ABSTRACT

Jazz improvisation has, in recent years, drawn the attention of researchers both inside and outside music scholarship. Ethnomusicologists have documented and described the musical details of improvising within a jazz framework and addressed certain questions about its place within human individual and social activity (e.g., Berger 1999; Berliner 1994; Monson 1996; Norgaard 2008); researchers outside music scholarship have approached this topic as an example of coordinated social activity (Borgo 2006; Sawyer 2000) and even as a model for optimizing organizational behavior (Napoli, Whiteley, and Johansen 2005). What is it about jazz improvisation that would attract interest in such disparate fields? What, specifically, is the experience of improvising in this setting all about? This article will suggest some answers and some avenues for further investigation, in the hope of fleshing out some of the theoretical descriptions heretofore suggested, and of contributing to a better understanding of-as the general semanticists would say-WIGO (What Is Going On) when jazz musicians improvise.