Recent Trends in the Study of Musical Improvisation:

Training the Interactive Musical Mind

Gabriel Solis
University of Illinois
Presented to the Japanese Association for the Study of Musical Improvisation
September 22-23, 2012

I. INTRODUCTION

The study of musical improvisation, once marginal, has come into its own in the last

decade, and has the potential to be among the most important areas of new research in coming

years. The Japanese Association for the Study of Musical Improvisation is unusual in

establishing an organization expressly dedicated to the study, but both the American

Musicological Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology have “special interest groups”

dedicated to improvisation, and the Society for American Music has made improvisation one of

its two conference seminar themes in 2013. The research group for improvisation at the

University of Guelph established the biennial online journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation,

now in its seventh volume, and a search for books and articles in English dealing in one way or

another with musical improvisation returns hundreds of items, nearly all published in this

millennium.

It would be impossible now to say, as Bruno Nettl did when he took up the subject in his

seminal Musical Quarterly article (1974), that the study of improvisation is largely defined by

the figure of Ernst Ferrand, nor, as he again did in the 1998 volume, In the Course of

Performance, that improvisation is “an art neglected in scholarship” (1). In certain ways, Nettl’s

own 1974 article has taken the place of Ferrand as the canonical starting point for new studies,

and we can reasonably say improvisation is rich in scholarship. On the other hand, in two

important ways we may find ourselves in a largely analogous position to that described by Nettl

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in 1998. First, the field is still dominated by two central writers: Nettl, himself, whose proposal

that improvisation and composition are part of a single continuum has been foundational; and

Ingrid Monson, whose analysis of interaction in jazz has defined the phenomenological study of

improvisation for the last decade-and-a-half. Second, by far the most numerous studies of

improvisation are bounded by specific genres or traditions, with jazz representing the majority.

Music Education also provides a source of recent research, with a mix of studies looking at

practical steps for implementing improvisation study into the (American) classroom, and more

theoretical studies addressing improvisation’s role in learning and creativity. There are very few

comparative studies of improvised music traditions, but to the extent that there are more general,

non-genre-bound studies of improvisation as such, they tend to come from the area of music

psychology, cognition and perception studies. Yet as we shall see, jazz is the principle exemplar

in these studies as well.

This paper will look briefly at current research in each of these areas, with an eye toward

establishing exemplary emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. I will then

introduce three critical areas for new research drawn from my current projects—largely based in

jazz, but not limited by genre in their application, as I see it. These are: updating theories of the

relationship between improvisation and composition; pushing into new areas in the study of

interaction; and moving from a “pedagogy” model of improvisation education to one based on

lifelong teaching and learning.

The problem of defining terms needs some attention now, before moving on, because

much of what I do in the rest of the paper hinges on it. A fundamental problem that faces

scholarship in musical improvisation is determining what, exactly, we mean by the term

“improvisation,” and in relationship to what other term or terms we define it. A common, and

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relatively simple definition can be found peppered throughout Nettl’s writing, and codified in his

entry for the Harvard Dictionary of Music, “The creation of music in the course of performance”

(Nettl 1986: 386; quoted in Nettl 1998: 10). Simple definitions of improvisation may seem

innocuous, but as Laudan Nooshin has written about at length, in their implications they are

inevitably problematic (2003). I propose the following for the moment, however: in many

musical traditions where this has been studied the terms “improvisation” and “composition” are

currently used by practitioners and commentators (and at times listeners); moreover, in all of the

work I am about to survey the authors use the terms, though often with caveats. Therefore, in

discussing their work I will retain “composition” to mean creation of invariant musical structures

prior to performance, and “improvisation” to mean creation of variable musical utterances in the

course of performance. However, as I move into the second part of the paper, with proposals for

new research, I will argue that the issues of variability and invariability, structures and

utterances, and temporal occurrence (before vs. during performance) have to be uncoupled, so

that we can account for any combination of these three continua.

