In Ajay Heble’s article below, he ventures into the relationship between care and improvisation, taking as his starting point a story about Kafka, imagination, and relationship. In the Complicating Care series as a whole, we have sought to define care as the “looking-after and providing for needs, the mending, upkeep and maintenance of bodies, nervous systems, and the earth” and have reflected in the series on care as practice, strategy and process, both within artists’ practice as well as in their communities. In this article, Heble examines care and its connection to belonging and relationships, improvisation, and intimacy, in part from the perspective of a pedagogue, musician, and curator. Heble asks, in the troubling context in which we live right now, what would happen if research, performance, and pedagogy were viewed themselves as “acts of care.” He suggests that improvisational music can teach us how to do this by resisting predictability and “settled habits of response and judgment,” offering improvisation as a way to stay “attentive” to our responsibility as we adapt to unforeseen crises and change. The capacity to “break out of conventional, recurrent solution-patterns,” argues Heble, offers a glimpse into improvisational music as social practice. Taking as his reference points both the isolation of musicians and their creative community engagement during COVID-19, as well as the anti-black racism exemplified in the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Heble focuses on the implicit care in “making something happen” with intention in the context of systemic injustice and unanticipated crises. He writes that improvised music, at a time when things are more “predigested and fixed” than ever, can provoke us “to think otherwise” and to “learn to dance with uncertainty.”
– Anna Bowen
Surviving the upheaval
There’s a story about Franz Kafka that’s in popular circulation. In its various iterations, it has captivated the attention and sparked the imagination of readers over the years, and it’s even the subject of a children’s book. Perhaps you’ve already heard it.
Franz Kafka, [one version of] the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate. Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met. ‘Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.’ This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met, he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted. When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: ‘My travels have changed me…’ Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: ‘Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.’ (May Benatar)
It’s a touching story. I’ve been taken with it ever since I first heard it. I’ve read that Kafka apparently put as much time, effort, and care into creating these letters for the little girl as he did into crafting his own writing. Moreover, in the kindness and compassion that Kafka provides to the inconsolable stranger, and the thought that he put into writing the letters to her, there is, I’d like to suggest, a story about the very practice of care. I’m thinking about care as it’s been described by Kristof van Baarle, Felipe Cervera, and Helena Grehan in “Stranger than Kindness,” their editorial for the “On Care” issue of the journal Performance Research. They suggest that care involves “the creation of spaces and ways of belonging, relating to humans and non-humans and seeking intimacy and a sense of connectedness so that we can survive the upheaval.” Care, in this improvisational encounter, this “sense of connectedness” in the park between Kafka and the little girl, manifests itself as an act of relationship-building in public space, a gesture, as it were, to help “survive the upheaval” of loss. I wanted to begin with this story of Kafka and the doll, this act of care, because it might offer a useful way to conceptualize some of the challenges and opportunities that confront us as we seek to carve space for meaningful connections with others and to generate and sustain possibilities for more caring collective futures.
I wouldn’t be overstating the case to say that in these troubled times in which we live, the practice of care is urgently needed. “Our world is one in which carelessness reigns,” suggest Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal, at the outset of their 2020 book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (1). Writing collectively under the name The Care Collective, the authors argue that “The crisis of care has become particularly acute over the last forty years, as governments accepted neoliberal capitalism’s near-ubiquitous positioning of profit-making as the organising principle of life. It has meant systematically prioritising the interests and flows of financial capital, while ruthlessly dismantling welfare states and democratic processes and institutions” (3). Indeed, you don’t need to look far to see the far-reaching and often devastating consequences of this reign of carelessness. Whether it’s in the rhetoric, actions, and policies of our elected politicians or in the apathy, disinterest, or denial that seem to characterize the everyday spaces and places where so many of us live and work, carelessness seems to be pervasive. In such a context, what might it mean for research, performance, and pedagogy to be treated as acts of care? How might we, as teachers, scholars, artists, and activists create the conditions that would make fulfilling and expansive practices of care more possible?
