Musical improvisation is real-time invention––the creation of the new. My master’s research examined one of the most common current ways of teaching musical improvisation in the jazz education system: the act and study of “transcription,” whereby students learn other musicians’ improvised acts (usually iconic “solos” from the jazz tradition), commit them to paper (or memory). The pervasiveness of this practice was interrogated through Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conception of “the smooth and the striated” and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment and speech. I argued that transcription, as currently taught, privileges a type of listening that elevates individual improvised acts above group interaction and is only tangentially related to improvisation itself. Further, though jazz educators speak of transcription as a part of the process of arriving at a personal approach to improvising, by defining improvisation within such measurable models, I argued that its implementation has (in Deleuze’s terms) taken something smooth (fluid, negotiable, dialogic) and fashioned it into something more striated (repeatable, set, hierarchical). For this presentation, I will demonstrate some of the issues raised by this work, using different strategies in performances of Max Roach’s solo drum piece, “For Big Sid,” offering openings to discuss the complex intersection of composition and improvisation in musical performance (which is the focus of my doctoral research).

Musical improvisation can stand alone or occur within compositional parameters. In the mid-1960s, composer and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell spoke of composition as the creation of an environment and made a distinction between “composition” and what he imagined as a possible “free” music. Regarding his early work, Sound, he states, “the musicians are free to make any sound that they hear at a particular time. That could be somebody who felt like stomping on the floor, well, he would stomp on the floor.” Mitchell (and many others) compose music that rejects the composition/improvisation binary, embracing a wide spectrum of intentionality where the ideas and desires of the performers can be central to the pieces––equal, in fact, to the those of the composer. In my view, too much improvised artwork hinges on the mere possibility of unexpected events, and exactly how those events play out can be viewed as incidental to the work––their occurrence can be conflated with artistic success. I believe this question to be key to writing contemporary music for improvisers––not merely “if we wish, we can stomp on the floor” as Mitchell would have it, but “if we are to stomp on the floor, how do we stomp on the floor?” If the art of improvising in music is to be advanced, and if composition within this artform is the creation of environments, those environments must be conducive to judgement and discipline, as well as to novelty and the unexpected. As the Jimmie Lunceford Band sang in 1939, “it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”