ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a cultural anthropological perspective on the body's potential to provide a foundation for cultivating a wide spectrum of culturally specific normative ideals of embodied music interaction. It argues that the playing body always exists within some kind of cultural context at the same time that it has its own, culturally independent features. The chapter focuses on the ways in which embodied music cognition is harnessed and shaped to achieve two distinct goals that are anchored in the specificity of the institutional transformations of academic jazz training. The first goal is to train the body to function as a kind of immediate, transparent, and unproblematic infrastructure for the flawless generation and execution of musical ideas in the real-time of improvisation on the embodied incorporation of jazz improvisation. The second goal is to transform the body into a kind of opaque instrument of mediation that has resulted from the academization of jazz training.