imagining improv: the interview

II (the imagined interviewer): Let’s start right at the center of things with a question that has been buzzing around the circles of improvisers these days—does free improvisation have any political meaning at all or is it strictly to be appreciated for its aesthetics? Here in the states we are uncomfortably aware of living in the heart of the world empire. Are we allowed to think that this music we have chosen fulfills a need we have to act in some way politically in the world?

JW: First of all, the fact that this question has arisen at all indicates that musicians want to be connected to the world outside their strictly musical interests. It is easy to be wrapped in one's tiny sphere, as if life depends only on what I can accomplish. To step back and see our lives in context, we gain an awareness that what we are living is not a project aiming at art or success but a human life, with an infinite number of aspects that are sustained by others. At the same time, musicians are asking what relation to the world do they find inside their musical activity, what is the specific meaning of what they do as improvisers for the world.

The most common meanings of “political” these days is either the means to acquire and exercise power effectively, which is what people on the left nowadays ascribe to “the other side”. Or it refers to the values and behaviors we choose and exhibit that hopefully create the kind of world we want for ourselves and others, our moral and personal choice. This is the meaning of the political that those who consider themselves on the left would prefer to apply to themselves, mostly in the form of opinions, but also some personal boycotts. As for the first, any form of music, including improvisation, can be used in the pursuit of power, personally or for groups, power that excludes or limits others. That is what the music world is organized to do, to balance contesting claims and demands for power with an elaborate hierarchy of players and genres according to the market. Music politics is all the games people play to be one of the winners, i.e. to dominate in a competitive field. If to survive as a musician means to be able to perform where, when and with whom one chooses then these games will have to be played.

As for politics in the sense of chosen values, the more free improvisation is successful as a genre alongside others the less there is anything political about it. One chooses a genre out of personal musical taste, not political/value interest. For instance, one is not combating injustice by listening to or playing one form or promoting injustice by choosing another. The days of moral snobbery towards country music are over, thankfully, and hopefully the snobbery that chooses composed over improvised music will also disappear.

I think it is rare to find leftist activists, people who consider themselves engaged in social change in their lives and commitments, in the audience of improvised music. Their preference is rather for music that is more explicitly political, like folk or rock. Yet for improvisers, to engage in any form deemed avant-garde is often considered a kind of statement, a badge of progressive, “good” politics. This is a leftover from the days when the avant-garde consisted of movements challenging and upsetting the bourgeoisie, complete with manifestoes, dogmas, sects and expelled members. Today this is pure surface, a kind of false advertising, since there is little positive value today ascribed to offending mainstream (our "bourgeois") culture or being rejected by it. The heroics of the avant-garde, by which egos were sustained in the mode of rebellion and refusal, is a thing of the past; we search with difficulty for any artist today who is in full rebellion rather than seeking to find and please an audience. The closest improv has come to the traditional avant-garde was so-called Reductionism, which did have dogma, theory, an inside/outside, and vague statements contesting the noise of the world. But it was essentially an aesthetic movement, which like cubism, did not question the relation of art and artists to the world. It had and still has a huge effect on the range of accepted dynamics, championing the use of silence, the awareness of form, and challenging the jazz-based expressionism of what had come before. But this was a movement internal to the history and community of improvisation rather than self-consciously facing outward to the world.

II: Then the fact that one has chosen to do a form of music that challenges the usual process by which music is created has no positive impact on the world?

It is we ourselves who choose our actions according to a vision that is both moral and political; the form of music does not do it by itself. I understand today better than in the past that improvisation has to be understood in the ambivalence of its meaning and possibilities. It is helpful to see even how improvisation today might unintentionally stifle the kind of values we desire (of community and equality, for instance) rather than promoting them.

There have been crucial changes since the mid-eighties in the relation of “progressive” art to the world, and it’s important not to project the present situation into the past. Free improvisation, which was mostly an effort of white players, was a part of the cultural left, and still associated with the left that was largely defeated on the field of political power, as made evident in the backlash of the Reagan era. Explicitly much of it was apolitical, as was Cage, and aestheticist. Yet, together with performance art, new forms of dance, punk and rap, it still had some sense of itself as challenging the fundamental direction of culture and society, at least as alternative--a rearguard action. It was outside the pale, in what seemed a permanently divided world, a division that went back to the beats’ square/hip, conformist/non-conformist alternative. Some of us were anarchists and most at least had been politicized in the sixties and still worked within an antagonistic, confrontational framework. Free improv was often intermixed with and sustained by impulses of free jazz, which had been defeated culturally, abandoned by most of its practitioners, but lived on here and there.

We were in for the long haul, or so we thought. Just as we had never imagined that the US political structure could endure a defeat in Vietnam, so we could not imagine that our music could be comfortably accepted and marketed. Liberal NEA/art council venues promoted "risk-taking" and "on the edge" art but would not go so far as to include improvisation. One director said he could not have performers who didn't know what they were going to do beforehand, and called my music "too political". It is no surprise that we thought we had something too hard to swallow for most people of what we called conformist culture. "Avant-garde" seemed an out of date term which few used (it applied more to visual art, in its revival of Dada and Duchamp), but we embodied many of its historical aspects.