I want to suggest that to get to a place where we can create such conditions, we might do well to take our cue from the work that improvising musicians do in the world. Improvised music, after all, has, at least in some of its most provocative historical instances, offered us a place for “the creation of spaces and ways of belonging,” a place where “a sense of connectedness” can be activated, can be enacted. I’ve argued elsewhere that struggles for social change often take as one of their most salient manifestations an allegiance to forms of artistic expression that can’t readily be scripted, predicted, or compelled into orthodoxy. If the social force of improvisation resides, at least in part, in its capacity to liberate us from having to respond to the world with predigested ways of thinking, if it has the salutary effect of productively troubling settled habits of response and judgment, then our success in solving some of the most crucial problems we’re facing, now and in the future, may well depend on our ability to break out of conventional, recurrent solution-patterns—in short, on our ability to think otherwise.
If the social force of improvisation relies in its capacity to liberate us form having to respond to the world with pre-digested ways of thinking… then our success in solving some of the most crucial problems we’re facing may well depend on our ability to think otherwise.
In suggesting that musical improvisation can teach us to think otherwise, that it can liberate us from pre-digested ways of seeing (and thinking about) the world, I draw inspiration from Daphne Brooks’ argument in her book Liner Notes for the Revolution about Black women artists who have “labored in and through sonic cultures.” These artists she tells us, were “dreamers who laid claim to music as a site to wrestle with crucial ideas about themselves and the world” (5). Music as a site to wrestle with crucial ideas. In his landmark book on the influential musicians’ collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), scholar and trombonist George E. Lewis makes a related set of arguments. He tells us that “the insistence by blacks that music has to be ‘saying something’ [is] part of a long history of resistance to the silencing of the black voice. Indeed,” Lewis explains, “as might be expected from a people whose genetic, historical, and cultural legacies were interrupted through sustained, systematized violence, every effort was made by the musicians to recover rather than to disrupt historical consciousness” (Power 41). Lewis is writing here specifically about African American experimental musical practices, and, in such a context, as I have suggested elsewhere, his reminder that “black musicians felt that music could effectuate the recovery of history itself” (42) serves as a vital corrective to some widely-held assumptions about improvised forms of music-making. Think, for example, about how, in the context of pedagogies, criticism, arts funding policies, and support structures, improvisation is often looked at askance, seen as involving adherence to neither convention nor protocol, as tolerating no system of constraint, as requiring no prior thought, as coming out of nowhere, simply being made up on the spot. And think about the fact that, in Lewis’s words, “improvisative discourses disclose the extent to which musicians have a vital stake in the ongoing dialogue concerning the future of our planet. Music becomes a necessity for existence, rather than merely a pleasant way to pass time” (“Teaching Improvised Music” 98).
For music-makers whose exploration question settled habits of response and judgment, improvised music has the potential to inform and transform contemporary cultural thought.
A necessity for existence, the recovery of history, the future of our planet: these, I admit, are momentous claims. I put them on the table here not only because they signal a profound shift in assumptions that often get promulgated about improvised music (improvisation, in other words, has a history, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere), but also because they offer an important commentary on how musical practices in which improvisation figures prominently are, indeed, social practices. They point, moreover, to what’s at stake—culturally, socially, institutionally—in a music that so many narratives of jazz history would have us summarily dismiss as inconsequential, elitist, eccentric, or incomprehensible. One of the most enduring lessons in George Lewis’s work is, as I’ve suggested before, precisely this: particularly for music-makers whose explorations question settled habits of response and judgment, improvised music has the potential to inform and transform contemporary cultural thought.
Sounding History, Sounding Futurity
Let me return to Lewis’s point about improvisation’s role in sounding both history and futurity. Some sense of that role became particularly evident to me through the work I did for 23 years as the founding Artistic Director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, a festival devoted to experimental jazz and creative improvised music. I believe that we have a lot to learn from the work that music festivals—and, I would suggest, particularly festivals of improvised music—can do in the world. During my 23-year stint (1994 to 2016) as Artistic Director, I had the opportunity to reflect deeply on the ways in which institutional frameworks shape not only what we listen to (and how and where we listen), but also the very ways in which we negotiate and construct meaning (about active histories,[1] about other possible futures). The work I’ve done over those years as a festival organizer has prompted me to ask important questions such as, who has the institutional power to determine what “counts” as knowledge, what counts as history, as music (and what gets disqualified as noise)? In what ways is that power connected to broader structures of social control? And how might curatorial practices shape thought, how might they fuel the creation of spaces and places of connection, possibility, and care?
