Research Collection

A piece describing the ongoing ‘Play Who You Are’ collaborative outreach project for youth with disabilities involving ICASP, KidsAbility, and other community partners

On the cusp of a North American concert tour in late 2010 and hot off the release of “To the One,” his musical meditation on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and his own lifelong spirit-quest, celebrated guitarist John McLaughlin agreed to a CSI request for an interview focusing on improvisation and spirituality. In addition to being a prodigious musician in every respect, McLaughlin has had an exceptional, if not unparalleled, trajectory through the crucible of twentieth and now twenty-first century music.

On May 15, 1953, Toronto’s Massey Hall played host to what has become widely known in text books and collectors guides as “The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever.” The concert featured iconic bebop musicians Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach – a stunning assemblage of musicians whom Downbeat Magazine proclaimed to be the “Quintet of the Year.” Curiously, however, the contemporary critical reaction was decidedly lukewarm. According to 1950s Globe and Mail critic Alex Barris, for instance, “All in all, it was neither a great concert nor a bad one.” How, then, has such an apparently pedestrian event come to be known as the “greatest jazz concert ever”?

This paper pursues an answer to that question by drawing on the socially-grounded aesthetic theorization of Pierre Bourdieu to help unpack the complex web of social and textual factors involved in the aesthetic valorization of the bebop. In the first section, I establish the theoretical framework, briefly explaining those elements of Bourdieu’s terminology and theory that are most germane to my study. In the second section, I apply Bourdieu’s concept of consecration to examine how music journalists, critics, and scholars discursively constructed bebop as a high art form. In the third section, I consider the musicians’ own effort to affirm their high art credentials. In the fourth and final section, I interrogate the consequences of the valorization of a primarily black music according to the aesthetic terminology and values of a primarily white establishment. PDF

ICASPs Elizabeth Jackson interviews Charles C. Smith, poet, lecturer, and organizer in the field of culture, and Artistic Director and founder of Cultural Pluralism in Performing Arts Movement Ontario (CPPAMO). They discuss improvisation as ‘a matter of being’, the positive effect of improvisation in marginalized communities and in environmental activism, and more generally, in any field of ‘shifting’ ground. PDF

VIDEO: Dr. O’Meally discusses the work of Ralph Ellison in relation to improvisation and social aesthetics. TEXT: A course description for Dr. O’Meally’s lectures

This essay unpacks a new term in improvisation studies and discourse. Improvisioning–for want of a better word or, perhaps, as the best word to describe this practice beyond words–unifies notions of diverse improvisatory practices with what those practices express, the vision (aesthetic, social, intimate, unspeakable) that only an embodied, live, improvised performance can bring into being. Improvisioning implies not only the active elements in creative practices based on improvisation, but also the seeing into things (the envisioning) that improvisation makes possible, the calling forth of the unexpected, the making present a response that could not have been predicted except in that moment, and in that specific context. The epigraph to Fischlin’s essay–from orator, social reformer, abolitionist, and author Frederick Douglass’s “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845);” as part of an extended passage on 19th century musicking made by American slave populations–reminds us that music made in the key of slavery and oppression literally sees into the nature of things in ways that other discourses do not–cannot–and that musical meaning is made out of specific contexts that challenge a listener’s capacity to take what is apparently “unmeaning jargon” and grasp its intent. “Jargon” here designates the very sign of difference upon which the social practice of slavery was predicated, that those who can’t understand the “unmeaning jargon” are diminished by their incapacity. But this jargon also marks the unique response, the singularity of the musical vision that captures and “impress[es]” minds with the unspeakable nature of oppression. Song, in this sense, improvisions: it sees, literally and figuratively, into things in an utterly distinctive fashion and reveals embedded truths about realities in powerfully affective ways. PDF