II. CANONICAL GENRES IN MUSIC HISTORY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

As I have said, in historical musicology and ethnomusicology the study of improvisation

continues largely to be bound to its role in a set of genres or traditions. Depending on how one

might enumerate these, they can be thought of as the five (or perhaps more) classical music

traditions that have, or had, contexts in which improvisation, as defined above, is recognized,

and occupies a position of value and importance to musicians and audiences. These traditions

are: Jazz and Avant Garde improvised music; Western Classical music (before roughly 1850);

North and South Indian classical traditions; Arabic, Turkish, and Iranian classical traditions; and

to a less extensive degree, Indonesian gamelan traditions. The fact that Jazz and avant garde

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improvisation makes up the largest single area of research, at least in English. This derives from

the prominence of the music in the U.S. and European universities, as much as anything.

Nevertheless, improvisation in Indian music has been a topic of interest for Western musicians

since at least the 1960s, leading to the consistent production of scholarship in the area, and the

prominence of the early music movement in Europe and the U.S. from at least the 1980s has led

to a fair number of studies unearthing the improvisatory practices of European classical

musicians from earlier periods. In the wake of Nettl’s work in Iran, Racy’s in the Arabic Middle

East, and Sutton’s in Java the subject of improvisation has become increasingly prominent in

studies of those classical traditions.

Recent studies of jazz and avant garde improvised music have been extensively

concerned with extending Ingrid Monson’s work on interactivity, responding to her theory of

group performance in Saying Something (1996). Travis Jackson’s book from 2012, Blowin’ the

Blues Away is a major entry in this literature, with a focus on the ways interaction can be seen

from the small scale of moment-to-moment improvised performance to the larger scale of players

networks and industry structures that made up the New York jazz scene in the late-1990s.

Jackson’s insight into the recording studio as a distinct context for playing improvised music is

particularly valuable, inasmuch as studio recordings continue to make up the principle “data set”

for jazz scholarship (2012: 159-87).

Research dealing with interaction in historical, mainstream jazz performance have

multiplied in the past decade, with major studies by Ben Givan (2003; 2006; 2007; 2009), David

Ake (2002; 2010), and Patrick Burke (2006; 2008). Historians have been perhaps less

committed to the interactivity and intermusicality tropes (with Tom Perchard (2011) going so far

as to argue against its importance), in part because their studies have largely dealt with

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recordings by musicians who can no longer be consulted about the creative process in their work.

Givan’s writing is exemplary. In his article on “Bessie’s Blues,” from the John Coltrane Quartet

album, Crescent from 1964, Givan analyses McCoy Tyner’s two-chorus solo in terms of Robert

Farris Thompson’s concept of “apart playing,” which he sees as a “meta-principle underlying

several…categories” of African diasporic music (2007: 258). “Apartness” is useful because it

fills a gap in the concept of interaction: improvised music requires not just unity or connection,

but also space and differentiation. Apart playing “involves a tension between individual

autonomy and collectivity,” a dynamic that ties musical form to social processes within the

performing ensemble and in the culture at large (258). The most interesting observation in the

article, which could be tested further is a description of the psychological group process involved

in playing jazz. At the moment of Tyner’s most harmonically adventurous playing, the band

shows exceptional rhythmic tightness. Givan proposes that this amounts to a principle of

improvisation: greater musical “apartness” requires a proportionally enhanced level of psycho-

social “togetherness” (274-75).

George E. Lewis (1996), David Borgo (2006; 2007), Paul Steinbeck (2008), Pauline

Oliveros (2004), and David Rothenberg (2002) have all written as scholar-performers using

phenomenological models to discuss interactivity in free improvisation, with a focus on

understanding the larger social meaning of the musical style as well as its formal principles.

