This text reveals how musicians, both individually
and collectively, learn to improvise. It aims to
illuminate the distinctive creative processes that
comprise improvisation. Chronicling leading musicians
from their first encounters with jazz to the development
of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner
demonstrates that a lifetime of preparation lies behind
the skilled improviser's every note. Berliner's
integration of data concerning musical development, the
rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz
outside performance, and the complexities of composing
in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz
improvisation as a language, an aesthetic and a
tradition. The product of more than 15 years of
immersion in the jazz world, ''Thinking in Jazz''
combines participant observation with detailed
musicological analysis, the author's own experience as a
jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by
scholars and performers, and, above all, original data
from interviews with more than 50 professional
musicians.Together, the interviews provide insight into
the production of jazz by great artists like Betty
Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins
and Charlie Parker. ''Thinking in Jazz'' features
musical examples from the 1920s to the present,
including transcriptions (keyed to commercial
recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles
Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. |
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