The Art and Science of Jamming

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I wish I were on the inside track on this one.

University Research Project in a Jam

Millions to be spent in bid to understand what happens when people make off-the-cuff music together

ELIZABETH CHURCH

From Monday's Globe and Mail

September 3, 2007 at 5:01 AM EDT

Musicians from Mali, Mexico, Canada and the United States will meet for the first time later this week on a stage in Guelph, Ont., to make music together. Their improvisational performance, part of an annual jazz festival in the city northwest of Toronto, is also the jumping-off point for a multimillion-dollar research project that seeks to understand what happens when an ad hoc group of people make off-the-cuff music together. The goal: to replicate that experience in other areas as diverse as architecture and medical research.

"When it works, it is quite wondrous," says Ajay Heble, the University of Guelph English professor leading the project. He is also the artistic director of the jazz festival.

"Improvisation can be a model for new ways of understanding," said Prof. Heble, a musician himself. "A group of people who may have never met, who know very little about one another - may not even speak the same language - can create inspired music. What makes it work and what does this tell us? These are the kinds of questions we are asking."

The $4-million project, to be announced tomorrow, will span seven years and bring together 33 researchers in a variety of fields plus 12 community groups. Participants come from Canada, the United States, England and Australia. The bulk of the funding is provided by the federal government, with a $2.5-million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. (The seven-year grant is the largest awarded by the federal agency and is given to between two and four major projects each year.)

The University of Guelph, McGill University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Montreal are also providing funding, as are several private foundations and partners.

In a society where increasingly diverse groups must work together, the researchers believe musical improvisation could provide models for co-operation and a tool to help build confidence and trust.

"It seems more and more, improvisation is the way the planet works and we should be studying it quite closely," said New York musician and scholar, George Lewis, another partner in the project and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. "The purpose is to find out how human beings tick and to develop new knowledge from music which we can generalize to many different areas."

The project will generate books and conferences as well as several outreach programs that will be used as case studies.

A Vancouver group will bring an improvisational artist to work with a choir in the city's troubled Lower Eastside. Another project involving the Montreal-based Canadian Centre for Architecture will examine how improvisation can play a role in the creation of public spaces. A project exploring the therapeutic possibilities of improvisation is also being discussed.

Eric Lewis, a McGill University philosophy professor and another member of the research team, will look at improvisation and its implications for intellectual property law - a hot issue with the rising use of sampling in music. That topic also will be the focus of one of four policy papers.

The researchers, he said, are making an effort to make their work relevant and involve groups outside the academic community. Such outreach also has become a key goal of SSHRC as it works to demonstrate the relevance of social science and humanities research to the general public.

The researchers themselves plan to put their theories to the test. A group of them - some accomplished musicians, some less so - will take the stage later this week for an improvisational performance with the playful title Not Just Talking Heads.

Prof. Lewis of McGill, a trumpet player, says every meeting of the research group has included a jam session and he thinks that experience has changed the way he relates to his fellow partners in the project. And he believes the experience is quite different from the one he would have had playing from a score where decisions had been made by the composer.

"I think our success in pulling off the project in no small part will be due to the fact that we improvise together," he said. " I know I learn things about fellow improvisers as people when I improvise with them that have very serious and positive ramifications in my ability to work with them," he said.

"I felt like I trusted them more. I felt much more at ease with them and I think that has improved my working relationship with them and, I say this quite honestly, it surprised me."

Perhaps, he suggested, the project might even produce new models for sharing research based on the experience of musical improvisation.

[geomouse]

Hey there Doctor, I thought you were the inside track on this one with the latest research paper? I'm still waiting for my copy for review. All the mice were kinda wondering when the walls in the maze were going to shift...