Yet people cannot live on the spirit of rebellion alone; we need bread, the bread that normal society is all too willing to offer for some kind of price—the realization of dreams of personal success, acceptance into the fold, not to mention enough financial reward to have a family and live in a place without roaches and squalor. The longing for a stable existence would replace a longing for the transformation of the world, leaving only a residue of leftist values. So in north america at least, most of those who had a degree of counter-cultural militancy about their music had to find some way to create a sustainable way of life, and personal satisfaction. Others were actively seeking market success for their music, and fully entered the entrepreneurial spirit of the 80’s, turning “edge” and “risk-taking” into advertising slogans. Others simply tired of playing the same damn thing, and became more self-critical, that is, they became what we normally think of as artists. And artists may not be paid well, but they at least have a claim on society that rebels do not have, without serious contradictions.

The smashing of the Berlin wall symbolized the potential unification of the world under market forces and at the same time doomed the counter-cultural moral ontology. Or at least the us/them shifted, and the Christian Right picked up the "us", claiming the rights of the oppressed, and the rebels were stripped of their illusions of distinction from the mass. It wasn’t long before free improvisation could arise again out of the ashes as a form of music that appeared new and fresh, yet did not carry the onus of rebellious, indigestible content. The improviser as Artist was liberated from, or forced out of, the role of ignored rebel and outcast. He/she has political opinions like everyone else but is integrated into normal society, is no threat, no dark and difficult “other”. The shift in the Artist label from negative (un-integrated) to the positive side, even a role model for kids today, is dependent on the creation of a far more pluralistic, compartmentalized and commercialized world. Whatever once existed as an art “public”, which assumed that art was an “other”, supposed to disturb us and make us think, has since been divided into small groups of consumers, each of which can ignore each other and still build its constituency, like different brands of cereal. Improv may be miniscule, not even on the stock market, but it now has its place on the shelf, and its value will only go up.

II: So then you once felt that improvised music was almost a revolutionary form of music, with deep socially progressive implications, but no longer do? (see "free improvisation as a social act" on the essays page)

JW: It is true, my views have changed somewhat as the world has changed, and this is how it should be. What I could say in the 80's and was valid for me at that time is no longer reasonable to say. The situation now is not adversarial for us, that is, the dominant culture is not being assaulted from the left or cultural ultra-left, of which I was a part in the 80's. If anything, it is assaulted from the Right. Part of this shift is that the left has become more broadly defined culturally as that-which-is-not-Right. There has been a kind of closing of the ranks on the cultural and political level, as divisive radicals (like myself) have been forced into a room full of Democrats and people who are only defined as against Bush's domestic and military adventurism. The artist against radical adventure--that is our new-found and conservative position. There is no New Left to ask, what kind of world can we create, what vision could inspire us; rather it's "how do we get out of the mess?" And there is no visionary cultural left even vaguely part of a political left (as in the Surrealist movement) to imagine a liberation that is social as well as personal.

This broad political shift is one factor behind the crack-opening of the music world doors to what was previously scorned as threatening and intolerable. Bare toleration leads to curiosity and then acceptance into the club of musical genres and even college courses. This tendency, irreversible it seems, is toward normalization of what once seemed impossible to imagination. Some laud this as progressive; I see it as simply a significant change. I myself did not seek this change, did not want improvisation to lose its adversarial role, but it happened, and my role is to understand it and clarify my interests in relation to it as a political as well as an artistic person.

II: You were once the champion of improvisation, one of the most vocal on the scene to advocate this form of music. Finally after years of being unavailable to people it is now there for the taking. Anyone in the world can access it through the internet, set up shows and DIY—and huge numbers of players are doing this. Yet you are unsatisfied, still complaining, still trying to be the rebel even though it doesn’t look like there’s much to complain about.

JW: This is a common fallacy based on psychologizing the subject. It implies that the positions one takes, political and otherwise, are attempts to fit a certain model, here the Rebel. The only way to explain the subject continuing to take a critical position is that he refuses out of personal need to give up that identity and accept the changed, present reality. Change would be from one model to another, like hopping from a drowning ship to one that would take one to safety.

Models are unitary, consistent, changeless identities; that is what is considered powerful and respected, even when they are no longer relevant. In my days of political organizing I once met an old Communist Party member, maybe 70, who was essentially doing the same thing as he had in the thirties when he was converted. He was following the same line and routine, selfless and self-effacing, as he probably always had--that was his strength, and the Party honored him for it. I wished that I could be as consistent as he was, as steady, and look back on a life of accomplishment. But I also knew that was an illusion, that then I would be as obsolete and blind as that man, which would be no accomplishment at all.

So yes, I have changed, but I think of change as a new configuration, not a new ideal-type. What constitutes my person is, in part, the thread of continuity and self-debate I have embodied since I was at least a teenager. For instance, my solo playing is still unavoidably my psyche in motion, rather than the piece of music it is for most musicians, but it is no longer the untrammeled freedom it once was, and I don't long for that past. Moreover, in the 70’s and 80’s I refused to admit to being an artist, because I would not accept any label that could allow others to plot out a path of success or failure for me, for which I had nothing but contempt. In a way I was what people really idealized as the artist, one who is bringing their art out of their being and life, with no thought to its impact on others. But if one is truly such an artist one cannot use that idealization, that label, to advance his or her art, and that is what I refused. Today I can chart separate lines for my success in the world—ability to get gigs, is how I define that—and my actual music. And I can see that from an objective point of view I would have to say that I am an artist (also a musician, which is something different), without falling into the idealized image of one.

The pure artist and pure rebel are images that can be used to back up whatever actual artists and rebels want to do. According to their respective models, neither would act from a personal feeling of anger or ambition; to do so would be weakness, and make them vulnerable to criticism. The sole pursuit of the artist's life is supposed to be art. The bio that musicians typically present in order to get gigs that actually pay for services, including my own bio, is one that presents them in the image of pure artist. You don't say that you really make your money doing web design or painting houses or that your wife/partner makes the "real" money; you want to appear as if you are successful in "living from your art." You also don't speak in a bio from the heart of your dreams and visions; you list everything as a project, an accomplishment the world of others has recognized. The others--promoters, critics, more famous partners--rather than the art that you yourself value makes you an artist. Interestingly, audience response also is considered irrelevant--when has a musician written a bio that includes an indication of how people actually respond?

To present yourself this way fulfills your prospective employers' image of themselves, as aiding in the promotion of art, which is considered a good for society, even if society doesn't know it. The image also functions in the preference of grant agencies for younger performers-- they are still pure, untainted with failure, can still be expected to fulfill the myth. Their elders have either achieved it, and don't need preferential treatment, or haven't, in which case they don't deserve it. Everyone knows that, in the states at least, only conventional musicians make a living from their work, but without this myth of the artist the market system would not function for the artist.

The problem is when the myth is in fact the musicians' fantasy for themselves; the myth is a lie they would like to see as a truth. The vast majority of working musicians, I would guess, are unhappy that they are not making more money, and this substitutes for the discontent that is a necessary part of the making of art itself. If I am thinking, how can I make more money, can I at the same time advance in a direction that I am pretty sure will not? Musicians' desires join what the world wants to see in us--we both expect to be proud of what we do. What musician would tell their state art council, "most of the time I am not happy with what I do, occasionally I find it passable"? And what improvisers would tell the truth: I don't know what I'm going to play in a performance, I might just fiddle with the keys for forty minutes, I don't know. No; you provide recordings, implying it will be something like this. And since you have sold yourself as this product, and you are a responsible entrepreneur, it probably will.

II: You may be critical but aren’t you glad to see free improvisation flourish now? Even if capitalism is what made it possible?

JW: As a musician my life now would be much different without all these new players, changes in older players, and the impact of electronics and “reduced” music. And my life would also be different if I could get a gig with just fifteen minutes of work, like I used to do; instead I spend my days not playing but trying to sell myself to often unwilling buyers. Really, improvisation is opening up, becoming more sophisticated musically, and I feel myself right in the middle of it, taking all the advantage of it that I can. I get to play in many parts of the world and in the process experience myself more fully as an artist than I could have ever imagined. If not for this I would probably be painting, as I was doing in the early 90’s, since it seemed then that improv was dying out. I might be just as happy doing that, who knows. The evolution and integration of the market deeply into everyone’s life, the opening of normal success ambitions to this form of music, may have been the necessary condition but it has brought amazing depths of thoughtful and feeling-full music out of people in the process.
Your argument sounds like that of people who charged the Vietnam protesters with ingratitude, that their country gave them the right to protest, and they should cease complaining about it. I don’t have to present an alternative to the market in order to point out how it inserts itself continually between us and music. For the music to become a market phenomenon means its domestication, the replacement of a conflict model of art (including the artist as conflicted) with philistine consensus, the rough seas smoothed out for the democratic good of all. The market is the medium is the message, and I’m somewhat less utopian about the situation than McLuhan was.

II: Do you feel disillusioned about this form of music after seeing that it could be used for personal ends just like any other music? Didn’t you have a rather purist view of free improv before?

JW: I wouldn't confuse the form with what we use it for; both need to be understood in their own right. But it is true that I idealized it, for instance in opposition to composition. It hadn't become clear to me that you could draw out the implications of this form without seeing it as an advance over composition, or any pre-determined intention. I was offended that it was the rejected and poor brother of composition, which of course is true; for instance, one still must disguise what one does as something approaching composition in order to get grants. But I was advocating it like a politics of the oppressed and that was a mistake. I started to write a book advocating improv and I couldn’t, I knew my actual experience of playing had nothing to do with advocacy, which would have been a reversion to an earlier model I had of how to do politics--didactic rather than self-questioning. I became aware of this partly because I was something of an artist in spite of myself; that is, I became critical of my playing in terms of my own satisfaction. If I advocate improv as a superior form then how could I discriminate between one moment that I liked and one I didn’t? Just to see it as my particular choice, to make music in the moment, and battle against habit, is enough.

