Rethinking Interaction in Jazz Improvisation

Abstract

In recent years, the notion that “good jazz improvisation is sociable and interactive just like a conversation” (Monson 1996, 84) has become near-conventional wisdom in jazz scholarship. This paper revisits this assumption and considers some cases in which certain sorts of interactions may not always be present or desirable in jazz performance. Three types of improvised interaction are defined: (1) “microinteraction,” which occurs at a very small scale (e.g. participatory discrepancies) and is not specific to jazz; (2) “macrointeraction,” which concerns general levels of musical intensity; and (3) “motivic interaction”—players exchanging identifiable motivic figures—which is a chief concern of today’s jazz researchers. Further, motivic interaction can be either dialogic, when two or more musicians interact with one another, or monologic, when one player pursues a given musical strategy and others respond but the first player does not reciprocate (as in “call and response”). The paper concludes by briefly considering some of the reasons for, and implications of, the emergence of interaction-oriented jazz scholarship during the late twentieth century.

With, against, or without? Familiarity and copresence increase interactional dissensus and relational plasticity in freely improvising duos.

“…One of the most striking result of our study is probably the significant amount of performance time during which the improvisers were, in fact, not intending to interact with their partner. Musicological scholarship has already discussed the possibility that the importance of interaction in jazz performances had been overemphasized, because of a tendency to frame as interactional processes what is just musicians “independently fulfilling their own musical functions in a creative way” (Rinzler, 1988, p. 156; see also Givan, 2016). Providing a computational analysis of interactions within a jazz quintet, Pachet et al (2017) come to similar conclusion, showing that musicians’ acoustical outputs do not exhibit a higher degree of correlation than what is already provided by the musical script they all share.…”

Emociones y psicoterapia: caminos e intersecciones

“…La interacción musical en el jazz implica, en quienes integran un conjunto, influirse unos a otros durante la ejecución de su música. A veces esas influencias se muestran en improvisaciones espontáneas en respuesta a lo que los otros participantes están tocando (Givan, 2016), es decir, que lo que cada uno toca depende, de alguna forma, de lo que los demás tocan. No es la partitura musical el principal referente sino las acciones de los otros músicos.…”

Review of Keith Waters,Postbop Jazz in the 1960s: The Compositions of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea(Oxford University Press, 2019)

“…Eastman School of Music 26 Gibbs Street Rochester, NY 14604 bbaker@esm.rochester.edu 3. As a result of this focus, the monograph necessarily ignores topics related to improvisation that have garnered a ention in recent music-theoretic jazz scholarship, including interaction (e.g., Givan 2016 andMichaelsen 2019) and affordance (e.g., Love 2017a and Hannaford 2019), as well as broader social, cultural, and political issues. Return to text 4.…”