ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 focuses on the importance of transcultural (as opposed to monocultural or multicultural) understandings of the term “jazz” and unpacks the term “complex (if not contentious) history.” Specifically, this chapter focuses on the art of jazz improvisation as a uniquely rich location in 21st-century musical practice. To do so, and as a kind of thought experiment, I posed the question: What, among the totality of things found in America's music schools, might be most fertile to harvest direct connections to the broadest representation of contemporary musical landscapes? To which the answer becomes clear vis-à-vis a reiteration of the argument made for the Improvisation-Noetic Matrix made previously in Chapter 3.
