Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz (eBook)

Preface 6
Contents 9
Part I Getting off Ground 12
1 What Is Free Jazz? 13
1.1 The Social, and Political, and Musical Origins of the Movement 13
1.2 A Provisional Positive Characterization 17
2 Jazz in Transition 19
2.1 Archie Shepp’s Outside Performance at the Donaueschingen Musiktage 1967 19
2.2 John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme 20
2.3 Cecil Taylor and Buell Neidlinger: 23
2.4 Bill Evans: Gestural Dialogs with Scott LaFaro in Autumn Leaves 24
Part II The Landscape of Free Jazz 28
3 Out of this World 29
3.1 Sun Ra: An Extraterrestrial Romantic 30
3.2 In Search of The Blue Lotus Flower: Coltrane’s Om 32
3.3 Mythologies of The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Transforming Swords to Silent Gongs 34
4 The Art of Collaboration 37
4.1 A Short Overview of the Classical Ontological Landscape of Music 38
4.2 The Oniontological Extension to The Fourth Dimension 39
4.3 What Is The Art of Collaboration? 42
Part III Collaborative Spaces in Free Jazz 46
5 Which Collaboratories? 47
5.1 Ornette Coleman’s Melodic Spaces in Free Jazz 50
5.2 John Coltrane’s Harmonic Spaces in Ascension 54
6 The Innards of Time 57
6.1 Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures 58
6.2 Trance Spaces: Archie Shepp’s The Magic of Ju-Ju 65
6.3 Dervish Dances: Albert Ayler’s Love Cry 66
Part IV Gestural Creativity 69
7 Gestures: From Philosophy to Thought Experiments 70
7.1 Gestures in Music Philosophy, Performance, and Music Theory 71
7.2 The French Approach to Gestures 76
7.3 Châtelet’s Gestural Thought Experiments 79
8 Geometry of Gestures 84
8.1 Gestures Are Diagrams of Curves 84
8.2 Definition of Gestures and Hypergestures 86
8.3 Hypergestures, Cognitive Science, and Cavaillès 90
9 The Escher Theorem and Gestural Creativity in Free Jazz 93
9.1 The Escher Theorem 94
9.2 Group Creativity and Categories of Hypergestures 96
9.3 Rebecca Lazier’s Vanish: Lawvere, Escher, Schoenberg 98
9.4 Musical Poetology 101
Part V What Group Flow Generates 103
10 What Is Flow? 104
10.1 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Concept 105
10.2 Keith Sawyer’s Group Flow 106
10.3 Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew 108
10.4 Gestures in Geisser’s and Mazzola’s Chronotomy 109
10.5 What Does Group Flow Produce? 112
11 The Symbolic Axis of Distributed Identity 114
11.1 Groups from Gestures: The Paradox of Algebraic Topology 115
11.2 The Fourier Ballet 119
11.3 Passion 121
11.4 Archie Shepp’s Coral Rock 122
Part VI Epilogue 124
12 From Pre- to Postproduction: The Infinite Listening 125
13 Global Strategies for Free Jazz 130
14 The Future of Free Jazz 133
References 136