I was myself using it for personal ends; that aspect appears the moment you drop the idealization of any figure, whether rebel, artist or teacher. What is the motivation to do this rather than that, what are you getting out of it? Just "doing what I feel like" is no answer. It became clear to me even in the late 80’s that what I was calling free improv was in part a vehicle for my political rage at the world. Just as in the early 70’s when the skeptical intellectual in me challenged the Marxist ideologue, so later the artist in me came to challenge the enragé.

Besides that it was humiliating that in my late 40’s my ego was involved, in a way it had never been before in my life. My music was implicated in my own sense of personal power, in my will to power. I was feeling hurt by rejection as it became clear in the later 80’s that the improv world was going to move towards professionalization and I could not take that step, that is, I couldn’t assent to it, which seemed to be necessary. On the one hand I was feeling a kind of Dionysian Totality in my solo performances a la Artaud, a kind of glorious self-integration that had nothing to do with the kind of thinking through of aesthetic choices usually associated with art, certainly composition. It also had nothing to do with audience acceptance or getting another gig. But then I would turn around and find myself treated as one competitor among many, lacking credentials, or schmooze-power, and having to beg to be allowed to play. I said in my bio at the time I was “non-commercial”, which was fine when people had a taste for that, but was nothing when the tide shifted. Today non-commercial means, you must not be serious about your art, so I can't use it, I have to bow to the prejudices of the marketplace. Otherwise I would be hired as a model rebel and not for the music I do, which has nothing rebellious about it.

I had to face facts and compromise if I wanted to continue to play music in front of others. To get even a handful of people to enter a circle of focus and concentration with me I would have to enter the music world and make it my job. Which I have done; I compete daily for gigs, for the “visibility” that will encourage promoters to be sufficiently interested to book me. I shrewdly calculate where I will have a chance, and how much time to waste on this or that attempt. It is all a stupid game, and has nothing to do with my actual music, nothing to do with the struggles I go through to please myself. I do my job, I accept it but do not assent to it. And once I get to play, all the cautious and deceptive “finite game” is behind me.

An old comrade from my political days has used the same qualities that enabled him to be a good analytical Marxist to build up a fortune on the stock market. And partly through my years of critical analysis I have the ability to see through the bullshit to how things work. I am sensitive to slights and take things personally, and this analysis sets me straight and helps extract me from a lot of pain. When I am rejected I try to remember that it is not my music or myself that is rejected but something the market just does not need at a particular time or place, may never need. Rarely do I feel successful in the normal sense, that I am being rewarded truly for doing what I love, or for the experience people have, but then I don’t see that kind of reward coming to others either. On the market people are rewarded for what they appear to be. That idea of reward for doing what we love is one of the common illusions by which the world recreates itself. I am in no way free of illusion, of vanity, of “taking things personally”, etc., but I do have some of the tools to bring myself back to earth.

II: Back to the more general question. Psychologists have drawn up a model of people who are on the right and those attracted to the left, in terms of values and motivations, and through testing have found amazing consistency. For instance, people who vote on the right are largely motivated by fear and tend to trust authority and hierarchy in general. Why do you think that the musicians and audiences drawn to this music are generally on the left politically? Isn’t it because they have drawn political implications from this music that they don’t find in other musics?

JW: That may be true but doesn't mean it is a correct conclusion. When I said that improv was empty of political/ethical meaning I was trying to clear the ground of the notion that to do this music in itself could legitimately satisfy us as a political/moral act. There are few who can live without some moral justifications for what they do, some sense that their activity is good for others as well as for themselves. And political discourse in Western societies would be meaningless without assuming that the speaker is defining and asserting the right thing to do.

There is a general attitude among musicians and spectators/ consumers that doing any kind of art is a positive thing, on the side of peace and social goodwill, apart from any judgment of the specific art. And to make art outside the mainstream, as judged by sales and popularity, is given a particular nod of approval, again, apart from the content. I believe this makes sense as does a benevolent attitude to the poor, the persecuted and excluded. The democratic, left-liberal sentiment is to include those rejected, and the good thing is to give them a chance. To devote your life to something that is not widely accepted or financially rewarding, when you could obviously make a living an easier way, is therefore considered a good thing, like social work. It yields a reward in a way that the unintentional poor could never be. And improvised music is clearly in the category of a devotion that is unrewarded in the normal self-interested way.

Actual political meaning, as opposed to this kind of social approval, has rather to do with how we seek to change the world and/or sustain it. To be self-aware politically at least means to know that one is constantly choosing, and to oversee that activity, to make sure one is choosing according to one's values and not just going along where feeling and our needs take us.

