ABSTRACT
One of the possible drivers of experimentation in free jazz is the quest for an individual voice. This chapter investigates the validation of experimental outcomes, albeit subjective, private and singular, and how they add to the capacity of the musician’s experience, aesthetic, creativity and expertise. Experimentation refers to new ideas as drivers for advancement in creativity, firmly rooted in aesthetics and not tied to any artistic genre. The creative process is discussed as being both cognitive and affective. Not only does creation involve ideation, the potential creation of something new by making creative leaps, but it also involves cognition and reasoning, and some level of expertise in evaluation. At the heart of the discussion is the notion that experimentation in the arts is different to that in the sciences because data are created rather than discovered as in chemistry or derived as in mathematics. Scientific data are assumed to exist but artistic data are assumed to be created. Experimentation in the arts therefore cannot be as reductionist as it is in the sciences. Should a methodology more akin to science be used to investigate music, the investigation tends to be seen and reported as a scientific experiment. Of course, much of that kind of experimental research in music concerns what it does rather than what it is. What we are focusing on here is experimentation that adds new data to the knowledge domain of music, which inevitably leads to the question of how we create free jazz.
