Jazz Improvisation Research Articles

Inclusive sound and music serious games in a large‐scale responsive environment

AbstractIn the last years, applications based on large‐scale responsive environments have risen up as a convincing aid for learning simple as well as complex concepts in a playful way. The full‐body interaction that characterizes these environments supports different learning styles and it is particularly fit for inclusion of participants with disabilities, due to its richness in emotional engagement and ease of use. This paper contains a short review of some serious games developed on a large‐scale responsive environment and devoted to music teaching and training of blind children. Authors present technology‐enhanced learning activities with the employment of three experimental applications: Harmonic Walk for teaching tonal harmony and melody harmonization; Jazz Improvisation for music re‐composition and score parts listening; and Following the Cuckoo Sound for helping blind children to walk straight. Quantitative and qualitative results report a great user engagement and a satisfying amount of successful records in formal task activities, which encourage further research to enhance education through large‐scale responsive environments applications and full‐body interaction. Moreover, the experience gained with blind children emphasizes the inclusive opportunities of these environments for the training and rehabilitation of disabled people.

Descriptions of expert jazz educators’ experiences teaching improvisation

The tensions present in learning jazz improvisation are well recognized given the contextual shift from more informal environments such as jam sessions and apprenticeships towards academic settings such as school bands and college jazz programs. Research suggests that the development of instruction in music education be informed by and modeled after expert practitioners, yet scant evidence exists on the most effective strategies, methods, and/or approaches for teaching jazz improvisation, in particular against the backdrop of this shift in educational paradigms. In response, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to investigate seven jazz educators’ lived experiences teaching jazz improvisation. Seven expert jazz educators situated in a variety of teaching contexts throughout Northern California were recruited using purposeful, snowball sampling strategies. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, observations of the participants in a teaching context, and documents such as syllabi, handouts, and recordings. Five themes in the form of vignettes describe these participants’ common experiences in teaching jazz improvisation: (1) Teacher as Guide; (2) Teacher as Motivator; (3) Psychological Aspects; (4) Navigating the Academic Chasm; and (5) Cultivating Lifelong Learners. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Finding the Blue Note: A Metaphor for the Practice of Teaching

Teaching and the process of developing curriculum, have been compared to the art of jazz improvisation. While similarities between the two exist, there are important differences that make the metaphor inaccurate. It is suggested here that because of the outward simplicity of teaching, the characteristics of teacher thinking and of those who become teachers, and the nature of the relationship of the teacher and audience, a more appropriate comparison might be to blues music and musicians. The article also suggests a distinction between the source and usefulness of what is called here emergent metaphors (those that grow out of or emerge from a teacher's language and experience) and ascribed metaphors (those that are constructed by the researcher describe an idea or behavior). Finally, implications of the metaphor for professional development, the preparation of teachers, and the success of school reform are offered.

Somatyczne, muzyczne i auguryjskie konteksty retoryki

Somatic, musical and augural contexts of rhetoric Rhetoric is considering from the way of performance (gr. hipokrizis, lat. actio), called by the Cicero “the body language”. There will be a point of departure in all kinds of somatic obstacles that limit the orator, and also the voices of the background that make oration harder. Among the natural voices there is a specific case of animal sounds, in particular birds’ melodies which were intensively listened by ancient augurs and poets. There is also returning question of birds singing and human voice, especially in the age of ecology and the new media, and in context of cinema music and literature. From the perspective of the zoophilology a very special case is the voice of marsh warbler that can be associated with jazz improvisation and the sampling. In the conclusion author reveals the rhetoric community between different discourses that were inspired by the art of improvisation – the free jazz (Coleman), deconstruction (Derrida) and birds language (marsh warbler).

