Improvisation is at the core of all creative endeavor

By Kate Dumbleton

“When you think of jazz, what do you think of?” As someone working in the broadly defined field of jazz, I frequently ask young people this question. Interestingly, their answers often reference visual cues and tropes as much as aural description of the music: gray-blue light on the iconic faces of Armstrong, Billie, Duke, Bird, Miles, Trane; cigarette smoke, berets, sunglasses, a gardenia, crowded clubs, cocktail glasses; a paradox of chic, touched up cosmopolitanism and gritty urban realism.
What’s most striking is that these images are a visual composite of the past—a romanticized stillness to be consumed as a retro-experience, a cool but frozen frame. This is often reinforced by defensive contemporary institutional messaging—“Keep jazz alive”—and by efforts to control the definition of jazz as a particular style of music.
How this fixity came to be in jazz is deeply complex, and more than a little ironic. It belies the continuum of radical inventiveness at the core of the music’s history, a core inventiveness not just about artistic approach or methodology, but about prying open the space to negotiate and re-imagine the possibilities for cultural expression and to challenge race-based cultural hierarchies.

In many ways, jazz in the contemporary moment reveals the challenges of building institutions around cultural expression, even as institutions have become critical to production and distribution. What might be the implications of releasing jazz from these fixed images or preconceptions? What would it look like to witness this music not as a set of fixed images or a canon of Masters but, rather, through its core creative history as insurgent imagination put to rigorous practice, as a negotiation of the role of the collective individual, as conscious risk-taking and experimentation, and as an approach to art-making and cultural expression based on a constant continuum of possibility, a celebration of divergent thinking and of rupturing what’s expected, of creating change?

These characteristics inherent in jazz are those of the most vibrant and necessary contemporary art and social practices. Indeed, they are at the core of Columbia’s own mission.

If we see and hear jazz as a continuum of possibility rather than a set of fixed images or sonic ideas, how might we engage this idea across genre or discipline? The answer may lie in actively investigating the practice of improvisation, a core element of jazz methodology. The practice of improvisation holds enormous potential for developing a personal approach to art-making in any discipline.

But first we must begin to debunk certain assumptions about what the practice of improvisation is and what it isn’t. Improvisation is not “winging it” as a result of a lack of preparation. Improvisation is not the necessary result of a failed plan. Improvisation is not unstudied or naïve. In fact, the practice of improvisation requires the highest level of preparation, commitment and continuous awareness of oneself and of others.
In music, becoming an excellent improviser requires extraordinary commitment to finding an individual voice and to listening to others so as to respond in a way that moves a conversation forward in the moment. It is about making choices and taking chances in real time and having the tools to do so. These tools come from rigorous practice, from understanding the context in which a decision is being made—from consciously engaging time and memory in new ways.

How might we apply these same strategies to other forms of art-making and creative expression? Indeed, to extend this investigation, it is possible to find extraordinary examples of contemporary work in urban planning, environmental work and interactive media design based on the practice of improvisation?

Engaging improvisation can start many places, particularly in a city like Chicago and a college like Columbia. Chicago is one of the most vibrant, innovative cities for jazz and improvised music in the world. Some of Chicago’s most imaginative performers are on the Columbia faculty, and not just in the Music Department. My suggestion would be to suspend any fixed ideas about what jazz is or isn’t. Check out the Jazz Forum on Friday afternoon at the Music Department or a Chicago Jazz Ensemble performance with Dana Hall. Attend a Sunday afternoon concert at the Jazz Showcase or a performance at Heaven Gallery, Enemy or the Elastic Lounge (all age venues).

If you sit close enough to the stage, you can catch the tiniest of visual cues the musicians give each other and how they hand off solos to the next contributor. Listen deeply to the way the ensemble plays together and when and how they make space for individuals to step out on their own. Try to hear and see the edge of each performer’s practice and think about what it means for your own work. What are the implications for seeing and hearing jazz this way — as the edge of possibility? The answer is at the core of the music. Smoke, berets and sunglass aside, it always has been.

Kate Dumbleton is the Executive Director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.