Review - <i>The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue</i>

Abstract

The dynamic musical and intellectual community that convenes each September for the Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium is a unique phenomenon – I am hard-pressed to find another example of a jazz festival (in the United States or elsewhere) that places a similarly extreme premium on intellectual and critical examinations of improvised music while in the midst of a full-fledged festival celebrating it. The interweaving of performances, round table discussions, keynote talks, workshops and paper presentations challenges listeners to think imaginatively and critically about the music they are hearing while scholars are encouraged to contextualize their work against the backdrop of the music. The collection of essays contained in this book stems in part from the 1998 installment of the colloquium, which shared its name – “The Other Side of Nowhere.” Apparently unknown to editors Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble at the time of the colloquium and in the early stages of this book, “the other side of nowhere” was also used by Sun Ra (on film in the 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise) to question basic assumptions about ways in which improvisation challenges standard knowledges. In a similar way, Fischlin and Heble believe in the open possibilities empowered through improvisation; for them, the “other side of nowhere” is a “metaphor for the alternative sound-world of improvised music making, and perhaps more notably, for the new kinds of social relationships articulated in a music that, while seeming to come out of nowhere, has profoundly gifted us with the capacity to edge beyond the limits of certainty, predictability, and orthodoxy” (1). The implications of a dialogic social space articulated and empowered through improvisation, hybridity, code-switching, and mobility undermines interpretations of “nowhere” that characterize improvised music as random, meaningless and socially disconnected, as self-indulgent noise-making. Indeed, the risk, if any, of the title of this volume rests within interpretations of “improvisation” and “nowhere” that point to randomness, the lack of musical and social interaction, and more broadly, the separation of art and life, aesthetics and ethics. The complexities of Fischlin’s and Heble’s argument contradict this somewhat common view of improvisation as meaningless and detached: