Negotiating Freedom:

Values and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music

David Borgo, Ph.D.

Black Music Research Journal 23/1 (Fall 2004)

Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an action

directed towards freedom. – Davey Williams (1984, 32)

A compromise between order and disorder, improvisation is a negotiation between

codes and their pleasurable dismantling. – John Corbett (1995, 237)

During the last half-century, an eclectic group of artists with diverse

backgrounds in avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, electronic, popular,
and world music traditions have pioneered an approach to improvisation that
borrows freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems
unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. While a definitive history of
this often irreverent and iconoclastic group would be impossible – or at least
potentially misleading – to compile, this article will highlight several values
and practices that have been, and continue to be, negotiated within the
contemporary
improvising community.

Freedom, in the sense of transcending previous social and structural

constraints, has been an important part of jazz music since its inception.
The syncopated rhythms and exploratory improvisations and compositions of jazz
have consistently stretched the structures and forms of American music.
The music has also provided a symbol and a culture of liberation to several
generations of musicians and listeners both at home and abroad.
But when Ornette Coleman offered the jazz community Something Else in 1958, he
galvanized an approach to freedom that had been circulating among diverse
musicians and one which has continued to inspire and inflame many in the jazz
community.[1]

At that time, Coleman and other like-minded musicians began to explore

performance practices that rely less on preconceived musical models and explicitly
defined ensemble roles. For sympathetic musicians, critics, and audiences, the
"freedom" implied by these new musical approaches allowed for creativity
unencumbered
by the constricting harmonies, forms, and rigid meters of bebop and swing styles.
It evoked a return to the collective practices and ideals evident in the
earliest forms of jazz and pointed the way towards a more inclusive musical
approach that could draw on insight and inspiration from the world over.
To unsympathetic listeners, "freedom" resulted only in musical mayhem devoid of the
swing, melody, and harmony that made traditional jazz music so vital
and technically demanding.[2]

At approximately the same time that "freedom" was becoming a rallying

point and a musical goal for many modern jazz musicians, improvisation
resurfaced in the Euro-American "classical" tradition – after a century-and-a-half
of neglect – in the form of indeterminate, intuitive, and graphically
designed pieces.[3] Composers not only expanded the amount of real-time creative
input demanded of performers, but they took, in substantial numbers,
to exploring the potential of improvisation on their own, in a sense conflating
the act of creation and performance together by removing the interpretive
step from the accepted musical equation.[4]

Since these pioneering early years on both continents, an approach to

improvisation drawing on these and other traditions has emerged in the
contemporary music community. A variety of names have circulated at various times
and in various locales to describe this musical practice, each with
its own group of adherents and each with its own semantic shortcomings.[5] The
preferred terms tend to highlight the creative or progressive stance of
the performers and the cutting-edge or inclusive nature of the music itself; e.g.,
free or free-form, avant-garde, outside, ecstatic, fire or energy,
contemporary or new, creative, collective, spontaneous, etc. Stylistic references
(jazz, classical, rock, world or electronic) are variously included
or excluded, as are cultural or national identity markers (Great Black Music or
British Free Improvisation).

The primary musical bond shared between these diverse performers is a fascination
with sonic possibilities and surprising musical occurrences and a desire
to improvise, to a significant degree, both the content and the form of the
performance. In other words, free improvisation moves beyond matters of
expressive detail to matters of collective structure; it is not formless music-
making, but form-making music. Musician Ann Farber explains:

Our aim is to play together with the greatest possible freedom – which, far from
meaning without constraint, actually means to play together with
sufficient skill and communication to be able to select proper constraints in the
course of the piece, rather than being dependent on precisely chosen ones.
(Belgrad 1997, 2)

To define free improvisation in strictly musical terms, however, is

potentially to miss its most remarkable characteristic – the ability to
incorporate and negotiate disparate perspectives and worldviews. Jason Stanyek
(1999, 47) asserts that free improvisation is above all "a fertile space
for the enactment and articulation of the divergent narratives of both individuals
and cultures." Individual improvisers have frequently joined together
to form artist-run collectives aimed at establishing creative and financial
control over the production and dissemination of their work and ensuring the
proper respect and remuneration for their efforts.[6] Although the lifetime of
these various collectives runs the gamut from months to decades,
the impulse to pool resources and to pursue communal approaches to creativity
remains strong among improvisers.

Defining Freedom

Improvisation has received some scholarly attention, although its

emphasis on in-performance creativity and interaction often defies the
standard musicological tools of the trade and the accepted conservatory methods
for evaluating competency and aesthetic value.[7] Authors interested
in free improvisation vary considerably in their approaches to the subject,
producing everything from biographical and formalist work to in-depth
social, cultural and political analysis. Arguing that the arts are predominantly
autonomous or self-referential discourses, some authors present the
"freedom" in the music strictly in terms of varying degrees of liberation from
functional harmony, metered time, and traditionally accepted performance
roles and playing techniques (e.g., Jost 1994 [1975], Dean 1992, and Westendorf
1994). Other authors have interpreted free jazz and free improvisation as
a social and cultural response to the appropriation and exploitation of African
American music styles (e.g., Jones 1963, Kofsky 1970, Wilmer 1977, and Hester
1997).
They focus considerable attention on the birth of the practice during the civil
rights movement in the United States and on the music’s place within the context
of an emerging post-colonial world. Still other authors have allied themselves
with Marxist or neo-Marxist critiques of hegemonic culture and have chosen
to focus on free improvisation’s implied critique of capitalism and its related
market- and property-based economy (e.g., Prévost 1995 and Attali 1985).

The diverse and emergent strands of free improvisation have problematized, for
many, issues of identity and idiom. Not only has dissent raged within the
jazz community since the early "assault" of Ornette Coleman and others, but the
development of a distinctly European approach to free improvisation and
the extreme hybridization of the music – incorporating avant-garde, electronic,
non-western, and popular music practices – has further strained issues
of idiomatic coherence and cultural aesthetics.[8] John Litweiler (1984, 257)
states that "the precedents of free improvisation [...] are in all kinds
of music, and no single kind."