In asking such questions, I intend a certain indebtedness, via the work of Paulo Freire and others, to the principle of demythologizing: the need, that is, to put critical pressure on some of the assumptions, languages, histories, and narratives too frequently promulgated by dominant pedagogical practices, orthodox models of thought, and institutional frameworks. But alongside offering such critical prompts, festivals of improvised music, I want to suggest, can also provide an important testing ground for alternative ways of thinking, for alternative ways of being in the world.
Given that there is a long and illustrious history of creative practitioners who have used the practices of improvisation and collaboration as ways to sound off against fixed systems of thought and oppression, to enact their own relations of care, it’s perhaps no surprise that festivals whose mandate involves the curation of creative improvised music are often explicit in articulating their broader social commitments. About the Guelph Jazz Festival, for example, I have often said: it’s about the music, yes; but it’s about so much more than that. The Festival, for me, is about reinvigorating public life with the spirit of dialogue and community. In a recent short video, cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2021) makes a related point specifically about the Vision Festival, New York’s pre-eminent celebration of free jazz and creative improvised music. “The music,” says Moten, “continues to give us an example of how we ought to be.” And at the Vision Festival, he continues, “people can come together under the protection and by way of the inspiration of this music, and the music has an ethics that’s already embedded in its own production. It becomes a lesson for us about how to live together.”
Moten’s comments put me in mind of an important claim made by cultural studies scholar Ien Ang. She suggests that “one of the most urgent predicaments of our time can be described in deceptively simple terms: how are we to live together in this . . . century?” (193). How we choose to live (and to do things) together, how we sustain bonds and reclaim history, how we adapt to unprecedented change, how we choose to create a shared future, how we remain attentive to our responsibility to build the world we hope to inhabit: the argument I want to share with you today is that improvised music can be a powerful site for sounding such questions about how. And at a time when there is increasing pressure to conform to the narratives promulgated by dominant knowledge-producing elites, and when entrenched positions and settled ways of thinking crowd out alternative visions and opportunities for change, these are, it seems to me, no small matters.
If we think, then, about festivals of improvised music as testing grounds that teach us, as Moten puts it, “about how to live together,” then I want to suggest that arts presentation can be a vital curatorial catalyst for promoting relations of care and connectedness, a modest, if perhaps unexpected, response to the urgent predicament of our time that Ang has identified.
I said a moment ago that the work I did as an arts presenter, the choices I made in curating a festival of improvised music, were about more than just programming, more than just music. As I’ve written elsewhere, through my work as a festival curator, I’ve become increasingly aware of the ways in which the choices I make (about what artists to present, in what context) ought to be understood not simply as programming matters, but as complex and resonant pedagogical acts, acts that frequently question static relations of power, acts that seek to build alternative visions of community and social cooperation, acts that often explicitly set out to challenge taken-for-granted representations and ways of thinking. Programming decisions, in other words, are far from neutral: they involve choices that are connected in complex and important ways to broader struggles over resources, identity formation, and power. Festivals, for example, can provide meaningful opportunities to recast the way we think about the histories, identities, and epistemologies of diverse (and often marginalized) peoples, and they can help to promote counter-narratives that invite and enable an enlargement of the base of valued knowledges. In this context, festivals might purposefully be considered, in cultural commentator Max Wyman’s terms, and in a phrase that calls to mind Fred Moten’s remarks about the Vision Festival, as “testing grounds for new visions of how we live together, new ways to establish shared values” (145). One of the things I’ve learned over the years during my time as a festival curator is that the social force of improvised music resides, as I’ve suggested earlier, in its capacity to trouble the assumptions (and the expectations of fixity) fostered by dominant orders of knowledge production. And at a time when so much of what we know, what we think, and what we believe tends to be fixed, calculated, packaged, and pre-digested, improvisation has the vital capacity to prompt us to think otherwise. Thinking otherwise. I believe that there is a lesson here that resounds throughout the history of creative improvised music: it’s a lesson about lateral thinking that Thelonious Monk taught us when he insisted that there were no wrong notes on the piano. When Jackie McLean took off for Destinations Out. When Nicole Mitchell Gantt tells us that her imagined location of “Mandorla Island is a raw, incomplete, and hopeful example of an alternative vision” where “[w]e don’t have to continue believing in and empowering the current western thought-agreement steeped in white hegemony” (61).[2] Or when Sun Ra encouraged us to sign up for Outer Spaceways Incorporated, and insisted that “There are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of).” It’s a lesson about what happens when the right and the proper make way for those of us who, in historian Robin Kelley’s phrase, “are bold enough still to dream.” When the scripted and predicted give way to openness, transformation, and an ongoing process of inquiry. When, to borrow from Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, we’re able to discern the “what can be inside the what is.” When, instead of relying on the taken-for-granted, we learn to dance with uncertainty.
