Theorizing improv

When I heard that George Lewis was going to speak at nearby Duke University, I imagined he was going to address his research on experimental music. I knew him as a trombonist and member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) but mainly as a scholar—the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. I had read his chapters in Fischlin and Heble’s The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, and he stood out to me as one of the most erudite writers about jazz improvisation I had encountered. In my research I remember a syllabus still online for a past course Lewis taught that made me regret not being everywhere at once; it was called Theorizing Improvisation. (Now that I absorb its long reading list, I am reminded that Lewis has not only been contributing to the discourse on all things improv for many years but he has also been fostering it like perhaps no other.)

From a 1997 interview with Lewis in the British magazine Resonance:

Any kind of reflective and investigative and introspective thinking about improvised music, whether done with the computer or not . . . is putting us among a community of people thinking about the mind, about meaning and understanding. Since I know that improvisers have a lot to say about these things, my current campaign is to get the voice of the improviser out there more, since we've already heard from the others.

Sounds like my kind of guy.

The talk Oct. 7, 2009, at Duke did in fact include a portion about his software Voyager that allows a computer to create music. But I was especially attracted to the title of Lewis’ lecture, Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Intention and Indeterminacy. Well, honestly, that was slightly confusing. It was more the description that got my improv juices flowing:

Philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s 1976 identification of improvisation as a primary aspect of thinking neatly encapsulates the critical reasons why we should be interested in the practice. If we can conclude that improvisation is the ubiquitous practice of everyday life, a primary method of meaning exchange in any interaction, then one should find it to be a crucially important site for both humanistic and scientific study, as well as a originary strategy for self-transformation.

Wow!

Lewis spoke of improvisation moving on several levels simultaneously. He pulled on not only musicology but also critical theory, literary theory, sociology. Bourdieu, de Certeau, dialogic imagining, the twinning of agency and indetermancy. He said the cross-cultural approach that he subscribes to disrupts older theories such as the belief that improvisers working together need to start out with a shared language. I was especially tickled when he titled one section of his lecture Toward New Ethnographies of Improvisation.

My fascination with Lewis comes from that rare feeling when the many months and years of pursuing a topic for my own advanced degree is met by another individual who has truly made the subject his life’s work. I took the opportunity to speak to Prof. Lewis after the presentation and told him of my upcoming launch of The Improvisers. I do believe I saw his jaw drop. We talked for some time—I was the last one left even after the room was rearranged—and he referred me to a few books I had not yet discovered (Goehr and Greenblatt). Just as Nachmanovitch had suggested to me when I interviewed him at his home in Virginia, I was now part of a small community of the emerging field of improv studies.