ABSTRACT
Jazz improvisation has, in recent years, drawn the attention of researchers both inside and outside music scholarship. The unity of the aesthetic act takes place through an intentional continuous transformation of the self, of others, of history, of the moment, of the piece of music, of silence into sound, of patterns into patterns of patterns that is continuously anticipating but also relating back and being re-integrated. Aesthetic experience as an act of improvising in the jazz setting here described is a dynamic integration into the unity of relationships creating an affecting presence. An improvisation can be understood, from the point of view of the performer, as a stochastic system. One difference between mature and immature improvisation is in the act of organizing musical elements across time. Along with acts of divergence, improvisers are also continuously bringing the sound back together; that is, an improvisation can be seen to exhibit both divergence and 'self-healing': a tendency toward consistency and coherence.