Call and response: Musical and bodily interactions in jazz improvisation duos

When individuals coordinate their behaviour, they need to both anticipate actions and respond to each other in meaningful ways. Jazz musicians often encounter situations in jam sessions in which they interact with previously unknown musicians, allowing insights into spontaneous collaboration. The current study investigated call and response patterns in free jazz improvisations by analysing movement and musical characteristics of duos. Twelve jazz musicians were paired into six duos of an e-guitar and a saxophone. Balanced across duos, one musician was asked to play a series of improvisations expressing the emotions happy, sad or neutral. The second musician responded to each improvisation without knowing the emotional intention of the first musician. Call and response roles were then exchanged. While musicians improvised or listened to their duo partner, they were both recorded with an optical motion capture system. Results indicate correspondences between call and response musicians in movement variability and cumulative distance of head motion. There were marked differences between happy and sad emotional expressions both in movement parameters and musical features including mean intensity, mode, and, albeit to a lesser extent, tempo. Retrospective verbal decoding of the call musicians’ emotional intentions was correct in 76.5% of all cases. Independently of explicit decoding success and even for the first encounters, musicians spontaneously tuned into each other’s performances by means of their body movements and the musical characteristics of the improvisations.

The spur of the moment: what jazz improvisation tells cognitive science

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise (and of day-to-day living), we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful (i.e. present in the moment) improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life.

The effect of mental practice on melodic jazz improvisation achievement.

The effect of mental practice on melodic jazz improvisation achievement.

Playin’ the changes—A jazz approach to researching student-teachers’ PowerPoint presentations

The current study aims to interpret student-teachers’ PowerPoint presentations using concepts derived from jazz improvisation. The purpose of the study is to acquire insight on how knowledge is ins...

Determining the end of a musical turn: Effects of tonal cues

Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In the case of turn-taking in improvised performance they need to be able to predict their partner's turn-end in order to accurately time their own entries. Here we investigate the cues used for accurate turn-end prediction in musical improvisations, focusing on the role of tonal structure. In a response-time task, participants more accurately determined the endings of (tonal) jazz than (non-tonal) free improvisation turns. Moreover, for the jazz improvisations, removing low frequency information (<2100Hz) - and hence obscuring the pitch relationships conveying tonality - reduced response accuracy, but removing high frequency information (>2100Hz) had no effect. Neither form of filtering affected response accuracy in the free improvisation condition. We therefore argue that tonal cues aided prediction accuracy for the jazz improvisations compared to the free improvisations. We compare our results with those from related speech research (De Ruiter et al., 2006), to draw comparisons between the structural function of tonality and linguistic syntax.

Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity

Creativity has been defined as the ability to produce work that is novel, high in quality, and appropriate to an audience. While the nature of the creative process is under debate, many believe that creativity relies on real-time combinations of known neural and cognitive processes. One useful model of creativity comes from musical improvisation, such as in jazz, in which musicians spontaneously create novel sound sequences. Here we use jazz musicians to test the hypothesis that individuals with training in musical improvisation, which entails creative generation of musical ideas, might process expectancy differently. We compare jazz improvisers, non-improvising musicians, and non-musicians in the domain-general task of divergent thinking, as well as the musical task of preference ratings for chord progressions that vary in expectation while EEGs were recorded. Behavioral results showed for the first time that jazz musicians preferred unexpected chord progressions. ERP results showed that unexpected stimuli elicited larger early and mid-latency ERP responses (ERAN and P3b), followed by smaller long-latency responses (Late Positivity Potential) in jazz musicians. The amplitudes of these ERP components were significantly correlated with behavioral measures of fluency and originality on the divergent thinking task. Together, results highlight the role of expectancy in creativity.

“Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz”: Auto/Ethnographic Improvisation as Educational Event in Doctoral Supervision

Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered “unprofessional” approaches to qualitative inquiry: neologisms, personal experience, stories, conversations, music, poetry, paintings, and film. We engage in reflexive interactions with each other and with such “data.” This was undertaken in the spirit of jazz improvisation—an unrehearsed performance—something that “happened,” an unplanned educational event but also an agency enabled by structure.