That means first of all confronting and challenging ourselves, for instance our desire to be accepted or at least understood by others, a desire that engages every juncture of our lives and thinking. It is particularly difficult for performing musicians, the most socially situated of all artists. There are moments of the social for all artists, obviously, and especially performers of the time arts, which require their presence with others as visual art does not. Music has a continuity with the whole of society that dance, theatre and performance art does not have. It is a component of everyday life, whether passively received or actively chosen. This is expanded to practical ubiquity by technological developments; for instance, even the obscure musician's sounds turned into an mp3 can potentially reach anyone with access to a computer. The lure of success is intimately bound up with the lure of an infinite acceptance by other humans, such as art tied to the visual could never imagine. If to be political means to be aware of what we are sustaining or changing, and to make our actions be choices, then all musicians must deal in some fashion with this desire.

When I say that to play improvised music is not a left-valued political act or choice I mean it does not change the world, does not make it, for instance, less hierarchical or less absorbed by the marketplace. In fact a case could be made that to expand improvisation into the marketplace sustains the world in ways that counteract many political left values. For instance, it deprives the artist of self-respect apart from that given by a value that consumers and promoters determine. When musicians are included in a festival, isn’t it largely the market that has chosen them? When we see the players who are most successful continue pumping out the same stuff that has been proven to please audiences, don’t we wonder what happened to the self-defining artist they once were? Wouldn’t we say that the market has preferred that they be less self-challenging than they could be?

I don’t want to reduce what I’ve called “the improv ghetto” to a market interpretation, however. I understand society as cellular, or as my favorite philosopher du jour, Peter Sloterdijk puts it, as a kind of foam. When we look at the coexisting units of society we see them as overlapping, not competitive and seeking to dominate or eliminate the others, any more than one family unit does. Society is a coexistence of an unlimited and evolving plurality of bubbles which are self-contained and immunized against each other. You are protected against the “outside” of others to the extent that you cannot truly imagine what they are on the inside. Those others are irrelevant to you but you can’t know that, you can only imagine them.

Applying this metaphor, we can see that improvisation has grown, in recent years, only at the point that it could create a safe place, a protected environment for itself, where it could establish a degree of impermeability, a hothouse, in Sloterdijk’s term, which is neither fully transparent nor fully opaque. The price of our strength—and it is really a strength now to have a kind of home for this music—is that it fosters illusions that it really touches, communicates with the rest of the world, that it has a kind of reality, something more than a self-sustaining bubble simply smashed up against others. One way this illusion is expressed is to think that the improv world is available to everyone, and people choose to enter or not based on their taste or level of aesthetic development. Especially since it is small and in contradiction with other genres, there are unspoken notions about those who have not made our advanced choice, and the elevation of those who have. The borrowing of the label avant-garde is valuable here, abstracted from a 20th century history that was rarely apolitical, as today’s version is. Here is one point where the market model, especially prominent in America, insinuates itself. To exist, to be a real component of the world, for an individual musician and for a genre, is a function of being recognized, and it is the market that does this in ways that are most calculable. It claims both to identify the niche and to serve it by displaying a product before the entire mass of potential consumers (“visibility”), filtering out those with dissimilar interest, and funneling them into the right pocket, the ultimate machine for satisfying desire, or so it claims. Capitalism is radical not just because it threatens the autonomy of units (“everything solid melts in the air”—Marx) but because it provides an ideology that claims that we are really communicating with others, making ourselves available and real at the same time, through the agency of the market.

What I’m describing here is mostly the “scene” improv which predominates today, where it appears that the doors are open to all but in fact where no one would enter who doesn’t already belong. And musicians, and I include myself, mostly and normally prefer to play in such places, where we know there will be a quiet and attentive audience that will give a generally favorable response. Our focus is on frequent performing, and developing our music through that, and so we tend towards safe situations where we won’t have to interact with people who possibly might think negatively about what we do. We think of such people as not belonging, as having entered the wrong door. We don’t want to have to convince people, perhaps to draw in those standing at the bar in the back, the walk-in crowd, the unidentified. We are set up for doing our thing and letting others do theirs. Like every secure situation we choose in our lives, there is more than a little fear involved in choosing it, a fear that, from the aesthetic side, can skew our judgments as to the music we have done. Our sense of importance and value, which seems so necessary to continue, is a hothouse flower that might wither or freeze in the outdoors—but that’s something we don’t risk testing.

To me, truly to act in a political way is to challenge our own assumptions about these things, not in the immune bubble of the campus or the scene, but where there is the possibility of others being challenged, others whose response we cannot presume to know. And then the aesthetic part returns, as we experience our music in this setting, and realize it is not just the listeners who have been challenged to step out of their skins but we ourselves, we have created a music here that could not have been created in the cocoon. We then discover a new model for our music, something like playing for the world, but which means playing in the presence of the unknown.

