Many listeners and performers enjoy jazz guitar improvisation, but very few have described it beyond musical analysis of transcribed solos and verbal statements covered in interviews. In this book, I approach jazz guitar improvisation from a new perspective, linking interviews and interplay (interaction) as a participant observer, playing together with five professional jazz guitarists in New York City, and conducting musical analysis based on cognitive theories. The aim has been to:
The theory chapters explain thinking involved in fluent improvising, whereas the fieldwork chapters present results from dialogues and interplay with the five professional jazz guitarists. Reflecting further on what jazz guitar improvisation is â i.e. how it is learned â and how it is used, this book raises the following questions:
What strategies are used in professional jazz guitar improvisation? What is implicit and explicit in these strategies?
When listening to good jazz guitar improvisation the guitarists perform at a level similar to a well-rehearsed performance, without preparing explicitly for the actual performance. How is this possible? I have found strategies to be a useful term for describing the processes that enable such high-level skills, as they contain both emotional and cognitive aspects. Strategies are used differently within different contexts, but they typically involve two major processes: formulation and implementation. Formulation implies analysis of a situation, while implementation defines the action plans needed (Sloboda, 2005). Recognizing that strategies can be innate, intuitive and highly personal, I believe that describing and analyzing them can reveal processes that can be transferable to other settings.
How do professional jazz guitarists create harmonic, melodic and rhythmical structures constrained by real-time and form, in this case improvising over a standard tune? Using the word âprofessionalâ here implies a search for the best practices (Sloboda, 2005), and professional jazz guitarists inevitably spend much time and energy acquiring and refining their skills. Are there particular practise1 strategies that these guitarists employ to produce better performance or to achieve the same results more quickly when performing? How can we understand their strategies in terms of existing knowledge of cognition? By linking practical context to a cognitive framework using chunking (grouping) and schema (context) theory, this is also a study of expertise, understanding skills as a consequence of general human capacity for extensive adaption to physical and social environments within a domain (Ericsson, 2009).
In the fieldwork, the interviews with the jazz guitarists reveal their explicit (articulated) knowledge. The implicit (unarticulated) sub-conscious dimension will be illuminated by observations and analysis of their playing. Although it is possible to make a conceptual distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge, they are not separate and discrete in practise and performance. The interaction between these two modes of knowing â explicitly defining âwhatâ and âwhyâ and implicitly âknowing howâ â is vital for the creation of new knowledge. While explicit knowledge can be codified and transferred via a manual or a method book emphasizing certain procedures, I believe that the intuitive, experience-based and implicit nature of a jazz guitaristâs knowledge makes it more dependent on close interaction and observation in a relevant context.
A practice-based inquiry
Central in practice-based research is practice itself and the role of the researcher. Far from attempting an objective position, I have framed the research questions using my personal background and experiences both as a guitarist and as a researcher, while accepting that the answers are something that the participants and I create together based on context and the aim of the research, including theoretical perspectives. By using the term interlocutor instead of informant, I stress this dialogic relationship (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).
Being engaged as a practitioner does not mean being uncritical but rather aware of how personal background might enable contact beyond the traditional objective researcher position. In this project, the interlocutors and my passion for jazz guitar improvisation enabled a focus on the phenomenon of jazz guitar by being linked to an embodied physical playing situation. Playing together helped the verbal conversation, and talking together helped the musical conversation. The empirical material should be an integral part of the theory building since many theoretical perspectives have been grounded in practice.
Improvisation happens in the moment and is a result of the cognitive constraints on the player, the complexity of the material and the context of the performance. Pilot studies were designed to find the blend of these constraints and define a possible bottleneck. As a part of the pilot studies, two concerts and two practice rehearsals were videotaped with me as a participant observer. This was done to cultivate observational skills of video recordings, to make implicit knowledge more explicit, and to cultivate interview skills by posing questions to fellow musicians.2 These preliminary inquiries, including associated logs and interview guide sketches, were very useful in preparing for the fieldwork in New York City.
The jazz guitar lessons with the five jazz guitarists were important to bring valuable and essential knowledge from the practice field and to fortify the research projectsâ trustworthiness. Ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner reflects on a similar process:
To keep comparable issues before me during this project, I resumed my former study as a jazz trumpeter and took periodic lessons with various artists. This allowed me to observe how different players evaluated my performance and the methods they adopted for correcting my mistakes and encouraging my progress. Using myself as a subject for the study â training myself according to the same techniques described by musicians â offered the kind of detail about musical development and creative process that can be virtually impossible to obtain from other methods. So, too, did reflection during my own performances on the experiential realm of jazz. Musical experiments in the practice room â for example, trying to invent and develop musical ideas â proved especially useful for testing different ideas about improvisation.
