Professional Jazz Musicians Research Articles

Practice research in free improvisation

This article focuses on interaction processes during the performance of free improvisation in the jazz idiom, and their correlation to the construction of individual musical identities. In this article, I regard musical identity as an artistic, dynamic and personal process characterized by continual communication, construction and negotiation with the surrounding social and cultural environment. Interaction, just like improvisation, is a fundamental defining element in jazz and free improvisation, playing a crucial role in shaping the musical identity of each musician during their performance. This is presented here as analogous to the moulding of individual identity in our everyday social interactions. This research is based on the author’s active participation in improvisation sessions and interviews with professional jazz musicians based in Lisbon, Portugal. Additionally, it explores how the context of free improvisation, when musical restrictions are minimized, intensifies the focus on the interactive improvisational process. This attribute makes free improvisation an ideal terrain for research on interaction and its relation with musical identity.

Trade-offs in Coordination Strategies for Duet Jazz Performances Subject to Network Delay and Jitter

Coordination between participants is a necessary foundation for successful human interaction. This is especially true in group musical performances, where action must often be temporally coordinated between the members of an ensemble for their performance to be effective. Networked mediation can disrupt this coordination process by introducing a delay between when a musical sound is produced and when it is received. This can result in significant deteriorations in synchrony and stability between performers. Here we show that five duos of professional jazz musicians adopt diverse strategies when confronted by the difficulties of coordinating performances over a network—difficulties that are not exclusive to networked performance but are also present in other situations (such as when coordinating performances over large physical spaces). What appear to be two alternatives involve: 1) one musician being led by the other, tracking the timings of the leader’s performance; or 2) both musicians accommodating to each other, mutually adapting their timing. During networked performance, these two strategies favor different sides of the trade-off between, respectively, tempo synchrony and stability; in the absence of delay, both achieve similar outcomes. Our research highlights how remoteness presents new complexities and challenges to successful interaction.

Self-assessment in jazz improvisation

The purpose of this instrumental case study was to be able to determine ways that professional jazz musicians utilize self-assessment during jazz improvisation and to better understand how social competencies and interpersonal communication influence self-assessment practice. Participants included four experienced jazz musicians who performed together regularly and had developed deep social and musical connections with one another prior to the study. Data were collected in five phases: (1) a rehearsal observation, (2) a group interview, (3) a second rehearsal observation, (4) a journaling session, and (5) a focus group. Five themes were developed from the data—“Empathy,” “Self-Doubt,” “Transcendence,” “Prior Knowledge,” and “Self-Awareness.” Self-Awareness served as a meta-theme to which the other four themes were connected. Further analysis of the themes indicated that the participants utilized self-assessment through non-verbal communication, deep listening, connecting to their past experiences, incorporating musical constraints such as form and harmony, using Norgaard’s tools of evaluative monitoring and sketch planning, and through empathetic attunement.

Pathways to sustainability

Australian jazz culture faces an interesting conundrum. Professional jazz musicians aim to create high-quality music in a range of styles, but finding the eyes and ears of the wider audience can be a challenge, especially in a music that constantly invents and reinvents what it is and what it can be. The national jazz festival circuit in Australia contains several key events: the Wangaratta, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane jazz festivals. For these festivals to continue to attract sustainable audiences, a diversity of programming featuring the crucial balance between local artists, international imports and Australian music must be a part of a robust programming strategy. This article investigates the diversity of artistic programming at the Wangaratta, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane jazz festivals, and the challenges faced by the regionality of their locations, in order to identify pathways for these festivals to connect with local audiences, musicians and wider fans of the music nationally.