For some, one's approach to energy, virtuosity, and stylistic inclusion or

exclusion can define quite clearly one's idiomatic allegiances. Despite their
many differences, the first generation of African American free jazz musicians all
seemed to share an intense approach to energy, momentum, and rhythmic
drive; think of Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Henry
Grimes, Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, and many others.
The second generation of African American pioneers along with many European
contemporaries began to explore other ways – both more and less dense and
more and less structured – of creating intensity. And for even later generation
improvisers, this extreme range of approaches to energy and aesthetics
can provide fertile creative ground, but it also present a point of considerable
contention in the community. The spectrum of contemporary improvisation
appears to be both strongly linked to the traditions of free jazz and, at the same
time, increasingly open to artists with little-to-no jazz experience.
Steve Day (1998, 4) argues that "true, jazz always contains improvisation, but
improvisation does not always contain jazz." Nick Couldry (1995, 7)
describes free improvisation as "a hybrid of both classical and jazz traditions."
Tom Nunn elaborates on this often-mentioned connection:

One of the common links that developed between these two traditions was
instrumental virtuosity, wherein techniques expanding and extending the
sonic possibilities of instruments provided the material of improvisation. The
use of atonality, dense textures, asymmetrical or non-metrical
rhythm, and open forms or forms derived from the music rather than imposed upon it
are other examples of developments common to both jazz and
the avant garde leading up to today’s free improvisation. (Nunn 1998, 13)
 Despite any sonic similarities between the emerging avant-garde
traditions, many contemporary composers have remained extremely
critical of musical improvisation and reluctant to challenge the implied hierarchy
of composer-performer-listener. For example, Luciano Berio (1985, 81,85)
dismissed improvisation as "a haven of dilettantes" who "normally act on the level
of instrumental praxis rather than musical thought […]
[B]y musical thought I mean above all the discovery of a coherent discourse that
unfolds and develops simultaneously on different levels."

This and other passages by respected twentieth-century composers

frequently betray a belief that musical notation is the only means
to inventing complex musical structures and, by extension, the only valid measure
of musical creativity.[9] This tendency to view all modes of
musical expression through the formal and architectonic perspective of resultant
structure is deeply entrenched in the music academy and derives
in great part from a bias towards the study of Euro-American composed-notated
works. A story from African American pianist Cecil Taylor recounted
by A.B. Spellman (1966, 70-71) highlights the issue:

I’ve had musicologists ask me for a score to see the pedal point in the beginning
of that piece [“Nona’s Blues”]. They wanted to see it down on paper
to figure out its structure, its whole, but at that point I had stopped writing my
scores out […] and the musicologists found that hard to believe,
since on that tune one section just flows right into the next. That gives the lie
to the only structured music that is possible is that music which
is written. Which is the denial of the whole of human expression.

A pronounced dichotomy between notated and improvised forms of musical

creativity appears to be less apparent in the African American creative
music community. Black composers, including Olly Wilson, T.J. Anderson, Hale
Smith, William Banfield, and Alvin Singleton, have incorporated improvisation
into their work. And many African American improvisers – particularly those with
close associations to the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) – interact with and incorporate notation in a variety of
performance contexts. Trumpeter, composer, and AACM member Wadada Leo Smith,
for instance, has devised an open-ended symbolic framework he now calls
"Ankhrasmation," the purpose of which is "to create and invent musical ideas
simultaneously utilizing the fundamental laws of improvisation and composition"
(Porter 2002, 265). According to George Lewis (2002, 128),
the definition of “composition” among African American creative musicians can be a
fluid one, “appropriating and simultaneously challenging
and revising various pan-European models, dialoguing with African, Asian, and
Pacific music traditions, and employing compositional methods
that did not necessarily privilege either conventionally notated scores, or the
single, heroic creator figure so beloved by jazz historiography.”

Eric Porter's (2002) new book focuses on the frequently neglected ideas
of African American "jazz" musicians and the self-conscious aspects
of black cultural production. Through a close reading of texts by Charles Mingus,
Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Yusef Lateef, Marion Brown, Wadada Leo Smith,
and Anthony Braxton, Porter raises many important issues about the relationship
between so-called jazz, classical, and popular musics, the role of
improvisation and composition in musical creativity, and the political, economic,
and spiritual dimensions of the new jazz. He, along with other
recent authors including Ajay Heble (2001), Sherrie Tucker (in press), and Julie
Dawn Smith (in press), also focuses the critical lens of feminist
studies on this music, which has traditionally been viewed as a predominantly
masculine pursuit. Many jazz musicians are only now beginning to realize
these embedded inequities. Anthony Braxton, for one, finds it ironic that many of
the politically and spiritually aware musicians of the 1960s could also
function as "chauvinist and oppressor" (Porter 2002, 284).

The frequently touted "openness" or inclusive nature of free improvisation does at

times obscure the gender sensibilities and the different cultural
aesthetics represented by its practitioners. George Lewis (1996) has made a
strong case for a clear distinction between an "Afrological" and "Eurological"
approach to this music. His terms are not ethnically essential but instead refer
to historically emergent, social and cultural attitudes.[10] Lewis’ study
focuses on the work of two towering figures of 1950s American experimental music:
Charlie Parker and John Cage. Both artists continually explored spontaneity
and uniqueness in their work, and Lewis argues that each musician was fully aware
of the social implications of his art. The essential contrast he draws
between the two lies in how they arrived at and chose to express the notion of
freedom. Cage, informed by his studies of Zen and the I Ching, denied the
utility of protest. His notion of freedom is devoid of any kind of struggle that
might be required to achieve it. Parker, on the other hand, was
(paraphrasing Leroi Jones 1963, 188) a nonconformist in 1950s America simply by
virtue of his skin color. Lewis (1996, 94) argues that for African
American musicians, "new improvisative and compositional styles are often
identified with ideas of race advancement and, more importantly, as resistive
ripostes to perceived opposition to black social expression and economic
advancement by the dominant white American culture." An Afrological perspective
implies an emphasis on personal narrative and the harmonization of one’s musical
personality with social environments, both actual and possible.
A Eurological perspective, on the other hand, implies either absolute freedom from
personal narrative, culture and conventions – an autonomy of the
aesthetic object – or the need for a controlling or structuring force in the
person and voice of a "composer."

