"If you want a better world, you need to play a better music," is a line very often said by Marshall Allen, and now it seems the Canada Council, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Humanities Research Council and the MCRI are all putting some money on that idea -- four million dollars worth -- to be used internationally and coordinated by the head of the Guelph Jazz Fest "Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” project, specifically spent to see just how true Marshall Allen's words might be:
The impetus for Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice stems from post-1960s forms of experimental jazz and creative improvised music that work outside traditional musical paradigms. Such forms of improvisation demand shared responsibility for participation, an ability to negotiate differences and a willingness to accept challenges of risk and contingency.
Music also plays a tremendously important role in society, Heble said. "By modelling forms of social organization, it can literally help us to hear the sound of change," he said. As part of the project, researchers will investigate the ways in which improvised music in particular plays a role in shaping notions of community and new forms of social organization.
[ Improvisation, Social Change Focus of Major Research Grant ]
Right on. As Butch Morris put it, talking about his own improvisational collective NuBlu Orchestra, there's been a serious gap in time between the late seventies when last we just "got together to play" -- not jams bent on flogging our own wares or spotlight stages to peacock our personal pet sounds, just we the musicians together to be in the time and space together to play to play together to explore and expand and develop the sound we make -- there was a lot of that happening back then, and we'd lost something really precious from that time.
Sun Ra told us "The planet is asleep and it's the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves" that we are not living our role as musicians with all this do your own thing tryin' to sell some units. But who knows, maybe there was still some little sparks left that are just now starting to find kindling, and it will be interesting to see how Heble et al plan to fan the flames.
I know what I would do. Assuming I could find some suitable local funky and affordable non-toxic performance space, I'd probably do just what Butch did when his angel Ilhan handed the gift of the blue-light to him: carve out a spot where we play, every day, seeded with the very most essential fixed assets (p.a., lights, thrift-store furnishings, youtube account, blogspot, a timpani ...) then get the direction happening, stack up the arrangements and evolve the Nature Theatre up to the next game level, re-in-vented, a catalyst for the new century, re-awakened into a club and a label, but a community direction, a societal force, and ineffable intangible unstoppable space-fire phenomenon.
Make a better music ...
Yeah. Well. Be a whack of grumps and by-laws to scale to get there, I suppose, but Rome weren't built in a day neither. A hundred years from now we'll maybe see Heble International packaging franchise Community Arkestras, subsidized by OHIP and the mental health association, sponsored by Pepsi. Live long enough, you see all sorts of strange things.
I told the kids at rehearsal today how the Fed had given Guelph U four mil just to investigate and define the sense and worth of what we were already doing there in the studio today. "Cool," they said.
We played a space-chord to celebrate.
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Can improvisational jazz
Can improvisational jazz enhance consciousness in the players?
I mean this quite physically, literally, in the actual reality: Could improvisation under the jazz rules be hooking our experience directly into the fundamental act of space-time consciousness?
Yeah, I know. This already sounds very new-age space voodoo, but it's not. This is a story of hard and testable neuroscience, and my tale begins at an article linking visual ambiguity to the quantum wave function collapse, phenomenon which Penrose/Hammeroff and others say may correlate with consciousness (see for example Stuart Hammeroff's Google lecture Why The Singularity is Bogus)
Now, here's my leap of groundwork: if we accept (for the moment) the Quantum Mind and if the spinning dancer illusion does exercise our quantum awareness during the brief interruptions between perceptions, then could that mean the similarly flip-flop Diana Deutch "tritone paradox" would also trigger this same figure/ground quantum superposition flip/flop, only because it is an audio illusion, repeated tritones must, by defintion, embed the looking-away gap that resets our isolated quantum system for the next go. If all that is so, this would link our perception of sound to the quantum mind equally as it does to the visual perception of the spinning dancer, a choice we consciously make to select between 'equal' superimpositions.
Now, here's the research hypothesis:
the fundamentals of jazz employ the tritone substitution carried over from traditional blues and gospel1, and many advanced jazz improvisers exploit this ambiguous paradox illusion rapidly, in varying shapes flowing through their realtime composition
Players not only perceive (wave collapse resolve) the tritone one way or the other, but they then use that perception/decision as a stepping stone leading the musical flow into the next sequence
... so, does it perhaps follow that these jazz players are, to an exceptional degree, continuously involved in a realtime flow of superposition quantum wave function collapses? (the spinning dancer and Diana's research points out, so too their audience but to a lesser extent since they only get to choose their personal perception of the tritone, and not also the flow direction of the tritone-surfing improvisation)
... so, on each path taken in the improvisation, they are literally brahmin-like branching physical new UNIVERSES! (albeit temporarily, until, says Penrose, the other players click to it and it becomes the "Orchestrated Objective Reduction")
that's a pretty freaky thought :) ... but here's the kicker, the real practical upshot for promoting improvisational jazz for real tangible social change:
Since the players are constantly entangled in this quantum selection action, might their brains become permanently altered (in the 40Hz consciousness correlate) in the very same way as the correlate enhancement among the expert buddhist meditators?