Microtiming and Mental Effort

The present study tested two assumptions concerning the auditory processing of microtiming in musical grooves (i.e., repeating, movement-inducing rhythmic patterns): 1) Microtiming challenges the listener's internal framework of timing regularities, or meter, and demands cognitive effort. 2) Microtiming promotes a “groove” experience—a pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music. Using professional jazz musicians and nonmusicians as participants, we hypothesized that microtiming asynchronies between bass and drums (varying from −80 to 80 ms) were related to a) an increase in “mental effort” (as indexed by pupillometry), and b) a decrease in the quality of sensorimotor synchronization (as indexed by reduced finger tapping stability). We found bass/drums-microtiming asynchronies to be positively related to pupil dilation and negatively related to tapping stability. In contrast, we found that steady timekeeping (presence of eighth note hi-hat in the grooves) decreased pupil size and increased tapping performance, though there were no conclusive differences in pupil response between musicians and nonmusicians. However, jazz musicians consistently tapped with higher stability than nonmusicians, reflecting an effect of rhythmic expertise. Except for the condition most closely resembling real music, participants preferred the on-the-grid grooves to displacements in microtiming and bass-succeeding-drums-conditions were preferred over the reverse.

Fractionating auditory priors: A neural dissociation between active and passive experience of musical sounds.

Learning, attention and action play a crucial role in determining how stimulus predictions are formed, stored, and updated. Years-long experience with the specific repertoires of sounds of one or more musical styles is what characterizes professional musicians. Here we contrasted active experience with sounds, namely long-lasting motor practice, theoretical study and engaged listening to the acoustic features characterizing a musical style of choice in professional musicians with mainly passive experience of sounds in laypersons. We hypothesized that long-term active experience of sounds would influence the neural predictions of the stylistic features in professional musicians in a distinct way from the mainly passive experience of sounds in laypersons. Participants with different musical backgrounds were recruited: professional jazz and classical musicians, amateur musicians and non-musicians. They were presented with a musical multi-feature paradigm eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN), a prediction error signal to changes in six sound features for only 12 minutes of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings. We observed a generally larger MMN amplitudes–indicative of stronger automatic neural signals to violated priors–in jazz musicians (but not in classical musicians) as compared to non-musicians and amateurs. The specific MMN enhancements were found for spectral features (timbre, pitch, slide) and sound intensity. In participants who were not musicians, the higher preference for jazz music was associated with reduced MMN to pitch slide (a feature common in jazz music style). Our results suggest that long-lasting, active experience of a musical style is associated with accurate neural priors for the sound features of the preferred style, in contrast to passive listening.

Place and imagined community in jazz

This article investigates the concept of imagined community amongst the professional jazz musicians; more closely the way that this imagined community functions within the scene. Through the focusing on the imagined community, the article extends the examination into the performance venues, the movement between venues and the meanings attached to them, revealing the reasons why an imagined community is beneficial for the musician. The research data is composed of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in jazz circles in the United Kingdom between 2006 and 2012. Through the exploration of the places occupied by the musicians, the article reveals how the community becomes concrete through the musicians’ movements. The article examines what added value it might hold for them. All in all, the investigation makes sense of the social conditions that create the need for such a community.

Stealing Knowledge in a Landscape of Learning: Conceptualizations of Jazz Education

Theoretical approaches to learning in practice-based jazz improvisation contexts include situated learning and ecological perspectives. This article focuses on how interest-driven, self-sustaining jazz learning activities can be matched against the concepts of stolen knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 1996) and landscape of learning (Bjerstedt, 2014). Based on an extensive interview study with Swedish professional jazz musicians, it argues that the multidirectedness involved in jazz improvisational practice calls for a rich learning ecology framework including several didactic loci.

