to this emerging pedagogical paradigm, it is impossible to separate the

Free Jazz in the Classroom

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Several writers have made a compelling distinction between a problem-solving and

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 202.

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performance on both denotative and metapragmatic levels; they simultaneously enact

Davis, interview by the author.