ABSTRACT
Jazz improvisers are interested in creating new musical material, surprising themselves and others with spontaneous, unrehearsed ideas. This chapter addresses the nature of improvisation, the challenging task of playing unrehearsed ideas, the process of developing improvisatory skills and the process of learning the jazz idiom. It discusses the nature of improvisation and the unique challenges and dangers implicit in the learning task that jazz improvisers create for themselves. The chapter broadly outlines some characteristics that allow jazz bands to improvise coherently and maximize social innovation in a coordinated fashion. It explores the following features of jazz improvisation. The features includes: provocative competence: interrupting habit patterns; embracing errors as a source of learning; minimal structures that allow maximum flexibility; and distributed task: continual negotiation and dialogue toward dynamic synchronization. The chapter suggests implications for organizational design and managing for learning. Jazz bands also embrace errors as source of learning, but for quite different reasons.