Contemporary free improvisers often struggle with the issues implied by

Lewis’ Afrological/Eurological model. English guitarist Derek Bailey
(1992, 83) betrays a Eurological perspective when he describes his practice of
"non-idiomatic improvisation" as a "search for a styleless uncommitted area
in which to work." Gavin Bryars, a celebrated English bass player and early
improvising partner of Bailey, chose to "abandon" improvisation after 1966 in
order to focus exclusively on the aesthetic autonomy offered by an Eurological
approach to composition. Bryars argued that, "in any improvising position
the person creating the music is identified with the music [...] It’s like
standing a painter next to his picture so that every time you see the painting
you see the painter as well and you can’t see it without him" (Bailey 1992, 115).

Not all European improvisers, however, favor a Eurological approach to the

practice. English saxophonist Evan Parker clearly sees his approach as part of
the African American jazz tradition:

What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming out

of a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call
it but I would want it to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to
certain people who continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts.
People like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor – these were people that
played music that excited me to the point where I took music seriously myself.
 That continues to be the case. That’s where what I’m doing has to make sense, if
it makes any sense at all. (Lock 1991, 30)

Contrasting Bailey’s and Parker’s approaches, British critic Ian Carr writes:

[W]ith monastic vigilance [Bailey] tries to avoid the habitual side of playing.
Compared with this religious sense of purity, this sense of keeping
an untainted vision, Evan Parker’s approach is secular, agnostic, and robust. He
is prepared to rub shoulders and get involved with all sorts and conditions
of musicians, and seems able to do this without losing his essential identity.
(Carr 1973, 70-71)

These and other remarks reflect an intriguing tension within the

community of free improvisers between Afrological issues of personal
and cultural identity and Eurological conceptions of music as an autonomous art.
African American drummer and composer Max Roach stated concisely
the issues and his intentions:

Two theories exist, one is that art is for the sake of art, which is true. The
other theory, which is also true, is that the artist is like a
secretary [...] He keeps a record of his time so to speak [...] My music tries to
say how I really feel, and I hope it mirrors in some way how
black people feel in the United States. (Taylor 1993, 112)

Roach's comments highlight the fact that African American jazz and improvising
musicians have frequently sought to celebrate aspects of black
life and culture and, at the same time, cast off the burden of race, especially
when that burden of "racial authenticity" infringes on the
marketability or the creativity of black musicians and their music. This dilemma
has played out since the 1960s most clearly in the tension
between black nationalism and universalism evident in the commentary of many
celebrated African American improvisers. Despite the helpful and
often illuminating distinctions between Afrological and Eurological perspectives,
the continued hybridization in the community of contemporary
free improvisation has made discussions of cultural belonging a very prickly
topic.[11] As multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton wryly comments:
"Why is it so natural for Evan Parker, say, to have an appreciation of Coltrane,
but for me to have an appreciation of Stockhausen is somehow out
of the order of natural human experience? I see it as racist" (Day 1998, 35).
George Lewis (2002), in a more recent article, advances the notion
that experimentalism was becoming “creolized.” Where the so-called “third stream”
movement (a proposed fusion of jazz and classical styles) had failed,
Lewis argues that “independent black experimentalism challenged the centrality of
pan-Europeanism to the notion of the experimental itself” (126).

Several AACM members rejected early on the prescriptive tenets of cultural

nationalism and questioned the idea that black music is a hermetic field and
yet still presented their work as an example of creative black music and as an
homage to black people. As saxophonist Marion Brown poetically states,
 "I'm like a man walking into the future backwards" (Porter 2002, 247). Weaving
together cultural naturalism, pan-Africanism, and universalism offered,
to many, the most effective means to negotiate the constraints put upon their
creativity by the hegemony of Western economic, discursive, and aesthetic ideals.

Performing Freedom

How do individuals and groups negotiate these diverse ideas of

"freedom" in musical performance? In what ways do culture and creativity
, memory and muscle factor into improvisation? And how does context affect the
meanings and economics of performing improvised music?

Venues for this music can run the gamut from small, local coffeehouses to well
publicized and attended international festivals.[12] And the featured
ensembles at these venues cover the full spectrum from one-time meetings between
improvisers (the "all-star event”) to the many longer-term associations
with essentially unchanging personnel (the "working group”). The former can
provide a sense of immediacy, excitement, novelty, and risk to participants,
while the latter may offer an intimacy and depth unavailable in the earliest
stages of interaction.[13] Tom Nunn (1998, 58) believes that:

Free improvisation, by virtue of its open and incorporating nature, invites (indeed
demands) the development of personal and group styles.
As an improviser accumulates experience, a unique style develops naturally.
Likewise, as a group develops rapport and players within a group become
increasingly familiar with one another’s musical tendencies (i.e., personal style
traits), a general style peculiar to the group will usually develop.

Free improvisers, in general, share the view that technical and

improvisational accomplishments are arrived at better through in-context
development and experience rather than through isolated training. The idea of
"rehearsing" during playing sessions, however, is less common since,
as the term implies, the "re-hearing" of musical details in order to perfect a
musical gesture, formal section, or complete performance runs counter
to the aesthetics of improvisation. Bassist Reggie Workman told me in a clinic
setting that he would like to rid our vocabularies of the verb "to try."
In improvisation, you do not try, you do![14]