II: Then what kind of act WOULD you consider political?

JW: The most common attribute of the political person is considered to be the holding of opinions, such as pollsters can access. But for me even the most thought-out and defensible position is not political if there is no risk involved to the person, no possible movement, no dialectic. No more than our art can be a creative act if it does not risk US, the players, at the very moment of playing—that is what improvisation is supposed to be doing. Without sticking your neck out even some little bit there can be no actual political change, and I don’t see how you can separate political values from political change. I can’t repeat this enough, such change is self/other, both sides of the dynamic must be present and tumbling over one another. This cannot be a manipulative assertion of humility using the language of dialogue; dialogue must be based on real conflict that may not be resolved. A growth of the number of people of a certain opinion, like the growth of the improv community, is not political change. I look on it positively, yes, from a musical and even social point of view, but not as political change, since nothing is being actively questioned. Political change means engagement with others who might not agree with you, who might even be hostile and contemptuous of you, and make you feel small. It entails some kind of sacrifice, not least of all sacrificing one’s pride in the values one holds. Politics of this definition means risking that an engagement with others might change the way you yourself feel about things, your own values, clearly a parallel with improv.

In an article I wrote in Signal to Noise before the 2004 election I said that if musicians wanted to be political they should start talking about public issues with their neighbors, including people who are not their friends, where they can’t predict what the response would be. Get on one of those Move-on busses to Ohio, back in 2004, or simply engage people door to door during a campaign. To do that would challenge the musicians' identity structure, the assumption that we have a hierarchy of roles, and primary is our need to be “the musician”, our comfortable specialty. The “citizen” who engages in electoral politics is generally scorned. As the citizens we can imagine ourselves to be we must leave our instruments at home, just as we must do in our couple relationships.

Even simply as musicians there are projects outside the usual role that I would consider acts of political engagement. You might, for instance, find a store that is not associated with music at all or with anything on the cultural left, like a laundromat, or a corner store, some place privately owned. Tell the owner you’d like to do a concert for just half an hour and not get paid, that you will do all the work of publicity yourself. Leaflet the neighborhood, say anything you want, like, “come hear the strangest music you’ve ever heard”. Then you, a person like those others, are inviting people you don’t know and can't predict; you come on time and meet people, talk with everyone afterwards. You don’t sign people up, sell cd’s, try to build the audience for the next time. For once you are not a little entrepreneur pushing your product.

This is one way to let the world into your life, and it is a rare political act that anyone does this. You will have done something stranger, more alien, than any music you have ever played. It has the potential of changing you and your relation to the world, and at the same time opening to a very different kind of community than the niche you are accustomed to. Then do it again, get your friends involved, travel around with it, talk about why you do this. People will not understand your motivation, they will be amazed that you have no interest in the commercial world but really just want to devote this time, this half hour, to them. They might see something in this world that is not encompassed by the buying and selling of labor and goods, something larger than all the words of politicians and opinion-holders and -makers. Here are the seeds of political and social change that comes through the back door, the front door being the politics of position, persuasion, conflict and argument.

It is of course possible for you to do this with a composed piece of music. But here is where the nature of improvisation comes in, if you’re looking for political content. With this form you have the possibility of communicating more directly with listeners than with any other, since you will find yourself really drawing your music from them, and from the space you enjoy together. You have put yourself in their hands; you have risked yourself, as standing on a stage will never do. And they will sense this and offer themselves as they never would to a stage performer. This offering might take the form of questioning whether what you do is really music. But isn’t this a question we hope will be asked? (Rather than, what cd’s do you have to sell…) And here you have a chance to probe that question.

II: But I still think you must see something of left values in this music apart from the context of performing it. If you had to compare an improv session to a rehearsed band piece wouldn’t you see a more democratic structure in the former?

JW: Certainly. To play this music with others is egalitarian on a level not imagined by any other music. The group in and of itself is a little democracy, if you will, in which the usual hierarchical role relationships are overthrown. A little private French revolution, and an exciting, valuable experiment. If there are two or more violinists they are not part of a string section; the drum is not the time-keeper; the sax is not the lead voice. If it is the lead then the players have not worked sufficiently to undermine the role, which is everyone's job, not just the saxophonist. This is one of the key differences from free jazz, for instance, where roles are still largely in place and are not challenged. I would even say the improv session is a workshop for the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, where we can learn to develop values which are hypocritically affirmed but lacking in the wider world.

Improv is bound up with the extension of our hearing, part of Cage's legacy, an kind of expansion of democracy to the excluded. As human animals we are selective in our hearing; we hear danger and are protected by this selective hearing. We cross a street and hear a car screech next to us and we don’t hear the birds at that moment, nor are we thinking of what a beautiful sound that is. And in other forms of music we hear the drums differently than the bass, we listen for different things. But in improv we are encouraged to listen deeply into all sound, which is why external sounds from the street are often played with rather than heard as an undesired interference (how many pieces have been ended not by the players' choice but by a street sound!). Sound is stripped of fear and our reactions are opened up to new dimensions.