Rothenberg’s work is interesting because of the range of interactivity he has made central to his

music. His projects have commonly involved a broad “eco-collaboration,” including the creation

of music that incorporates recordings of bird song, whale song, and other animal noises. In live

performance he has worked convincingly, interactively—with amplified insects. His book,

Sudden Music, describes an experience of “improvisation, in music, life, and nature,” that could

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be described as “fractal.” In an infinitely complex world, musical improvisation may take the

form, he suggests, of “a confluence of sudden happenings, where the order we discover emerges

as the result of chance” (2002: 2). Borgo offers a more normatively academic study of the same

kind of music, but still one that builds on a vision of massive interactivity, using the idea of

“swarm intelligence” (SI) as a model for decentralized, intelligent systems. SI, he suggests, is a

particularly useful tool for exploring not only analyses of free improvised music, but for teaching

such music. Four simple principles govern working SI networks: positive feedback loops;

negative feedback loops; the influx of random, accidental information; and “the notion that

individuals and the group as a whole benefit from multiple interactions and perspectives” (2006:

6). By observing these four principles, creative musicians collaboratively, interactively make

music that is “organized in complex ways without a composer or conductor” (5). His theory is,

he argues, applicable beyond free improvisation as a genre, inasmuch as it provides a way of

seeing cultural activity more broadly. The style networks that characterize one or another

improvised performance are themselves nodes within other networks—here the theory is

reminiscent of Jackson’s writing. Improvised music becomes a microcosm of the many,

networked improvisations that make up a community, an industry, society, and ultimately the

world at large (10). There is a utopian idealism common to much writing on avant garde

improvised music, and Borgo’s is no exception. Ultimately he sees free improvisation and SI

interpretations of it as not only a metaphor for, but a way of facilitating a better social order, in

which we are, “better prepared to survive and flourish in our increasingly interconnected, and

therefore interdependent world (21).

Scholarship in improvisation in historical Western classical music is largely tied to

performance, and while useful, is not especially interesting, and in the interest of space I will not

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discuss it in detail. Much of it amounts to guides to reviving knowledge about how to interpret

Baroque and Classical period scores, which were originally written with more or less extensive

ex tempore ornamentation. Part of the problem with research into other modes of improvisation

in the European past, such as the art of preluding at the keyboard, or making divisions on a

ground bass, is that the evidence, beyond generalizations, is quite limited. Exceptions, such as

studies by William Kinderman, Nicholas Temperley, and Robert Hatten in my volume, co-edited

with Bruno Nettl, Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society (2009), use the evidence

of music composed in styles intended to mimic improvisation, or sketches of music known to

have been composed through an improvisatory practice.

A notable figure mediating local and Western traditions of scholarship in the Middle East

is Ali Jihad Racy, whose career as a performer of maqam has been perhaps even more widely

regarded than his highly influential work as a scholar. Racy’s interest in improvisation stems in

part from his studies with Nettl, and consequently similar concerns arise in their scholarship. In a

set of book chapters and articles (2000, 2003, 2009) he has articulated the notion that

improvisation in Arabic music, finding its apotheosis in the taqsim genre, represents in a

microcosm the primary aesthetic goals of Arabic culture. “Recreating the musical system and

giving it concrete existence through practice,” he says, the improvising Arabic musician, “is

recognized as a prime conveyor of tarab, or musical ecstasy” (2000: 310). Other writers on

Arabic and Turkish maqam/makam-based musics have taken improvisation for granted to some

degree. If, as Racy says, improvisation is integral to the musical system at large, then its

presence may reasonably be normalized in Middle Eastern music scholarship. Scott Marcus

(1992), Dahlia Cohen and Ruth Katz (2006), and Mondher Ayari and Stephen McAdams (2003)

have all used the term “improvisation” to write about the performance of this music, but they

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have discussed techniques of improvisation only incidentally. Rather, this body of work has been

principally concerned with understanding how mode functions, practically, and in perception and

cognition. In this regard, their work actually remains consistent with older, local traditions of

scholarship on music in the Middle East. I note that there is some research into the activity of

musical improvisation in Iran by Masato Tani (2005a; 2005b; 2007), but because it is in

Japanese, I have not had the opportunity to review it.

Laudan Nooshin’s article, “Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge and Power:

the Case of Iranian Classical Music” goes further in articulating a move away not only from

close discussion of techniques of improvisation, but away from using the term “improvisation” to

describe the performance of the modal classical musics of the Middle East (2003). Her argument

rests on the idea that the term “improvisation” and the various associations it carries was

introduced into the region long after its classical music traditions had developed (244). While

local musicians have incorporated knowledge of the term over time, it may still not adequately

describe the creative process in these musics, particularly because of its opposition with the term

“composition” (246, 265ff.).