This is not to say that practice techniques are unheard of in the world
of improvisation. One common device used in both free and
idiom-specific improvisation traditions is handicapping. Handicapping refers to a
self-imposed challenge designed to limit material or techniques
available to the improviser. These may be conceptual or even physical handicaps
imposed on the performer. Conceptual handicaps could involve playing
only one note or within a specified range, or aiming for a uniform mood to an
improvisation. Bassist Bertram Turetzky recently told me that his first
instruction to classical musicians who have no previous experience with free
improvisation is to play the note Bb continuously for several hours in as
many ways as possible. Physical handicaps might include using only a particular
part of an instrument or only one hand. In a recent clinic for example,
kotoist Miya Masaoka asked a student drummer to improvise using only his elbows.
While from one perspective these devices may appear to limit individual creativity,
they can also remind each participant to focus attention on the
collective statement and the musical moment rather than to become easily
overwhelmed with the enormous scope of individual musical possibilities.
Tom Nunn finds the biggest mistake made among first-time improvisers is to focus
exclusively on what they, as individuals, are responsible for.
Or, alternately, participating in simple cat-and-mouse type does not allow for
meaningful musical relationships to emerge and be explored.
He writes, "they are under the misconception that free improvisers make the music.
Therefore, they each feel personally responsible to make
something happen, yet nothing happens as a group, nothing congeals" (Nunn 1998,
70). Evan Parker comments along these same lines:

However much you try, in a group situation what comes out is group music and some
of what comes out was not your idea, but your response to somebody
else’s idea [...] The mechanism of what is provocation and what is response – the
music is based on such fast interplay, such fast reactions that it
is arbitrary to say, "Did you do that because I did that? Or did I do that because
you did that?" And anyway the whole thing seems to be operating at
a level that involves [...] certainly intuition, and maybe faculties of a more
paranormal nature. (Corbett 1994, 203)

Many free improvisers discuss spiritual, ecstatic, or trance-like performance

states. Total mental involvement is cited by some, while others describe
a complete annihilation of all critical and rational faculties. Musicians stress
performance goals ranging from complete relaxation or catharsis to
a transcendental feeling of ego-loss or collective consciousness. The sheer
energy and density of sound at times experienced in free and collective
improvisation can potentially create a state of hyperstimulation verging on sensory
overload; Cecil Taylor, for instance, claims to enter a trance every
time he plays. The idea of spirit possession also appears in the improvising
community. Saxophonist Jameel Moondoc describes a time when
"the music got so intense that spirits came into the room, just hovering around,
and in one aspect it was incredibly scary. It was almost like we were
calling the ancestors, and they came" (Gershon 2001, 15). Others describe a
voluntary, self-induced form of trance – more akin to shamanic practices –
as they guide the listener on a spiritual journey (Borgo 1997). Despite these
diverse belief systems, a feeling of spirituality and reverence pervades
many improvised performances. David Such (1993, 131) quotes celebrated bassist
William Parker:

Free music can be a musical form that is playing without pre-worked structure,
without written music or chord changes. However, for free music to succeed,
it must grow into free spiritual music, which is not [...] a musical form; it
should be based off of a life form. It is not about just picking up an
instrument and playing guided by math principles or emotion. It is emptying
oneself and being.

While the spiritual concerns of improvisers can be diverse and often difficult to
analyze, the economics of performing contemporary improvised music
has been a topic of some concern for both performers and scholars of this music.
The previously mentioned tendency to form improvising collectives
was and is, in great part, a direct response to the often racialized notion that
jazz and improvised music most appropriately belong in the under-funded
club and cabaret. In a recent article surveying the development of the AACM and
investigating the racialized notions of “New music”, George Lewis
(2002, 121) writes:

For the black musicians, on the other hand, the “club,” rather than the concert
hall, had been heavily ideologized as the ideal, even the genetically
best-suited place for their music. Early on, however, black experimentalists
realized that serious engagement with theater and performance, painting,
poetry, electronics, and other interdisciplinary expressions that require
extensive infrastructure, would be rendered generally ineffective or even
impossible by the jazz club model. In this light, the supposed obligation to
perform in clubs began to appear as a kind of unwanted surveillance
of the black creative body.

For a time in the 1970s, the “loft” became an “alternative” space for performances
of this increasingly multimedia expression, and creative scenes
began to flourish, particularly in and around New York City. But just as the term
“jazz” had been criticized for decades as a boundary-imposing
and financially-limiting label, the new loft venues – perceived to require minimal
infrastructural investment and therefore undeserving of extensive
financial support by established arts funding agencies – quickly became another
obstacle to the recognition-seeking and border-crossing strategies of
creative musicians and improvisers (see Lewis, 2002, 121-123). Although the
situation has arguably improved since that time, venues and funding for
“New music” tend to still be hypersegregated according to racialized categories.
[15]

Experiencing Freedom

How do listeners and performers of this music engage with the sounds
and practices of "freedom"? Can improvised performance offer
a window into different conceptions of musical structuring and complexity?
Improvisation, by virtue of its emphasis on collaboration and in-the-moment
creativity, does seems to invite different approaches to performance, listening,
and analysis – approaches that focus as much attention on the human
and cultural aspects of music making as on the formal structure of the musical
work.[16]

Since, on hearing the initial sound in a free improvisation, neither the performers
nor the audience know what direction the music will take,
open and attentive listening is essential to creating and maintaining the flow of
the music and to extracting meaning and enjoyment from the experience.
The fact that both the performer and audience perspectives begin at the same
point offers, according to Tom Nunn (1998, 93), "a level of excitement,
involvement and challenge to the audience listener that is unique, at least in
degree, to free improvisation.”

Free improvisation requires that performers and audiences listen actively rather
than passively and perceive the entire acoustic soundscape as
"musical." Barry Truax (1986) has described three general modes of engaging with
the acoustic soundscape: background listening, listening-in-readiness,
and listening-in-search. For Truax, background listening is akin to "distracted
listening" while the listener is actively engaged in another activity.
Listening-in-readiness involves focused attention, but that attention is to
familiar sounds-associations built up over time that may be readily identified.
With listening-in-search, one scans the acoustic soundscape for particular
sounds, attempting to extract or create meaning from their production or the
environment’s response to the sounds produced. [17]

Mark Bradlyn (1991) adopts visual terms to describe further this

soundscape to which listeners may attend. He states:

The first step in learning to listen is stopping still and opening our ears, first
to figure, next to ground, next to field.
The field, the aggregate soundscape is the most difficult to perceive […] [T]here
must be a constant flux, a never fully focused
shifting among figure, ground, and field [...] One performer’s playing may
suddenly emerge as a stark figure against the ground of
another’s only to just as suddenly submerge into the ground or even farther back
into the field as another voice emerges. (15)

Bradlyn’s conclusion is that collective free improvisation may falter if

participants and listeners fail "to hear the texture, the
field, in pursuit of the dramatic figure, the gesture" (18). And he further
suggests that improvisation "succeeds as music only to
the extent that listening achieves equal status with playing" (15). Even these
active and inclusive approaches to listening may not
take full account of the variety of emotional, spiritual, cultural, and even
political dimensions to experiencing improvised performance.