To be perfectly consistent, t here is nothing in the model of free improv that would enable us to distinguish one session as better musically than another. It cannot level the playing field and at the same time create such value. To establish musical value for ourselves, as a consumer or producer of what others listen to is not egalitarian or democratic. The only improv that would come close to egalitarian values is spontaneous improv, meaningless, "mere" play. This is when people have not a single thought of structure, do not value one sound at all over another, in other words act as randomly as possible. We might even say this is not a work of intelligent choice, so it cannot be considered Art in an aesthetic sense. This is something that can be approached but not achieved, which is no reason that it should not be engaged in. You can go into really deep places with this kind of freedom, not limited to musical sound—singing, speaking nonsense, turning your playing into a kind of dramatic role—what ever “comes up” as in a free-for-all therapy session (a dirty word for artists!). Take off your clothes, if that is where things are heading, anything goes, self-conscious embarrassment is banished, or at least excused. If you really want to experience such freedom then you have to be willing to escape music and just freely float in a space of your own free will, where every moment you challenge yourself—why hold myself back from this?

I personally like to do this in sessions; they make me aware that I am not just a musician but a human being in touch with myself and all my urges, which “democratically” rush to the surface to express themselves. There are a few people I know who share this interest and we have done it together. But I would not even propose this to my musical partners, because we are not improvisers in this total, spontaneous sense, but rather are using improvisation as a tool to open us to musical events that are interesting to us, valued. The work of musical creation, however much it might value spontaneity, is elitist in the long run if it involves preferring, through a mixture of conscious and unconscious choice, one sound, one length of silence, etc. over another. Not to mention preferring to play with one player over another.

Free improv, in contrast with jazz or classical improvisation, has weakened the value traditionally placed on expertise and skill, any criterion that would allow one player to be considered better than another. It has opened the door to the unwashed-- those who feel intimidated by the training required to master techniques of a musical instrument. Or even those who feel they have no musical talent, can’t do anything usually associated with music, like singing in tune, or even holding a pitch. This too I consider a positive contribution of improv, but only because such people have generally learned to create their own techniques, made choices of one sound over another, and challenged the more traditional musicians, like myself, to put our skills and years of training into perspective. It is basically why extended technique has more and more triumphed over trained technique, since unlike the usual learning model (learn to walk before you learn to run, learn to play the notes, then you can improvise), free improv encourages one to believe that he or she is actually playing the moment any sound is made. Personality types who traditionally were attracted to the discipline of learning an instrument are as a result meeting completely different types across the room, and this is all to the good. This is one of the continuing tensions with (free) jazz among audience, critics and musicians, for jazz has standards for admission to the club, just as classical and folk—can you play your instrument or not! The increasing acceptance of improv means that more and more people are accepting that this is not so important, and so there is a greater emphasis on the subjective question about musicality, which can shine through despite low skill levels. It is the attraction to sound, which can be as pedestrian as a postmodern dancer walking across the stage normally. (And can be just as boring if repeated forty years later …) Sound is the egalitarian thrust of improv; the more one gets away from traditional musical training the more the musician is simply the maker and chooser of sound. You can do in the kitchen or the shop, which frees music from the stage and all its aura-filled pretensions. Free improv was not this in the beginning but at least some have taken the route of what might be called the democratization of sound, putting all sound out there to be experienced.

That is why I would say that improv is a workshop for opening us up, for listening as fully as possible to all players. It is perfectly in line with what the psychologists would describe as the values of the left. It is not what attracted me initially to play this music, but it does seem to be a part of its current success.

II: Concept Art and Performance Art, the Duchamp legacy that began in the sixties, is often thought of as "making a statement", especially regarding the dominant mode of Modernism, which held art in reverence. How would you locate free improv in relation to that?

JW: When it comes to art, making a statement refers to an implicit message in the artwork, intended or unconscious. You can debate the meaning, but the object, including music, is not going to tell you if you're right about it. No theory, such as my prose above about music, can substitute for the object or process of art. Not that the artwork or the prose about it is on a higher ground, they are simply different, albeit interactive modes. In the post-war period the interpretation of art as well as the extra-aesthetic or anti-aesthetic, critical content of art is far more significant that earlier. We are far from the days of the autonomous art object of formalist days, and artists, including especially improvisers, seem to be aware of interaction with a world of political and social values, as witness the focus of this essay.

I cringe when I hear that this or that artwork is "making a statement". This is often an attempt to resolve the poetry of the artwork completely into prose, to end the ambiguity the work may be attempting to set in motion. It is often linked with the notion that artists have a "strategy" guiding their work, and is a part of the self-interpretation and presentation of many of them. And yet we do want to understand the relation between an art object, artist intention, art movements, and the world. Visual art history especially has been viewed from this perspective, sometimes to the detriment of the aesthetic impact of what is in front of the viewer, but that relationship with the world is part of how art has changed. It is often helpful, for instance, to understand why an artist changes direction to know social changes that may not be traceable except through viewing the art.

