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Negotiating freedom: values and practices in contemporary improvised music.

Black Music Research Journal

| September 22, 2002 | Borgo, David | COPYRIGHT 2002 Center For Black Music Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

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.

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