Stanyek (1999, 47) finds even more at stake in the process of listening
than the "musical" success of the improvisation.
He asserts that "if free improvisation has anything emancipatory or
'anticipatory' about it, then this kind of proleptic vision is
contained within the act of listening, not in the sounds themselves." For
Stanyek, "listening is the way identities are narrated and
negotiated and the way differences are articulated." He elaborates:

Indeed, the critical nature of free improvisation, its ability to accommodate the
disjunctures which invariably arise out of any intercultural
encounter, (and perhaps the fact that free improvisation resides outside of many of
the economic and aesthetic strictures of the culture industry),
all help to provide a welcome antidote to the music-as-a-universal-language trope
which pervades many intercultural collaborations. (44)

The "freedoms" frequently associated with contemporary improvised music are

mediated by specific personal, social, and cultural experiences.
Since the 1960s, the revolutionary timbres, textures, and approaches of this music
have resonated in extremely varied ways, from Black Power
or transcendental spirituality to post-modern angst and confusion. And yet, in
the moment of performance and through the act of listening,
our personal, social, and cultural understandings – and interpersonal and
intercultural sensibilities – may be powerfully changed in the rapture
and rupture of improvisation.

Documenting Freedom

Can and should improvised music be recorded? How do we engage with the
sounds of "freedom" when they are detached from their original
context and replayed at a different time? The many issues surrounding the
recording of free improvisation have received considerable attention
(see Bailey 1992, 103-104). Tom Nunn (1998, 154) argues that "much of the
unknown-about-to-be-known is lost in recordings. The image of the musicians
playing together, communicating, collectively creating in the moment is impossible
to capture on tape." Cornelius Cardew (1971, xvii) believes
that "documents such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as
they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at
best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and
place [...] what you hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing,
but divorced from its natural context." David Roberts (1977-1978, 39) finds that
"for musics not predicated upon the dissociation of form and
performance, recording can, and often does, spell the kiss of death." Vinko
Globokar insists that recordings of this music should be listened to
once and then discarded.

These artists and authors seem to agree on two central points: (1) an
audio recording, no matter its fidelity, necessarily reproduces
only a limited spectrum of the performance experience, and (2) the act of listening
to improvised music away from its initial performance context
and on several occasions forever alters its meaning and impact. Their disregard
for the simple utility of recordings or of the sense of tradition
that they can and do engender also seems to betray a certain Eurological
perspective; one focused on the aesthetic autonomy of the artistic/performative
experience.
Martin Davidson, of Eminem records, expresses a rather different viewpoint. He
argues that "recordings and improvisation are entirely symbiotic,
as if they were invented for each other [...] the act of improvising is filling
time (either a predetermined or an open-ended amount) with music –
something that could be called real-time composition, and something that has more
need and more right to be recorded than anything else" (Davidson 1984, 23).

Most free improvisers acknowledge the advantages that recordings offer

in actually establishing and disseminating a tradition.
Networking is a critical means of survival and exposure in the dispersed and
marginalized free improvising community, and the exchange of
recordings is a helpful means to that end. Many improvisers also conceive of
recordings as important documents or milestones in an evolving career.
Derek Bailey (1992, 104) remarks that all that is usually claimed for a recording
is "that it should provide evidence of musical identity or of changes
in identity." Many performers also acknowledge the educational value recordings
can offer through repeated listening.

Scholars of African American and improvised music have frequently

engaged – and struggled – with the issue of an oral/literate dichotomy
 in music performance and analysis (see Sidran 1981). The increasingly
interconnected and technologically sophisticated context for modern culture
challenges us to view contemporary music as a complex site wherein new oral/aural
cultural forms and practices are electronically inscribed into society.
Tricia Rose (1994), in her recent study of rap music, adopts (from Walter Ong)
the concept of "post-literate orality" to describe hip-hop culture.
She writes that "the concept of post-literate orality merges orally-influenced
traditions that are created and embedded in a post-literate,
technologically sophisticated context" (86). Arguing a similar position, Daniel
Belgrad (1997, 193) states that African American music offers
a model of "secondary orality" in a postliterate culture, "the possibility of
asserting the values of an oral culture within a culture already
conditioned by writing." Well before these scholars began to tackle the subject,
Wadada Leo Smith addressed this same issue:

In ancient times when all people held improvisation as their art-music form, it was
said then that theirs was an oral tradition [...]
In our times now, an oral-electronic tradition is being born, and this signifies
the age of a new improvisation-art-music-form.
One only needs to think in terms of the media and its proper use to understand how
any significant event, and I’m speaking culturally now
and particularly of music, can be immediately received anywhere in the world
within seconds or minutes depending on the transfer in time
lapse through satellite techniques: indeed an oral-electronic tradition. (Smith
1973)

Improvisers, while often centered on collective and spontaneous

contribution in performance, are equally aware of developing an
individual sound and style and defending a career path within the music industry.
Yet their approach confounds many established legal and
cultural norms of music ownership and the standard practices of music copyrighting
and royalty compensation. For example, before 1972 it
was not possible to register an improvised sound recording with the Library of
Congress. And royalties – an important economic component
of countless musicians' careers – are still dispensed almost exclusively to
composers (or to the record labels that maintain copyright over
the recorded sound) to the detriment of improvising artists.[18] Improvisation
also challenges us to rethink ingrained notions of musical
value and traditional approaches to musical analysis and discourse.