The practice of musical improvisation has been studied in somewhat more detail in

Indian music in the recent past, with attention to Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. This, I

believe, is a result of the music’s importance to improvising musicians—mostly jazz and rock

musicians—internationally (cf. Napier 2006). The star status of a figure like Ravi Shankar raised

awareness and generated interest among European and American musicians, and in fact a fair

number of studies specifically look at the connections between jazz and Indian improvisation

(e.g. Blume 2003; Clements 2008; Farrell 1998). Notably, the Journal of the Indian

Musicological Society featured a special issue on improvisation in 2007, but in fact only two of

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the seven articles (most of which were by Western scholars) dealt specifically with Indian

traditions (van Hulzen 2007; Martinez 2007). The rest dealt with jazz, Western classical music

and so forth. A number of shorter “lectures” also published in the same volume, by Indian

musicians themselves, dealt with improvisation in Indian traditions (Atre 2007; Parikh 2007;

Ravikiran 2007). The concerns of all three of these “lectures” are in line with a series of studies

into the nature and techniques of musical creation in the act of performance in various Indian

genres by Western scholars appearing throughout the last decade (Napier 2006; Widdess 2011;

Widdess and Nooshin 2006; Zadeh 2012). The crux of all of this research, by scholars and

musicians, is that the binary opposition between music that is fixed and conceived before

performance, and music that is variable and conceived in the act of performance is inadequate to

explain Indian music genres as diverse as khayal, alapana, and thumri. I shall return to this point

shortly. Ultimately, Widdess and Zadeh each point to the idea of a dialectic of “schema” and

instantiation—a dialectic that is clearly related to Nettl’s theory from 1974—as a better way of

understanding how the music works (Widdess 2011: 194, 206-07; Zadeh 2012: 3-4).

The question of improvisation in Indonesian gamelan traditions—whether it exists at all

—is vexed, with major American scholars taking quite distinct positions. Unlike the modal

musics from across the West and South Asian regions, in which invariant musical content may

form only a small percentage of any given performance, in Indonesian gamelan styles if

improvisation occurs it is quite limited. Where scope for improvisation exists, it is often in only a

few parts within an otherwise fixed orchestral texture. R. Anderson Sutton’s article on Javanese

gamelan in the volume In the Course of Performance ultimately takes the position that

improvisation (in the limited sense of making decisions in the moment of performance) is

possible in the tradition, but not necessary. While “Javanese musicians and listeners enjoy the

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element of flexibility…there is a strong aversion…to major musical risk-taking and to bold

originality” (1998: 87). He concludes that Javanese musicians occasionally improvise, but

“Javanese music is not improvisatory” (87). In a study of the somewhat unusual Gendér Wayang

genre in Bali, Nicholas Gray has taken a much more extensive view of improvisation as a part of

a continuum of new musical creation. He proposes five categories of creative process that range

from “spontaneous variations” within a piece in the moment to “composition of new pieces”

(2011: 94).

III. COGNITION AND PERCEPTION

While more or less all studies of improvisation have one or another genre at their base,

recent studies in music perception and cognition have attempted to identify fundamental

structures of the human experience that facilitate improvisation in general, and that are impacted

by improvisation. Ultimately much of this literature can be subsumed within the general topic of

“creativity studies,” though within that field a strong distinction between composition and

improvisation appears still to be in place. There is not time here to discuss this material in depth,

and the technical nature of much of the underlying psychoanalytic and neurological theory

makes it hard to summarize adequately. Two points will be worth noting, however. The first is

that by far the majority of this work takes not just jazz, but specifically avant garde free

improvisation as its model for case studies (Ashley 2009: 415). This focus is understandable,

inasmuch as many of the scholars are themselves avant garde improvisers, and because it is hard

to find a tradition in the world in which improvisation is so unequivocally central and valued.