Social Network Drivers of Creativity and Innovation at the Individual and Team Level

In the contemporary business world, creative ideas are more often the product of social interaction and influence than long periods of thinking in isolation. To this end, researchers and management practitioners have been interested in examining the role played by social networks in driving creativity and innovation. Previous findings illustrate the complex way in which social networks can influence creativity and innovation, suggesting that it is important to further explore the effect of different networks (external and internal), at different levels of analyses (individual and team), involving new or repeat relationships, as well as the role of contacts with particular attributes (goal orientation and prosocial motivation) or resources. These topics are addressed in this symposium through four papers that explore in distinct, yet highly related, ways the links between social networks and creativity and innovation at work, both at the individual and at the team level of analyses. Balancing repeat collaboration with external memberships in a network of professional jazz musicians Presenter: Floor van den Born; VU U. Amsterdam Presenter: Kevyn Yong; HEC Paris A social resources perspective on employee creativity Presenter: Travis J Grosser; U. of Connecticut Presenter: Giuseppe Labianca; U. of Kentucky Networks and creativity: The effect of functional diversity and goal orientation on creativity Presenter: Wonseok Choi; U. of Connecticut Presenter: Nora Madjar; U. of Connecticut

Preparing Middle School Music Teachers to Teach Jazz

This mixed-methods study combined qualitative and quantitative data to identify middle school music teachers who perceive themselves as highly effective jazz teachers and to uncover the experiences that have best prepared them to teach middle school jazz. Quantitative data suggested that (a) playing in college jazz ensembles, (b) taking a college jazz pedagogy course, (c) mentorship in jazz, and (d) taking a college improvisation course all significantly correlate with one’s perceived ability to teach middle school jazz. However, both qualitative and quantitative data indicated that listening to jazz and playing as a professional jazz musician are among the most closely associated experiences to perceived ability, suggesting that the college jazz experience, although important, may not be the most important way of preparing future middle school jazz educators.

Profiling the jazz singer

This paper presents new data extracted from the National Survey of Jazz Instrumentalists and Vocalists. The survey was administered to 209 professional jazz musicians who resided and performed in Australia during 2009–2010. Presented here are five statistically significant characteristics which differentiate vocalists’ experiences from other jazz musicians. These are: the singers’ preference for learning by imitation, their use of chords to find starting notes, their reliance on aural feedback, their greater sense of personal risk in improvisation, and their desire to be comfortable when performing lyrics. The results are accompanied by suggestions as to how jazz educators may respond to the findings.

The sign of silence: Negotiating musical identities in an improvising ensemble

Group musical improvisation, as a spontaneous process of collaborative creativity effected through non-verbal social interaction, is a unique psychological phenomenon and universal capacity. Existing studies focus on improvisation among professional jazz musicians, often using qualitative methods. However, improvisation transcends genres and levels of training or experience, and existing qualitative data are rarely analyzed as discourse. We compare findings from studies of jazz musicians’ improvising with interview data from free improvisers from varied backgrounds focused on their improvising together ( n = 10). The ways jazz musicians construct improvising in talk were distinct from the constructions of this more diverse group, suggesting a specifically professional discourse. By focusing on accounts of deciding whether to play, the ambiguity of musical contributions in the non-verbal context of playing is highlighted. Analysis indicates that musical acts within improvisation are interpreted by the musicians involved in ways that inherently support or resist particular identities. The unique creative, communicative and social process of musical improvising in groups can therefore best be understood when the entirety of improvisational practice and its various contexts are acknowledged. Future research can best recognize the diversity of, and change in, what improvisation can encompass with continued discursive investigation of group improvising.

The Outside of ‘Sitting In’: Jazz jam sessions and the politics of participation

Jazz jam sessions project an aura of open participation by allowing musicians to “sit in” and through a general relaxation of formal performance constraints. This essay examines the jam session historically, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s, to demonstrate how it was also informed by an ethic of exclusion. Professional jazz musicians, working in a highly commercialized entertainment business, consistently prized jam sessions as events where they felt liberated from the demands of the public--whether conceived as a live audience or as the potential body of consumers of recordings--and where they could play “for musicians only.” The allure of freedom and spontaneous interaction that marked the jam session, however, proved irresistible to club owners, who sought to stage jam sessions for paying audiences. Impresario Norman Granz strove to realize their promise of democratic participation by promoting a new kind of concert in which audiences were encouraged to participate actively with voice and body. Most efforts to stage jam sessions provoked defensive responses from professional musicians, as though the image of participation offered within the performance frame had to be carefully maintained by protecting it from potential intrusions by the public.