Evaluating Freedom

Can free improvisation be criticized? If so, then by whom? What is implied by the
word "criticism"? According to Marion Brown, "'Criticism'
is by definition a product of the gulf between musicians' ideas and those of the
audience. Once a listener determines that his or her
interpretation does not match the performer's," Brown argues, "one becomes a
critic" (Porter 2002, 251).

Even among performers, a gulf can surface between divergent interpretations. While
some artists freely engage in conversations and critical
reflection immediately following a group improvisation, others are loathe to do
so, since each member’s immediate impression of the improvisation
may differ considerably and candid discussion can make subsequent improvisations
by the group too self-conscious. Listening to
recorded playing sessions at a later date, either alone or as a group, is one
common means of self-evaluation and group feedback in free improvisation.

The jazz critical establishment has historically been harshly divided over the
relative merits of freer forms of improvisation.
Both journalists and musicians appeared to take sides almost immediately after the
arrival of Ornette Coleman's quartet in New York and the subsequent debate has
hardly subsided to this day. Beyond the stylistic quibbling, however, it may be
the apparent critical vacuum that has done more harm to the reception and
recognition of this music. In 1973, Marion Brown self-published Views and Reviews
meant to accompany his collectively improvised album Afternoon of a Georgia Faun
released three years earlier. In so doing, he set forth his personal aesthetic
philosophy and positioned the artist as the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of his
or her own work. And, somewhat paradoxically, he also debated the applicability of
language to represent musical experience. Perhaps most importantly, though, he
challenged the critical status-quo of writers who betray a preference for composed
music and who, by virtue of their powerful institutional positions, can
dramatically affect the lives and livelihoods of black avant-garde artists. Eric
Porter (2002, 253), paraphrasing Brown, writes that:

[O]ne is prone to judge a piece of music by its formal, or compositional, elements.

Because this presents a problem when analyzing fully
improvised music or compositions that include improvisational elements, Brown
proposes that a different set of aesthetic principles must be
invoked when evaluating such music. 'Balance' is achieved in improvised music not
through a compositional structure but through musicans'
personal expressions and the emotional bond they create with their audience.

George Lewis (2002, 123-125) further highlights the issue of how,

where, and by whom this music should be criticized in his
discussion of the treatment afforded various “downtown” musics by the Village
Voice in the late 1970s. The Voice, at that time,
separated critical discussion of various musical genres under the headings “Music”
(“i.e., reviews of work from the high culture West”)
and “Riffs” (“the low-culture, diminutively-imagined Rest”). Lewis concludes that
the AACM and other creative artists with similar ideologies
were “destined to run roughshod over many conventional assumptions about
infrastructure, reference, and place” (124).

The practice of so-called “jazz” musicians and “improvisers” engaging

with extended notation and graphic scores,
electronics and computers, and multimedia approaches to performance directly
challenged the binary thought – black/white,
jazz/classical, high culture/low culture – that was and is still common in critical
discourse. Lewis points out that even African American
critics and activists were not immune from attempting to regulate and restrict
African American creativity. Amiri Baraka, whose important
early work (Jones 1963) strongly supported the then emerging “avant-garde,” later
derided many black creative musicians for being unduly
 influenced by European modernism (see Lewis 2002, 129).

Several journals and magazines consistently publish reviews of free

improvisation recordings, performances, and festivals and
provide a window into the critical values espoused by the contemporary print media.
[19] As with music criticism in more traditional veins,
comparisons to previous recordings or similar well-known groups or players factor
prominently in these writings. Malcom Barry (1985, 173)
writes: "inevitably there is difficulty in separating the form from the
individuals practicing that form [...] [T]he anti-composed music becomes
identified with particular figures just as composed music does.”

Free improvisation critics most often base their evaluations of the music on the
perceived level of ensemble rapport. Did the musicians
and music congeal in a meaningful way? Were the ensemble or sectional transitions
effective? Did the musicians explore novel and
interesting relationships? Reviewers also frequently comment on the presence (or
absence) of references to established musical styles
(jazz, rock, classical, electronic or world) within free improvisation. While
these comments can be helpful in orienting the reader
(or prospective buyer) prior to actually hearing the music, critics variously
praise or denounce the use of these "style signs" as
ingenious layerings and postmodern juxtapositions or as unfortunate byproducts of
too heavy a reliance on established techniques and practices.

Even if most overt idiomatic qualities are consciously avoided by the performers,
free improvisers still incorporate and experiment with the
accepted tools of artistic expression: stability, interruption, repetition,
contrast, etc. Performing freely improvised music involves a
constant balancing act between complexity and comprehensibility, control and non-
control, constancy and unpredictability, a balancing act
that can invite considerable debate and disagreement. The issue of control verses
non-control brings to mind an issue touched on earlier
in this essay – the idea of virtuosity in improvisation. Do our standard
conservatory conceptions of virtuosity provide an accurate measure
of a musician's improvisational skills? A frequently recounted story may serve to
illuminate this issue. By his own account,
multi-instrumentalist Steve Beresford likes to explore the totally controlled and
the totally uncontrolled. His expansive approach to instrumental
technique, however, allegedly got him ostracized from a 1977 Company Week (Derek
Bailey’s annual meeting of improvisers) because his approach to
his instruments was deemed "insufficiently serious" (Lake, 1977).[20]

Nick Couldry (1995) devotes a rather extensive discussion to the subject of

virtuosity in improvised music. He highlights, in addition to
conventional notions of instrumental ability or more contemporary notions of so-
called "extended techniques," the idea of "a virtuosity in
finding," or the ability to imagine new sounds and discover an individual voice.
He also finds an "intensity of application" – in his view
more virtue than virtuosity – important to the demeanor of improvised performance.

So-called "extended techniques" – the exploration of unconventional sounds and

devices on conventional instruments – has been, and continues
to be, an important part of the vocabulary of many free improvisers (see Borgo
2003). And critical evaluation is often based on a perceived
mastery of these difficult techniques. For example, Tom Johnson wrote in a 1980
Village Voice review of an Evan Parker solo performance:
"In short, this was not a hit-and-miss affair the way it is with most woodwind
players when they turn on their multiphonics. This was a
musician who had transformed these new sounds into a vocabulary that was familiar
to him as major scales are to most musicians" (Johnson 1989, 461).