Nonetheless, the consequence of such a focus may be a theory that maximally reinforces a

cognitive distinction between improvisation and composition as modes of creativity. The second

point is more positive: it appears that the cognitive turn offers a robust way of theoretically and

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analytically linking the musical details of improvisation to the embodied and socially embedded

experience of improvisers. Unlike historical, anthropological and older music-theoretical

paradigms that have tended to objectify musical sound, cognitive studies view improvisation as a

kind of musical creativity inherently constrained by human bodies, by the element of time, and

by socially embedded knowledge (Ashley 2009: 414; Iyer 2002; 2008; Monson 2008).

IV. MUSIC EDUCATION

Improvisation has appeared in a remarkable range of scholarship in music education in

the past decade. Much of the research is essentially limited to pedagogical applications, but

some intersects with the theoretical topics of interest in musicology and music theory at large.

Again, as in the cognitive studies, by far the majority of improvisation scholarship in music

education is connected specifically with jazz and free improvisation. The core of this literature

(Ake 2002; 2010; Murphy 2009; Prouty 2004; 2006; 2008) involves a debate over the efficacy

and political implications of improvisation pedagogy methods in American university music

programs. Kenneth Prouty and David Ake have both been intensely critical of the status quo, as

a system that emphasizes static ideas about “right” and “wrong,” and that is stylistically and

creatively limiting. Murphy, by contrast, suggests that while improvisation class pedagogy may,

indeed, be limiting, Ake and Prouty have missed crucial elements of jazz improvisation teaching

and learning in tertiary institutions because of their singular focus on one element of the

program.

Without weighing in on the question of whether college-level jazz programs optimally

train aspiring musicians or not, I would simply suggest that music education research offers a

number of interesting potential areas for further development of musicological studies of

improvisation if we take a perspective on teaching and learning that moves beyond the

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institutional pedagogy model. Here I am interested particularly in studies of “lifelong” learning,

including not only school-age learning, but a range from infant musical experience to adult

learning, both among amateur and professional musicians. Reineke Smilde describes

improvisation as “of critical importance to musicians” in a lifelong learning context (2012: 296).

While musicians may not have had formal training in improvisation, in surveys of older

professionals it was highlighted (along with childhood singing experience and the opportunity to

play in high quality performance environments) as a key skill in remaining musically proficient

(293). Thus we might study not only how people learn to improvise, but how they improvise to

learn (Campbell 2009).

V. FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF MUSICAL IMPROVISATION

I would like to offer some thoughts on further directions for research in improvisation,

with the aim of bringing together the material from this wide review of recent literature. I

propose that understanding the ontology of creativity, processes of interaction, and modes of

teaching and learning might be mutually beneficial.

1. What IS the relationship between improvisation and composition, and how can we do a

better job of developing language that helps?

In a forthcoming study of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane’s live recording form

Carnegie Hall, I suggest the terms “comprovisation” and “improvosed” to offer a more nuanced,

theory of the kinds of creativity at play in jazz. To me the key consideration is not temporal nor

a matter of relative permanence, but rather levels and types of repetition. I propose that a

thoughtful consideration of repetition, of all types and at all levels, in the performances that

make up Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane necessarily leads towards a somewhat

tempered understanding of the divide between improvisation and composition and the making of

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musical works in jazz. Nettl’s theory of composition and improvisation worked against the

prevailing view of the two as antitheses. Instead, he described the two terms as fundamentally

“part of the same idea,” that idea being musical performance itself (1974, 6). In his words, “The

conclusion that recurs again and again in our thoughts is…that all performers improvise to some

extent. What the pianist playing Bach and Beethoven does with his models—the scores and

accumulated tradition of performance practice—is only in degree and not in nature, different

from what the Indian playing an alap in Rag Yaman and the Persian singing the Dastgah of Shur

do with theirs” (19). I suggest here, ultimately, that in jazz we might be principally attentive to

moments of formal regularity—repetition from performance to performance—and the ways that

repetition facilitates evaluation and self-awareness.