The Philly Joe Jones Rudimental Soloing Style

Name: Marios Spyrou Main Subject: Jazz Drums Research Supervisor: Jarmo Hoogendijk Title of Research: The Philly Joe Jones Rudimental Soloing Style Research Question: How can classical exercises be incorporated into jazz improvisations and still sound spontaneous, creative and true to the jazz drumming idiom? Summary of Results: Before starting this research at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, I was not so aware as how to express myself and phrase on the drum set. By studying the history of the instrument, I have found out that all the great jazz drummers have adopted and incorporated the 26 American drum rudiments in their playing, which include several sticking patterns “borrowed” from the classical music and the Swiss Army drum corps. These rudiments are like scales for melodic – instrument players, who have to practice and know them very well in order to gain technique and express themselves on their instruments. The same applies to drummers using these 26 sticking patterns. While I was listening to the great jazz drummers, I discovered that a perfect example for this is Philly Joe Jones. You can clearly hear in his soloing that he is using these rudiments in his own unique way, making them sound swinging and therefore adopting them into the bebop drumming. I therefore decided to take Philly Joe as my main “model” for this research. I started transcribing his solos and analyzing his phrasing, making my own variations and phrases based on this rudimental approach. My final result is that I can know phrase on the drums and express myself freely whenever I have to take a solo, without copying or playing standard phrases from jazz drummers like I used to do in the past, while still sounding authentic and true to the jazz drumming style. Biography: Marios Spyrou was born in Nicosia in 1990. He was inspired by from an early age by his father, who is also a jazz drummer. At the age of 19 he enrolled in University of Nicosia from where he graduated. There he met the great Cypriot saxophonist Charis Ioannou and started being interested in Jazz music. He attended the Bicommunal Jazz Program seminars in Cyprus led by the great New York Jazz virtuosos Ari Roland, Chris Byars and other well-known Jazz musicians. While attending these seminars, Marios was influenced by the jazz drummer Keith Balla who introduced him into the world of bebop style. In 2015 he moved to The Hague, where he is currently studying with the legendary jazz drummer Eric Ineke. On May 2015 he won the second price of the 1st Apollon Jazz competition in Greece with the Cypriot jazz band BopCy.

"We Can Draw!": Toronto Improvisation, Abstract Expressionism, and the Artists’ Jazz Band

The Artists’ Jazz Band (AJB) was founded in 1962 in Toronto by abstract expressionist painters Graham Coughtry (trombone), Richard Gorman (double bass), Dennis Burton and Nobuo Kubota (alto saxophone), Robert Markle (tenor saxophone), and Gordon Rayner (drums). The AJB’s personnel shifted around this founding core, including pianist/trumpeter Michael Snow, electric bassist Jim Jones, guitarist Gerald McAdam, and saxophonist Bill Smith. They continued to perform into the 1990s. Few ensembles anywhere in the world so strongly foregrounded the relationship between abstract expressionism in the visual arts and jazz improvisation. Because of this, it is instructive to discuss the AJB’s music in terms of twentieth-century modernism, particularly in relation to the musicians’ immediate predecessors on the Toronto scene, Painters Eleven, and in the context of the automatistes in neighbouring Quebec, whose pioneering visual art also had ties to the free jazz of the 1960s and afterwards. The AJB’s introduction of modernist discourse—on the canvas and, by implication, in their music—influenced other improvisers associated with the AJB in the 1970s and 1980s. Modernist influences, stemming from the visual arts, encouraged a generation of musicians in Toronto to depart from more conventional “jazz” practices in order to pursue “free jazz,” free improvisation, and a host of performance possibilities.

Shaping interpersonal learning in the jazz improvisation lesson: Observing a dynamic systems approach

Music institutions predominantly utilize the one-to-one lesson in developing and supporting music students’ learning of skill and knowledge. This article explores the effect that interpersonal interaction plays in shaping pedagogical applications between teacher and student. Observing the learning of improvisation within this individualized social context, dynamic systems theory (DST) is used to explore how learning and development of musical improvisation skills are shaped by interpersonal behaviors and learning relationships. Through the dimensions of teacher “action” and “affiliation”, this phenomenological study investigates the interactive behaviors of five expert Australian educator/improvisers and their students. Interpretative phenomenological analysis is utilized to identify modes of behavioral interactions that evolve through dynamic and fluid interplay. Interactive behavior positions and facilitates the delivery of skill, knowledge, teacher attitudes and understandings of the improvisation process. An interpersonal model of behaviors within the instrumental music lesson is posited, and implications for ongoing critical reflection of interpersonal and pedagogical approaches in the one-to-one context are suggested.