(Berliner, 1994, pp. 9â10)
Immersion in a practice common for the practitioners in the field has been rewarding.
The fieldwork projects can be seen as a contribution to the emerging and rapidly growing field of cognitive ethnomusicology (Berkowitz, 2010), combining cognition and ethnomusicology, emphasizing how professionals talk and reflect on their practice and performance habits from a cognitive perspective.
Challenges
In this inquiry, practise is defined as a focused and structured way to achieve results, targeting one aspect of a larger problem at a time, breaking down the greater problem into simpler, more manageable units. This resembles the notion of deliberate practice coined by Anders K. Ericsson (1995), which involves hard and repetitious work to gain results. Working within restrictions, focusing on one aspect at a time, is appropriate for practicing improvisation, but not for performing it. According to Hal Crook (1991) performance implies circumventing analytical thinking used in deliberate practise, to listening and intuition in context. This implies that after much concentrated practise the individual and targeted topics in deliberate practise may appear in improvisation by themselves, more naturally and intuitively. In jazz performance, deliberate practise is transformed into a more collective, situated and tentative activity relying on rules and roles in the context. As Paul Berliner states,
improvisation involves reworking pre-composed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation.
(Berliner, 1994, p. 241)
This description recognizes that jazz improvisation is dependent on practise or preparation ahead of performance in the form of pre-composed material (chunks) âconceived, shaped and transformedâ by the context (schemas) in which it is created in performance.
Illuminating how professional jazz guitarists create chunks in practise and integrate them in performance as part of overall improvisation strategies or plans, has been important. Improvisation implies discovering what we are looking for in the process of doing it. The reflexive accounts have helped me keep track of this transitory process. Reflecting subjectively and critically on jazz guitar from my perspective as a learner has been a tool for gaining greater imaginative variation and structural description. Implicit processes have been raised to consciousness by introspection and become more explicit. Using video as a tool for analysis has been especially rewarding, allowing for zooming back and forth on the video to capture the moment more fully.
Derek Bailey argues that it is impossible to learn improvisation from a (method) book, and that it cannot be taught from one source (Bailey, 1982, p. 7). He maintains that improvisation is a skill that is learned by âstumbling on the right methodâ through trial and error. This is important to mention; rarely can one expect a single method to cover all the complexities found within a field like jazz improvisation. Learning to improvise normally demands synthesizing information obtained from different sources by using different methods. Bailey defines improvisation as a spontaneous activity performed in real time and by the constraints of oneâs own imagination. Strategies described in this book elucidate some of the complexity found within this field, focusing on both implicit and explicit knowledge and the nature of their interaction.
Inspiration
The functionalistic approach is inspired by American pragmatism represented by people like Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James. This pragmatism entails a philosophical âlearning by doingâ approach where theory is extracted from practice and applied back to practice in a reflective way. Intuition and exploration, trusting the body to make its own way, has been important in this project, recognizing that I might illuminate important aspects of a musical practice, but at the same time I might miss other important aspects of the situation.
Donald Schon is a follower of American pragmatism and argues that the best professionals typically know much more than they can explicitly define and that their implicit knowledge gathered from real-life experiences is crucial for their expertise (Schon, 1991). Jazz guitar improvisation as here studied is an example of such expertise, internalized through thousands of hours of practice. Ericsson (2006) suggests that expertsâ knowledge must be studied in a natural context defined by the constraints of their expertise. Taking lessons from professional guitarists and observing how different players engaged in the interplay and answered my questions was a way to make this project natural.
Along with Schonâs reflections, I have found Jeff Pressingâs more theoretical elaborations fascinating, especially his perspectives on cognitive constraints in jazz improvisation (Pressing, 1998). His notion of a referent, as a situation-specific creative channel for a more abstract schematic knowledge base, has been particularly interesting. This inspired the use of a single tune, All the Things You Are, as a reference for discussion and analysis. I associate referent with a tune and knowledge base with domain-specific knowledge containing different strategies.
Comparing introspective verbal reports of a personâs own actions with a video of the same action shows that the verbal reports in many cases are quite different from what is documented on the video. This effect has been demonstrated in observational and log studies by Roger Chaffin et al. (2010) in classical music, and by Helga Noice et al. (2008) in jazz music. My approach attempts to go beyond the limitations of interviews and self-reports, as I will compare what professional players say with what they do, that is, with what they play. Johnson-Laird writes about the explicit and implicit aspects of music cognition and psycholinguistics in this way:
[musicians] can articulate only a limit...