"Intensity of application," however, would seem to imply, if not conventional

notions of virtuosity, at least a sense of personal conviction and
performance energy. And this intensity can arguably be heard in the full spectrum
of sounds explored by contemporary improvisers, ranging from
the incredibly dense and loud to the almost unimaginably soft and sparse.

Perhaps what is most often missed, however, in critical discussion of freely

improvised music is its functional quality. In his Views and
Reviews, Marion Brown seeks to dismantle the Western aesthetic that elevates art
as an object of beauty above and beyond its functional purpose.
Brown argues not only that improvised music is as 'valid' as composed music but
also that, even when 'arrived at through mutual cooperation
at a folk level, [it] may be as successful as any other kind of music" (Porter
2002, 251).

This may, however, beg the question that many of the music's detractors are quick
to level at it; if this music is as social and as liberating
as many profess, then why is it not more popular? This question is by no means
new.[21] Many politically and socially active black avant-garde
artists have faced this continuing question of why black creativity is seemingly
so removed from African American communities. Anthony Braxton,
in his Triaxium writings, casts blame on a general lack of recognition of artistic
creativity in American society and on the market forces that
promote popular music to black audiences (Porter 2002, 283). George Lewis (2002,
129) additionally finds that academic cultural studies has
frequently downplayed or even disparaged those indigenously black musics that are
not obviously or predominantly based in or represented as
mass culture. Lewis argues that in this context, “the entry into classical music
by black composers becomes, rather than bourgeois accommodation,
an oppositional stance” challenging “fixed notions of high and low, black and
white” (130). He summarizes:

Thus, in the age of globalized megamedia, to the extent that certain oppositional
black musical forms have been generally ignored or dismissed
by academic theorists, the idea is thereby perpetuated that black culture, as
academically defined and studied, is in fact corporate-approved
culture, and that there is no necessary non-commercial space for black musical
production. (129-130)

Porter (2002), however, finds historical evidence for a strong connection between
creative music making and a vision to make progressive
music meaningful to a wide spectrum of people. He expresses that, "difficult as it
was to implement effectively, [this vision] can be
understood as a reflection of the Black Arts movement in the jazz community, where
making a living went hand in hand with making music relevant" (207).

Final Remarks
 Clearly, the diverse personal experiences and opinions of free
improvisers and the transcultural and hybrid nature of the musical
activity make generalized discussions of critical values within the community
somewhat problematic. Yet despite the frequently expressed
desire among certain free improvisers for a "styleless" or "non-idiomatic"
approach to music, more than four decades of recorded documents
and live performances attest to a growing tradition and reveal certain shared
traits to the music. Within this dispersed and disparate community,
there does appear to be – at the very least – a shared desire to meet together,
often for the first time in performance, to negotiate
understandings and embark on novel musical and social experiences.

Free improvisation, it appears, is best envisioned as a forum in which

to explore various cooperative and conflicting interactive
strategies rather than as a traditional "artistic form" to be passively admired
and consumed. Improvisation emphasizes process over product
creativity, an engendered sense of freedom and discovery, the dialogical nature of
real-time interaction, the sensual aspects of performance
over abstract intellectual concerns, and a participatory aesthetic over passive
reception. Its inherent transience and expressive immediacy
even challenge the dominant modes of consumption that have arisen in modern, mass-
market economies and the sociopolitical and spiritual efficacy of art in general.

According to George Lipsitz (1997, 178), jazz music has offered

"cultural, moral, and intellectual guidance to people all over the world."
John Gennari (1991, 449) asserts that jazz has served – and continues to serve –
"as a progenitor of new forms, an inventor of new languages,
a creator of new ways to express meaning." Ajay Heble (2000, 8) writes that "from
its very inception jazz has been about inventiveness,
about the process of change," and "that sense of change and inventiveness is most
powerfully registered in its cultural forms that accent
dissonance and contingency, in music making that explores the sonic possibilities
of traditionally outlawed models of practice."
But Jerome Harris (2000, 122) reminds us that "The movement of jazz onto the global
stage is a trend that may be judged to hold some dangers."
Among other things, he identifies "the possibility that jazz may lose benefits
that derive from cultural closeness between the makers, mediators
, and audience – among them, some easy broad consensus about its aesthetic
direction." Slyly referencing Ornette Coleman's seminal work,
Harris concludes that "The shape of jazz to come may differ from that which has
come before" (124).

The increasingly global participation in free improvisation does seem to preclude

the possibility of a "broad consensus about its aesthetic
direction." But as musical devices and relationships are negotiated within freely
improvised performances and within the community of
improvisers, musicians do offer important rhetorical commentary on desirable
social organization, the politics of representation,
the public function of art, and the possibilities for resistance to embedded
cultural and historical constructions. And by paying
attention to the ways in which artists and involved listeners define, document,
perform, experience, and evaluate this music,
we may gain insight not only into the process of artistic and cultural innovation,
but also into the processes by which we engage
with our natural and social worlds. Nearly all societies and artistic communities
have an "avant-garde”; a cultural site in which new
ideas may be expressed and explored. As musicians and musical practices continue
to work across and between national, cultural,
and stylistic boundaries, free improvisation may play a special role in both
generating and coping with complexity.

Notes

[1] The arrival of Ornette Coleman’s quartet at the Five Spot in New York City in
1959 and his subsequent albums for Atlantic Records
(The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz) further polarized early support and
criticism for the music. See also David Ake (2002).

[2] See Tynan (1961), Welding and Tynan (1962), and McDonough (1992) for examples
of this debate.

[3] In an unpublished talk at UCSD titled "The Secret Love Between Interactivity
and Improvisation, or Missing in Interaction:
A Prehistory of Computer Interactivity," George Lewis focused on the ways in which
terms such as "interactivity," "indeterminacy,"
"intuition," and even "happening" or "action," have frequently been employed to
mask the importance of improvisation in the arts.