If the terms improvisation and composition remain useful for jazz studies, it is because

they reflect commonsense distinctions between creative activities undertaken in different

contexts and with different immediate goals in mind. They are, however, by no means radically

separate in practice. For the most part, they represent multiply interlocking activities. Repetition

of various sorts is clearly implicated in both the activities of composition and improvisation and

in the ways we think about their musical products. The interconnection between the two modes

might be set out as follows: jazz composition is most normatively found in the writing of

“heads.” These short, generally at least partially stereotypical song forms usually incorporate

“catchy” melodies and harmonic progressions, so that they remain appealing on multiple

repetitions—neither too complex to satisfy casual listening, nor too simple to repay close

attention. Unlike composition in other contemporary forms, however, jazz heads are also created

with the express purpose in mind of providing inviting frameworks for improvisation (Solis

2009, 99-100). Improvisation, then, is central to jazz composition, providing a primary source of

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aesthetic purpose. Improvisation, as a distinct musical practice, is also interlaced with

composition, in part due to this reciprocal relationship (that is, because most—but not all—jazz

improvisation involves the creation of new musical utterances in the context of the repetition of

pre-composed structures). Berliner describes this as an “endless cycle” of precomposition and

improvisation, which gets close to what I mean (Berliner 1994, 221-27). Equally important,

though, is the idea that compositional thinking in the act of performance—that is, thinking in

terms of the creation of repeatable forms—and the repetition of units of various sizes from one

improvisation on a given piece to the next is common in mainstream jazz practice, as it is in

Indian and Middle Eastern classical traditions.

This is not just the case for the small number of jazz musicians who become known as

“compositional” in their outlook but in fact, for many, if not most players. There is an

unfortunate lack of credible direct evidence of this except in the recordings themselves. In the

voluminous body of interviews with jazz musicians conducted mostly by journalists, but

increasingly by scholars, this topic has come up relatively seldom and often tangentially. For the

most part, the newness of improvisation—the “sound of surprise” that is taken to be constitutive

of jazz—has been a foregone conclusion, a background assumption, and as a result has not been

deeply interrogated. On the other hand, indirect evidence abounds. My own article on the reissue

of Monk’s live recordings from the Five Spot, for instance, makes a very similar case regarding

the difference between the originally released sets and those that Monk did not want released at

the time (Solis 2004). The musical issues at stake in selecting recordings for release appear to

have been ones that specifically inhabit the ground in which improvisational and compositional

concepts blend.

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 Form in music (which has been seen as the hallmark of composition as a mode of

creativity) is essentially a matter of manipulating temporal experience through repetition. It is

actually very difficult to find competent—much less masterful—performances in the styles

discussed so far in which performers do not create coherent forms. This is true largely because

improvising musicians develop not only quick reflexes, but extensive memories, allowing them

to recall previous approaches to particular tunes, and because formal logic itself tends to grow

from schematic, predictable patterns of repetition.

As an example of this, I point to the performance of “Sweet and Lovely” from the

Monk/Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert. The piece is a standard 32-bar AABA Tin Pan Alley song,

and the group interprets it as the one ballad on their second set that evening. Coltrane takes the

second solo, following Monk, which he begins with a chorus in a slow, “single” time. After a

pronounced pause at the end of the solo, each of the musicians seeming to take a big breath, the

band jumps into a double time groove that is also at a significantly faster underlying tempo. As

Akira Toshimori pointed out, the shift in underlying tempo is such that in the “double-time”

section the group is actually playing what amounts to a “triple time,” as the relationship between

the beats in the fast section and the slow section is quite close to 3:1. Nevertheless, since there is

a doubling of beats per chord change, I continue to call this a “double-time” section.

Shadow Wilson, the quartet’s drummer, had prepared the audience for the move to double

time, by playing double time patterns regularly throughout the preceding three choruses and

Coltrane had played rapid figuration in his transitional chorus. Still, the gap between the last

regular time chorus and the first in double time, along with the tempo change separates the

sections more than they might have been if there was only a shift to double time. In fact, Wilson

and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s time-defining gestures become one way of hearing the

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creation of large-scale form over the course of the entire performance. Wilson is the first to

gesture toward double time, doing so at the end of the first A section of the ensemble head

chorus. The other musicians hold him back at this point, notably Abdul-Malik, whose walking

bass line is definitively in “single” time. At various points, but importantly as the band reaches

the ends of the various A sections throughout the piece, Wilson plays double-time patterns,

gradually ratcheting up the energy and expectation of a leap to a full-band double-time section.

