Negotiating freedom: values and practices in contemporary improvised music.

Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an action directed towards freedom.

--Davey Williams (1984, 32)

A compromise between order and disorder, improvision is a negotiation between codes and their pleasurable dismantling.

--John Corbett (1995, 237)

During the last half century, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, electronic, popular, and world music traditions have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. Although a definitive history of this often irreverent and iconoclastic group would be impossible--or at least potentially misleading--to compile, this article highlights several values and practices that have been, and continue to be, negotiated within the contemporary improvising community.