The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice) - Softcover

Fischlin, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822354780 ISBN 13: 9780822354789

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected; they insist that they must be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Fischlin is Professor and University Research Chair in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He is coauthor (with Martha Nandorfy) of The Community of Rights – The Rights of Community.

Ajay Heble is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph and an editor (with Rob Wallace) of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now!, also published by Duke University Press. He is the founder and artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival.

George Lipsitz is Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many books, including How Racism Takes Place and Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW

Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation

By DANIEL FISCHLIN, AJAY HEBLE, GEORGE LIPSITZ

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5478-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
vii
PRELUDE "The Fierce Urgency of Now": Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics 
of Cocreation..............................................................
xi
INTRODUCTION Dissolving Dogma: Improvisation, Rights, and Difference.......
1
CHAPTER 1 Sounding Truth to Power: Improvisation, Black Mobility, and 
Resources for Hope.........................................................
33
CHAPTER 2 Improvisation and Encounter: Rights in the Key of Rifference.....
57
CHAPTER 3 Improvising Community: Rights and Improvisation as Encounter 
Narratives.................................................................
99
CHAPTER 4 Improvisation, Social Movements, and Rights in New Orleans.......
141
CHAPTER 5 Art to Find the Pulse of the People: We Know This Place..........
171
CHAPTER 6 "The Fierce Urgency of Now": Improvisation, Social Practice, and 
Togetherness-in-Difference.................................................
189
CODA.......................................................................
231
NOTES......................................................................
245
WORKS CITED................................................................
263
INDEX......................................................................
281

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SOUNDING TRUTH TO POWER

Improvisation, Black Mobility, andResources for Hope

In his remarkable book on the influential musicians' collective, the Associationfor the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the AfricanAmerican scholar and trombonist George E. Lewis tells us that "the insistenceby blacks that music has to be 'saying something' [is] part of a longhistory of resistance to the silencing of the black voice. Indeed," Lewisargues, "as might be expected from a people whose genetic, historical,and cultural legacies were interrupted through sustained, systematizedviolence, every effort was made by the musicians to recover rather than todisrupt historical consciousness" (Power 41). Lewis is writing about AfricanAmerican experimental musical practices, and, in such a context, hisreminder that "black musicians felt that music could effectuate the recoveryof history itself" serves as a vital corrective to some widely heldand oft-institutionalized assumptions about improvised forms of music-making(42). After all, despite being the most widely practiced (and perhapsthe oldest) form of music-making in the world, improvisation, as numerouscritics have noted, is also the least understood and most maligned:its cultural significance, in particular, tends to be ignored or in disputeboth in the academy and in the broader public understanding. Think, forexample, about how, in the context of pedagogies, criticism, arts fundingpolicies, and support structures, improvisative music is often looked ataskance, seen as involving adherence to neither convention nor protocol,as tolerating no system of constraint, as requiring no prior thought, ascoming out of nowhere, simply being made up on the spot. Think aboutthe fact that since improvisational musical practices are central to manymarginalized communities, the resultant failure of scholars to pay seriousand sustained attention to improvisation has led to a broader failure torecognize the extent to which improvisation provides a trenchant modelfor flexible, dynamic, and dialogical social structures that are both ethicaland respectful of identity and difference. And think about the fact that,in Lewis's words, "improvisative discourses disclose the extent to whichmusicians have a vital stake in the ongoing dialogue concerning the futureof our planet. Music becomes a necessity for existence, rather than merelya pleasant way to pass time" ("Teaching Improvised Music" 98).

Improvisation as Social Practice

A necessity for existence, the future of our planet, the recovery of history:large claims, these, we admit. These remarks from George Lewis,whose own stewardship of improvisative musicality has done so much togenerate new critical perspectives, signal a profound shift in long-heldassumptions about improvised music, and they offer a provocative commentaryon how musical practices in which improvisation figures prominentlyare, indeed, social practices, a commentary central to our book'sfocus on key sites of creative activity, sites in which improvisation as amusical practice intersects with rights and social justice discourses. Theypoint, moreover, to what's at stake—culturally, socially, institutionally—ina music that so many anointed narratives of jazz history would haveus summarily dismiss as inconsequential, elitist, eccentric, or incomprehensible.One of the most enduring lessons in Lewis's work is preciselythis: particularly for music-makers whose explorations question settledhabits of response and judgement, improvised music has the potential toinform and transform contemporary cultural debate. It can do so by deepeningand reinvigorating our understanding of the role that improvisingartists can play in activating diverse energies of critique and inspiration,and of the difference they can make (and have made) in their communitiesby using modes of working together to voice new forms of socialorganization, to "sound off" against oppressive orders of knowledge production,and to create opportunities and develop resources for disadvantagedpeople. In short, the working models of musical improvisation developedby creative practitioners have played a powerful role in recastingthe identities and histories of aggrieved populations and in promotingself-representational counternarratives that enable an enlargement of thebase of valued knowledges.

