The aesthetic that informs most American audiences renders improvised music inaccessible; it’s a fact that the more popular the music to an American audience, the less improvisation is a part of it.

A commenter posting to a TED clip wrote that jazz skills are about building a mental catalog of phrases and patterns that you can then use and modify; this is so wrong.

I got a call from the owner of my favorite improvised music venue in Brooklyn, Puppets Jazz Bar, who informed me that, due to financial problems, the club was going to fold that night and would I like to attend the last rites.

Decisions are often made in the witch’s cauldron of the recording studio about what takes, or parts of takes, to include in a final product; more often than one might imagine (or admit) the result is an entirely new work, almost unrecognizable from the original versions that were butchered to construct it

It seems that as improvisation became more important to jazz performance, the musical result became more questionable in terms of authenticity.

A perusal through the latest issue of the Journal of Jazz Studies (formerly Annual Review of Jazz Studies), now available for free on-line.

By Ratzo B. Harris
I disagree that jazz, in the big-picture sense, has retired to an art music niche; this is an illusion that the American Musical Culture Machine has perpetrated in order to maximize profits for a select few.

By Ratzo B. Harris
Does Arturo O’Farrill jump farther out of “tradition” than, say, Cecil Taylor when playing the blues?

A key element in improvising music is the ability to anticipate one’s sound. It’s always easier to play when you know that when you go to play a certain note, it will sound right. Imagine playing a piano where all of the B-flats and the D-naturals have been reversed. It could seriously cramp one’s style. I had a something of a similar experience last night.

By Ratzo B. Harris
The necessity to compensate for what someone else plays makes the notion of improvisation antithetical to that of composition, which is divorced from the performance milieu by many degrees.