Even as Coltrane also suggests a double-time feel in the beginning of his solo, Abdul-Malik’s

steady bass holds the group back from a full-fledged shift in feel. All of the tension generated by

the repeated gestures toward double time may be responsible, in fact, for the faster underlying

tempo once the full band makes the shift, a way of underlining the explosive power of their

interpretation of the double-time feel. Here the players generate overarching form through

repetition and difference in the moment of performance, again in a way that is not easily

explained with recourse to the language of composition and improvisation. Each of them, but

particularly Wilson and Abdul-Malik engage in creative gestures that are perhaps the clearest

example of “comprovisational” practice in the whole piece.

A study of brainwave patterns of imrpovisers and composers at work creating new music

would be very interesting at this point. It could shed light on the neurological processes that

undergird creativity. The fact that what we usually call composition normally happens alone and

what we call improvisation normally happens intersubjectively may be important, as may be the

speed of creation. I suspect not important enough, however, to see the two as categorically

distinct modes of creativity.

2. What are the limits to our ability to write about interaction, and how can we move

through them?

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 Here I think we may need to pay more attention to moments where interaction does not

work, either because musicians do not notice interactive cues, or because they do, but fail to

respond to them well. As an illustration of this sort of failure I draw on the Monk quartet’s

performance of “Evidence” from the first set of their 1957 Carnegie Hall concert, looking at a

moment of transition, from Monk’s solo to the ending head chorus. Monk obscures the transition

from solo to final head by replacing the first hit of the head, normally Ds played in octaves, with

a rootless EbMajor7 chord, voiced so that the same G he had just played at the end of his second

solo chorus is prominent in the texture. Coltrane seems surprised by what turns out to be the

return of the head, coming in with his opening notes each a beat late. It seems plausible that

Coltrane might have expected Monk to play a third solo chorus, or that Coltrane simply missed

the entrance. In any case, Monk then makes something out of the off-kilter timing of Coltrane’s

entrance, consistently playing the melody notes late for the rest of the final head. The effect is a

kind of heterophony, where Coltrane holds down an unornamented version of the melody, while

Monk ornaments it exclusively through rhythmic displacement, one of his most common

techniques.

One limit to studying these kinds of moments is that recordings offer only limited

evidence. I am working with Lara Pellegrinelli, of Princeton University, to develop eyeglass

cameras with which order to record live jazz performances. We want to see where musicians

look while playing, and hope to use these recordings, along with interviews, to better understand

the shifting attention musicians pay to each other, their instruments, and audiences when

performing.

3. How can we do a better job of understanding the learning process in improvisation?

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 Once again, I offer an example from my forthcoming book. The period Monk and

Coltrane spent working together is typically addressed because of its impact on Coltrane. Ben

Ratliff says, “It is tempting to try to figure out exactly, down to the atom—in terms of harmony

and rhythm and melody—what John Coltrane got from Thelonious Monk, since that year has

often been described as Coltrane’s turning point” (2007, 35-36). Ratliff does not satisfy his

temptation, but instead focuses on the larger sense of personal and artistic growth that Coltrane

described from his time with Monk. As Coltrane sad to Don DeMichael, “I felt I learned from

[Monk] in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically…I could watch him play

and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn’t know

about at all” (DeMichael 1960, quoted in Ratliff 2007, 36). Ratliff rightly senses that Coltrane

“wasn’t so much after the specific phrases and changes…but much larger areas of music-making

that he hadn’t considered” (36). Monk gave Coltrane space and freedom—literally, quite

famously by leaving him alone on the bandstand to play hugely long solos, but also figuratively,

pushing him to overcome obstacles of conventional thought and imagine finding a new musical

language.