Jazz in Los Angeles: The Black Experience

Los Angeles has long been recognized as an icon in the United States from the perspective of its social, economic, and historical contributions to American life. The city has provided the United States--and, indeed, the world--with a model for urban development in the areas of assimilation, integration, and diversity. Yet some of the developments, especially those impacting blacks, have had results that can be questioned, particularly from the vantage point of those who might be considered progressive. Jazz in the United States has succeeded as an art form, but does this include Los Angeles--the Mecca of the entertainment world? And what is the definition of success? Further, if we consider jazz as an art form rather than entertainment, competition with other musical genres has proven to be a formidable obstacle in Los Angeles; the overriding demands of commercialism--as advocated and practiced by the film industry--congeal to make all forms of dance music more accessible to the public than jazz. The tangential questions are these: (1) Has jazz succeeded as entertainment or an art form in Los Angeles? (2) What is the real contribution of jazz to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to jazz? How Do I Know This? I write this essay from the perspective of a professional jazz musician, with over forty years experience, who lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years. My parents migrated to Los Angeles in 1943 so my mother could finish nursing school. She was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and my father from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born in the Japanese ward of White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles because this Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) institution wouldn't allow a black baby to be born in any other ward. When my mother graduated from nursing school, we moved back East, eventually to Philadelphia, where we lived until I was fourteen. I started piano lessons at age five--hating it; European classics just weren't for me then. We lived in a row house, and it wasn't until a neighbor, hearing me practicing sorrowfully, took me to his house next door and put on an Erroll Garner record. I was about ten years old, and my life turned on a dime. I spent every waking hour studying and playing (as best I could with SDA parents) the music--jazz, the music of the masters--and have done so, virtually exclusively, ever since. In an interview with Arthur Taylor ([1977] 1982), Nina Simone perfectly describes my life as a jazz musician: Max Roach defined the word technically. Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does--the slang he uses, the way he walks, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things--all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play. Jazz is not just music. It's the definition of the Afro-American Black. (156) My family and I returned to California in 1959, wherein I furthered my commitment to jazz through music education--from undergraduate to a terminal degree--all from institutions in Los Angeles. In 1998, after completing my Ph.D. in music from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I took the hajj to New York, where I spent almost ten years and was fortunate to play with many of the famous serious jazz musicians. In my career, I've played with bands led by some of the most formidable players/leaders from all over the world (see Appendix A). Since receiving my Ph.D., I have lived, taught, and performed in Tokyo, Japan; New York City; and Shanghai, China. At present, I am in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sharjah is to Dubai as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, or Santa Monica is to downtown Los Angeles. This essay represents my worldview of jazz in Los Angeles, based upon recollections, opinions, life experiences, and memories of the people I am fortunate to know and have worked with in and from Los Angeles. …

Participatory Discrepancies and the Perception of Beats in Jazz

A POPULAR THEORY HOLDS THAT "SWING" STEMS specifically from asynchronous timing between bass and drums in their shared articulation of the beat, a phenomenon Charles Keil has dubbed "participatory discrepancies" (PDs; Keil, 1987). The "push and pull" between these instruments purportedly generates a "productive tension" thought to drive the groove with energy. This paper presents the results of two experiments on the perception of PDs. Experiment 1 employed synthetic recordings of a conventional swing groove in which the onset asynchronies between bass and drums were varied. Participants used three listening strategies to perceive the asynchrony and its purported effects. Experiment 2 employed recordings of professional jazz musicians and tested for the effects of learning in the perception of PDs. Little evidence emerged from either experiment in support of the PD framework. An alternative proposal drawn from metric entrainment theory explains the effects of PDs as more limited and local than previously thought.