Talk, Listen, and Understand: The Impact of a Jazz Improvisation Experience on an Amateur Adult Musician’s Mind, Body, and Spirit

This paper examines the impact of creating music in an improvisational jazz style on an amateur adult musician’s mind, body, and spirit. Learning jazz improvisation skills can help build more empathetic human beings, when the focus of improvisation is on reacting to what you hear in a clear and concise manner. Life skills are developed by focusing on deep listening and communicating with other musicians. Enabling a person to talk to, listen to, and understand those around them builds community and understanding, and lessens the likelihood of conflict. This allows growth and progress to take place in society, making the cultural capital built from a jazz improvisation program invaluable.

What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.

Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation

AbstractThis article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.

Fred Wah Remixed: "where you are is who you are"

Fred Wah Remixed:"where you are is who you are" Joel Katelnikoff (bio) The following essay is a work of Recombinant Theory. The essay remixes the work of Fred Wah, rearranging his critical and poetic writing in new patterns, producing original aphorisms that are directly indebted to Fred's own concepts and style. The essay might also be considered a "fake" essay; all of its contents have been produced through a set of artistic constraints rather than being composed in the style of a conventional academic essay. The recombinant essay is not a straightforward expression of my own beliefs; it does not use conventional citation; it is not a report; it is a demonstration. The idea of this being a "fake" essay corresponds with Fred's own concept of "Faking It" (also the title of his collected critical essays). Fake Language is the language of the outsider; it is accented language; it is language that doesn't pass as institutional, or as an authoritative vessel of meaning. It is an alternative form of discourse for those unable to speak in the discourse of the insider. Fred dramatizes this concept by showing how his father, a Chinese immigrant, inadvertently mispronounced the word "soup" as "sloup," then fabricated an elaborate explanation for how his pronunciation could actually be correct. Fakery is an intuitive and creative relationship with truth, and Fred says, "I guess I picked up on that sense [End Page 205] of faking it from him, that English could be faked, and I quickly learned that when you fake a language you see everything else is a fake." Outsiders have a distinct vision of languages, cultures, and institutions. Without being at home, without belonging or acceptance, everything looks particularly false, including and especially the outsider's own attempts to participate. In my own experience, I know this fakery well, because I have never really had a role model for the proper use of language, and, for the most part, I've only ever been able to speak and think in fragments, like my own father, first-generation literate, who was never able to finish his sentences in speaking, who would forfeit his own words even as he produced them. Fragmentary speech and thought hasn't been amenable to writing (poetry or cv lines), but, like Fred, I've developed tactics for Faking Language to fill or mask the gaps in my literacy. In the introduction to Faking It, Fred says that, to write critically, he's always written poetry. This hybridization of genre is a double fakery, both of theory and of poetry: it's fake to infuse poetry with philosophical formulations, and it's also fake to bring poetry's perceptual practices into the critical writing process. Fred says the act of faking language "is not so much fraudulent as generative," producing new possibilities of thought through new possibilities of language, while also calling out the artificiality that motivates every practice and product (even, and perhaps especially, in conventional theory and poetry). Fakery is a tool for "a poet who's never trusted meaning and its prior constructions." If conventionally formal writing is orchestral (expertly adhering to sheet music), Faking It is improvisational jazz (generating spontaneous variations on riffs and techniques). Faking It doesn't perform with its mastery already-in-place, doesn't transcend its situation, doesn't know what it is until it is. Faking It is a fast-access brain activity, continually seeking methods for assembling diverse techniques in inventive ways. The result may be euphony or a vast clatter. As Fred says of the jazz influence in Faking It, "a freely moving line playing off of and against the bound chord progressions showed me the delight of distortion and surprise." Faking It invents what it is as it becomes it. During my recombination of Fred's writing, his jazz-inspired techniques have had a potent influence on my own critical methodology: specifically, in remixing Fred's work I've developed a syntactic device capable of synthesizing the flow of a run-on sentence and the concision of the fragment, yoking these elements together under a third technique: that of repetition. Fred discusses each of these...

An ecological description of jazz improvisation.

