Bloomsbury Academic Practice of Musical Improvisation, The: Dialogues with Contemporary Musical Improvisers

Review The Practice of Musical Improvisation is not a treatise on improvisation, but an investigation into its axioms and stakes, a series of interrogations of its main contemporary suspects. It thus proposes a set of endogenous discourses, firmly rooted in practice, and whose diversity is the only force capable of revealing the process of improvisation. - --Matthieu Saladin, Artist, Musician, and Associate Professor in Sound Art, University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, FranceFilled with poetic and provocative thoughts culled from a wealth of interviews with creative practitioners, this book offers substantive grist for the discursive mill of improvisation studies. Key ontological and epistemological questions arise, but the experiential dimension of how improvisation feels shines through most clearly in these engaging pages. Initially not having the speaker's name attached to their words may feel disorienting, but it allows the ideas to swirl around untethered from the personalities who conjured them and offers the initiated reader a chance to guess who said what. - --David Borgo, Professor and Chair, Department of Music, University of California, San Diego, USA Product Description Over several years, Bertrand Denzler and Jean-Luc Guionnet have interviewed a variety of approximately 50 musicians about their practice of musical improvisation. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and carefully edited. Musicians include both the very experienced such as Sophie Agnel, Burkhard Beins, John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Bill Dixon, Phil Durrant, Axel Doerner, Annette Krebs, Daunik Lazro, Radu Malfatti, Seijiro Murayama, Andrea Neumann, Jerome Noetinger, Evan Parker and Eddie Prevost, as well as those newer to the field. Asked questions on topics such as the mental processes behind a collective improvisation, the importance of the human factor in improvisation, the strategies used and the way musical decisions are made, the interviewees highlight the habits and customs of a practice, as experienced by those who invent it on a daily basis. The collection recounts musicians' radically personal paths to draw an incomplete map of the blurred territory of contemporary improvised music. About the Author Bertrand Denzler and Jean-Luc Guionnet are both well-known improvisational musicians and active composers. They have worked with some of the most important international improvising musicians across Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, the Far East and Australia, and have published dozens of recordings with labels such as Potlatch, Matchless, Confront, Umlaut, Empty Editions and Ftarri.