There is a long and illustrious (if too often underrepresented) history,especially within the context of African American creative practice, thatlinks jazz and improvised music with struggles for civil rights and socialjustice. Much can be learned from performance practices that accent andembody real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration.Robin Kelley, a historian and scholar focusing on black culture andradical social movements, has done important work on the role that hopeand the imagination play as revolutionary impulses for social betterment.Key strands of jazz and improvised music-making might be understoodin this context. In an era when diverse peoples and communities of intereststruggle to forge historically new forms of affiliation across culturaldivides, the participatory and civic virtues of engagement, dialogue, respect,and community-building inculcated through improvisatory practicestake on a particular urgency.

Lewis's claim about black musicians and the recovery of history doesmore than simply counter long-standing myths and assumptions aboutimprovisation. It should perhaps also put us in mind of Frantz Fanon'sargument in The Wretched of the Earth about how imperial powers soughtto manipulate and eradicate the subject people's past in an effort to instillfeelings of inferiority. For Fanon and many of the black cultural nationalistswho followed his arguments, especially during the 1960s, what wascritical in countering such institutionalized systems of erasure, what wasparticularly germane to such efforts to reclaim the past, was the need todevelop a sense of self-worth. Iain Anderson, a jazz scholar, suggests inhis book This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture that"this 'revolution of the mind' required a positive reevaluation of blacknessin order to shatter the hold of white psychological and cultural oppression"(97).

Kelley, too, reminds us in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black RadicalImagination that this "idea of a revolution of the mind has alwaysbeen central ... to black conceptions of liberation" (191). However, heis absolutely forthright in his insistence that a revolution of the mind is"not merely a refusal of victim status." Instead, he tells us "about an unleashingof the mind's most creative capacities, catalyzed by participationin struggles for change" (191). Addressing "anyone bold enough still todream," Kelley argues that "the most radical ideas often grow out of a concreteintellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populationsconfronting systems of oppression" (7, 9). Attracted to a model of artisticpractice that, in his words, "invites dreaming, urges us to improvise andinvent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon,"Kelley encourages us to see (and, picking up on his lead, we would add tohear) "life as possibility" (159, 2).

Life as possibility: isn't this, after all, one of the most enduring lessonsembodied in, and exemplified by, improvised music? Isn't there morethan a little allure in the snap of the new and untried, in the sparkle ofprovocation, in the itch and prod of a relentless spirit of inquiry, of intuitiveknowing, in the right to dream, in the right to embody improvisatorycreativity publicly? And if oppositional politics often takes as one ofits most salient manifestations an allegiance to forms of artistic practicethat cannot readily be assimilated or scripted using dominant frameworksof understanding, then to what extent might improvisatory performancepractices themselves be understood as activist forms of insurgent knowledgeproduction? To what extent might improvised music be understoodin the context of aggrieved communities struggling for access to representation,legitimacy, social recognition, and institutional visibility, letalone to real access to resources with the potential to transform materialrealities?

Improvised music, at least in some of its most provocative historical instances,ought to be seen and heard in precisely such contexts. Musicians'collectives such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians(AACM) and music curators and festival organizers who present andpromote improvised music have a vital role to play in the development ofnew theoretical and organizational models and practices for the creationand nurturing of alternative pedagogical institutions. By providing alternativesto the taken-for-granted course of things, by creating new knowledgesand opportunities, by generating alternative ways of seeing andhearing the world, such organizations have much to teach us. They too, inother words, should be understood to be part of Kelley's argument aboutradical ideas emerging out of "concrete intellectual engagement with theproblems of aggrieved populations."

Life as possibility: the creation of new opportunities, the nurturing ofnew sources of hope for disadvantaged peoples, these have long beenhallmarks of the AACM. The flautist and president of the AACM NicoleMitchell suggested in a keynote talk for the Improvisation, Community,and Social Practice (ICASP) project, under whose auspices this book waswritten, that a central context for understanding both the musical andsocial impact of the aacm is the role that improvised and experimentalmusic has played in creating a kind of utopia in sound for African Americans,during a time when they couldn't have it in reality. In an interviewwith the music scholar and flautist Ellen Waterman in Critical Studies inImprovisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Mitchell speaks explicitlyabout musical improvisation as a form of social practice that allowsher to dream of "other worlds." Riffing on a phrase in a poem writtenabout her by Kalamu ya Salaam and included in the liner notes to herrecording Black Unstoppable, Mitchell suggests that the line "I dreamed ofother worlds" suggests the ability "to take blankness or nothingness andcreate a combination of what's familiar and what's unknown, or what'snever existed before, with creativity." She explains, "That's why I love toimprovise. Because improvisation is a practice that allows you not to befocused on the smallness of who you are and your reality, but to actuallyexperience the greatness of possibility and surprise and spontaneity."