If we want to understand the history of free improvisation in this way then we can certainly discern elements of implicit and explicit statements. Initially it arose not as a movement of any kind but because there was something in the post-war generation that could not be contained by the forms handed down to it, particularly jazz (Derek Bailey). It grew into including a kind of statement of opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, middle class society, government, etc., and some free jazz has continued this kind of political rage, an expressive music (Peter Brotzman, William Parker). There were also a few latter-day Surrealists who felt improvisation fulfilled the goals of that visual/political art movement in the field of music. My own dionysiac solos of the late 80's could be interpreted as an Artaudian Performance Art. More recently, there are those who saw in reductionism a kind of statement that critiqued the constant noise of society. The annual High Zero Festival in Baltimore is linked to performance and concept art, partly through the inspiration of John Berndt, who thinks of his work as a challenge to contemporary mis-conceptions about music and social order.

Concept Art was initially an in-house attack on an aesthetic and theory little known outside art circles. Performance Art went beyond that, to critique the society and its ideological underpinnings. The visual is more explicit than wordless music could ever be. I would be loathe to admit that improvised music makes a statement, but it does challenge the listener and player in ways that the wider culture now resists and might someday register as a shift. Despite its forty-plus year history, still opens listeners to a kind of chaos of sound and energy which sends jazz listeners of the Ken Burns variety running for cover. On the other hand, reductionism challenges our desire to be emotionally aroused/satisfied by music, to fill up the soundscape with volume and pyrotechnics; it's appearance has brought about the first major rift in the improvisation community. These are aesthetic challenges of value but they could only peripherally be called statements addressing the world. Both unquestioningly accept the separation of Artist and non-artist, the proscenium stage, art as commodity, performer as entrepreneur, etc., which in the visual arts have been challenged for the past fifty years or more, and even reach back to Dada for inspiration.

It is more reasonable to link improvisation with philosophical questioning than with explicit assertions, even if few improvisers actually take this step. A concept artist like John Baldessari creates pieces that are open-ended in meaning; when put into words it comes out this way: “Is what we perceive as chaos just another kind of ordering that we don’t understand yet?” The ambivalence of meaning, the detachment of signifier and signified, is a post-modern concern with epistemology that is implicit in improvisation. And of course aesthetics: my question, “Can I play something that is not music?” animates my playing and practice. If anything an artist does is art, as Duchamp asserts, then what is the artist?—an easier question in his day of established roles than today. What is the nature of continuity when the relation of elements as arbitrary as possible? These are questions not only of aesthetics but of cognition as well. True, they could motivate composed music as well, but in-the-moment composition, where one cannot go back and change what has been done, raises elaborate questions of the relation of the players’ intention and the resistance of the materials, such as Cage highlighted.

II: If you could envision change then where would you seek it, and what would you do to bring it about?

JW: It’s strange to me that I could have this critical view of the world and yet be what I would call a happy person. This happiness is and wants to be as fragile as my relation to my music, but it does not depend on the world becoming more peaceful, tolerant, and sustainable. I suppose if Christian terrorists took over the government and threw me in a prison camp it would change my perspective but that does not seem likely. My happiness in no way prevents me from seeing that the picture is very bleak, either present misery of millions or the future of the planet. We are living in a time when there is no fulcrum of ideas or institutions with which to imagine an alternative, a utopia, and no myth of a glorious past to make us think we are capable of something greater. These are what people have imagined whenever living and vibrant cultures were turned into cynical and oppressive civilizations, and they have motivated great works and sacrife for others. Our present is flattened out, dreams of wholeness and harmony confined to the individual, a single life-span. Instead of the image of a healthy society to motivate us, as Marxism’s communism once did for vast numbers of people, we are asked at every turn simply to be practical in the pursuit of problems, and for the rest to cultivate our gardens. It is suggested that we can only hope for a modest personal security, since honest social interaction in an inclusive public space seems to be forever flawed, and without public happiness, i.e. a trusting community, our lives are miserably shrunken. Instead of this, as the current answer to all problems, we are offered technology and the capitalism.

If there is some utopian no-where that I approach and depend on it is in those moments when I as player/listener and others as player/listeners create that space where, to paraphrase Nietzsche, we love not knowing the future. We are present with the secure feeling of our common insecurity, the wonderful fragility of happiness. We struggle together to untie the knots and retie them in interesting ways, we work together, each according to our abilities, but each equally rewarded, as the socialists used to say. The music of that moment is what I call improvisation--playing, not to be confused with performing, or even creating. How this relates to the misery of the world I cannot say. It solves no pressing problem, eliminates no injustice, provides no comfort. But also it does no harm, it joins people rather than separating and dividing them, and does not use others for personal gain. The uselessness of art is perhaps the most one can ask of it.

Jack Wright April-Sept. 2007