The “Finite” Art of Improvisation: Pedagogy and Power in Jazz Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacques Attali writes that music can serve to “invent categories and dynamics and regenerate social theory” through improvisational practice. Yet the performance practices of which he writes are those based in free improvisation, structurally boundless and relatively non-hierarchical with respect to the relationships between performers. Many improvised genres, however, are not reflective of such a free approach. Do such improvised idioms similarly open up new possibilities for social relationships, or, by the very nature of their stylistic and practical boundaries of what is considered correct or acceptable, actually reinforce existing social orders? In this essay, I explore these arguments within the context of the critical discourse over jazz pedagogy in the institutional context. It is not a critique of jazz pedagogy pre se, but rather, an exploration of how such discourses reflect, generate, and re-generate social interactions that are often deeply affect by power relations between various entities, such as the western art music tradition versus jazz, the educational institution versus the jazz performance community, teacher versus student, administrator versus teacher. All such relationships have affected the manner in which institutionalized jazz pedagogy has developed, and how it is practiced and lived by all involved.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".