Abstract
ABSTRACT While numerous scholars and performers of free improvisation have noted that egalitarianism structures social interactions between participants of this musical practice, they have largely treated this concept as self-explanatory. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation I conducted in Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco between 2008 and 2016, this article examines how egalitarianism generates several patterns of social interaction in habits of talk, embodied behavior, and musical sound. Conceptualizing egalitarianism as freedom from social and aesthetic hierarchy, I argue that participants of these scenes pursue egalitarianism through an array of behaviors that prevent other individuals from knowing what they prefer, intend, understand, and value in the practice of free improvisation. Preventing others from accessing these kinds of knowledge places each participant on an equal plane of unawareness which in turn allows them to experience creative freedom. More broadly, then, this article outlines how free improvisation is based in a concept of freedom in which the negation, rather than the accrual, of knowledge leads to greater experiences of personal liberty.
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