"We Can Draw!": Toronto Improvisation, Abstract Expressionism, and the Artists’ Jazz Band
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Artists’ Jazz Band (AJB) was founded in 1962 in Toronto by abstract expressionist painters Graham Coughtry (trombone), Richard Gorman (double bass), Dennis Burton and Nobuo Kubota (alto saxophone), Robert Markle (tenor saxophone), and Gordon Rayner (drums). The AJB’s personnel shifted around this founding core, including pianist/trumpeter Michael Snow, electric bassist Jim Jones, guitarist Gerald McAdam, and saxophonist Bill Smith. They continued to perform into the 1990s. Few ensembles anywhere in the world so strongly foregrounded the relationship between abstract expressionism in the visual arts and jazz improvisation. Because of this, it is instructive to discuss the AJB’s music in terms of twentieth-century modernism, particularly in relation to the musicians’ immediate predecessors on the Toronto scene, Painters Eleven, and in the context of the automatistes in neighbouring Quebec, whose pioneering visual art also had ties to the free jazz of the 1960s and afterwards. The AJB’s introduction of modernist discourse—on the canvas and, by implication, in their music—influenced other improvisers associated with the AJB in the 1970s and 1980s. Modernist influences, stemming from the visual arts, encouraged a generation of musicians in Toronto to depart from more conventional “jazz” practices in order to pursue “free jazz,” free improvisation, and a host of performance possibilities.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".