[4] Composers who have experimented with improvisation include: Amendola, Austin,
Barlow, Barrett, Bryant, Cage, Cardew, Carlos,
Clemente, Curran, Eaton, Erickson, Evangelista, Foss, Gubaidulina, Guy, Harvey,
Ives, Leandre, Levine, Mazzola, Nono, Nørgärd,
Oliveros, Partch, Riley, Rush, Rzewski, Scelsi, Scodanibbio, Sender, Stockhausen,
Subotnik, Uitti, Vandor, and Young, as well as
the groups FLUXUS, Il Gruppo di Improvisazione da Nuova Consonanza (GINC), KIVA
(at UC San Diego), Musica Electronica Viva,
New Music Ensemble (at UC Davis), and the Scratch Orchestra. Pioneering work by
composers in the American “third stream”
such as Gunther Schuller, George Russell, Bob Graettinger, John Lewis, and others,
could be mentioned as well.

[5] One treatment of the problems associated with categorizing such diverse musical
approaches under a single, often misleading
heading is found in Such (1993, 15-29).

[6] Important artist-run collectives in the United States have included the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM) in Chicago (which has continued to the present date), The Jazz Composers’
Guild (organized by Bill Dixon shortly after his
famed October Revolution in Jazz in 1964) and Collective Black Artists (CBA) in
New York City, the Black Artists’ Group (BAG)
in St. Louis (the birthplace of the World Saxophone Quartet), and the Underground
Musicians’ Association (UGMA) in Los Angeles
(formed by Horace Tapscott). Notable European collectives have included the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), the Music Improvisation
Company (MIC), the Association of Meta-Musicians (AMM), the London Jazz Composers
Orchestra (LJCO), the South African-influenced
Brotherhood of Breath, The Jazz Center Society, The Musician’s Co-operative, the
Musician’s Action Group, and the London Musicians
Collective, all in England, as well as the Instant Composers Pool in Holland, the
Globe Unity Orchestra and the Berlin Contemporary
Jazz Orchestra in Germany, and the Instabile Orchestra in Italy.
[7] See Ferrand (1961) for work on improvisation in the European classical
tradition and Nettl (1998) for a survey of ethnomusicological
work on the subject. See also Ake (2002) for a discussion of the debate
surrounding the role of avant-garde jazz in the music conservatory.

[8] See the European Free Improvisation

website-[Link]

[9] See Boulez (1976, 115) for a similarly critical stance towards improvisation.

[10] One might also investigate the emerging Asian-American consciousness centered
primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area improvising
music community. See for example Houn (1995 and 1985-1988).

[11] See Monson (1996, 200-206) for a related discussion of “colorblind”

interpretations of jazz. See also Harris (2000) for
discussion of issues surrounding the globalization of jazz. And Atton (1988-89)
offers the results of a survey raising important
issues of national and cultural identity in improvised music.

[12] Important festivals that feature improvisation and new music include Le
Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Québec,
The Vision Festival in New York City, The Guelph Jazz Festival near Toronto, and
several in Europe including Saalfelden (Austria), Willisau
(Switzerland), La Batie (Geneva, Switzerland) and Vilshofen (Germany).

[13] The annual Company Week, organized by Derek Bailey since the 1970s, provides
an excellent example of an event that encourages
first-time meetings and unusual groupings of well-known improvisers.

[14] Improvisation seminar held at the “(Re)soundings” festival in Atlanta,

Georgia, July, 1998.

[15] Lewis (2002) highlights many additional issues regarding the various
“downtown” improvising scenes and the discriminatory arts
funding policy regarding “New music.”

[16] See Sarath (1996) and Borgo (in press and 2002).

[17] See also Barry 1977-78, Attali (1977, 136-140), and Durant (1989) for similar
discussion.

[18] An ongoing legal battle over the use of an improvised flute passage by James
Newton in a Beastie Boys song has brought additional attention to this issue.

[19] Journals and magazines that regularly provide coverage of this music include
Avant, Bananafish, Cadence, Coda, Contact, Downbeat,
Gramophone Explorations, Hurly Burly, Improjazz, The Improvisor, Musicworks,
Opprobrium, Resonance, Rubberneck, Signal to Noise, and The Wire.

[20] In Borgo (2002) I document a similar disrupting experience in which the

musical devices and personal dynamics that a new member brought
to the improvising group Surrealestate provoked discontent among the existing
members.

20 Porter (2002, 204-206) discusses Archie Shepp’s 1965 Impulse release Fire Music
and the saxophonist’s desire to create a music that
could reach a larger audience without being too "commercial.” On the album, Shepp
moved between political eulogy ("Malcolm, Malcolm–Semper Malcom")
and songs inspired by a children's television show ("Hambone"), to covers of
Ellington ("Prelude to a Kiss") and a recent pop hit ("The Girl From Ipanema,
" which had reached the charts a year earlier in a version by Stan Getz and Astrud
and João Gilberto). Fire Music, although containing
some inspired playing and arrangements, demonstrates that the fusion of avant-garde
aesthetic goals with a socially responsible and popular
music that would be relevant to a wide range of people was a difficult
proposition. Three years after the album’s release,
Shepp expressed displeasure that he sold more records on college campuses than in
black communities.

Acknowledgments

Much of this article is drawn from my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Borgo 1999).
I would like to thank my committee members
at UCLA, Tim Rice, Robert Walser, Cheryl Keyes, Roger Savage, N. Katherine Hayles,
and Joseph DiStefano for their invaluable
assistance and David Ake and Robert Reigle for their frequent suggestions. I am
also indebted to the three anonymous
readers for their insightful comments.

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Wilmer, Valerie. 1977. As serious as your life: The story of the new jazz. London:
Allison and Busby.

David Borgo recently joined the faculty of the University of California in San
Diego as an Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices
Program. He received a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1999 and previously
taught at James Madison University in Virginia. David has been a professional
saxophonist for over 15 years and is currently at work on a book exploring the
relationship between the emerging sciences of complexity and contemporary
improvised music.