Jazz improvisers' shared understanding: a case study

Abstract

To what extent and in what arenas do collaborating musicians need to understand what they are doing in the same way? Two experienced jazz musicians who had never previously played together played three improvisations on a jazz standard ("It Could Happen to You") on either side of a visual barrier. They were then immediately interviewed separately about the performances, their musical intentions, and their judgments of their partner's musical intentions, both from memory and prompted with the audiorecordings of the performances. Statements from both (audiorecorded) interviews as well as statements from an expert listener were extracted and anonymized. Two months later, the performers listened to the recordings and rated the extent to which they endorsed each statement. Performers endorsed statements they themselves had generated more often than statements by their performing partner and the expert listener; their overall level of agreement with each other was greater than chance but moderate to low, with disagreements about the quality of one of the performances and about who was responsible for it. The quality of the performances combined with the disparities in agreement suggest that, at least in this case study, fully shared understanding of what happened is not essential for successful improvisation. The fact that the performers endorsed an expert listener's statements more than their partner's argues against a simple notion that performers' interpretations are always privileged relative to an outsider's.

Keywords: collaboration; communication; improvisation; interaction; intersubjectivity; jazz; music; shared understanding.

Figure 1

Start of questionnaire part (b)—generalizable statements that could apply to all three performances.

Figure 2

Positioning of pianist and sax player, on either side of a screen onstage in the performance space.

Figure 3

Percent of the 151 statements originally made by themselves, the outside listener, and their partner that the pianist and saxophonist endorsed (by selecting 4 or 5 on the 5-point scale).

Figure 4

Distribution of players' agreement for the 151 unique statements. “Perfect agreement” means that both players gave exactly the same rating (from 1 to 5 on the 5-point scale); “substantial agreement” means that both players' ratings differed by only 1 point and they were either both endorsements or both dissents; “possible agreement” means that one of the players' ratings was neutral and the other's was not, which could either be seen as agreement or disagreement; and “disagreement” means that ratings differed by 3 or 4 rating points.

Figure 5A

Statements with perfect agreement where both players endorsed the statement or were neutral.

Figure 5B

Statements with perfect agreement where both players dissented.

Figure 5C

Statements with substantial agreement (ratings different by only 1 point) that both players endorsed.

Figure 5D

Statements with substantial agreement (ratings different by only 1 point) where both players dissented, and statements with possible agreement (one player's rating was neutral and the other's was not).

Figure 5E

Statements with disagreement (ratings differed by 3 or 4 rating points).

Figure 6

Players' ratings of the generalizable statements for all three recordings.