I suggest, however, there is also a more mundane answer; not, perhaps, a new harmonic

concept that Coltrane learned from Monk, nor a new rhythmic conception, but still a specific

musical concept that Coltrane developed during his time with Monk. I think Coltrane’s work

with Monk shows the development of a more sophisticated conception of form in solos, and one

that can be tied to Monk’s example. Monk did, indeed, give Coltrane space, but he also gave him

musical direction. Coltrane’s solos on Monk’s Music are often interesting, but do not show

extensive attention to developing interesting architectonic forms. He described his time playing

at the Five Spot as a kind of working through musical exercises on the bandstand. “[Monk]…got

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me into the habit of playing long solos on his pieces,” he told Don DeMichael, “playing the same

piece for a long time to find new conceptions of solos. It got so I would go as far as possible on

one phrase until I ran out of ideas” (DeMicael 1960, quoted in Porter 1998, 111). This seems to

characterize precisely the kind of performance captured on the live recordings the band made at

the Five Spot around this time, but much less so the concert at Carnegie Hall. Coltrane’s solos on

the Carnegie Hall concert were relatively short—mostly no more than two or three choruses—

while his solos at the Five Spot were much longer—ten choruses or more at times. In either

case, though, after months playing until he “ran out of ideas,” there is a clear sense of

architectonics to Coltrane’s playing, and one that he carried with him into his work as a leader.

Moreover, Coltrane seemed to learn from Monk the idea of building the architectonics of a solo

from the materials of the head, creating a kind of unification to the whole performance that was

not always heard in modern jazz. This is, of course, one of Monk’s hallmarks, and in certain

instances of Coltrane’s later playing (A Love Supreme, perhaps most strikingly) a nearly

obsessive motivic logic came to be dominant.

It is harder to pinpoint the impact of the collaboration on Monk, if there was one. Monk

was a mature musician by the time he hired Coltrane, and from the start he had been doggedly

singular in his artistic vision. He clearly liked having his work interpreted by a soloist who

understood what he was looking for, but also brought a distinct sound and approach to the music,

and in this sense Coltrane was a perfect collaborator. Robin Kelley sees the time at the Five Spot

as a turning point in Monk’s career—and surely it was—but not necessarily a turning point for

his music on the large scale. “With the assistance of brothers Coltrane, Wilson, Ware, and

Abdul-Malik, Monk had turned the Five Spot into the hippest monastery in the Western world.

But it worked both ways: this tiny little bar in the East Village gave him the boost he needed. It

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raised his spirit, helped provide sustenance, and positioned him in a community that truly dug his

music” (Kelley 2009, 239). I would argue that it was not just the gig at the Five Spot that gave

Monk this sustenance, but the opportunity to work, night after night, with a group that heard and

respected his ideas. It may also have been deeply gratifying for Monk to have a real pupil, in

John Coltrane. We know that Coltrane spent whole days with Monk, learning everything from

Monk’s still obscure pieces to how to play multiphonics on the saxophone, but also taking walks

to see the city from Monk’s point of view and eat ice cream (Monk’s favorite). We know from

Coltrane that the experience was deeply satisfying to the young saxophonist. It must also have

been valuable to Monk, because although he was generous to young aspiring musicians (Steve

Lacy described similar experiences under Monk’s tutelage), he was not always so free with his

time. But I also argue that Monk may well have learned from working with Coltrane. He may

have learned about bandleading, and about presenting his ideas to others. Again, the literature

provides little on this subject because we take a pedagogical model from granted—younger, less

mature musicians learn from older, more mature ones. This is true, but older musicians continue

to grow through improvisation as well. I hope to design a longitudinal study with musicians at a

range of career stages to investigate this over the next few years.

In conclusion I offer this thought: we are in a good position today as scholars of

improvisation. Unlike in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s, when the field was being

established, it was still possible to see improvisation as a limited aspect of music making, and

even to see it in a negative light. That is not the case today. Instead, we can lay claim to a

subject that touches on every area of musical study, and that is undertaken by quite possibly all

musicians in some capacity or another. We may come to understand improvisation as not just

one mode of musical performance, but the heart of musical creativity itself. Should we do so, we

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may, ironically, lose the grounds for arguing for improvisation as a special area of study; but if

so, we will have done so making our scholarly concerns fundamental to the study of music at

large—a fine trade-off, in my opinion.

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