The greatness of possibility and surprise and spontaneity: there is anactivist edge to this assertion, a belief that improvisation can teach us toenact the possibilities we envision. The activist edge is there in Mitchell'sbelief that music can be transformative, even visionary; it's also there inthe title of her recording Black Unstoppable, the phrase itself suggesting astrength and determination of purpose. But the activist slant is also registered,perhaps most profoundly, in her belief that hope (a term that comesup throughout the interview) resides in the capacity, indeed in the power,to dream. Again, we're put in mind of Kelley's comments: "We must remember,"he writes in Freedom Dreams, "that the conditions and the veryexistence of social movements enable participants to imagine somethingdifferent, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is thatimagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call'poetry' or 'poetic knowledge'" (9).

Social movements play a crucial role in generating new ways of knowing,new ways of being. The AACM has been a vital social movement thathas given rise to a wide range of emancipatory hopes and practices. Now,if Mitchell is particularly attracted to improvised music-making becauseit enables an expression of utopia in sound, because it allows aggrievedpeoples a place for the sounding of unscripted futures, then it's also worthnoting that, for her, as for George Lewis and other members of the AACM,improvisation can also be a vehicle for the rehistoricization of minoritizedcommunities: "I also reflect on history and reality in my work," Mitchelltells Waterman in their interview. One pertinent example she gives has todo with her understanding of her own role as a female jazz improviser inwhat she acknowledges is a "male dominated field." She explains that thisunderstanding has shaped her own practice of using her voice in playingthe flute: "I sing into the flute. I sing with the flute. I sing and then I justplay the flute. So I have all of these combinations of the relationship betweenthe voice and the flute. Part of that comes from the desire to leaveevidence that a woman was here. Because, you know, it is a very maledominated field. Even without a video or picture of that music, I wantto leave that mark, that aesthetic of whatever is coming through me asa woman, as a channel for that feminine energy" (qtd. in Waterman).Mitchell's insistence on leaving evidence, on embedding traces of historyand forms of memorialization into her improvisatory musical practices,is part of a project of sounding truth to power, of supplying a dissentingvoice in a field that "has not exactly been known for its gender equity"(Tucker 260).

In evidence here are musical strategies that might contribute to ourunderstanding of how improvised musics play a role in the so-called politicsof hope, which is so often deemed a key aspect of struggles for rights.By invoking the controversial phrase "politics of hope" in the context ofimprovisation as a social practice, we underline the degree to which hopeis often predicated on the possibility of real, lived alternatives to hopelessness.Is it possible to think of improvisation as embodying the publicexpression of multiple forms of alternative expression, multiple forms ofcreative enactment that instantiate and restore the possibility of hope tothe everyday?

Changing the Stories We Live By

If the conventions associated with fixed genres "contribute to an ahistoricalview of the world as always the same," and if the "pleasures of predictabilityencourage an investment in the status quo"—indeed, if the fixityof genres has often functioned as a locus of racialized and gender-basedforms of power—then the use of extended techniques in music, the use,that is, of unfamiliar performance techniques on familiar musical instrumentsto expand the sonic vocabularies conventionally associated withthose instruments, may be indicative of improvisation's insistence on findingnew kinds of solutions to familiar problems and challenges (Lipsitz,American Studies 185). The extended technique of Nicole Mitchell's usingher voice as part of her flute playing becomes a way both of engaging withhistories of struggle (in this case, engaging questions of gender equalityand women's agency in improvised music) and of changing the stories wetell about those histories.

After all, as the Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri puts it, "if we change thestories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives" (46). Other writers,such as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, have written wisely and eloquentlyabout the role that stories and testimonies have played as essentialcatalysts "to affect recourse, mobilize action, forge communities ofinterest, and enable social change" in relation to rights and social justiceclaims (3). But what is improvisation for? What's at stake in the stories wetell about improvised music, and for whom is it at stake? How might thestories that are told and circulated about improvised music make a differencein relation to pressing matters of public interest and consequence?Why, in short, does improvisation matter?

In asking such questions, we've discovered loosely connected but coherentlyfocused strands of an emergent narrative about powerful andhistorically resonant ways to unsettle orthodox habits of response andjudgment, and we've seen how such a narrative has had (and will continueto have) a profound impact on a wide range of pressing mattersfor scholarship, critical pedagogy, and activism related to civil rights,alternative-community formations, and transcultural understanding. Theprofoundly interconnected discourses of improvised musicking and socialjustice ought to be understood as complex and multidimensional fields ofendeavor that intersect in ways that have energized new networks of possibility,and inspired resources for hope.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW by DANIEL FISCHLIN. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822354780
• ISBN 13: 9780822354789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326