In this paper, I build on writings in psychology and philosophy to offer ecological description of jazz improvisation grounded in the analogy of navigation through a complex environment. I begin by contrasting this approach with the computational description of improvisation as algorithm of input, processing, and I continue with the ecological description itself. This description reframes many aspects of improvisation, including the (Pressing, 1984, 1988, 1998), the nature of improvisational skill, and the problem of temporal coordination between soloist and ensemble. Stylistically, I focus on straight-ahead, tonal jazz, the first style most students learn, which is foundational to much current jazz practice. The ecological description could be adapted to other styles. To bring the description to life, I offer evidence from exploratory study of improvisational errors.Because I offer something less than a falsifiable theory, I posit this paper's central premise instead as a description, which is primarily intended to encourage a shift in researchers' perspective. The result, I hope, is a picture of improvisational cognition that is richer, more complex, and harder to pin down-an opening, rather than a closing. Balancing this, I conclude with some predictions of the ecological description that could be tested empirically.The Computational View of ImprovisationThe computational view of improvisation stems from early theories of cognitive science that were inspired by the artificial intelligence research of the 1950s-60s. These theories take computerized information processing as a model for human cognition, so that information received from the external world is perceived, translated into a syntactic code of meaningful symbols, and processed according to a systematic set of rules, and body movements are mere outcomes of these processes (Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014, p. 1). In its strictest form, this view is now largely obsolete, as more recent research has revealed myriad links between perception and action, including in the realm of music performance (p. 2). But theories of improvisational psychology remain grounded in the computational view.Pressing (1984) was the first to develop a computational theory of jazz improvisation (p. 353; cf. Pressing, 1988, pp. 130-132, 1998). In Pressing's formulation, improvisation depends on two large-scale parameters. First, there is the referent: an underlying formal scheme or guiding image specific to a given piece (1984, p. 346; cf. 1988, p. 153; 1998, pp. 52-53). Second, there is the soloist's long-term memory, for like motives, scales, and arpeggios, and for techniques of combining and developing objects (1984, p. 355; cf. 1988, pp. 161, 166; 1998, pp. 53-54). Given a referent and a sufficient memory store, the act of improvisation proceeds as a self-sustaining cycle through three stages, input, processing, and output (1988, pp. 152-166). The soloist's previous actions, along with the referent, constitute the input. To process the next action, the soloist continues, develops, or alters one or more of the input's features (1984, pp. 350, 353; 1988, p. 157). At some point, the action determined by the soloist's processing crosses a cognitive Rubicon and becomes irrecoverable output. The soloist then acts without further sensory or central intervention, though there remains limited scope for local fine tuning until the action is complete (1984, p. 355; 1988, p. 153). This action, as output, in turn becomes the input for the next action, and the cycle resets.Johnson-Laird (2002) presents a different computational model. Whereas Pressing's improviser relies on a memory store of prelearned objects and processes, Johnson-Laird's has memorized no objects, instead relying on memorized rules of melodic construction within a chord progression (pp. 422, 430). The algorithm focuses on choosing notes appropriate for the harmonic context and placing them in effective contour and rhythm. …

Polyrhythms, negative space, circuits of meaning: making sense through Dawn of Midi'sDysnomia

AbstractDysnomiais a 2013 recording by the jazz trio Dawn of Midi scored for acoustic piano, bass and drums. Eschewing jazz chords, improvisation, swing rhythms and theme and variations, the music is instead organised around repeating rhythmic loops and interlocking melo-harmonic fragments, as one groove assemblage segues into the next like an evolving DJ set. The music sounds equal parts minimal process, electronically sequenced and traditional African. This article engages the musical and philosophical concepts at play inDysnomiato think through writing about music via three paths of speculative inquiry. The first part of the article considers works by Kodwo Eshun, Paul Morley and David Sudnow, idiosyncratic thinkers outside of the mainstream of academic music discourse who vividly approach writing about music through defamiliarising language and inventing concepts, generating associations based on comparative listening and describing the dynamics of musical process. In the second part of the article I draw on these writing techniques to direct my repeated listening encounters withDysnomiaand construct a prose interpretation modelled on the polyrhythms of the music. I conclude with a brief discussion of the phenomenological perspective on musical essences and suggest that music is a model for thinking through writing about music.