Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz

by Mazzola, Guerino B.; Cherlin, Paul B.

• ISBN13: 9783540921943
• ISBN10: 354092194X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Summary

The scientific approach of this book transcends the limits of art literature in that it also develops geometric theories of gestures and distributed identities, also known as swarm intelligence.We exemplify this approach in the framework of free jazz, which is a prototypical creative and collaborative art form. Leader artists such as John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Archie Shepp are presented in their strongest works and theories. A CD with new recordings of the group Tetrade (Jeff Kaiser on trumpet, Guerino Mazzola on piano, Sirone on bass, Heinz Geisser on percussion) is included.The pillars of our theory of collaboration are built from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow, physicist Gilles Ch'telet's gestures, and computer scientist Bill Wulf's collaboratories.

Table of Contents

Getting off Ground
What Is Free Jazz?	p. 3
The Social, and Political, and Musical Origins of the Movement	p. 3
A Provisional Positive Characterization	p. 7
Jazz in Transition	p. 9
Archie Shepp in Donaueschingen	p. 9
John Coltrane's A Love Supreme	p. 10
Cecil Taylor and Buell Neidlinger	p. 13
Bill Evans: Gestural Dialogs	p. 14
The Landscape of Free Jazz
Out of this World	p. 21
Sun Ra: An Extraterrestrial Romantic	p. 22
Coltrane's Om	p. 24
Mythologies of The Art Ensemble of Chicago	p. 26
The Art of Collaboration	p. 29
A Short Overview of the Classical Ontological Landscape of Music	p. 30
The Oniontological Extension to The Fourth Dimension	p. 31
What Is The Art of Collaboration?	p. 34
Collaborative Spaces in Free Jazz
Which Collaboratories?	p. 41
Ornette Coleman's Melodic Spaces in Free Jazz	p. 44
John Coltrane's Harmonic Spaces in Ascension	p. 48
The Innards of Time	p. 51
Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures	p. 52
Trance Spaces: Archie Shepp's The Magic of Ju-Ju	p. 59
Dervish Dances: Albert Ayler's Love Cry	p. 60
Gestural Creativity
From Philosophy to Thought Experiments	p. 65
Philosophy, Performance, Music Theory	p. 66
The French Approach to Gestures	p. 71
Châtelet's Gestural Thought Experiments	p. 74
Geometry of Gestures	p. 79
Gestures Are Diagrams of Curves	p. 79
Definition of Gestures and Hypergestures	p. 81
Hypergestures, Cognitive Science, and Cavaillès	p. 85
The Escher Theorem and Gestural Creativity	p. 89
The Escher Theorem	p. 90
Group Creativity and Categories of Hypergestures	p. 92
Rebecca Lazier's Vanish: Lawvere, Escher, Schoenberg	p. 94
Musical Poetology	p. 97
What Group Flow Generates
What Is Flow?	p. 101
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Concept	p. 102
Keith Sawyer's Group Flow	p. 103
Miles Davis' Bitehes Brew	p. 105
Gestures in Geisser's and Mazzola's Chronotomy	p. 106
What Does Group Flow Produce?	p. 109
The Symbolic Axis of Distributed Identity	p. 111
Groups from Gestures	p. 112
The Fourier Ballet	p. 116
Passion	p. 118
Archie Shepp's Coral Rock	p. 119
Epilogue
From Pre- to Postproduction: The Infinite Listening	p. 123
Global Strategies for Free Jazz	p. 129
The Future of Free Jazz	p. 133
References	p. 137
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