Excellence and Improvisation in Life and Projects
– by Way of Jazz

Bjørn Alterhaug (bass)
Professor
NTNU
Norway

John Pål Inderberg (sax)
Assistant Professor
NTNU
Norway
 

View selected slides from the presentation
(If you have problems opening the presentation, right-click the link and choose "Save Target as")
 

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis

Improvisation as a phenomenon and as action seems to be a field where the scientific research and literature are not overwhelming. The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl supports this statement in his article “An Art Neglected in Scholarship” (from the book In the Course of Performance, 1998): “...it must be repeated that among the activities and processes studied by music historians and ethnomusicologists, improvisation plays a small part.” Various factors, like ideologies of music research and choice of methods, could account for this neglect. In my opinion, the most important factors that maintain the situation, are the prevailing scientific ideals and thinking, i.e. Western rationalist terminology.

For nearly 400 years the conceptions of rationality from Descartes and Locke have influenced our self-understanding and have made a strong impact on the Western culture. The worshipping of a one-dimensional rationality has led to a development in the higher educational system that by its recirculation of knowledge is in the act of being strangled by its own regurgitation. A result has been a development into two separate cultures—the rational and the emotional, where the scientific way of thinking even has permeated the humanistic disciplines.

These days, however, we can hear voices, which no longer have the complete trust in the type of rationality. Remarkably, one of these voices is George Soros (one of the world’s richest men) who in an article in the Atlantic Monthly 1997 writes: We have had 200 years of experience of the age of Rationality, and as rational human beings we should realise that rationality has its limits. The time has come to develop a conceptual framework based on our fallibility. Where the rationality has failed, maybe the fallibility will succeed.

By the end of them Millennium it seems that our way of thinking is changing and that a fruitful dialogue between the so-called “rational” and “emotional” is developing. A new cultural diversity, the multiethnic society and the information society have rapidly grown. We are experiencing and understanding the world in a new way. Our surroundings are changing, complex structures create patterns which are represented in new ways—we are talking about changing paradigms.

This leads directly into the core of the processes of improvisation. Time has come for appreciating the qualities represented by improvising traditions all over the world in understanding human activities in different contexts. Improvisation is a matter of changing something, it is about transformations and altering relations, both towards others and oneself, in other words: creating. As improvisation always is present where people meet, it is an integral part of everyday life, carrying as much meaning as questions of existential character. Therefore it can be argued that improvisation is one of the few fields of knowledge and experience that all cultures in one or another way share, consequently its interdisciplinary possibilities are unique.

Some would find it unexpected that improvisation represented by jazz is chosen as a central paradigm. One important motivation for this is the unique fact that jazz has developed a musical language which makes possible for the executants from different cultures spontaneously to join a creating community, and in this new community make their own original contribution, regardless of cultural background. Jazz improvisation was created through a synthesis between African and European musical traditions, brought to fertility via a multicultural melting pot. The outcome was a historical, dialectic jump into such a liberating way of acting, that during some few decades jazz became a common property of the world community.