ABSTRACT
Jazz is more than just a style of music that is captured in our collections of records, tapes, and compact discs. It is a celebration of the process of creating music, a form of musical innovation that engages performers as active composers in the collective invention, adoption, and implementation of new musical ideas. As a process of organizational innovation, jazz addresses some central concerns of organizations and their managers. First, jazz is self-consciously spontaneous, creative, and expressive. It is fundamentally concerned with inventiveness as an expected mode of thought and behavior. Second, jazz is most typically a social process, involving a group of inventive musicians. Jazz enables individual musicians to coordinate the innovation process so that they achieve a credible and aesthetically pleasing collective outcome. The jazz process is built on the assumption that each individual musician is simultaneously and consciously adapting to the whole, supporting the other players, and mutually influencing the outcome. Jazz is thus a truly collective approach to the entire process of innovation, for it requires that the invention, adoption, and implementation of new musical ideas by individual musicians occurs within the context of a shared awareness of the group performance as it unfolds over time.