Dancing with Uncertainty
Learning to dance with uncertainty: this might be an apt way to describe the situation that many improvising artists found themselves in during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the first lockdowns caused by the pandemic, arts organizations and musicians around the world demonstrated the effectiveness of improvisational responses, creatively using public spaces and the digital sphere to connect artists with their communities in profoundly moving ways. During this time when concerts and festivals were cancelled and the ability of musicians to earn a living wage was severely diminished, so many musicians and arts presenters responded in creative ways that encouraged us to think otherwise. From opera singers on their balconies serenading quarantined communities in Italy, to drive-in concerts in Denmark, to a worldwide sonic meditation via video call inspired by the lifework of the great improviser Pauline Oliveros, to a program in Houston, Texas where you could schedule an improvising musician to perform a ten-minute piece of experimental music from a safe distance in front of your home, to a 24-hour online event called Pansodia organized by the University of Padova in Italy and held as part of UNESECO’s International Jazz Day, to a 24-hour online improvisation festival that I curated in August 2020—there was no shortage of inspiring artists who found ways to share the power of music to bring people together during this difficult time, to engage in “the creation of spaces and ways of belonging,” in short, to create conditions that sought to make fulfilling and expansive practices of care more possible.
I’d like briefly to zoom in on one particular example: IF 2020, a 24-hour online improvisation festival that featured performances by over 150 artists that I organized with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) in August 2020 in partnership with festivals and community organizations around the world.
This all-night celebration of the arts featured short pre-recorded improvised performances by musicians, spoken word poets, dancers, theatre practitioners, and multi-disciplinary artists from 25+ countries captured in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While in-person arts festivals were being cancelled, IF 2020 offered a compelling alternative for people to come together and find solace and inspiration through art. What we learned from the Festival was a lesson not only about creativity and resilience, about how improvisational artists can thrive using whatever materials they have at their disposal, adapting artistically to the environments and circumstances in which they find themselves, but also about the role improvisational artistic practices can play in modelling alternative ways of being together and collaborating in community, even while we remain apart. What we saw was how individuals and communities adapted to unprecedented situations, how they built new ways of communicating with, caring for, and relating to one another. How they used improvisation to think otherwise, or, to draw from the words of author and activist Arundhati Roy from a now oft-quoted article published shortly after the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, to “imagine the world anew.”
the ability to improvise, to respond and adapt to unforeseen circumstances, has perhaps never been more important
Dancing with uncertainty. Imagining the world anew. Learning to think otherwise. The COVID-19 emergency has shown us that the ability to improvise, to respond and adapt to unforeseen circumstances, has perhaps never been more important. One of our central arguments throughout the work I’ve been doing with IICSI is that musical improvisation is more than only a form of artistic practice; indeed, I believe that it has much to teach us about social and societal improvisation, about the ways in which we listen to—and interact with—one another across various forms of difference, in various contexts and situations. Improvisation, in short, offers vital strategies for managing and responding to change, for learning to think otherwise. So what are we to do with this knowledge? Where, to invoke the title of Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1967 book, will we go from here?
My invocation of Dr. King here is, I think, relevant for a number of reasons. It is meant as a deliberate cue for us to recall the parallel pandemic—of racial injustice and systemic anti-Black racism—that captured the world’s attention during that same time, especially as a result of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. It also prompts us to consider that those who were perhaps most adversely and disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 emergency have been aggrieved communities and people of colour. Emergency, as I think the pandemic made very clear, does have a colour. In such a context, it’s worth recalling that improvisation (at least in music) might also be said to have a colour. In many ways, and for many creative musicians, it’s the colour of resistance and activism.[3] Think of the long, important, and illustrious history of improvisation in the context of aggrieved peoples (in particular of African American jazz artists) sounding off against systems of fixity and oppression. Think of these artists who were able to use the resources at hand in the arenas that were available to them in order to make positive things transpire, and to create something new that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise; artists who, to use the familiar adage, made “a way out of no way.” Improvisation for these African American artists (and recalling the remarks I quoted earlier from George Lewis) was an expression both of unspoken, erased, or whitewashed Black histories and of unwritten, unscripted futures; it was part of Black music’s resistance to capture and fixity, part of a refusal to give in to the kind of culture of acquiescence or non-participation that resigns itself to the way things are because (or so we are too often told), no other future is possible. In the context of African American creative practice, improvisation has long taught us that another way of thinking is possible.