William L. Young, M.D., Recipient of the 2009 Excellence in Research Award

William L. Young, M.D., Recipient of the 2009 Excellence in Research Award

John Coltrane

This article was prepared by Peter Elsdon, with editorial assistance from Sarina Velt. This article is a transcription of the address given by saxophonist David Liebman at the International Coltrane Colloquium in Tours, France, November 2007. While it has been edited for publication, we have tried to stay as true to the spirit of Liebman’s remarks as possible. Liebman’s perspective is that of a musician growing up during the time at which Coltrane was at his creative peak. His memories of watching the Coltrane quartet play live attests to the transformative power these performances had on many young musicians around this time. Liebman also gives an insight into the conditions in which the Coltrane quartet worked, and his comments on the clubs in which the group performed (which by extension serve as a commentary on the working conditions for professional jazz musicians around this time) are particularly interesting. This emphasis on the economic realities experienced by working jazz musicians at this time serves as a useful counterbalance to the tendency in commentary on Coltrane to elevate his performances to the status of the otherworldly. Liebman also reflects on dealing with the legacy of Coltrane in his own playing, through comments which illuminate the sometimes overbearing influence forebears can exert over musicians seeking to forge their own paths.

Jazz musicians: creating service experience in live performance

Purpose – Although music has been indicated by nightclubs and pubs' patrons as the most important service offering, the service marketing literature provides very little guidance on how artists could increase their audience satisfaction with an experiential product such as live music. This paper aims to give a wider understanding of jazz musicians' experience of their role in the creation of live performance.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 12 biographical interviews with 16 professional jazz musicians were completed.Findings – The respondents identified audience, agents and venue owners as important elements of their product; however, they were inclined to see their live performance rather as an experience created by the product itself.Practical implications – As the quality of relationship between musicians and wider business is in need of significant improvement, this paper identified potential sources of misunderstanding in a saturated and highly competitive marketplace. Practical implications...

The parallax of art and commerce

This article adds to art versus commerce debate by introducing the thoughts of eight professional jazz musicians. Our article suggests that other studies of marketing in music are flawed either methodologically (e.g. Kubacki and Croft, 2004) or, more crucially, conceptually (e.g. Holbrook, 2005). We feel that too many discussions have misconceived of the debate by positing art and commerce at opposite ends of a spectrum, allowing for some degree of (theoretical or actual) concord in between. As such musicians are classified as artists, who “sell out” to commerce, or else mere commercial players who have no business calling themselves artists. We argue that the debate of art versus commerce is misconceived: it is not a spectrum but rather a parallax, a space between opposites that cannot be bridged and remains forever apart. The parallax shift is therefore one of perspective, which enables two opposites to co-exist without meeting in the middle. This paper therefore offers fresh insight into current problems identified in arts marketing theory by outlining the thoughts of leading artists themselves. In addition, the paper argues that marketing is an extremely important tool to ensure a sustainable UK jazz scene.

Internet Metronome: An Experimental Remote Jazz Jam Session with Uncompressed HDTV Transmission over Lightpaths

SUMMARY An experimental remote jazz jam session with uncompressed HDTV over the Internet was conducted on September 21st as a Grand Final event of the Aichi Exposition 2005. Professional jazz musicians located at the venue of Aichi Exposition and at SARA in Amsterdam have made the jazz jam session with new mechanisms called as “Internet Metronome” and “delay-control unit” using an international “lightpath.” This was the first music collaboration using a new methodology and, one of the challenging demonstrations to transport the uncompressed HDTV streams with timing control under the current software and hardware architectures. “Internet Metronome” and “delay-control unit” enabled to make a tempo using and controlling delay, and “lightpath” minimized the network jitter. Using these new mechanisms and technology, the musicians could play with new music collaboration environment over the Internet with long communication delay, and enjoyed remote jazz jam session at both ends.