I would think that should be a relatively easy prediction to test. All we need do is to strap an Anthony Braxton or a Marshall Allen into the EEG to see if they are also pushing a super-human slack-time baseline consciousness frequency of 80Hz!
in other news, if your curious about these folks who are getting set to look at the whole question of Jazz For A Better World, KCSB-FM 91.9 in Santa Barbara has posted a podcast summary of the Guelph Jazz Festival -- click through and enjoy! You may even come away a teeny bit more alive than when you started!
1. yes, I know, jazz is not the only idiom to exploit the tritone substution; the technique is found in old-time country, rock players very often use tritone rules to overlay solo scales with rhythm chords, but those uses are programmatic in most instances (always done the same way as part of the arrangement) -- it is similarly used in recent classical music such as Richard Wagner, but again, not in rapid successions of total improv flow. There is also improv jazz that ignores tonality completely and therein be outside this consideration, however there is still the chance that all of the above musical forms are altering their players with other quantum superposition consciousness exercises, so I'm not saying the improv jazz is the only way to this effect, only that it is the way that has a story-line trail of layered results that leads us to the testable hypothesis. By all means, have all musicians tested for accellerated quantum correllate!
Musical improvisation as a
Musical improvisation as a model for political, cultural and ethical dialogue and action is the focus of a $4-million international community/university research project headed by a University of Guelph professor.
Prof. Ajay Heble of the School of English and Theatre Studies will lead the "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" project, which involves researchers from 18 universities across Canada, the United States, England and Australia. It is supported by a $2.5-million Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
The project is one of only two initiatives to receive a prestigious MCRI grant this year. Grants are awarded following extensive peer review.
"This grant is testimony to Ajay’s excellence as a researcher and the importance of this work," said president Alastair Summerlee. "This research will propel Canada into being a world leader and focal point for leading-edge critical research on improvisation."
SSHRC president Chad Gaffield added that the council is "proud to support top-quality collaborative research initiatives such as this one. This project is helping us build Canada’s research strength and capacity. Collaboration among research disciplines can create new forms of knowledge that build understanding, while training the next generation of scholars."
In addition to the SSHRC support, funds were committed by U of G, McGill University, the University of British Columbia and Université de Montréal, as well as private partners and stakeholders.
Improvisation is arguably the most widespread musical practice in the world and the least understood, Heble said. Musicians collaborate to make real-time creative decisions so that the creative process is very much in the foreground. The impetus for "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" stems from post-1960s forms of experimental jazz and creative improvised music that work outside traditional musical paradigms, he said. Such forms of improvisation demand shared responsibility for participation, an ability to negotiate differences and a willingness to accept challenges of risk and contingency.
Music plays a tremendously important role in society, Heble said. "By modelling forms of social organization, it can literally help us hear the sound of change," he said. As part of the project, researchers will investigate the ways improvised music in particular plays a role in shaping notions of community and new forms of social organization.
"By exploring how musical improvisation opens up consideration of such vital issues as human rights, alternative community formation and transcultural understanding, we are getting at issues that are central to the challenges of diversity and social co-operation in Canada," he said.
"What's particularly exciting about the project is that we’re shaping and defining a brand-new field of interdisciplinary study, but one that has historical roots in the work of improvisatory greats such as Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Archie Shepp and Pauline Oliveros. Their music exemplifies participatory virtues of dialogue, respect and community building."
Heble is also the founder and artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, one of Canada’s leading presenters of improvised music. The festival is among numerous community partner groups that will be involved in the seven-year initiative. Other partners are the Canada Council for the Arts, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
The project has three overall research objectives:
• revealing the complex structures of improvisational practices and developing an enriched understanding of the multiple social, political and cultural functions these practices play;
• demonstrating the policy implications of this new and enriched understanding of improvisation for education, arts funding, intellectual property rights and multiculturalism; and
• assessing claims made for the social and cultural impact of improvisation and exploring improvisation-based models for social responsibility and action.
Research will focus on issues raised by seven areas related to improvisation: law and justice; pedagogy; social policy; transcultural understanding; gender and the body; text and media; and social esthetics. In addition, working closely with community partners, researchers will create outreach projects to bring world-class improvising musicians together with youth and disadvantaged groups.
The project outcomes will include 21 colloquia, a summer institute, a research-intensive website, five books based on the findings, policy papers and a peer-reviewed electronic journal. A large portion of the grant will support training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.
"We believe there is huge potential now to document and demonstrate the ways in which creativity and innovation can be vital tools for building sustainable communities, promoting social co-operation and adapting to unprecedented change," Heble said.
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