Making Something Happen
Where, then, do we go from here? Think back to one of the questions I raised near the outset of my talk: how might we, as teachers, scholars, artists, and activists create the conditions that would make fulfilling and expansive practices of care more possible? As I reflect on my work on improvisation, and, in particular, with the festivals I’ve curated, I’ve come to realize a perhaps obvious, if under-appreciated, point: to borrow again from Kristof van Baarle, Felipe Cervera, and Helena Grehan from their “Stranger than Kindness” editorial: “putting the effort into making something happen, whether it is a text, a lecture, a meeting, a theatre or dance performance, can actually be essential to developing relations of care” (3).
If, as artists, teachers, activists, and researchers, we aim not simply to transmit conventional models of academic knowledge and ways of thinking (via what Freire famously calls the banking method of pedagogy) but instead to make something happen, we will, perforce, reach new audiences, invite broader forms of public participation and critical inquiry, generate new relations of care, prompt new ways of thinking. I’ve tried to carry many of these same principles, these sound practices—about making something happen, reaching new audiences, generating relations of care, prompting new ways of thinking—into my lifework. I’ve shared some brief examples with you today about my work as a festival curator, touching on both The Guelph Jazz Festival and the first edition of IF (our institute’s Improvisation Festival). For me, one key takeaway from the examples I’ve shared with you is that we need to create structures and conditions in our communities (as well as within the larger institutions in which we work) that can allow us to “make things happen.” Whether it’s through our festivals, with our communities, or in our pedagogies, we can, indeed, put the effort into making something happen. But to create “places and ways of belonging” requires deliberate effort. To curate with care requires intention.
It’s not always comfortable to let go of what we know and expect, to trade the pleasures of certitude and fixity for the surprises that come from ways of knowing, being, thinking, and relating that can’t be readily accommodated within received frameworks of assumption.
To push up against the reign of carelessness requires fresh new ways of thinking: a willingness to take risks, to resist orthodoxy, and—well, yes—to trouble settled habits of response and judgment. To survive the upheaval requires imagination. But imagining the world anew, we know, is no easy task. It’s not always comfortable to let go of what we know and expect, to abandon the tried and true, or to trade the pleasures of certitude and fixity for the surprises that come from ways of knowing, ways of being, ways of thinking, and ways of relating that can’t readily be accommodated within received frameworks of assumption. Think back to the story about Kafka, the girl, and the travelling doll. It might have been easy for Kafka to ignore the girl’s tears, to trivialize her loss; but instead he took the time, and he used his imagination, to make something happen: to compose letters from the doll to help the girl cope with her loss, and, in so doing, to develop a relationship with the girl that showed he cared about her.
Perhaps there’s a lesson there about the responsibility to act creatively, imaginatively, in support of others. A lesson about thinking otherwise, and of exercising compassion with genuine intent. A lesson that can translate into our own lives in ways that can help us survive the upheaval. Think of it as a call to action. A call to make something happen. To show that we care.
A version of this paper was first presented at “Silence-Producing Machine. Improvisation in and beyond music and the arts,” XXXVII International Colloquium, organized by 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, at the Fonoteca Nacional de México, Mexico City, June 27, 2024. Special thanks to Benjamín Mayer Foulkes and Ricardo Lomnitz.
Endnotes
[1] Active history can be defined as “history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities.” See Active History, n.d., https://activehistory.ca/about/
[2] Mitchell Gantt describes her work on the Mandorla project “as a creative challenge to the normalized view that west is ‘best’ and . . . a call for us to honour musical practices that have survived western erasure” (64).
[3] Think also about why musical improvisation has, at least until recently, been largely expunged from dominant models of pedagogical inquiry in both classrooms and communities. In his essay “Beneath Improvisation,” musician and scholar Vijay Iyer explains, “The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements.” He suggests that “The ongoing ejection of Black musics from the category of music aligns directly with the historic and ongoing dehumanization of Black people, the kind that was used to rationalize and justify enslavement, imperialism, plunder, and genocide on the timescale of the past half millennium.”
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